e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: EDUCAUSE

  • Pre-EDUCAUSE Announcements and Other Odds and Ends

    We’re in that period leading up to EDUCAUSE when everybody makes their big announcements. Two caught my eye as being relevant to e-Literate; I’m sure there will be more.

    First, Blackboard announced some improved integration of Wimba and Elluminate with competing LMS platforms. I argued previously that there’s good reason to believe that they would live up to their promise of continuing to support such integrations, and now we have the evidence. Several Wimba products now support the cross-platform IMS Basic LTI integration standard, and Elluminate now has a new (or improved?) Moodle-specific integration connector. As Blackboard continues to widen their portfolio of products, I think you’ll see more and more about them actively working with competing LMS providers.

    Second, Desire2Learn announced progress on their mobile support. I’ve been meaning to blog about their efforts in this area since they announced their plans at their conference this summer, but I just haven’t managed to get around to it before now. Like Blackboard and Moodle, D2L is pursuing a belt-and-suspenders approach to mobile by building out both phone-specific apps (Blackberry and iPhone for sure; they’ve hinted about Android but I don’t know if they’ve announced anything about it explicitly yet) and a device-independent HTML-based mobile interface. As I have written before, this strikes me as an expensive strategy. But I guess if you can’t be sure which way the market is going to go in an important area like mobile, you invest the resources necessary to hedge your bets. Anyway, what I appreciate about D2L’s current press release is that they tell you exactly what subset of LMS functionality their mobile interface supports. None of these mobile apps are going to do everything that their native interface does at this point, and the details can really matter. I’d love to see a feature list like this one from all the LMS providers.

    I’ll be at EDUCAUSE on Wednesday and Thursday and hope to come back with some tidbits and possibly some interviews to share. If you want to try to catch up with me while I’m there, your best bet is probably to go to the community source reception.

    One last non-EDUCAUSE-related tidbit: If you haven’t watched Robert Scoble’s interview with Blackboard’s VP of Mobile Kayvon Beykpour, you should. Beykpour founded the company Terribly Clever that Blackboard acquired for its mobile academic portal. In the interview, he proves himself to be…well…terribly clever. He has some interesting insights into where the academic mobile space is going, and Scoble does a good job of asking the right questions.

  • EDUCAUSE Openness Constituent Group

    My fellow SUNY escapees Patrick Masson and Ken Udas are up to some good stuff now. They’ve started an EDUCAUSE constituent group on Openness–open source, open standards, open educational resources, open content, open management practices, etc. Their hope is that the disparate groups that tend to care about each of these strands will identify the common strands of philosophy and practice that will help universities develop more coherent policies and ways of doing business that are both practically beneficial and consistent with the values that universities ought to support. It’s an ambitious project, to be sure, but very important.

    In concert with the new constituent group, the EDUCAUSE board has released a value statement on Openness. Here’s an excerpt:

    A central pillar of the academic community is its commitment to the free flow of information and ideas. This commitment to sharing is essential to scholarly discovery and innovation. It is also central to helping learners engage, absorb, and apply knowledge in order to advance personally and academically. Finally, this commitment to openness provides the foundation for leveraging resources, both within and among institutions, to strengthen the creation, transmission, and preservation of knowledge.

    The academic—and, by extension, social—value of unfettered intellectual exchange finds expression in technologies, applications, and approaches that foster sharing, collaboration, and open access to knowledge and resources. By actively encouraging collaboration, customization, and experimentation, open environments—whether social, cultural, or technological—best facilitate the free flow of information and ideas on which discovery, innovation, and high-quality higher education depend. In an IT context, examples include:

    • Open standards and interoperability
    • Open and community source software development
    • Open access to research data
    • Open scholarly communications
    • Open access to, and open derivative use of, content

    The constituent group meets at the conference this afternoon at 4:55 PM in Room W340D. I’ll see you there. And if you’re not at EDUCAUSE, you can find out more information about the effort here.

  • Going to EDUCAUSE

    I’ll be leaving for EDUCAUSE tomorrow morning and will be there until Friday morning. I’m not giving any presentations this year other than a 15-minute presentation on Oracle SAIP at the Desire2Learn booth, but I have lots of meetings and typical goings on. If you’re going to be in Orlando this week and want to track me down, just ping me.

