In the February 2003 Sloan-C View, there was a lead article summarizing the give and take views expressed on the Sloan-C listserv regarding Learning Management Systems (LMS). The editors feel that there is more to be gleaned from a discussion of this topic and they have asked a university IT administrator and a knowledgeable faculty member to present perspectives regarding a series of probing issues related to LMSs.
No one standard will suit all
Not a new sentiment, really, but one worth repeating. And it was repeated, in many different ways across a rather wide spectrum of speakers at the eLearning Results conference in Sestri Levante, Italy, yesterday. The eLearning Results conference is a two day do, organised by the hosts Giunti Labs, in collaboration with IMS, ADL, and the various other interoperability specification and standards acronyms: ISO SC36, CEN/ISSS, IEEE LTSC, BSI, and more. Yet the overriding message of day one was remarkably clear: there is no one standard to rule them all, nor will there ever be. However seductive the vision of universal interoperability may be, each and every community has its own needs and wants that need to be addressed.
E-learning trends today & beyond
“New developments are occurring in e-learning training at a breakneck pace. What trends are hottest, and which will impact your business most? Find out what three leading experts have to say as they turn on their high beams and look into the future 18 to 24 months out.”
http://www.ltimagazine.com/ltimagazine/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=56219
Publishing as teachers: What’s stopping us?
“Scholarship. Teachership. It is certainly indicative that the first word, scholarship, is a word that we probably have occasion to use every day of our professional lives. Yet even though we might also be involved in teaching activities every day as well, there is not an equivalent word - a word like “teachership”, say - to help us think and talk about what we are doing.”
Overcoming educators’ digital immigrant accents: A rebuttal
“When I wrote the twin articles “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants” (2001b) and “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, Part II: Do They Really Think Differently” (2001c) for On The Horizon, my goal was to highlight an enormous issue that most educators have chosen to minimize, to ignore, or to ascribe to causes other than technology change.
In short, there are important, never-before-seen differences between the generation that grew up with digital technologies (the Digital Natives) and the generation that grew up before these technologies (the Digital Immigrants).”
Open source courseware — Evaluation & rating
The cost of doing business is going up for colleges and universities, particularly when it comes to course management systems. Proprietary enterprise solutions for course management — BlackBoard, WebCT, eCollege — are beginning to cost the same as other enterprise solutions. Translation — they’re getting very expensive. This rise in cost, along with the traditionally closed architecture of such systems has lead some universities and organizations to develop in-house programs tailored to their specific pedagogical needs and development resources.
http://www.xplana.com/whitepapers/archives/Open_Source_Courseware
Futurist fears end of innovation
Author Howard Rheingold believes the freedom of technologists to innovate is under attack as never before. Delivering the keynote speech at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, Rheingold warned that vested interests, flexing their political and economic muscle, are stifling technological innovation. “Our freedom to innovate is not necessarily going to be as free as it was in the pre-Internet era,” he cautioned. “We are at a pivotal point in the history of technology and a lot of assumptions should be questioned.”
UW drops BB & WebCT — Selects Desire2Learn as its new e-learning system
“The driving force behind this initiative was not dissatisfaction with the current course management systems … The driving force was the escalating cost of supporting two CMS platforms in a time of severe budget constraints.”
UW System completed negotiations last week with Desire2Learn, a Canadian company whose product will replace WebCT and Blackboard as the campuses’ common e-Learning system. The selection of the Desire2Learn platform comes after a year-long process aimed at procuring a single product or suite of products that meet the UW’s evolving web-based learning needs.
High score education: Games, not school, are teaching kids to think
The US spends almost $50 billion each year on education, so why aren’t kids learning? Forty percent of students lack basic reading skills, and their academic performance is dismal compared with that of their foreign counterparts. In response to this crisis, schools are skilling-and-drilling their way “back to basics,” moving toward mechanical instruction methods that rely on line-by-line scripting for teachers and endless multiple-choice testing. Consequently, kids aren’t learning how to think anymore - they’re learning how to memorize. This might be an ideal recipe for the future Babbitts of the world, but it won’t produce the kind of agile, analytical minds that will lead the high tech global age. Fortunately, we’ve got Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Deus X for that.
Blackboard, students and publishing on the Web
And this week… let’s talk about Blackboard! Last week I did a quick survey of how the Internet and web publishing can completely change the way students write - the Internet gives students a real audience for their writing, it expands the content of their writing (images!), allowing them to link and be-linked-to, while promoting continual revision throughout the semester. Does Blackboard, a web-based course management system, take advantage of any of these features? It does not.
http://www.xplana.com/articles/archives/blackboard_and_students