e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: situated-software

  • 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.

  • Survey Gives Proprietary AND Open Source VLE Developers Cause to Worry

    IM+M (Jim Farmer’s company) has published some survey data on VLE adoption by higher ed institutions in the UK from 2001 to 2005. Interestingly, the data looks bad for almost everyone. There’s some limited good news for Moodle and Boddington, but as institutions are voting with their feet, the general sentiment seems to be “A pox on all your houses.” (more…)

  • Why We Need More Standards

    I almost missed this post by Scott Leslie expressing his mixed feelings about the standards talk coming out of Alt-i-Labs. Lucky for me, Stephen picked it up in OLDaily. Scott writes:

    Part of me really wants some of these developments to come true, to deliver the promised ‘plug and play’ elearning environments described herein, and in my rational moments I know that 10 years really isn’t that long for a field like this to coalesce around an open set of interoperability specs. And yet it would be hard to fault a newcomer looking at these presentations for wondering if this represents what is still to be done, how anyone manages to develop quality online learning experiences now (and how many PhDs will be required to operate the CMS of the future)?

    The thing is, the newcomer would be correct to wonder. While a good teacher can cultivate quality learning experiences (online or otherwise) with a rock and a stick, the truth is that today’s online learning environments don’t really help them much. The majority of online courses basically use the LMS as a discussion board (a.k.a. “the rock”) and a file sharing system (a.k.a. “the stick”). There are several reasons why interoperability standards should help this situation a great deal. (more…)