One of these days I’m going to have to figure out how to tweak my blog’s CSS so that I can get my SUNY-specific blogroll section up. In the meantime, I’m going to keep pointing to SUNY bloggers from time to time. Today’s entry is from Alex Reid at SUNY Cortland, in which he reflects on the challenge of getting faculty literate in video and other multimedia forms. Alex calls this “information literacy”, which makes me think of charts, statistics, and search engine proficiency, but his definition is more expansive and provocative: (more…)
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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Video Literacy
There’s an old joke among instructional designers. In response to a request for “gratuitous” video in a course, we ask, “What moves?” The implication, of course, is that if you are not showing content that is inherently dynamic and in motion then there is no point to video.
How last millennium can you be?
The joke betrays a lack of sophistication–of literacy–regarding the expressive power of the moving image. I think we need to take video more seriously and give it a privileged place right beside the written word in freshman composition classes. Because video can express some of the same concepts we ask students to relate using the written word, only more powerfully, more compactly and…well…just differently. (more…)
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In Defense of Walled Gardens
I’ve been seeing the phrase “walled garden” a lot in the edublogosphere, and always with a negative connotation. It is a term that seems to carry over from more general usage referring to either media content or wiki pages that are not open to the public. Of course, Walls are Bad, Open is Good. (“Two legs baaaad, four legs gooood!”) I am a general advocate for Openness, particularly when it comes to education. But I think we are in serious danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. (more…)
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Zimbra: What a Mashup-Enabled Enterprise App Looks Like
Phew. Enough with the Apple stuff. I actually still have one or two more posts on the topic that I want to return to at a later time, but I need a break from it. (I’m sure you do too.)
So here’s a slightly different angle. As regular e-Literate readers know, Patrick Masson and I published an article in eLearn Magazine in which we advocated for “an LMS for a mashup world.” Since then, there have been a lot of questions of what such a beast would look like. Can you build a system that has both the ease-of-use that comes from tight integration in traditional enterprise apps and the nimbleness that you get from mashups?
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What I'd Like to See Next in iTunes University
Update: Although you can’t copy and paste the podcatching URL from the iTunes client, it is apparently possible to expose the podcatching URL from the administration interface. I have no direct information about why this is so. However, it is consistent with Apple’s general approach to DRM. It may be that by making it easy for the producer to expose the URL but inconvenient for the consumer to do so without help from the producer, they are trying to strike a balance that gives iTunes U a “soft” DRM capability without resorting to encryption. But that’s just a guess.
This is part 6 of a series of posts documenting a vist to Apple headquarters in February, 2005. For the full series, see part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5. and part 6.
As you can probably tell from my last few posts, I’m pretty jazzed about the potential of iTunes U. But that doesn’t mean that I think the first version is perfect by any means. Here’s what I’d like to see from Apple going forward: (more…)
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Why iTunes University is a Game Changer
This is part 5 of a series of posts documenting a vist to Apple headquarters in February, 2005. For the full series, see part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, and part 6.
In my last post, I made the case that we should feel reasonably safe taking Apple at their word when they say that they want to keep iTunes U free and free from lock-in for the long-term. As far as I can tell, it’s not evil. In this post, I’m going to argue that it is, in fact, a force for good-good for the evolution of learning environments, good for the textbook market, and good for expanding the horizons of digitally-enhanced teaching and learning interactions. (more…)
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Who's Afraid of iTunes U?
This is part 4 of a series of posts documenting a vist to Apple headquarters in February, 2005. For the full series, see part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5. and part 6.
In my last post, I outlined Apple’s business model, particularly as it relates to the higher education market. You can’t really understand why they have launched iTunes U without first understanding how they do business. And from what I’ve been able to see so far, iTunes U is exactly the opposite of what some fear it to be.