Category: Elearning and Academic Governance

Almagest

This looks like the sort of tool I’ve been looking for – a content management system with the appropriate granularity for teaching, such that text, images and other multimedia elements are stored in a database, and there is a presentation / editing tool to allow use of elements in the database in a given teaching situation.

It’s been developed at Princeton, there is a Building Blocks integration to Blackboard, and it is Open Source – sounds ideal, although I’ve not examined any of the details yet, and the devil is always in the detail …

Stephen’s Web ~ by Stephen Downes ~ Blackboard Acquisition of WebCT

Being the lazy commentator I am, I will link to Stephen Downes’ compilation of commentaries on the acquisition of WebCT by Blackboard and write my own commentary when I have had time to think it all through.

It is also interesting to note an article back in 2003 in Xplanazine and a follow-up this week.

My initial cynical take on this is that Blackboard has swallowed the serious Higher Ed vendor competition which has a better toolset but worse usability, and it will now focus on the VET / TAFE / K-12 market for vendor systems rather than developing new stuff for Higher Ed. If you want Higher Ed tools, go Sakai if you can afford it and / or you have an IT team that wants to play with toys, or go Moodle if you want a ready-made simple system that works and is easy to support or modify.

Or you can go to
Blackboard and WebCT Merger – FAQs
and have all your questions answered by Blackboard …

Blackboard and WebCT Merger – FAQs

All your questions answered by Blackboard …

Internet Time Blog: Another way of looking at instructional design

Jay Cross’s article (via Stephen Downes, OLDaily) resonates with my desire to distinguish “training” from “education”. He takes some major events of the past century and suggests how they have shaped our view of learning.

Downes ~ Principles for Evaluating Websites

Another Stephen Downes’ article – this might be a useful resource for students (and staff) in assessing website content.

(Critical) history of ICT in education – and where we are heading? – FLOSSE Posse

“Why is the impact of technology on the way we learn so marginal, even though millions of dollars and euros has been spent on to develop educational computer technology? Could it be that there has been some principle conceptual bias and all the minor changes made in to it do not help much, as the principle is wrong?

With an analogy: if you are sailing somewhere in equator and take a course by mistake to south, even that you should go north, it does not help much if you every year fix your course 5 degrees. You will still end-up to Antarctica.”

I particularly like the Analogy 🙂

Stephen’s Web ~ by Stephen Downes ~ How To Be Heard

Much of what I read online comes via Stephen Downes’ OLDaily. His guide, entitled “How To Be Heard” is not about how to market your blog, but is more about how to write your blog (and really is about how to write regularly irrespective of the medium.)

This is a very good resource. (It also recommends a sans serif font – hmmmm maybe I need to review my choice … ???)

I’m playing around with the combination of WordPress, Feed2JS and Blackboard in order to use the corporate LMS, but get around some of the annoyances of Blackboard and some of the difficulties of collaborative content being locked inside a password-controlled environment.

The Announcement Tool in Blackboard is pretty annoying in that you have to go into the Control Panel in order to use it, and you have to have staff level access, and there are some non-intuitive things about the permanent vs non-permanent listing. There is also no capacity to have the Announcements pushed to students rather than making them pull them from Blackboard.

So long as Announcements are not considered “secret” (should not be seen by anybody not enrolled in the subject), they can be posted on a blog and “fed” into a permanent Announcement.

1. Make a blog, for example at http://www.edublogs.org
2. Find the RSS feed from the blog (see the button labelled RSS on the left navigation under Meta)
3. Go to Feed2JS and put the URL into the appropriate text box
   1. In the settings, decide whether you want students to know where the “real site” is – ie whether you want them to find the actual blog to read information directly.
   2. If you don’t link to your blog anywhere in the feed, you may be able to keep it relatively secret
   3. I’m going to play with whether we can restrict a blog to inside UniMelb so that the blog itself would only be viewable from a Unimelb ip, or via Blackboard outside of the Uni
4. Generate the javascript using the generate button
5. Use the style preview to apply different CSS styles to the feed
   1. Note that the CSS will apply to all previous announcements too because of the way that the Announcements page is generated
6. Paste the CSS and javascript into the Announcement, and make the Announcement permanent

Now all you have to do is update the blog site, and the permanent announcement will update itself.

It would also be possible to use WordPress for collaborative work with student groups, who could then publish their work via Blackboard. I’m still trying to work out if this is as much trouble as setting up groupwork within Blackboard itself.

Having waxed lyrical about the possibilities afforded by fanfic for encouraging creative writing in school kids, my next foray into harnessing the power of popular culture is to suggest replacing the Problem-Based Learning curriculum in Medicine with a requirement to critique a few episodes of House.

Not only would you get the evidence-based, hypothesis-testing scientific approach to practising medicine, but you would also get to analyse motivations from doctor, nurse, administrator, patient and patient-social-circle context.

And you might even get a good laugh as well …