This is big news. As far as I know, this is the first major hosting company to offer managed hosting for an Open Source LMS platform. (And Embanet is a fairly large firm, too.) I was just today talking with some folks at a small university who probably wouldn’t be able to consider using an open platform if it meant that they had to host it themselves. Kudos to the Sakai team for pulling this off.
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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Parallel Play Grows Up, Part II
Well, the conversation continues, with an interesting twist. This time, one blogger has explicitly responded to a request for his input from another blogger. The semantics here are interesting, since the original blogger (Dave Hyatt) didn’t directly ask for comment. Instead, what he wrote was
I’ll be eagerly awaiting the responses of both Tim and Eric to this entry.
This reminds me a bit of the mediated debates that the Supreme Court has with itself sometimes as justices ask questions of the lawyers not so much because they are looking for the answer as because they are implicitly articulating arguments for each other. While the lawyer, of course, does play some part in the conversation, it’s often not the part s/he thinks (or hopes) that it is.
Since the main converation here is between a small number of standards gurus who know and respect each other’s work (and presumably know each other personally, though I’m just guessing here), this could be viewed as a similar sort of conversation, with their respective blogging audiences acting as the mediating litigators. I wonder whether this style of communication would be less inclined to develop outside of a well-established community of experts. To what degree is familiarity and mutual respect required to overcome the awkwardness of this indirect form of conversation?
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Open Source, Cross-Platform Groove for Academia?
It looks like Penn State is modifying the LimeWire code base to create file sharing with digital rights management (DRM) and authentication built in. They will also add the ability to tie into specific university data repositories as well as adding collaboration tools. Sounds like Groove to me. The project, LionShare, will be ready in the Fall of 2005.
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Open Pedagogy
Carnegie Mellon (apparently sponsored by HP) has created an interesting twist on the MIT “open courseware” (OCW) model. I find the Open Learning Initiative to be interesting for several reasons:
- They are giving away not just content but also pedagogical models, which include “cognitive tutors,” “virtual laboratories,” group experiments, and simulations.
- They have focused on traditionally lab-oriented engineering courses.
- They seem to have a very active dissemination plan to enlist other schools to teach the content and contribute back modifications. This is critical; opening up the content by itself often isn’t enough to drive adoption.
Details are scant on the web site, though. I guess we’ll have to stay tuned.
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elearnspace: Rapid Elearning, Workflow Learning
George Siemens of elearnspace makes the healthy and obligatory nothing-new-under-the-sun critique of this year’s crop of online learning buzzphrases:
Rapid elearning and workflow learning are two concepts that have been getting enough attention over the last year to be classified as “trends”. I’m not entirely sure what to think about either. We have a unique problem in the learning/technology field of giving every small nuance in a concept a new name. Then we declare the old name/concept “dead” (almost as if we are constantly struggling to stay with the “in crowd”). Rapid elearning simply means “we have limited resources and time, how can we get this stuff done faster”…and workflow learning simply means “learning integrated (an abused word that can cause a rash to break out in some tech workers) as a vital business process…while still focusing on the needs of each individual worker”.
Of course, he’s right. In particular, “rapid e-learning” is certainly nothing new and, to the degree that it’s a trend, it’s not entirely a good thing. I’m less sure about workflow learning; there is a very real change in what’s possible that’s developing owing to new technologies that are enabling more real-time and meaningful support interactions, both with work peers and with information systems. I suppose I would call workflow learning “EPSS: The Next Generation.”
But there are sometimes good reasons to give things new names whether or not they are actually new. In the case of rapid e-learning, I think it’s important to clearly label what it is and what it’s for lest all e-learning be reduced to rapid e-learning (which, conveniently for many organizations, is also cheap e-learning). We need a name for it so we can talk about when it’s appropriate, and I don’t think we currently have a label that works.
Now, in the case of workflow e-learning, the opposite is true. EPSS never really evolved past lame software help cue cards in most organizations. It never really found a home in a meaningful way, in part because it wasn’t training, it often eliminated the need for traditional training, and yet it was expected to be owned by the training department. I don’t know whether workflow learning will have any better luck as a trend, but there is something to be said for putting a different spin on an old (but good) idea in order to revive its chances for getting the attention that it deserves. That said, we do have to be careful when we engage in what is essentially a spin job lest we risk sabotaging ourselves with excessive hype (as I believe Jay Cross comes dangerously close to doing sometimes).
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More on Apple's Workflow Taxonomy
The prerelease version of Automator currently comes with 123 Actions that are grouped into categories according to function. The categories include Mail, Find, Alert, People, and iPod, and users can search for Actions using Tiger’s standard Mac OS X search field. The alternate view command groups the Actions by keyword, which can be a quick way to narrow down the choice when searching for a particular Action. The set of Actions offered to developers is not restricted to Apple’s own applications: currently it includes Actions included for Microsoft Corp.’s PowerPoint presentation software.
So the taxonomy is not organized for the user based on application but rather on typical work tasks (for home users, that is–Apple’s primary audience). As it should be.
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A Workflow Taxonomy
A few posts ago I mentioned that Apple’s new Automator tool was a potentially interesting development vis-a-vis workflow learning. Well, a new article at MacWorld surfaces this fascinating additional tidbit:
With the Automator, you don’t have to write a single line of code; instead, you build a flow chart. On the left side of the Automator’s window, you can pick from a large collection of “actions” organized into 16 categories–Apple is supplying more than 100 actions, and developers can add even more for their own apps–which you drag into the Workflow area. As you drag items in, they connect to one another. By building up a series of actions, you can create a complex series of tasks that incorporate several different Mac programs.
In essence, Apple is creating a workflow taxonomy. It will be interesting to see how this develops.