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.

  • How to Grow Standards

    Scott Wilson has a terrific response to my recent post calling for “more standards.” To begin with, he articulates one of the underlying issues that I think was bugging Scott Leslie as well. In the abstract, it’s hard to argue against standards. In practice, however, the particular Standards that are Issued from the Official Bodies that Bless Them sometimes seem like they add a whole lot of complexity to relatively little benefit.

    So how do you solve this problem? How do you increase the probability that a given standard is going to have significant practical value? Scott W. offers solid formula which I will paraphrase and expand just a bit as follows:

    1. Identify a user problem that you need to solve.
    2. Check to be sure that you can’t solve it using an existing standard.
    3. If possible, find a few other organizations that have the same problem and talk it through.
    4. Build a pilot solution implementation with standardization in mind.
    5. Test the solution and encourage your peer organizations to test it as well.
    6. Refine based on testing.
    7. When you believe you have a stable, workable solution, then select an appropriate Standards Body to have it live with. In general, avoid having education-specific standards bodies (e.g., the IMS) Bless the Standard unless you are solving an education-specific problem.
    8. Have the appropriate Standards Body examine the proposal, suggest changes when appropriate, and Issue a Blessing.

    In this scenario, the Standards Bodies really act as a quality assurance and dissemination mechanism. While they certainly could assist member organizations in the early stages of preparing a standards proposal, it would be healthiest to cast a broad net and encourage grassroots solution development as broadly as possible. Scott W. holds up JISC’s eLearning Framework (eLF) as good example of that approach, and while the jury is still out on how productive eLF will ultimately be, I agree that it’s a good example of the right approach.

    Here’s an example of how this sort of approach could work, drawing on a discussion that’s happening right now in the Moodle community: (more…)

  • Survey Gives Proprietary AND Open Source VLE Developers Cause to Worry

    IM+M (Jim Farmer’s company) has published some survey data on VLE adoption by higher ed institutions in the UK from 2001 to 2005. Interestingly, the data looks bad for almost everyone. There’s some limited good news for Moodle and Boddington, but as institutions are voting with their feet, the general sentiment seems to be “A pox on all your houses.” (more…)

  • Why We Need More Standards

    I almost missed this post by Scott Leslie expressing his mixed feelings about the standards talk coming out of Alt-i-Labs. Lucky for me, Stephen picked it up in OLDaily. Scott writes:

    Part of me really wants some of these developments to come true, to deliver the promised ‘plug and play’ elearning environments described herein, and in my rational moments I know that 10 years really isn’t that long for a field like this to coalesce around an open set of interoperability specs. And yet it would be hard to fault a newcomer looking at these presentations for wondering if this represents what is still to be done, how anyone manages to develop quality online learning experiences now (and how many PhDs will be required to operate the CMS of the future)?

    The thing is, the newcomer would be correct to wonder. While a good teacher can cultivate quality learning experiences (online or otherwise) with a rock and a stick, the truth is that today’s online learning environments don’t really help them much. The majority of online courses basically use the LMS as a discussion board (a.k.a. “the rock”) and a file sharing system (a.k.a. “the stick”). There are several reasons why interoperability standards should help this situation a great deal. (more…)

  • Ken Udas is Moving to Penn State

    I am both sad and delighted to report that friend and colleague Ken Udas will be leaving SUNY to become the next Executive Director of Penn State’s World Campus. Sad because I will miss having him to share triumphs, trials, tribulations, and tragedies with on a daily basis. Delighted because Ken is a stellar professional who deserves to be in a place where he can have the greatest impact on the broader world of online learning. I’m sure that Ken and his new colleagues at PSU will accomplish great things together.

  • Conversations About Learning Design

    Some discussions have popped up recently on the Sakai Pedagogy discussion group that led to some interesting questions about the potential role of learning design (small “l”, small “d”) in higher education. Since the Sakai conversations tend to be technologist-heavy and teacher-light, I cross-posted a few of the foundational questions to the LAMS community:

    What are the use cases for workflow in a high ed learning environment?
    When is workflow *not* appropriate?
    Is a flowchart the right metaphor?

    If you have direct experience teaching or learning with LAMS or a similar tool, please join the conversation and add your perspective. If you don’t have experience with any of these tools, please come along anyway. It should be a fun conversation.

  • The Promise and Perils of Social Software

    My friend Joe Ugoretz has a new article on social software in the Academic Commons. He provides a good overview of a number of social software tools and suggestions about how to use them. But also embedded in his piece is a warning about what happens if we fail to embrace the new technologies and make them our own. (more…)

  • Widgets, Gadgets, and the LMOS

    Mark Oehlert has a great post up on the implications of the proliferation of tools like Apple Widgets, Yahoo! Widgets, Google Gadgets, and so on, for learning environment design. (Some of you may recall that Apple widgets figured prominently in one of my early LMOS posts.) Mark’s post is good enough to be worth quoting at length: (more…)