e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Category: Ed Tech

The “Ed Tech” category includes posts about educational technology products themselves, including LMSs and other learning platforms, adaptive learning and other digital curricular materials products, learning analytics, and educational apps of all types. It also includes technical aspects of ed tech products, especially interoperability.

  • ANGEL's Open Source Move

    ANGEL Learning has announced that they have incorporated TiddlyWiki into their product and that they have released the source code to the enhancements. What the announcement doesn’t mention is that the company also made a financial contribution to TiddlyWiki’s main developer Jeremy Ruston in recognition and support of his work.

    I happen to have had a number of conversations with the ANGEL folks about this move, starting from early in their process, and I must say that they made every effort to do this right. They put a fair amount of thought, for example, into where they should contribute the code and considered donating it back to the TiddlyWiki community before settling on EduForge. It’s sometimes difficult for a smallish company to figure out an affordable way to productively contribute back to open source; I hope that other educational software products, including open source and proprietary LMSs, pick up on ANGEL’s contribution and help to build a larger community around it. TiddlyWiki is a great tool for teaching and I think that ANGEL’s enhancements to it are rather clever.

    Kudos to ANGEL Learning for understanding and respecting the work of an open source community.

  • Common Cartridge: e-Learning Made Easy

    This is a guest blog post by Jim Farmer, Coordinator, Scholarly Systems Group at Georgetown University and editor at the eReSS project, University of Hull.

    On September 4, 2007, a summer morning in Adelphi, Maryland, the workgroup, breakfast in hand, slowly assembled into in a large conference room at the University of Maryland, University College (UMUC). The tables were assembled in a U-shape with twelve places on each of the three sides. A digital projector on a stand in the center became the symbolic altar of digital technology. A large screen at the open side of the U illuminated knowledge with multicolored four-line outlines, charts, graphs, “screen captures” and illustrations.

    Heads down behind black or sliver laptop screens, eleven representatives of publishers, software suppliers, higher education organizations, and colleges and universities sat scattered among the conference tables. As part of the IMS Global Learning Consortium Common Cartridge Test Fest, they had been considering how this technology could be used to transfer digital content from publishers and authors to learning management systems for use by faculty and students.

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  • And Now for Something Completely Different…

    In an apparent move to call attention to its language pack support, and in honor of “Talk Like a Pirate Day,” Blackboard has apparently released a “Talk Like a Pirate” translation pack.

    [Insert your own joke here.]

  • On Edupatents, Corporate Branding, and Putting Words in People's Mouths

    There’s a write-up of the edupatent flap in eSchool News. It provides a reasonably good summary of the basic history, as far as these types of stories tend to go, and also gives a high-level account of the current state of the legal battle. (Short version: It’s dragging on.) All in all, it’s a useful summary of what we already know. But it does include one statement by Blackboard’s General Counsel Matthew Small that’s a bit of a jaw dropper.

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  • Apparent Progress Toward a More Usable Sakai

    Sakai has had some fairly serious usability problems since its inception. The development community has been aware of these problems for some time; however, the efforts toward improving the situation have been sporadic and fragile to date. Today, I’m happy to point to some tangible signs that this is changing, and that we have a good chance of seeing some real improvement starting with the next release.

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  • Thoughts on "Analytics" and Privacy

    Last week at the IMS conference, the LTAC (Learning Technology Advisory Council) had an interesting and, I think, fruitful discussion about “analytics.” In this context, the term umbrella term covers various types of data analysis that would be useful in helping ensure that more students learn more and better. One example that came up a couple of times in the discussion was some work done by John Campbell at Purdue University showing that analysis of some basic stats out the LMS (e.g., how recently and frequently a student has logged on) will predict the likelihood that the student will persist in the class and pass it with a very high degree of accuracy. The idea is that if you could get an early warning that a student is at risk, you can intervene and hopefully help that student get through a rough spot.

    Of course, developing this kind of tool raises all sorts of interesting problems, not the least of which is privacy.

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  • The Openness Dialogue Continues on Terra Incognita

    After a brief summer hiatus, Ken Udas’ Terra Incognita blog is resuming its series of guest posts on open source and open educational resources in higher education. The latest post is from Gavin Baker, a member of the board of directors for FreeCulture.org (among other things).

    Good stuff.