e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Google

  • Google Soon Adding JotSpot to Google Apps

    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.

  • A Good Window Into Information Architecture Trends

    Rashmi Sinha has an outstanding post analyzing the information-finding affordances of Google Base. For people who are interested in learning some of the basic concepts in modern information architecture (IA), she does a great job of illustrating key ideas. (You may want to fire up another browser window and play around with Google Base while reading her article in order to make it more concrete.) For people who are a little further along in their education, the post has a great analysis of IA trends in general and strong review of Google’s new interface in particular. Here’s one observation that I particularly appreciated:

    Finally, what’s most interesting about GoogleBase is that it corroborated what I have believed all along – tags and search don’t replace facets, categories and other information architecture concepts. I can imagine a tag-based, del.icio.us like GoogleBase – input your information and find others’ information serendipitously. But Google wants people be able to find information in a predictable, intuitive manner and for that it has to rely on a combination of categories, facets and tags. It did not reinvent Yahoo’s directoy – instead its an innovative way of using all three. Tags are a brilliant innovation and can do many better things better than other methods. But the rumours of the death of classification, facets etc., have been greatly exaggerated by experts such as Clay Shirky.

    She strikes a great balance between appreciating the value of tags and resisting the hype around folksonomies. Tags are great. Categories are great. Facets are great too. They all (should) work together.

    Finally, there’s an interesting little throw-away in her piece that caught my attention: Google has only twelve top-level categories at Google Base, and one of them is “course schedules.” What are they planning for the education market?

    (Found via elearningpost.)

  • Progress Toward an Offline e-Learning Client?

    One of the most beloved aspects of the SUNY Learning Network’s current Lotus Notes-based homegrown LMS is its offline capabilities. Faculty members can download the current course data–including student discussion posts, tests, etc. They can respond to posts, grade papers and tests, add announcements, and so on, all while offline, and automatically synchronize the next time they have a connection. People who haven’t used this capability (especially those who always have a broadband connection handy) don’t understand the value of this affordance, but I do. It’s for the same reason that, much as I love my GMail, there are times when I really need an email client that can work offline. Or an offline RSS feed reader. Sometimes, it’s really handy to not have to be connected. And that’s doubly true for faculty members who are not gadget freaks, live in rural areas, and are unlikely to have ubiquitous broadband (or any broadband at all).

    Anyway, like it or not, we’re on the hook to reproduce that capability in our next-generation system. This is a somewhat daunting challenge. Not that it’s rocket science; synchronization has been done many times in many different ways, and there are any number of existing code bases that we could draw from. Rather, it’s daunting because it’s a lot of work to do at all and a lot more work to do right. Developing and, even worse, QA testing a cross-platform fat client in an environment where you have no control whatsoever over the profile of the client machines is a pretty large task, even if you draw on an existing cross-platform technology base such as Eclipse RCP or Mozilla Firefox.

    A while back, I wrote a bit about some relatively new possibilities for re-implementing the fat client experience with…er…less fat. At the time, though, I was focusing more on the user experience; I didn’t really get into the whole synchronization issue.

    As of yesterday, it looks like there may be a nice, lightweight solution to offline synchronization on the horizon, courtesy of none other than Ray Ozzie–the original inventor of Lotus Notes and now Microsoft’s CTO. (more…)

  • More About Designing for the Long Tail

    In my last entry, I wrote:

    We need a system that is optimized toward slotting in new pieces as they become available, not as an after-thought or an add-on, but as a fundamental characteristic of the system.

    That sounds cool and all in the abstract, but what does it mean? What is missing in today’s LMS’s, which all claim to be extensible and standards-compliant? To get an idea of what can happen with a system that is truly designed to integrate with other applications, let’s consider the case of Google Maps. (more…)

  • Lean Clients, Plump Clients, and Chubby Clients for Learning Management Systems

    As I mentioned in a previous post the SUNY Learning Network currently uses a home-grown learning management system built on top of Lotus Notes. And while there is a web interface to the system, many of the current users are quite attached to their fat client.

    This may sound quaintly outdated at the moment. However, I strongly suspect that we’ll see fat(ter) LMS clients in the near future. There are some wonderful affordances that come with a more robust client-side component to the system. Up until now, those affordances have come with the relatively steep price of having to develop, install and maintain fairly heavy-duty (and often cross-platform) client-side software. But that’s changing. These days, the browser and the operating system themselves are increasingly able to function as client-side platforms for richer functionality. Add to this the blossoming of web services and the small, simple client-side tools that they enable, and we have the potential for what I would call “lean clients,” “plump clients” and “chubby clients.” (more…)