e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Learning-Activity-Management-System

  • What We Don’t Know About Learning Analytics

    Long-time e-Literate readers know that I have been a fan of the concept of learning analytics for a number of years now. But it became apparent at this year’s Learning Impact conference that learning analytics are the new hotness. Everybody is talking about them, and increasing numbers of vendors (LMS vendors, ERP vendors, textbook vendors, etc.) are trying to figure out how to get in on the party.

    Which means it’s probably time to start asking some critical questions about how well we really understand learning analytics and where the potential for failure and disappointment might be.

    (more…)

  • Call for LAMS Conference Papers Extended

    I just got a note from James Dalziel letting me know that the deadline for papers for the LAMS conference (in Sydney) has been extended to August 9th (my birthday!). If you haven’t yet checked out the Learning Activity Managment System, then go out right away and either get a trial account or download and install it on your own computer. (It’s easy.)

    If you are familiar with LAMS, then start working on your boss to spring for the trip to Sydney and consider proposing a paper. Conference details are here.

  • Conversations About Learning Design

    Some discussions have popped up recently on the Sakai Pedagogy discussion group that led to some interesting questions about the potential role of learning design (small “l”, small “d”) in higher education. Since the Sakai conversations tend to be technologist-heavy and teacher-light, I cross-posted a few of the foundational questions to the LAMS community:

    What are the use cases for workflow in a high ed learning environment?
    When is workflow *not* appropriate?
    Is a flowchart the right metaphor?

    If you have direct experience teaching or learning with LAMS or a similar tool, please join the conversation and add your perspective. If you don’t have experience with any of these tools, please come along anyway. It should be a fun conversation.

  • Does Education Inflected Architecture = Web 2.0?

    In my last post, I suggested that we need an architecture that is designed with a low barrier of entry for educators to actively influence and change themselves. Today, I ran into a related post by Dana Boyd, which I actually found through Hypergene Media Blog which, in turn, found it via Ben Hammersly. (Whew.)

    Here’s the relevant quote:

    My argument is that we stop thinking of remix as production, but as active consumption. Remix happens as a bi-product of consumption. What we’re remixing is culture and the active consumption of culture is part of identity development and living as a social creature in society.

    Think about clothing consumption. Few people buy all of the items on the mannequin. You buy different pieces and mix and mash them. You might even decide to alter them by adding patches, by dying them, by cutting them up. You make the clothing yours. And then you share your consumption with the world by parading on the streets. In this way, you make the clothing tell your story.

    Boyd is talking about remixing content by way of analogy to personal effects, but why couldn’t his point apply equally to software services and applications?

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  • Time, Ownership, and the VLE

    This is the first of several posts I’ll be making about stuff I learned at yesterday’s conference at FIT–which was excellent. It’s not often that I go to a conference where I find every single speaker to be interesting, but this was certainly the case here. (Raymond Yee apparently live-blogged…er…live-wiki’ed the first part of the day.)

    Anyway, keynote speaker Rachel Smith pointed out a great little project called Dracula Blogged. Basically, the author, noting that Dracula is written as a series of dated journal entries, decided it might be cool to republish the novel as a weblog, posting each entry on the same calendar day (e.g, October 6th) as the dated entry in the novel. I think the success of this experiment underlines a couple of attributes that we need to think about for next-generation VLE’s. (more…)

  • First Impression of Sakai 2.0: Better Than I Expected

    Given that Sakai 1.5 was a feature-impoverished, unusable wreck, I fully expected 2.0 to be unusable as well. After spending half a day with it, I think it’s safe to say that I was wrong. While 2.0 is certainly not nearly as mature as other FOSS LMS’s such as dotLRN and Moodle, I think it may just be roughly competitive with entry-level Blackboard or WebCT Campus Edition. That’s an impressive leap to make in 6 months. (more…)

  • Learning Activity Management Systems

    SUNY has a home-grown Lotus-Notes-based learning management system that has some truly remarkable features. I’ll be posting about some of these innovations over the coming weeks as I get to know the system better. What I want to focus on in this post, though, is a feature that I have only ever heard of one other LMS providing in a meaningful way, which is providing a fundamental course organization structure (i.e., a user interface to the course) that focuses on the temporal sequence of learning activities rather than the more typical interface that simply organizes the course based on types of functionality and content resources (e.g., course notes, discussions, etc.). In previous posts, I have referred to this idea in terms of learning experience objects, but the folks at Macquarie University in Australia have built a system based on the same principles that they call a Learning Activity Management System (LAMS). (more…)