Higher Education Content from rSmart

The product group I’m in at Oracle (Academic Enterprise Solutions, or AES) has a new white paper out on the company’s vision of the future of the academic enterprise. A lot of this is aspirational, but it does give you a sense of the general direction that the company would like to take in terms of product development. Also, being Oracle’s vision, it focuses on Oracle’s view of academic IT and how Oracle products fit in. If you don’t like enterprise-y approaches or you don’t like Oracle products, then this document probably won’t be of much use to you.

Since I have made a commitment to take the umbrella concept of open education more seriously, this will be the first post in an occasional series in which I express my concerns about open education as a way of working through the issues. It is also part of an occasional series of posts about or inspired by the book .

MergingArts has a good audio interview with Inigral CEO Michael Staton. Michael makes some good points about the nature of sites like Facebook that raise questions about a number of academic social networking efforts. Essentially, he argues that people don’t want to mix their work and social spaces. There’s an almost ontological separation of the two. Unlike, say, chat, which isn’t a “space” per se, Facebook is a “place” where people hang out.

Sarah Milstein, author of the O’Reilly Radar report Twitter and the Micro-Messaging Revolution, pointed me to this blog post with a lot of interesting suggestions about how to use Twitter as a teaching tool. It’s good reading, and the Academic Hack blog (which I hadn’t heard of) looks like a good new addition to my RSS reader.

A friend asked me what I think about the story in the Chronicle about the professor who encouraged his students to create a hoax story about a pirate in order to teach them about students about vetting the quality of their sources as part of a history class. They created a blog about the fake history and added a Wikipedia page about the fictional pirate. Then they “Facebooked, Twittered, and Shoutwired it.” The professor pulled the plug when he found out that some of his historian colleagues were buying into the hoax.

So what do I think of it? I think it stinks.

I have signed up for David Wiley’s Introduction to Openness class. It’s free for online participants (although you don’t get college accreditation for it).??In an intriguing move, he’s modeled the course somewhat after RPGs, where course “credit” (whatever that means in this model) depends on class- and guild-dependent quests.??I will probably play a Merchant, although I’m tempted to be a Bard.

Via Michael Korcuska’s blog, there is a new vision document describing the proposed path for the next major version of Sakai. If you find this interesting, then you may also want to look at the documents outlining the current thinking for Sakai 3.0 RC1 in (a little) more detail. addthis_url = 'http%3A%2F%2Fmfeldstein.com%2Fsakai-3-vision-document%2F'; addthis_title = 'Sakai+3+Vision+Document'; addthis_pub = '';

?? michael.feldstein for e-Literate, 2008.

I’m sitting in my hotel room near LAX early in the morning and I have a little time between the legs of my trip to reflect on the amazing experience I just had at The OPEN Forum. I must say, Thanos Partners did a superb job of organizing a fun, fascinating, and frictionless conference. (And the food. OMG.) I expect to write a number of posts reflecting on different facets that were covered during the forum, but this first one will mainly be a brain dump to capture a bunch of raw observations before they have a chance to fly out of my head.

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Read the rest of Open Forum Brain Dump (1,336 words)

I’ll be attending Thanos Partners’ OPEN Forum for Higher Education Executives next week. If anybody wants to catch up with me there, you can ping me or just find me at the session.

According to Desire2Learn’s patent blog, Blackboard has now filed suit against the USPTO (technically against the Director of the USPTO) to stop the inter partes re-exam from proceeding. Their argument is that the law states the USPTO cannot order a re-exam after a final judgment has been rendered by the courts upholding the patent.

This is a guest post by Jim Farmer.

“Learning, education, and HR standards communities have very little to show in terms of cross-domain standards interoperability and convergence despite significant investments over a period of more than a decade.” Chuck Allen, Executive Director of the HR-XML Consortium, made this assessment of standards that cross the boundaries of standards-setting bodies in a “White Paper” submitted to the LETSI SCORM 2.0 Workshop held October 15-17, 2008 in Pensacola, Florida. As learning systems exchange data with various administrative, ERP and human resources systems, standards are needed to avoid expensive continuous redundant software maintenance.

One criticism I consistently hear when talking about retention early warning systems is that they may provide value for the university but mostly don’t for the student. The university benefits by retaining the student because it gets more tuition. But, the argument goes, the student may have all kinds of valid reasons for dropping out of a course or a program. Furthermore, retention and learning have no necessary relationship, they argue. You can stay in school and still not get anything of value out of it. The (usually implicit) conclusion from these arguments is that retention systems are nothing more Big Brother tools for squeezing more money out of hapless students.

