My colleague Alexandra Pickett called my attention to this Trends and Vendor Satisfaction Survey by the Alliance for Higher Education Competitiveness (A-HEC). It takes less than the advertised 30 minutes to complete. If you’re involved with higher education and instructional technology in any way, it’s probably worth your time.
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.
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IBM Follows SUNY's Lead on Notes/Domino Migration
Ya know, you can’t make this stuff up.
As regular readers know, the SUNY Learning Network is currently on a home-grown LMS built on top of Lotus Notes/Domino. About eight months back, we proposed [PDF] the notion of migrating to a standards-based Java portal backed by a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Well, this week, IBM announced details of Domino Next, the successor platform to Lotus Domino. And what is that architecture? A standards-based Java portal. Basically, their strategy for migrating their customers to a successor technology is the same one that we came up with. And they’re doing it in a semi-versionless way. Meanwhile, the same day, another article comes out saying that IBM completed 1800 SOA projects for a thousand customers last year—double of what it had been the previous year.
I’m glad to see that IBM is following our example.
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More Offline Toys
Today I’m trying out Blogjet. In contrast to ecto, it has a somewhat simpler interface more reminiscent of a browser than an email client. Like ecto, it offers WYSIWYG:
Both seem like they would work fine for faculty.
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Working Offline with ecto
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Social Software, the LMS, and Walled Gardens
Antero Aunesluoma writes:
There should exist somekind of continuum between “totally public” and “delimited to a single course in LMS”. A continuum that would serve the diverse users needs. And I refer the term “user” to faculty and students, not to educational technologists. The users need to decide themselves their products level of publicity. Whether the product is a blog entry linked to a course or an article written to a Wiki by a group of students. By level of publicity, I mean some kind of general categories friends/group/course/university/universum.
Amen.
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Web 2.0 for Tracking Web 2.0
Before I start on this post, I want to note that I am writing it in the Bleezer offline blogging client found via D’Arcy. This little freeware application is just a couple of months old and it already rivals much older for-pay blogging clients.
Anyway, Alan Levine is asking for a Web 2.0 tools list that is managed using a Web 2.0 tool.
His wish is my command (created using Lazybase):
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Why All Faculty Members Should Blog
So much to blog, so little time.
There have been a few interesting responses to the “Sisyphus Taught Videography” post. For example, in a comment on that post, MIDizen X observes that students can be the producers of the media: (more…)