Monthly Archive for September, 2003

http://www.webct.com/service/ViewContent?contentID=18218512

“In the demonstration, the WebCT Vista academic enterprise system automatically synchronized calendars with Microsoft Outlook using the OKI authentication and scheduling OSIDs, or APIs, to exchange data. This would enable both calendars to be simultaneously updated by updating one.”

This probably doesn’t seem like much, but in theory the promise held by widespread OKI OSID support is much greater. If such support were to be found in even a couple of the major CMS players (as well as one or two viable open source projects,) the barrier to entry for discipline-specific or pedagogic-specific application developers suddenly gets much lower, as they can focus on their application’s core functionality and not on re-building it to work with each of the different proprietary APIs. It’s perhaps unfortunate, though, that they chose the application they did to illustrate their implementation of the OSIDs. - SWL

http://www.cpwire.com/archive/2003/9/24/1396.asp

“The California State University system has adopted the Blackboard Learning System and the Blackboard Portal System to meet the e-Education needs of more than 414,000 students and 46,000 faculty and staff.”

Wow. There have been quite a few large CMS RFPs and competitions over the last year (Wisconsin, Minnesota, MiCTA to name a few) but California’s always the biggie. I seem to think, though, that this announcement is more a formalization of something that had already been happening at many of the campuses concerned, and so maybe isn’t quite the coup it first sounds to be. - SWL

- via [Online Learning Update]

http://iet.open.ac.uk/pp/r.goodfellow/Euroc03/talk.htm

This is the text of the keynote speech at the recent European Association for Computer Assisted Language Learning in Limerick, Ireland. The speech is by Dr. Robin Goodfellow (no, not that other guy) of the UK Open University. It’s longish but I found it worth the read, in part because there were lots of useful references to be picked up along the way. And I must say that where the paper ends up got the cultural theorist in me stirred up a bit

“Thus we arrive at the conclusion that the literacies of online learning environments, for all the revolutionary and progressive claims, continue to be constructed by, and in turn to construct, the discourses and forms of social action of the embodied world, in particular of the institutions, corporations, schools, colleges, and universities, very largely English-speaking and technology-owning, in whose interests the globalisation of education is proceeding”

It’s pretty easy not to talk about these issues. Much harder to not just ‘go along.’ I’m mostly berating myself on this point. It’s 3 in the morning. Good night. - SWL

http://www.iadis.org/wbc2004/committees.asp

I don’t normally blog conference announcements, but this one seemed pretty interesting. The International Association for Development of the Information Society has put out a call for papers for it’s upcoming conference, to be held March 25-26, 2004 in Lisbon, Portugal, on the theme of ‘web based communities.’ As they say on the conference home page, the goal “is to publish and integrate scientific results and act catalytically to the fast developing culture of web communities. The conference invites original papers, review papers, technical reports and case studies on WWW in particular the emerging role of so-called WWW-based Communities.” Portugal in March, hmmm, I can think of worse places to be. - SWL

One likely can’t make too much out of this, but I thought it interesting that 3 of the top 10 ‘best selling’ dissertations (as reported by Proquest) related to knowledge management. If you set your filter a little broader, you might even say that about half of these related to learning within organizations. - SWL

-via [ResourceShelf]

A searchable database of 51 institutions using electronic portfolios courtesy of the American Association of Higher Education (note this is the same resource that used to be hosted by Kalamazaoo College at http://www.kzoo.edu/pfolio/database.html). Found it via the Kalamazoo site, which also contains this useful biliography relating to e-portfolios, as well as their own portfolio site. - SWL

Jay Cross is blogging the VNU Supplier Summit. There are lots of nuggets in his notes, and of particular interest to me was the session by Bryan Chapman, an LMS analyst with Brandon Hall, who had some numbers associated with average LMS license prices.

Continue reading ‘Jay Cross’ Notes on LMS presentation by Bryan Chapman (from Brandon Hall group)’

http://careo.elearning.ubc.ca/weblogs/
michelle/archives/000194.html

Via Michelle Lamberson comes mention of an important collection of papers on learning objects that came out of the recent OLN Institute at Ohio State called “Building and Assessing Shareable Content.” The proceedings for the conference, a book titled “Learning Objects: Contexts and Connections” (Catherine M. Gynn and Stephen R. Acker, Editors) are now available online.

Continue reading ‘Proceedings of the OLN Institute -’

http://www.opensector.org/1063723220

Another piece similar to the one I posted on yesterday concerning the relevance of Free and Open Source software to education. It focuses even more so on its relevance to developing nations, and points to an excellent report by Niranjan Rajani on behalf of the Finnish government that also has details of the progress of open source in  Africa, Asia and South America. - SWL

- via [Open Sector]

http://www.icampus.ucl.ac.be/LINUX/
document/quatrequarts.html

This paper by Thomas De Praetere of the Université cathlolique de Louvain in France, the original home of Claroline, puts forward some arguments on why open source is so successful, particularly in educational institutions. I know this might surprise some - I’ve had many educators complain to me about their inability to get open source in the door of their institution - yet I believe what this paper claims is true, that the ‘education sector’ is still one of the greatest contributors and adopters for open source, and given the inverse trend of institutional funding levels to licensing costs, will likely remain so. The article is in French, but the google translation’s not too bad. - SWL