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.

  • Visualizations of Online Social Archives, Part I

    It’s not often that you find a graduate thesis that is actually fun to read, but that’s exactly what I found in Revealing individual and collective pasts: Visualization of online social archives by Fernanda Bertini Viegas, an alumna of MIT’s Media Lab. The bibliography alone is worth the trip; she does an amazing job of pulling together a critical mass of the credible literature on online social interaction (which can be hard to find amid all the garbage that’s churned out). Beyond that, her empirical research into visualization tools is fascinating. There’s a lot here that we can use to improve online learning environments.

    In this first post, I’ll review some high-level lessons that can be gleaned from the paper regarding best teaching practices in today’s learning environments. In my next post, I’ll follow up with some analysis about how this research can be used to improve those environments.

    (more…)

  • Comprehensive Information About Extending WordPress

    If you use WordPress, or if you are just interested in learning more about what is possible to accomplish with good blog software, then you should spend some time reading Lorelle on WordPress. She is in the middle of a month-long commitment to write one post every day about WordPress plugins. These aren’t just short posts about one plugin each; they are long, detailed articles about entire categories of plugins. For example, her post “Video, Music, Podcasts, Audio, and Multimedia WordPress Plugins” covers no fewer than 45 plugins in various levels of detail and also includes links to documentation and technical support resources. In some cases, she’s simply compiling and categorizing lists of plugins from the several WordPress plugin catalog sites (which is a worthwhile service in itself), but for about 20% of them, she provides more detailed overviews of their functionality in the context of other plugins in the category.

  • EduPatent Alerts

    Via Stephen Downes, I see that Mark Oehlert posted a list of Blackboard’s pending patents, 8 of which were filed for in the last year (6 of which were filed in October and November of last year), and many of which are not covered in Blackboard’s patent pledge. This has prompted me to invest a little time in creating a more–dare I say it?–Web 2.0ish edupatent alert system.

    You’ll notice that there is a new tab on the top of this blog labeled “EduPatents.” On that page you will find an RSS feed aggregator that displays any blog posts on the web that have been tagged by their authors with the word “edupatents”, any posts that use the word “edupatents” in the body of their texts, and any web pages that have been tagged “edupatents” on del.icio.us. (I took the liberty of tagging Mark’s post, so it shows up in the aggregator even though he didn’t tag it himself.) You can subscribe to the feed directly or, if you prefer, you can also subscribe by email. Equally importantly, you can contribute to the contents of the feed in a variety of ways. If we all make use of this system, then you won’t have to rely on just a couple of bloggers (e.g., me) to be able to see everything that’s relevant and post about it.

    If you’re interested in learning more about how to make the most out of this new system and how I created it, then read on.

    (more…)

  • IMS Report on Learning Technology Satisfaction and Trends

    The IMS has issued a new report with the somewhat imposing title, “IMS GLC Learning Technology Satisfaction and Trends, North American Higher Education, 05 February 2007 Update.” You can get it here, but first you’ll have to register with the site (if you haven’t done so already). It’s important to read Section 2 of the report (and particularly the “Survey Approach and Disclaimers” subhead) carefully; it is very difficult to get definitive data for this kind of research, and the authors of the report were very careful to spell out the limitations of their methods.

    Nevertheless, there’s lots of interesting stuff here. Here are some of my own observations, in no particular order:
    (more…)

  • Birthplace of Blackboard Comments on Patent Issue

    Here’s an interesting article (ironically titled “Suit Threatens Blackboard Inc.”) from the campus newspaper at Cornell University, the birthplace of Blackboard:

    Only time will tell how Blackboard Inc., Cornell’s course management software provider, will fare on campus and throughout the country.

    Amid a national legal debate over the scope of Blackboard’s “Internet-based education support system and methods” patent, Cornell technology staff members are moving forward with a preliminary assessment of whether Blackboard is the most appropriate software for Cornell professors and students.

    Stressing that the “legal issues aren’t having an impact on our commitment to Blackboard in the short run,” Jim Lombardi of CIT admitted that the controversy, “probably accelerated our plans to take a look at what the options are to Blackboard.”

    (Snip)

    “When Blackboard announced their patent it did cause us to begin an assessment of whether we wanted to move away from Blackboard … It did cause us to rethink whether we wanted to use their product,” said Polley McClure, Cornell’s vice president of Information Technologies.