  • I Want More

    The EDUCAUSE webinar on edupatents today was very good. (The archived event is available.) James Hilton, University of Virginia’s CIO, did a great job of laying out the fundamental conflict between the academic endeavor and the United States’ obsession with ideas as property–an idea that has infused academia through technology transfer departments among many other avenues. Bruce Wieder, an intellectual property lawyer at Dow Lohnes PLLC, gave a solid primer on patent law. I wish we had had somebody like him available much earlier in the process, when none of us knew anything about patents.

    I have some minor quibbles. For example, neither speaker seemed to know about the Digital Vending Services International patent. But my biggest concern is that the conversation didn’t go far enough. Having described the epic clash between freedom of ideas and ownership of ideas with great clarity, neither speaker made any real effort to explore how academia might move forward in grappling with this problem. Maybe that’s a lot to ask of one webinar. But EDUCAUSE has shown some admirable leadership in the edupatent area and I think they are in an ideal position foster this conversation. In order to do so, they’re going to have to move beyond Blackboard and really help universities to take a collective hard look in the mirror.

  • What I Want from the EDUCAUSE Seminar on Edupatents

    Seb has a good post up raising some questions for the free EDUCAUSE webinar on edupatents tomorrow at 1 PM Eastern time. I’ll add a few of my own (which in some ways are just extensions of Seb’s):

    • What are the various edupatents being litigated in the United States today and what is the potential impact of each of them? Who has liability exposure?
    • In an environment where we have multiple companies litigating multiple edupatents (as we already do today), what will happen to the market? How will this affect existing educational software vendors? New entrants into the market? Open source projects? Overall customer choice?
    • How do university intellectual property policies impact this environment currently? How are their efforts to lobby Congress regarding proposed changes to the patent law related to the current situation? How do their IP policies encourage or discourage this kind of environment?
    • What can individual universities do to minimize the adverse impact of edupatent litigation?
    • What can the university community as a whole do to impact the edupatent situation? What role can organizations such as EDUCAUSE play to help clarify the issues and foster positive collective action?

    I cannot overemphasize the point that the edupatent problem is not just a Blackboard problem. We now know of 3 separate edupatents in court in the United States, and that’s only the tip of the iceburg. EDUCAUSE is performing a valuable service by raising awareness through this webinar, but I’m afraid that it will all be in vain if its individual constituent universities do not step up and confront this issue head-on.

  • Thoughts on "Analytics" and Privacy

    Last week at the IMS conference, the LTAC (Learning Technology Advisory Council) had an interesting and, I think, fruitful discussion about “analytics.” In this context, the term umbrella term covers various types of data analysis that would be useful in helping ensure that more students learn more and better. One example that came up a couple of times in the discussion was some work done by John Campbell at Purdue University showing that analysis of some basic stats out the LMS (e.g., how recently and frequently a student has logged on) will predict the likelihood that the student will persist in the class and pass it with a very high degree of accuracy. The idea is that if you could get an early warning that a student is at risk, you can intervene and hopefully help that student get through a rough spot.

    Of course, developing this kind of tool raises all sorts of interesting problems, not the least of which is privacy.

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  • Making College Textbooks More Affordable

    This is a guest blog post by Jim Farmer, Coordinator, Scholarly Systems Group at Georgetown University and editor at the eReSS project, University of Hull.

    On Friday, June 1st, the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance released their report “Turn the Page: Making College Textbooks More Affordable.” Responding to a Congressional concern about high and rapidly increasing cost of “textbooks,” the Advisory Committee was asked “to conduct a one-year study of the cost of college textbooks and to make recommendations on increasing the affordability of textbooks.,”

    The report was the well-referenced, thoughtful and realistic document and recommendations for which the Committee is known. Higher education should view the report as a warning of the “groundswell of criticism against colleges, bookstores, and publishers” Congress is receiving from constituents already concerned by high and increasing costs of college. Faculty should now be aware cost and effectiveness of learning materials and instructional methods will become an issue. Publishers should accelerate their effort for interoperability and cost reduction.

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