e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: ePortfolios

  • Desire2Live

    There’s a very interesting interview of Desire2Learn CEO John Baker and General Counsel Diane Lank in T.H.E. Journal. It’s a particularly good read if you haven’t been keeping up on the details of the trial, but there’s also good stuff in it for people who have been following closely. For me personally, the biggest bit of news in the article was this from John Baker:

    $3.1 million is a lot of money, but it’s certainly not putting us in any financial jeopardy whatsoever. We’ve been very fortunate to have incredibly strong clients over the years, some of which pay almost that much money as an individual client. So we’ve been very, very fortunate to have good clients and good cash flow–no debt–we’ve got a very strong cash position. So we could pay that, without actually skipping a beat, and continue to be profitable this year and going forward. So from a financial perspective, it’s one of the concerns people have raised over [the course of the trial]. In the early days, $3.1 million was a lot of money for us. Today it doesn’t even come close to our R&D budget within our organization.

    So we’re quite comfortable; we’re still hiring a lot of people; we still intend on growing; we’ve obviously launched new products; and we’re actually going to be launching more later in the year. So we’re intent on keeping our innovative edge and [focusing on] the clients and client success.

    What’s interesting is we actually think that by all of our clients moving to 8.3, it’ll actually result in us having to support less versions of our application. Instead of being like Blackboard, where they’re probably supporting about 20 different versions of the application, at tremendous cost, we’re going to be supporting one, which will probably shave millions off of our costs [which will be applied to] new projects, new technology. We’re going to better support our existing clients. Or to focus our energy on the next version, the 8.4 version, or the 9.0. So we’re actually quite excited. We’re actually trying to find the silver lining in this and put ourselves in a better position than we were [in at the start of this]. Now, it’s not what we wanted to go through, but we can afford to pay it.

    And then, what might happen is that if we lose on appeal, there’s nothing else we have to pay. We’ve got that workaround put in place. So that one-time cost for us is something that we can absorb. Some of the things we’re going to be asking the judge to do is to reduce that as well, if he doesn’t eliminate it altogether.

    Because D2L is not a publicly traded company, we’ve had no visibility into their financial situation and how the suit was affecting them. If they can manage to get the injunction cleared up (particularly it is cleared up by the judge accepting their workaround), then they may come out the other side of this just fine.

    Also, they’re still cranking out product. Version 8.3 appears to be a fairly robust release with a lot more functionality than just the patent workaround, and they have a new and impressive sounding ePortfolio product. (I highly recommend Barry Dahl’s podcast interview with D2L’s lead product manager Kenneth Chapman.) Their management team must be really good, because I never would have predicted that a company their size would have the cash reserves to manage under this sort of financial burden and the focus to keep developing with this much distraction.

  • Tabblo: How an ePortfolio Should Work

    I just stumbled across a service called Tabblo, which provides a slick interface for pulling pictures together into an attractive layout. To my mind, it is the perfect example of how ePortfolios should be designed. (more…)

  • D'Arcy Lays it Down on ePortfolios

    D’Arcy has a very useful wiki page up outlining all the various dimensions of the huge, amorphous blog sometimes known as “ePortfolios.” This is why there will never be just one class of ePortfolio apps .

  • If They Build It, Will We Come?

    Cole Camplese has a great post about FaceBook:

    FaceBook is a social networking service that about 85% of the college student population uses. A quick survey of my class this semester showed me that 44 out of 45 students were in the FB. It is amazing how much time and energy students give to their entries and it shows me that with the right mix there are things we can do to design killer experiences:

    • One thing is to make it easy to connect to others. LMS tools do not do this. They are positioned as a teaching tool first and only — that is shame as I would love if it my students spent some real time inside our learning spaces.
    • Make features they want — right now our CMS/LMS has dropboxes, messageboards, quizzes and all the things I want as a teacher but nothing for them. There isn’t a place to connect with others outside of email, you can’t leave quick messages for anyone, and the chat stuff is just so old school.

    And yet, we can’t seem to get ePortfolios off the ground. Clearly, we’re starting from the wrong end of things. Let the students show us how they use online spaces to present themselves, and let us go to them and teach them how to harness what they are already doing for purposes like reflection and job hunting. Applications like FaceBook and MySpace are pretty easy to build these days; we shouldn’t have to invest big bucks into designing ePortfolio apps. They already exist. From the software perspective, what we mainly need is a tool that makes it harder for students to carelessly or accidentally throw out the stuff they did for class that may be important in ways they’re not thinking about yet. We need that Box-‘O-Stuff, where they save their first assignment drafts and where it becomes natural and automagic to keep all subsequent drafts. Then we need easy hooks so they can suck that content out of their boxes and post it on whatever MySpace-like application (whether integral to the LMS or a third-party service) suits their specific portfolio purposes. The main focus then becomes on teaching them what to put in the portfolio and why, rather than on how to build the widgets.

    But are we humble enough to approach it this way?

  • ePort(able)Folios

    Last week I had the pleasure of moderating a conference on ePortfolios at SUNY Brockport. Unfortunately, the audio on WebEX apparently died early on, so there is no online archive available. It’s too bad. It was a great conference.

    Anyway, I’ve said on a number of occasions that ePortfolios are a lot like artificial intelligence in that they will be only a year away for the next ten years. But the conversation at the conference made me realize that I haven’t got it quite right. The real problem is that, for all the many different definitions of ePortfolios out there, we have a bizillion different sets of application requirements which are not being looked at holistically. We’re trying to solve the wrong problems.

    (more…)

  • e-Portfolios and Personal Content Management–Rip, Mix, Burn

    Last week I had the pleasure of spending most of my working week at CIT, which is SUNY’s instructional technology conference and also the largest SUNY-wide conference of the year. It was really exciting to see so many folks from all across the system engaged in thinking about how to “teach different” (to steal a phrase from Apple Computer).

    Anyway, one of the talks in which I participated was a panel discussion about e-portfolios at SUNY. And I must say, I think that the e-portfolio system designs I have seen so far go about solving the problem in the wrong way. Because the right solution would turn a conventional LMS inside-out. (more…)

  • Blog Your Undergraduate Major

    The suggestion on blogsperiment that students should be encouraged to create blogs that transcend individual courses fits well with the idea in my last post about approaching the web-enhancing of a university on the departmental level rather than on a course-by-course basis. However, unlike the other idea, this one can be done without a large commitment from the department (although that certainly would help). Give the students blogs, encourage individual instructors to give blogging assignments, assign a category or shibboleth tag for each course, and add a per-course aggregator. Here’s what you get from it:

    • Students can use their own blogs for per-course blogging assignments.
    • The per-course blog posts can be sucked into the course enviroment without a lot of manual fiddling or filtering.
    • Each student’s blog becomes essentially a portfolio of course contributions over the lifetime of his/her undergraduate career.
    • Because the the posts are permanently archived, students can more easily reflect back on previous courses and their relationships to new ones. They can even rejigger their categories as they gain broader and deeper perspectives on what they are learning.

    These are just a few of the benefits; the original blogsperiment post offers more and is well worth reading.