e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Inigral

  • IMS Learning Information Services: The State of the Union

    Regular e-Literate readers know that I am a big booster of the IMS Learning Information Services specification. (For an overview of the basics of the specification, see my posts here, here, and here.) There has been a lot of news recently about adoption, and I thought it would be worthwhile to pull together a unified post of who is doing what. I’m going to divide vendors and projects into a few different categories based on their released code, public commitments, etc.

    (more…)

  • Keeping Work (LMS) and Play (Social Networks) Separate?

    MergingArts has a good audio interview with Inigral CEO Michael Staton. Michael makes some good points about the nature of sites like Facebook that raise questions about a number of academic social networking efforts. Essentially, he argues that people don’t want to mix their work and social spaces. There’s an almost ontological separation of the two. Unlike, say, chat, which isn’t a “space” per se, Facebook is a “place” where people hang out. They’ll go there to check out what’s happening when they have a little free time, like a dorm floor lounge or a favorite pub. This is very specifically not what people want to do with work spaces, and they don’t want them mixed.  Most people don’t go to the office to hang out in their spare time. So how can social networks enhance work-like endeavors such as formal education?

    Inigral’s answer is to carry the work relationships over into the social space. If we make friends with and hang out with the people we work with, we will probably feel better about our work, try harder to please our colleagues, be less afraid to ask for help from them, etc. Other efforts that focus on embedding social networking tools directly into an academic space like an LMS may have a tougher time of it. It’s not obvious that current-generation social networking tools will transfer to direct work tasks in the way that, say, presence awareness and chat do. There’s definitely some more thinking to be done in this area.

    On a related note, Inigral has posted a survey regarding how new media is being used in higher education. If you have something to contribute in this area, please go on over and participate.

  • Openness: Finally, We're Getting Somewhere

    Update: The Sannier vs. Wheeler smackdown is available on video here. Microsoft Silverlight is required.

    As I sit on the flight home from the EDUCAUSE conference thinking back on the themes of the week, it is clear to me that various flavors of openness have finally arrived in a big way in higher education, with more on the way. Certainly, a critical mass of universities are recognizing the value of open standards and accepting that open source is a viable and important approach. Open access and open educational resources are coming on too, although they are much earlier in their adoption cycle. Further down the road, open governance and open business practices are looming on the horizon.

    (more…)

  • IMS Learning Information Services: Enabling Innovation

    In my previous posts on this topic, I outlined the mundate yet important core use cases that LIS is intended to address. Now I’d like to start looking at some of the sexier possibilities that the spec enables. In recent guest posts, Inigral‘s Michael Staton wrote about the Schools on Facebook application and also let the cat out of the bag that Schools works with Oracle’s LIS implementation, called SAIP. (I couldn’t respond publicly at the time because Oracle’s product hadn’t been officially released yet.) The details of what Inigral has done here are worth exploring, both because they demonstrate how LIS can be used to do new and exciting things and because they provide some clarity about how to think about (and to not think about) social software and PLEs.

    (more…)

  • SIS to Facebook Direct. Introducing Schools on Facebook.

    tab_view.png
    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, really.  They do.)  I am also not representing ACU, its trustees, nor their ancestors.

    So, as I said yesterday, Oracle’s had a short few partners for this upgrade.  With the others included being mainstream LMS systems, you might wonder why Oracle would bother with an upstart like Inigral who hasn’t even invested in a good marketing site.  I hope to answer that question here.  If you read Michael’s blog often, this post will be of interest to you.

    We are introducing a product we’re calling “Schools on Facebook” (in private beta) that is a private, secure application (on Facebook) that can be skinned with a schools branding and connect with their current technology infrastructure.  It doesn’t compete with but complements CMS and LMS systems by focusing on socialization and relationship building; more on how below.

    It’s a cliche when a start up claims to revolutionize this or that.  So, at Inigral we try to stay realistic: we’re focusing on adding a social layer to what already exists.  We want to change the conversation about the internet in education from one of using the web to “manage courses” to one about using the web to facilitate the relationships that develop on campuses already.  After all, a real learning environment is one built on the mortar of person-to-person exchange.   Why not have an application that focuses on that?

    No software is a better example of this than Facebook, which took your campus by storm less than four years ago.  Students started engaging in high-frequency, (some might say mindless) contact that seemed to help students connect with their peers to build and maintain relationships throughout their campus experience.   And you never even paid for it.  Some of you[r colleagues] (not you, you’re too savvy for that) even talked about shutting it out.  But as time went on more of you (and you were early on this one) started to realize what Nicole Ellison documented in her research: that Facebook magnifies the “connectedness” that people feel to your school, one relationship at a time.

    Students use Facebook to represent their identity, and they fill out all sorts of information to that end.  Our product, Schools on Facebook, delivers course schedules, majors, organization memberships and other on campus affiliations to Facebook.  It also shows that “campus safe” identity to classmates and instructors, which helps to build conversations by introducing “primer” information,  i.e. “I see you’re a member of the economics club, are you planning on being an economist?”

    Students use facebook to talk about school all the time, our application just enables a students’ course information to be a part of those conversations.  It also enables contact between faculty and classmates who are not “friends” with a student on Facebook.  Faculty that have ventured on to Facebook have struggled with whether or not to be “friends,” and the safest bet with the least amount of line crossed is to not be friends.  Through our application, campus exchanges can stay out of the personal part of Facebook, and the personal part of facebook can stay out of campus exchanges.

    It has some other great features, too.  But I don’t want to take up any more of Feldstein’s blog with our pitch.

    This is the first public announcement that we are currently selecting two more schools to participate in our limited beta this fall.  We’re only taking three, and we’ve signed up one and have a big name other in the pipeline (huge name, actually).  We’re looking for the “right” school, one that’s going to be excited to see what the Oracle upgrade can enable, one that isn’t afraid to say “we think Facebook adds value to our campus,” and one that’s not afraid to talk about using cool technology openly to others in higher ed.
    Contact me at mpstaton a t inigral.com if you’re interested.

    As you know, the beginning of the school year is a hectic time for all of us!!  I will try to get to all emails as quickly as I can.

  • Please Welcome Guest Blogger Michael Staton

    Michael is the CEO of a company called Inigral, the company that produces the Facebook Courses application. You may have seen his earlier guest post for the On the Horizon. I have been talking a fair bit with Michael lately because my team at Oracle has been working with his company on integration through the IMS Learning Information Services specification. (Again, more on this real soon when we release our product.) We’re entering a new era with Web 2.0 where the university (with the students’ permission) may want to share data with outside applications for specific educational purposes. These new software configurations lead to new kinds of business partnerships, where the university’s relationship with the vendor is quite different than the traditional model. This is all in addition to the basic question of how these Web 2.0 capabilities should fit with and influence the unversity’s approaches to teaching and learning with technology.

    Michael is grappling with all of these issues right now, so I’ve invited him to come and think out loud with us here about them here on e-Literate.