I believe, though could be mistaken, that this valuable list of current US e-learning patents was created by Jim Farmer at im+m.

This next comment goes in the “Scott complaining about something that is free” bin, but Jim, is there any way you could maintain this (if that is what you are doing in) in something like DabbleDB or a GoogleDoc spreadsheet? Something that automatically produces an RSS feed (and that you could give permission to others to add to, so as to not have to shoulder the burden alone).

Efforts like this that keep the community appraised are immensely valueable. And I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but much like the case with the Ed Tech conference listings I documented a while back, in this day and age we need to be looking at web-based formats and tools by default, ones that produce RSS and allow collaborative editing. There is simply too much too kepp track of to do otherwise, and it is only in spreading the load that we can hope to keep up. – SWL

If you weren’t already impressed enough with Atutor, the accessible, open source LMS from U of Toronto’s Adaptive Technology Resource Centre, along comes the second piece in their ever-growing suite of accessible learning technologies. With shared document authoring, calendering, chat, threaded discussion and extensive group support, ACollab is WCAG 1.0, Section 508 US-compliant software that can be easily integrated with Atutor to provide a powerful open source learning environment. Caution: use of this product may actually enable learning amongst an entire class of people who are otherwise discriminated against by badly designed, inaccessible technologies. – SWL

This 39 page paper (draft 1.5) by Daniel Schneider is well worth the effort. On top of the ton of good thinking on why traditional CMS don’t suffice and what roles the instructor might play within different pedagogical designs, the paper was worthwhile simply for introducing (at least to me) the term “Community, Content and Collaboration Management Systems” (C3MS) to describe packages such as Plone, PostNuke and Drupal. As the author notes, these are often discussed as ‘content management systems’ but this term belies much of their true nature as collaborative and community-building content management systems. – SWL

- via [Kairosnews]

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

There are lots of desktop sharing programs out there. I came across this one today in search of a program that would allow me to have many remote users view my desktop(and pretty well do *only* that) and not require them to have anything but a web browser, e.g. no other client software required.

There’s a tiny app to download on my end; the service runs in an ASP-model, so they give you an unique URL on their server, and then sharing you desktop is as easy as starting the program and then passing the URL to anyone you want to see it. Pretty close to real-time viewing of your desktop in your guest’s web browser. Their pricing model is not ‘bad’ ($400/year for unlimited one-to-many sessions, and they have monthly plans as well) but could maybe use some tweaking if it were to appeal to higher ed users as a potential low cost/low threshold application. – SWL  

Not only does it support messaging to all these various other clients, it apparently has an RSS plug-in too so you can read your feeds in it! This is probably not news to regular IM users, as apparently the free version has something like 11 million downloads to date. But having just installed 3 different IM clients last Friday, I must say I am very attracted by its potential (and thus concerned about what the MS announcement might mean for it, but that’s another story). – SWL

And now I realize why – you ultimately need to see this in action in a multi-machine setting to really appreciate how powerful a digital tool to support classroom learning this could be. I think the folks at Silicon Chalk appreciate this and so are doing lots of demos, and are also creating more movies (cf.
http://www.silicon-chalk.com/tutorials.htm) to better illustrate what they are trying to do.

But still I’ll give it my own small stab:

• both students and instructors must have a client application installed on their machines. Whoever spawns the class session has instructor status by default and all other users by default are students. The system can allow the clients to communicate in a peer-to-peer fashion over an 801.11b wireless network, and there is also a server that makes it possible to work over a regular LAN/WAN/internet
• the software enables the instructor to share a bunch of things (powerpoint; regular screenshots of open apps, browsers, windows) with the students. This is all recorded on the client machine
• the software also records audio, presumably a mic attached to the instructor. This is also pushed to the client and in the case of students sitting in the same space can be ‘muted’ but is still recorded locally
• the software has a number of student-focused tools that allows the students to make notes etc on what is currently happening
• there are some other tools (questions, pace survey mechanism, comprehension survey mechanism, doc sharing and return) that are also enabled and recorded.
• The software records all of these events, and the student can then review the entirety of the class through the client. Much of the content is searchable, so an intelligent usage of the software by a student would have them making significant notes that they could search on and re-locate themselves at the point in the class when they occurred – and see the app being shared/the site being view and hear the commentary by the instructor.

If it’s not clear yet, the power seems to me that it creates an archive of the session with any of the student’s personal notes or other interactions set in context. Each student’s recording will be different as it will have some of the same core material, but they may have had their screen set up differently (it has a very cool interface to deal with multiple ‘windows’) and certainly their inputs will al be unique. And it’s digital and searchable.

Personally, I wasn’t one of the people who recorded lectures, and my note taking was always sporadic – I learned through engagement in dialogue and it was only by trying to re-phrase and wrestle with what I was being taught that I came to understand it. But had I had a tool like this, I think I could have still engaged in this form of learning AND ended up with a dynamic archive of the session to help me recall more specific details, never my strongest point.

I’m really interested to hear who Silicon Chalk think is in their market space. Certainly some of the synchronous tools and some of the groupware collab tools do pieces of what this does, but in my experience none of them do it with the intense focus and obvious experience in both the teaching and learning experience, and likely not in the $15-30/client range. That’s per client/year, not per client per class. There’s a free full-featured trial version that has a 4 month time limit. And they even have an option for 4 month licensing periods (they know how long a typical term is!)

This is likely only the start, but I really was excited to see this. IMHO, if you teach in a lab setting or in an institution that has a laptop program (as these are the places where this technology makes most sense to begin with) it behooves you to check out this software. – SWL