education Content from rSmart

Michael Feldstein picked up on some good news on Desire2Learn's blog. The US Patent and Trademark Office has denied Blackboard’s request to suspend the re-examination process.

In the past few months I've attended the most recent Sakai and Kuali community events. Aside from adding to my collection of great polo shirts I'm also reminded how important these face to face gatherings are. While these communities are very productive working as a globally distributed team, there's no substitute for the connections made face to face.

Attendees at these community events often remark that they need a forum to engage campus leaders who don't typically attend the community events.

There's an elegantly articulated post in the Blackboard blog about educational choice and diversity and an interesting thread of conversation among the Sakai community commenting on it. Though the post is superficially supportive of choice, openness, and diversity, it seems to me that it's more a marketing attempt to lay claim to the platform on which scholarly technologies will run. In other words, choice and diversity as long as you get to it through the Blackboard platform and pay them for it.  

In "The Educational Software Paradox: Can We Learn To Unlearn?," Trent Batson talks about how educational software like the Sakai CLE, Blackboard, Angel, D2L, Moodle, and other systems are caught in a paradox. Though technology would seem to be capable of transforming the way we learn and teach, the systems are stuck reinforcing the status quo. Instead of being designed for transformation they are designed in a way that mirrors the way things are done today and caters to the majority of stakeholders who'd just assume not change.

Great presentation on Opencast, an open-source project aimed at building a technology infrastructure and community sharing best practices around lecture/event capture, processing, archiving, distribution, and effective use of podcasting for teaching and learning. Mara Hancock talks about the importance of Opencast in a post about the planning grant. 

After 5 years as Portland State's Director for Web Communications, I've moved on to work for The rSmart Group, a commercial provider of open source technologies working mostly in the education sector with Sakai, OSP and Kuali.

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