    Lombardi and others described the assessment process as “due diligence” or “insurance.”

    “Whenever a company starts getting that many people annoyed at it, you sense some risk — that’s what it comes down to,” said Lombardi.

    Cornell officials were careful to emphasize that Blackboard is the right fit for Cornell at this time. They said that the assessment would have occurred this year even without the upset and anxiety elicited by Blackboard’s legal actions.

    I’ve heard similar comments from a handful of current Blackboard customers.

  • Desire2Learn Responds to the Blackboard Pledge

    Here’s the meat from the full post:

    We at Desire2Learn are unwavering in our position that the patent claims are invalid and unenforceable against Open Source, our competitors, and us, and that we do not infringe on the claims. We look forward to a decision by the United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) on our comprehensive petition for an Inter Partes re-examination of the patent. We will continue to invite Blackboard to dissipate the cloud that it has cast over innovation and the educational ecosystem. The “pledge” does not alter Blackboard’s attempt to dictate educational software business models. We will continue to resist Blackboard’s attempts to monopolize the methods by which universities, schools, libraries, and other entities build their educational platforms. Blackboard continues – with the “pledge” perhaps even to a greater degree – to decree with whom education and business worldwide may conduct business. The users – not the vendor – should determine which competitive offering best fits the needs at their institution. By attempting to dictate educational software business models, Blackboard appears to fear competition.

    In taking the “pledge,” Michael Chasen claimed: “[Blackboard is] committed to the open exchange of ideas, collaboration and innovation . . . [t]his pledge is part of that commitment and our continued efforts to work collaboratively with the e-Learning community to foster greater openness and interoperability.” In light of Blackboard’s purported change of heart it suggests in its “pledge”, and the USPTO’s decision to grant re-examination of the patent, we encourage Blackboard to give meaning to Mr. Chasen’s words, and to join us in requesting that the court stay the litigation until the USPTO has had an opportunity to complete its work. This action would enable all members of the community – including Blackboard – to focus on their primary objectives.

  • The Blackboard Patent Pledge

    I’m late to the party on the pledge news for a variety of reasons (not the least of which is a recalcitrant DNS server out there in the ether that denied me access to my new blog site for the better part of the last two days…grr). It is gratifying to see that my absence really didn’t matter much. A lot has been written about this in the past few days and I don’t really have anything new to add.

    If you’re playing catch-up on the issue, you’ll want to start with Blackboard’s own page on the patent pledge. Equally important to read and read carefully is the joint statement by the EDUCAUSE and Sakai Foundation boards in response. In posting the letter to the Saki listserv, Sakai Foundation Board Chairman John Norman introduced it with the following warning:

    Bb announced an Open Source Patent pledge today. www.blackboard.com

    In their press release they refer to ‘collaboration’ with Sakai and Educause. Our ‘collaboration’ was to try make it as useful as possible. Since Bb quote selectively from our statement, I reproduce it in full below. It will go up on the Sakai website later today.

    I recommend taking John at his word and read the whole letter, in part because it is very well-crafted and encapsulates a lot of the sentiments–both postive and negative–that have been expressed about the pledge since the announcement. For your convenience, I have reproduced the letter in its entirety “below the fold” in this post.

    Inside Higher Education has a good piece on the story this morning, with quotes from many of the usual suspects as well as a few unusual ones. THE Journal has some good, in-depth quotes from Sakai and Blackboard representatives. Slashdot has picked up the story as well, and includes a few interesting and informative comments. Not covered in any of these are comments from the bloggers you’ll always want to read on this topic, including (but not limited to) Seb, Barry, and Stephen. Also interesting is Elgg developer Ben Werdmuller’s (re)assertion that Bb’s patent wouldn’t cover Elgg anyway.

    Since the community as gotten so good at responding to these issues, I think we should take better advantage of the whole RSS thing and consolidate the various comments for easier consumption. If people blogging on this topic would include “edupatents” as a tag or somewhere in the body of their post text, I would be happy to set up an aggregator on e-Literate that scoops up those posts (and would encourage others to do the same). Let me know if there is interest in this; it would be pretty easy for me to do.

    Now, if you haven’t seen the EDUCAUSE/Sakai statement, keep reading:

    (more…)