Phil and I were recently interviewed by KQED’s Sarah Tan for a story about the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s Summit platform. As often happens when our comments are just one bit of a larger story—particularly when we are asked to provide a more critical external perspective as a check on the enthusiastic reports of a project’s participants—some interesting parts of the interview conversation inevitably ended up on the cutting room floor. Ms. Tan was kind enough to grant us permission to repurpose some of the source material from the interview for this blog post.
Schoology: The strongest LMS you’ve never seen
LMS evaluations are typically painful ordeals for not just committee members but also for the vendors. They have to provide multiple demos, have lots of Q&A, and write 100+ page proposals based on extensive feature requirements and perhaps even more painful terms and conditions. But there is one case that might be worse – not […]
Social Media, Social Activism, and Edupatents
Back when the Blackboard patent and lawsuit first surfaced in July of 2006, social software was still a pretty new thing. There was a fair bit of surprise in the community when the Wikipedia page on the History of the Virtual Learning Environment, created in large part to gather prior art for the suit, generated […]
Vote for the D2L Million$Mission on Facebook
Apparently, somebody started a Facebook group supporting D2L’s offer to Blackboard to donate a million dollars to schools in return for Blackboard dropping the patent suit. Facebook groups have become a way for people to express their support for an idea or an initiative. This is something that wasn’t in fashion yet when the original […]
Things I Like About the Facebook Interface
There’s a lot to dislike about the Facebook user experience. The groups capabilities are pretty anemic, for example. And don’t even get me started about making me go to a web page to respond to a private message. But I am finding some clever aspects that are worth emulating too. In particular, there is some […]
Letting Facebook Be Facebook
My colleague Linda Feng pointed me to an interesting article about a study by the University of Liecester about how students are using Facebook and how it impacts their lives at the university. Two critical points come out of this for me. On the one hand, social networking in and of itself does seem to […]
SIS to Facebook Direct. Introducing Schools on Facebook.
Hi! I’m Michael Staton and I’m a guest blogger. What I say in no way represents Michael Feldstein or his ancestors. Also, our screenshot here is of our app with Abilene Christian University, a school known for being a thought leader in instructional technology and mobile learning products. (They give their students iPhones. No, […]