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.

  • What Really Happened at SUNY

    I was doing a bit of research on the IMS Tool Interoperability effort and I ran across this post by Chuck Severence. He was enthusing about the need for the developing standard–a sentiment which I wholeheartedly support (although I don’t know enough about TI yet to know how I feel about the way they propose to meet the need).

    At any rate, this bit caught my eye:

    This is like a holy grail – like a quest – and some have tried and come up short – SUNY is a good example where they insisted that hte [sic] “future is now” and ultimately ran out of steam and “lived in the present” and went with Angel (a good choice by the way).

    Chuck probably has no way of knowing this, but his characterization of how things went at SUNY isn’t entirely accurate. While I have generally avoided blogging on this topic to-date, I have decided to break my silence and make just a few comments.

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  • Thoughts on OpenID From an Identity Management Expert

    While I have been following the OpenID conversation among the edublog community with interest, I have kept my mouth shut on the subject–mostly because I still don’t know enough about it to have anything intelligent to say yet.

    That said, I call your attention to a post by Mark Wilcox, a colleague of mine at Oracle. In addition to being a former WebCT developer, Mark literally wrote the book (or, at least, a book) on LDAP and is a product manager in our identity management group. So he knows what he’s talking about.

    There’s some good stuff here about AOL’s decision to provide OpenIDs to all their customers, the possibility of government-issued OpenIDs, the problem (or non-problem) of being issued multiple OpenIDs without your consent, and other good stuff. Again, I don’t have much in the way of commentary on the post because I’m still just absorbing the basics at this point. But it’s interesting reading.

  • New Patent Information Center at EDUCAUSE

    Kudos! Find it here.

    In particular, be sure to check out this PowerPoint presentation about the costs of patents to universities.

  • Why I'm Not Worried about the Microsoft Patent Threats Against Linux

    Understandably, there’s been a lot of hand wringing about this. But the experts and evidence all suggest that Microsoft is all bark and no bite in this particular case.

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  • My Edupatents Talk at PESC

    Update:I tried to embed the slides from the talk but, unfortunately, SlideShare kept messing up my blog’s layout. You can find a copy of the slides here.

    Here is the presentation I gave at PESC on April 23rd. (Thanks to the good folks at im+m for recording and archiving the audio of the talk.)

    I’d like to make just a couple of additional comments:

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  • 'Dracula Blogged' Restarts Today

    “Dracula Blogged,” one of my favorite blog-based literary/pedagogical experiments, restarts today. The core idea is that the dated entries from Dracula (which was written in diary format) are delivered as blog posts on their actual dates. So, for example, the first entry in the novel, dated “3 May,” went live today. It’s a wonderful way to experience the novel.

    This year’s effort will also include maps, pictures, and discussions related to each entry.

    Enjoy.

  • Still More on the Supreme Court Ruling

    Patently-O has a piece by Professor Joshua Sarnoff on the ruling. Sarnoff has quite a resume, apparently:

    Professor Joshua Sarnoff, Assistant Director of the Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Law Clinic and a Practitioner-in-Residence at the Washington College of Law, American University. Professor Sarnoff filed an amicus brief in support of Petitioner KSR.

    Professor Sarnoff’s analysis of the ruling, once again, has some bearing on edupatents.

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