Monthly Archive for April, 2005

http://dotlrn.org/news/one-entry?entry%5fid=90509

When people ask me for examples of open source CMS that really might be considered as alternatives to the current major commercial systems, I often cite .LRN as one potential example. It’s been built from the ground up on a portal framework and already contains a host of tools one would recognize from conventional commercial CMS (and apparently there is now a related LOR component as well). This announcement of self-test SCORM compliance is another piece of good news for them. - SWL

http://ideant.typepad.com/ideant/2005/04/tag_literacy.html

I haven’t been doing a lot of ‘me too’ blogging of late (e.g. highlighting what other bloggers have written) but I thought this post deserved a mention, in part because I’m not sure if Ideant is as widely read as it should be. the piece is a worthwhile read for the folksonomies crowd. I like the term “distributed classification systems” - I’ve been using the term ‘dynamic taxonmies’ as my Furl category for such articles, but this term I thinks works better. I don’t have a lot of time for the term ‘folksonomies’ but at the end of the day, it’s hard to argue with a meme. - SWL

http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/
index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view
&newsId=20050425005245&newsLang=en

The next twelve to 18 months should prove to be a very interesting time for folks dealing with CMS-related issues on campuses. As per this news release, WebCT is leapfrogging any sort of ‘5.0′ release in favour of a new Campus Edition 6.0 - from what I understand, an effort to bring together their product lines (Campus Edition and Vista) around a single architecture and code base rather than apply more duct tape to the plate of PERL spaghetti code that had previously been Campus Edition.

Add to this the upcoming release of Sakai 2.0 in June (on which the scoop is we’ll finally start to see more of the promise of Sakai), the maturing of various ’service-oriented’ visions and practices, more folks experimenting with blogs, wikis and ‘community’ systems like Drupal to deliver their online courses, and not to leave out options like Moodle and ATutor, and you get what looks to me like a CMS landscape increasing in instability (and not in a bad way).

In some ways, it’s all about timing. From where I’m sitting, many current licensees of the big CMS are frustrated with the costs associated with these platforms, and more than a few instructors express frustration as well. The migration from current Campus Edition platforms to WebCT 6 will not happen overnight, and will present the opportunity for a new round of decision making for many instituions. Will Sakai present a viable alternative in time for any but the largest and most brave adopters? Will any specific ’service-oriented’ models emerge that are easily adoptable by schools that aren’t already exhibiting maturity in their elearning architecture practices? Will Drake marry Moira, and is Hudson their bastard love child? (Oops, sorry, wrong blog). Time will tell. But clearly, if there was a time to consider alternatives, at least for WebCT adopters, the coming months, when they will be asked to swallow Oracle or SQL server on top of WebCT, seems opportune. - SWL

http://www.campus-technology.com/
news_article.asp?id=10963&typeid=156

I’d like to believe that lots of what this article has to say is true; that, putting to the side for a moments complaints about the nature of CMS systems themselves, giving faculty an ‘integrated’ environment saves them (and the students) from the duplication of lots of dull, administrative tasks and frees up time to spend on the more critical tasks of teaching and learning. That was, after all, supposed to be one of the initial drivers behind this approach in the first place.

But this piece is just so anecdotal (”I recently did an informal survey of faculty members by email” or “One faculty member responded,” etc.) that it almost reads like a surreptitious piece of WebCT marketing. Indeed, I found it via an agent I have monitoring WebCT’s pages for news announcements.

So, make of it what you will. Studies on this topic ARE important - a large amount of time and effort has been poured into system integration efforts, standards, architectures and the like, on the assumption that removing duplication and increasing seemless integration is a “Good Thing™.” But not enough actual studies have similarly happened to determine if these efforts do increase usage, decrease barriers, decrease costs, and so on. And unfortunately, this piece isn’t one of them either. - SWL

http://blackboardblog.blogspot.com/

So I open my emailbox this morning to find a message from one of our former edtech blogging brethren, Greg Ritter from Ten Reasons Why. As many of you will know, Greg works for Blackboard (yes that Blackboard) who are having their annual conference right now in Baltimore. Greg wrote to ask if I’d point to a blog they have set up for the conference.

Well, I was a bit torn (as torn as I can be at 8 o’clock in the morning) - this breaks one of the blogging commandments to not blog on command, and to make matters worse, so far it looks basically like a more efficient means to distribute press releases into the blogosphere. Yet here I am, shameless shill of the corporate overlords, pointing to this Blackboard conference blog. I decided to let you be the judge yourselves - as is so often the case, folks in the blogosphere can sniff things out pretty well for themselves, and it’s definitely not the case in this medium that any press is good press. - SWL

http://www.adlnet.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=PF9ProceedT

The proceedings for the 9th ADL Plugfest are now available, including both online video, links to the powerpoints and to some demos.

As if the point needed more illustration, nothing quite exemplifies the differences between the training/corporate elearning communities and the higher ed community, or between the state of the advanced research community and the state of actual practice in the field, (or between the military and everyone else), as does looking through proceedings such as these. I almost get whiplash from the contrast between some of my current conversations in higher ed (where the boutique model of production is so entrenched I sometimes get push back at the notion of an instructor wanting to re-use any content, at all) and this, where orderly lines of SMEs and instructional designers are expected to crank out content based on specific processes, protocols and procedures, yes sir!

Still, lot of potential interest here - from the Wednesday sessions, one can find a presentation on “XML Content Formats for SCORM” from a number of luminaries, including Canada’s own Roger St-Pierre from the DND, and John Townsend, head of HarvestRoad. It is interesting to see where folks such as these have got in practice with using XML for content markup (not just metadata) and then subsequently displaying it in multiple formats. As Stephen Forth points out in the question period, the control that, say Boeing, can exert on its content production model seems like a luxury to many of us. Townsend’s ‘devil advocate’ comments in his part of the presentation (especially the comparison of higher ed to being ‘near anarchy’ in its production models) was especially appreciated by me.

Another notable presentation was from Rob Ferrell of IBM who presented on IBM’s efforts on the “Dynamic Assembly of Learning Objects.” Ostensibly, if you go back far enough, this was one of the early motivations for the notion of learning objects, at least in the training communities. Interesting to see working code and architecture of how this can work in practice. Not sure that I’m convinced all of the obstacles to this happening regularly can be overcome, but clearly it’s not just a theory any more.

Finally, also of note for being a lone voice in the wilderness of this mechanized view of learning is David Wiley’s keynote to the ‘Working on Simple Sequencing and Navigation’ thread within the Plugfest. David makes the important point that things like SCORM don’t solve all the problems - they help with things like interoperability, and are necessary constraints that instructional designers must work within, but at the end of the day the fact that an object validates as a SCORM package does not mean it is effective learning (or reusable!)

Anyways, lots of stuff to ponder here. Happy viewing! - SWL

No Need to Click Here - I’m just claiming my feed at Feedster

No Need to Click Here - I’m just claiming my feed at Feedster