Tools, Toys, and Technology (Oh my!) Content from rSmart

Well, it’s December 30th, and I have already gotten my first invitation to contribute to a “predictions for 2009″ article. And it got me thinking about a twist on the question. What developments in the world of educational technology during 2008 will turn out to be more important in retrospect than they were widely recognized to be at the time?

Discuss below.

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.

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)

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.

In the recent past, I wrote about not really getting Twitter. Since then, I have to say that it has grown on me. I am not and never will be an addict. But it does add a nice social dimension to my day, particularly given that I work alone from my home office a lot of the time. It lets me feel a little more connected with friends and colleagues, and does so without taking up unacceptable amounts of time. So, for my former fellow Twitter skeptics, I have a few suggestions for how to get the most out of it:

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Read the rest of Learning to Like Twitter (520 words)

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.

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Stephen Downes and Scott Leslie have both expressed concern that my original post regarding the Zotero lawsuit was possibly too charitable toward Thomson Reuters. Sadly, as more information comes in, it’s beginning to look like they were right.

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Read the rest of Thomson Suing Zotero: More Info and More Thoughts (809 words)

Very few of you will care about this, but for those who do, there’s an interesting blog post by an Intaglio guy about why writing workflow in BPMN and having it machine-translated into BPEL makes more sense than, for example, writing in XPDL.??

If you’re into that kind of thing.

My apologies. I lied to you, Dear Reader. I had told you that I would videotape OpenWorld for you. But as I had feared, it just didn’t seem right. There was too much awkwardness (due to the fact that I’m an Oracle employee) without enough return. Besides, I was crazy busy. So no video.

In my previous??posts??on this topic, I outlined the mundate yet important core use cases that LIS is intended to address. Now I’d like to start looking at some of the sexier possibilities that the spec enables.

Jeff Young has a great piece in The Chronicle??called “Blackboard Customers Consider Alternatives“. As usual, Michael Korcuska has insightful things to say about it. I only have a little bit to add on one quote from Blackboard CEO Michael Chasen:

I have 300 people on my development team working full time on our products and services???I don???t know if there are 300 full-time people currently working on Sakai.

In an earlier post, I outlined the motivating pain that brought the working group members to the table. In this post, I’m going to list out the highlights of the solution we came up with to address that pain. Again, this post is focused mainly on the important but unsexy problems of SIS/LMS integration that IMS LIS was intended to address. I’ll get to some of the sexier implications in a future post.

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Read the rest of IMS Learning Information Services: What a Solution Looks Like (738 words)

A few weeks back, I got an invitation from Matt Small to get a tour of Blackboard NG. Given all the rumors and speculation around it, I was obviously interested. I particularly wanted to know how much of it exists in code today and how much is vapor. So I took Matt up on his offer, and got a tour from him and John Fontaine. And while I didn’t quite get a full answer to the vaporware question, I did learn a lot of other interesting stuff about the platform and Blackboard’s strategy.

photo credit: iluvcocacola

e-Literate is back in business and ready to go. Which is good, because I have a backlog of posts I want to get to.

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.

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while. Barry Dahl has a great post analyzing the back-channel comments from our recent panel discussion with Stephen Downes and Robbie Melton. He concludes that only 31% of the posts were productive, by which he means on-topic questions or comments. This issue came up during the panel discussion itself, and Robbie (brilliantly, in my opinion) characterized it as a “teachable moment.”

This is a guest post by Jim Farmer.

As the dominant supplier of learning system software, Blackboard Inc. is “mission critical” to colleges and universities in the U.S. It has been more than two years since Blackboard completed the acquisition of WebCT. Reviewing Blackboard’s performance may provide some insight.

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Read the rest of Blackboard, Inc. Analysis, Part 1: Software Licenses (1,503 words)

This is a guest post by Jim Farmer

OK, Dear Reader, I need your help once again. You haven’t let me down yet.

My wife is working on a summer program for high school ESL kids who come from all over the world. She and her colleagues are fairly non-technical. They want to create a map of the world where they can display information about all the students in the program and where they come from. Here are the features I’m looking for:

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.

Michael just introduced me two posts below.  I’m Michael Staton, and I’m a guest blogger.