All posts in LMS

The Content Management System Isn't the Enemy -- Unless It Is

Posted June 11th, 2008 by Bill

From Cole Camplese, Should it all be Miscellaneous?:

The idea that we can follow a book filled with instructions on how to do information architecture, web design, usability, and so forth may be crazy.

Some great conversations going on about structuring dialogue within organizations, and the inherent tension between freely flowing conversation and institutional control over the messages contained within that conversation, and the need for quality control over content affiliated with an institution.

In addition to Cole's post (linked above), D'Arcy Norman has a couple of good posts that provide some context.

Do You Want To Help Eliminate Blackboard?

Posted March 28th, 2008 by Bill

The Summer of Code application process is underway. Along with some good folks at The Oregon State Open Source Labs, we have put together a proposal to share content between Moodle and Drupal.

In combination with the recently developed functionality to author and export content from Drupal in IMS LOM format, you could author courses in Drupal or Moodle, and use those courses interchangeably in Drupal, Moodle, or any other LMS that imported IMS LOM.

OER's: Publishing is the Easy Part; Now, Let's Make Them More Usable

Posted February 17th, 2008 by Bill

Introductory Notes

These are some thoughts in progress -- I've been thinking these things through for probably the last few years, but things have been getting more interesting of late.

Some of the blog posts that have helped shape my thinking here include:
http://bavatuesdays.com/proud-spammer-of-open-university-courses/
http://weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca/brian/archives/044998.php

Everybody's Favorite Open Source LMS: Blackboard

Posted February 4th, 2008 by Bill

From Michael Feldstein, via the OLDaily.

It looks like Blackboard paid for Google adwords to have ads for Blackboard appear when people searched for "Open Source LMS" --

Image via Michael Feldstein

Unfortunately, the Blackboard ads appeared under the heading "Open Source LMS" creating the appearance that Blackboard is an open source product.

On Aggregation, and Crow

Posted November 24th, 2007 by Bill

A mildly edited version of my response to Jim Groom's post over on the bava --

D'Arcy mentioned the need for this to scale, and he's right. With that said, I don't think we need to have scalability to 100K students as a first goal. The beauty of the small pieces loosely joined is that it's easier, and that it's a step away from the monolithic LMS's so beloved by so many --

Toward that end, it's good to consider what we'd need to carry from the blog to the aggregator in order to connect a student work with an institutional SIS/LMS. To start, I see two factors as essential: first, mapping a feed to a student, and second, mapping individual posts from within a feed to a course.

My Proposal, NECC 08

Posted October 3rd, 2007 by Bill

In this session, participants will examine portfolios from several angles:

as a learner, using the portfolio to track/present their day to day work;
as a learner, using the portfolio as a tool to highlight individual artifacts in order to demonstrate learning over time;
as an instructor, examining the various situations where portfolio use may or may not be the best choice to support student learning;
as an instructor, using a portfolio as a professional development tool;
as an administrator/evaluator, using a portfolio as a means of presenting the different types of learning occurring within a school or an organization.

This Would Be Easier If You Were Joking

Posted August 17th, 2007 by Bill

I'll admit it at the outset: I'm in a bad mood today.

But when I see things like this, and this, and this, all talking about running courses in Facebook, I can't help myself

(Okay, really I can. But in this case, I don't want to).

Read Facebook's terms of service.

The "User Content Posted on the Site" section is particularly relevant here:

When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content on the Site. By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.