Thanks to fellow Oracle blogger Jake Kuramoto for pointing to this ZDNet piece revealing (among other things) that JotSpot is about to become part of the Google Apps package. Long-time e-Literate readers know that I was lucky enough to be able to interview JotSpot’s co-founders in the early history of this blog, and that they had a profound influence on my thinking about educational technology. (Some of the intellectual roots of the LMOS concept can be traced back to that interview.)
To my mind, this is big news for educational technology. JotSpot is a fantastic platform for building long-tail educational tools. The fact that it is becoming a first-class citizen in the Google ecosphere opens up many great possibilities.
Thanks for the nod Michael. It’s always good to find another blogger
outside the walls. Does Eddie Awad (http://awads.net/wp/) aggregate
your blog into OraNA? I keep tabs on JotSpot b/c I know one of the
early employees, also an Excite founder. They went dark for quite a
while after the acquisition, so it’s good to see them back in the news.We should talk about AppsLab and how it may apply to what you’re already doing. Drop me a note. Jake
Jake, I have hesitated to ask to be added to OraNA because I don’t blog about Oracle that often. (In fact, since I have had this blog for quite a while and have an established readership with specific interests, I generally avoid blogging about Oracle unless I think it has very specific relevance and doesn’t come across as excessively promotional of the company.)
At any rate, thanks for introducing yourself. I’ll ping you via work email on Monday.
I have to agree with you Michael that Jot is "different". A couple of years ago the UK’s Trades Union Congress (national trade union confederation) used Jot to develop its manual for the development and management of on-line courses, with the clever and efficient way it worked with Microsoft Office, and the overall ease of use being key to the choice. And ALT has been using Jot for some years for our internal "office manual", to good effect. It will be interesting to see how the integration within Google Aps works for users; and how long will it be before a synchronous discussion environment (based on Maratech, even?) is added?