Monthly Archive for December, 2006

You already know what I want for Christmas. So in the spirit of the season, here are my (non-denominational holiday) gifts for ….

WebCT and Blackboard - I’d say a lump of coal, except they’d probably just claim to have patented ‘mining’ and sue me. So instead, how about “Courage,” the courage to adopt a strategy that keeps customers not by locking down their content in difficult to export ways but instead by creating a product people can easily leave but want to stay with; the courage to grow as a company not through intimidation and pathetic legal challenges but again, by continuing to develop a product that people simply want to buy (oh, and did I mention I believe in Santa Claus too!)

ELGG - continued success, and for some funder to acknowledge the blood, sweat and tears of these guys to build one of the best social learning platforms around today. As open source.

D’Arcy - some plane tickets to Hawaii so I can finally stop seeing all the links to Hawaiian hotels in his del.icio.us feed

Alan - what do you get the guy with a great new job and seemingly unlimited talent? How about some well earned time at his cabin soaking in that unused hottub!

Stephen - A Patent. On Everything. Just Kidding.

Brian - his own radio show. I know, I know, who un-Web 2.0 of me. But I’d listen to it. You probably would too if you’d seen his record collection.

All the Edubloggers who felt it necessary to acknowledge an “award” from a link troll - some more self-esteem. Come on folks - “top 100 Edublogs”? What you’ve got there is exactly equivalent to someone’s blogroll. You’re all great. We love you very much. Remember, in the inimitable words of Dave Winer - it doesn’t matter if only 2 people read you, as long as they’re the RIGHT 2 people.

Michael (and all the other tireless folks working to expose the evils of software patents for education) - Math You Can’t Use: Patents, Copyright, and Software. Actually, no. Just a well deserved break. (And to Michael, great success next year in the new job).

the Moodle, Sakai, Atutor, .LRN projects and all the other open source CMS folks - continued success in the new year. Even if you are not an open source CMS adopter, be glad for what these folks are doing for you. Because you benefit from their work and efforts too, in more ways than you likely realize.

And finally…

To the readers of EdTechPost - thanks. And a promise - to re-launch this site early in the new year with comments back on. So you can talk back to nonsense like this post. That’s gone unrectified for far too long.

Hope you all get a break over the next few days, I look forward to learning and creating with you all in the New Year! Cheers, Scott.

http://www.oit.ucla.edu/ccle/

Tip of the blog-tam to Michael Penney for letting me know of the recent announcement that UCLA plans to adopt Moodle as its institution-wide learning and collaboration environment, while also pledging to “continue as a Sakai Foundation member and … to work with others in the Sakai, Moodle, and IMS communities … on data, tool, and language interoperability solutions.” Let us hope this latter comes true too - with the behemoth increasingly playing annoying content lock-in games, (more to come on this, don’t you worry!) it bodes well for us all to have an increasingly healthy set of open source alternatives that can model non-predatory, open, interoperable solutions.

This is one new year’s prediction I feel pretty safe making - that we’ll see more and more institutions getting behind these and other open source CMS solutions in 2007 as they will be able to take advantage of the critical mass of adoption that built up in 2006 and avoid the “enterprise un-ready” FUD that major adopters like the Open University and Athabasca (amongst many more) have helped assuage. - SWL

Overheard in the Leslie house today:

Kaya (4 years old): How can Santa work with the Elves on toys if he’s at the Mall?

Daddy: Well, I suppose he has a super fast sleigh or something to get him back to the North Pole every night.

Calum (7 years old): That’s not it, dummy. Those are Santa’s clones(!?!)

http://eportfolio.edutools.info/static.jsp?pj=16&page=HOME

I wasn’t really a part of this project, but my colleagues at Edutools have put the comparison of 6 eportfolio tools into our comparative analysis tool so you can now do some easy side-by-side comparative analysis of them.

Now’s probably as good a time as any to mention a change to the overall review process on the Edutools site, specifically with the better known Course Management System comparison site.

The big issue with running this site has always been how quickly the reviews go out of date and the effort involved with maintaining them (on the old site, we had active reviews for 25+ CMS). That’s why we’ve changed our review model. Instead of only one person doing all the reviews, anyone is free to post a review of a new product or a revision to one of these. We’ve also built some feedback mechanisms and associated discussion forums with each of the reviews in the hopes that the community will police itself - the reviews are partially constrianed by a set of checkbox features, but there are free text areas as well (these are clearly demarcated on the site) to allow for additional comments outside of the standard feature comparison.

So I am no longer actively writing these reviews, they are being upkept by various people, including the vendors themselves, and we encourage you, if you find the site useful and have issues with a review, to read the Editorial FAQ and follow the dispute process if there are issues in what you are reading. - SWL

My Amazon Wish List

Just because I know you’re all wondering what to get this lowly edtech blogger for the holidays. Never let it be said that I didn’t ask

http://www.eduventures.com/about/press_room/
12_12_06.cfm?pubnav=about

Via Jim Farmer’s eLibrary feed, an ongoing treasure trove of documents on patents and elearning (amongst other topics), comes news of this report by Eduventures, a Boston-based consulting firm. You have to pay for the full report, but even the short precis has some interesting nuggets from a student perspective. According to this summary, the study of 6,200 enrolling freshman in the US found ‘Professional Preparation,’ ‘Academic Strength’ and ‘Affordability’ (in that order) as the top 3 things incoming students are looking for. And around the notion of ‘Academic Strength,’ apparently

students value “close interaction with faculty” and “experiential learning” more than “honors programs” and the development of smaller “learning communities.”

http://www.xk72.com/charles/

For the server geeks out there, here’s a nifty little app that my buddies at The Learning Edge turned me on to. It’s a Java-based tool that lets you watch all of your HTTP session traffic in real time. The really nice piece is how it handles XML as it enables you to see the XML flowing between the client and server. It also does bandwidth simulations - while this is probably pretty out of fashion these days, we should remember that broadband adoption in the US is just over 50% and that connectivity in places with many remote communities (like Canada ) can still be challenging. - SWL

So first Michael Feldstein joins Oracle. Now comes news that Jon Udell is headed to Microsoft. What’s next? Jimmy Wales starts working for Encyclopedia Britannica? Stephen Downes becomes chief evangelist for Blackboard? I swear, if that happens, we’re headed to our secret bunker in the hills, and good luck to the rest of ya! - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/gems/mashup.vss

I liked the UML icons that Scott Wilson produced and shared for the OminGraffle tool, but couldn’t use them ‘as is’ because OminGraffle doesn’t exist for the PC. So I asked Scott if he could share the source with me so I might somehow get them into Visio, the tool I most often use to whip up such drawings. He kindly went one better and produced an exported stencil for Visio, out of which I created the same set of mashup shapes for Visio. Just drop it in “My Documents - My Shapes” to be able to use it in Visio. Happy Diagramming! And thanks again Scott! - SWL