As I sit on the flight home from the EDUCAUSE conference thinking back on the themes of the week, it is clear to me that various flavors of openness have finally arrived in a big way in higher education, with more on the way. Certainly, a critical mass of universities are recognizing the value of open standards and accepting that open source is a viable and important approach. Open access and open educational resources are coming on too, although they are much earlier in their adoption cycle. Further down the road, open governance and open business practices are looming on the horizon.

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Read the rest of Openness: Finally, We’re Getting Somewhere (2,096 words)

My fellow SUNY escapees Patrick Masson and Ken Udas are up to some good stuff now. They’ve started an EDUCAUSE constituent group on Openness–open source, open standards, open educational resources, open content, open management practices, etc. Their hope is that the disparate groups that tend to care about each of these strands will identify the common strands of philosophy and practice that will help universities develop more coherent policies and ways of doing business that are both practically beneficial and consistent with the values that universities ought to support.

Just want to give a quick shoutout to my friends Steven Zucker and Beth Harris for their beautiful work on the newly redesigned smARThistory web site. When I think about Open Educational Resources, this is the sort of thing that I want to see. The site is clean and well-organized with an extremely high signal-to-noise ratio. They also have links out to useful Web 2.0 tools like a Dipity timeline and annotated photos at Flickr. It would be nice to see those sorts of resources even more tightly and pervasively integrated with the main assets of the site going forward, but that would really be icing on the cake.

Good stuff.

I’ll be leaving for EDUCAUSE tomorrow morning and will be there until Friday morning. I’m not giving any presentations this year other than a 15-minute presentation on Oracle SAIP at the Desire2Learn booth, but I have lots of meetings and typical goings on. If you’re going to be in Orlando this week and want to track me down, just ping me.

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My colleague Linda Feng pointed me to an interesting article about a study by the University of Liecester about how students are using Facebook and how it impacts their lives at the university. Two critical points come out of this for me. On the one hand, social networking in and of itself does seem to help students.

There’s been a fair bit of buzz, both on some edublogs I respect and in the Sakai listserv, about Thomson Reuters suing George Mason University, alleging that the Zotero team illegally reverse engineered EndNote. My initial reaction to Thomson’s move was very negative and my final reaction may be equally negative. Even casual readers of this blog know that I am not a big fan of using intellectual property as an anti-competitive bludgeon in an already thin educational software market. I’m also not a big fan of the DMCA, a draconian law that goes way too far in an effort to stop piracy.

Here at e-Literate, we’ve been arguing for some time that part of the edupatent problem rests squarely on the shoulders of the many universities that pursue profits from intellectual property too aggressively, at the expense of their mission. Well, there’s a New York Times??piece out this week that makes the same case.

Read it, please.

Investors should be pleased with Blackboard’s stock prices. The stock prices consistently outperform the NASDAQ Composite Index. [1]

Financial analysts continue to rate the stock as outperforming the market with buy and strong buy recommendations. Each quarter Blackboard CEO Mike Chasen, CFO Mike Beach and Senior Vice President Mike Stanton brief analysts winning appreciative comments. They also make presentations at conferences of financial analysts with similar responses.

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Read the rest of Blackboard, Inc. Analysis, Part 2: Financial Performance (2,011 words)

According to a blog entry on Desire2Learn’s Patent blog, the US Patent and Trademark Office has denied Blackboard’s request to suspend the re-examination process. Bb and D2L have been fighting over the venue for the next round of the battle, with Blackboard asking the USPTO not to complete the re-examination process (despite having earlier said that a re-exam would only make their patent stronger) and D2L asking the US Court of Appeals not to hear Blackboard’s case until the USPTO issues a final ruling. D2L has won the first of these two battles.

Today Oracle announced the release of the Student Administration Integration Pack, or SAIP. It’s the first product that I have worked on as an Oracle employee, and I’m proud of it for a number of reasons. It’s not a particularly glamorous piece of software, but I think it’s going to be important. This is my first post in a planned series about it.

This is a guest post by Jim Farmer

Hi!  I’m Michael Staton and I’m a guest blogger.  What I say in no way represents Michael Feldstein or his ancestors.  Also, our screenshot here is of our app with Abilene Christian University, a school known for being a thought leader in instructional technology and mobile learning products. (They give their students iPhones.  No, really.  They do.)  I am also not representing ACU, its trustees, nor their ancestors.