Real-time College and University Transcripts Coming

Published by Jim Farmer May 2nd, 2008 in Higher Education and Open Source, Open Content, Open Access. 4 Comments

This is a guest post by Jim Farmer.

“Today the four firms providing electronic transcript services [to U.S. colleges and universities and school districts] have agreed to form a network so transcripts will be delivered to any user of their service regardless of where the transcript originated.” Speaking from hastily-written text, Larry Furth, Executive Director of the School Interoperability Framework Association (SAIFA) announced the agreement at the 5th Annual Conference on Technology & Standards in Washington, DC. The panel discussion on Emerging Standardization was delayed fifteen minutes as the four panelists reached agreement. The agreement is expected to be announced formally later this week. Mark Johnson, President of the National Transcript Center, John O’Connell, Senior Vice President of Business Development for Docufide, Craig Powell, President of ConnectEdu Inc., and J. Michael Thompson, Chief Executive Officer of XAP Corporation were speaking on Emerging Standardization Efforts and Trends.

Continue reading ‘Real-time College and University Transcripts Coming’

From the archive: Jing Rocks!

Published by Michael Feldstein January 21st, 2008 in Instructional Design, Tools, Toys, and Technology (Oh my!) and Notable Posts. 4 Comments

Thanks to my wonderful readers, I have solved my screencasting dilemma. To begin with, I am thoroughly impressed with TechSmith’s Jing. It is extremely simple to use and produces very high-quality videos with very small file sizes. And it’s free. It’s not what you need if you’re going to want to edit the files, create interactive training, or add other bells and whistles, but it’s perfect if you want to do a simple screencast easily and well. My sole complaint about it is that it’s just a little sluggish on the four-year-old Dell laptop. (We haven’t tried it on the Mac yet. Did I mention that it’s cross-platform?)

Jing can save files to anywhere, but we’ve decided to use its built-in one-click integration with Screencast.com. You get 200 MB of free storage with Jing, which probably isn’t enough for Kathy’s course, but it’s enough to get started. After that, the next step up is $6.95/month for 25GB. Seven bucks a month is a little more than we wanted to pay, but it’s well worth it for the ease-of-use and the peace of mind knowing that Techsmith (the company that created Camtasia) is running it. Basically, Kathy will create a private folder for each student. It should be very simple. The files play in Flash, so there should be minimal technological barriers, and the text comes across crystal clear. This obviously isn’t a particularly accessible solution but, since this is all one-on-one feedback, Kathy can make other accommodations for individual disabled students. And if she wanted to store other files in there for students (e.g., audio, or even a Word or PDF document), her account would handle that too. It’s not limited to Flash video.

There are a couple of annoyances. For example, Jing only saves to the “Jing” folder in her Screencast.com account, so she’ll have to go into the web interface and move each file over to the students’ private folders after uploading. That significantly reduces the value of the one-click integration. Also, the web interface for Screencast.com is a bit clunky; common tasks take more clicks than they should. And finally, it would be nice to enable email subscriptions on folders so that people could be notified when new files are added. But these are all relatively minor. Overall, I’m convinced that this will work well.

I’ll keep you posted as the semester progresses.

At the JA-SIG Conference Next Week

Published by Michael Feldstein April 25th, 2008 in Higher Education and Open Source, Open Content, Open Access. 0 Comments

I’ll be traveling to St. Paul, MN on Sunday for the JA-SIG conference. I’ll be there all week, including the post-conference Sakai planning sessions on Thursday and Friday. I’m a co-presenter for one session with Unicon’s Cris Holdorph on integrating Sakai with Peoplesoft. Other than that, the most likely place you will find me during the day is in the sessions from the “Community Source Management/Governance” track.

Feel free to ping me or just track me down if you want to meet up and chat.

Is Blackboard’s Lawyer Calling D2L’s Customers?

Published by Michael Feldstein April 24th, 2008 in Higher Education and Tools, Toys, and Technology (Oh my!). 0 Comments

Here’s an interesting bit from D2L’s patent blog:

Clients have been calling us to let us know that Matthew Small, General Counsel of Blackboard, has been calling them. From what we understand, his purpose appears to be twofold: (1) to encourage clients to switch to Blackboard ; and (2) to create FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) with respect to alternative products and services in the eLearning space.

From what we gather, he has been making statements that are not supported by the record in the Court or by the actions of the Patent & Trademark Office. If your organization is called, we invite you to suggest to Mr. Small that we are always willing to engage in an open dialogue with you and him.

We remain confident that Learning Environment version 8.3 is an appropriate design-around to the patent claims – as we announced nearly one month ago. We also remain confident that the patent’s claims are invalid and that the Courts and the PTO will ultimately invalidate the patent.

As there is no www.factcheck.org for this litigation, we continue to encourage you to review the documents and the facts. We are happy to discuss any questions that any client, or other interested people, may have. Just let us know!

John Baker, President and CEO (John.Baker@Desire2Learn.com)
Diane Lank, General Counsel and Director, Legal Services (Diane.Lank@Desire2Learn.com)
John McLeod, Director of Marketing (John.McLeod@Desire2Learn.com)

It’s unsurprising that an aggressive company engaged in a lawsuit with its competitor would use the suit to try to poach customers. But I’ve never heard of a company having their lawyer act as a sales guy. If it’s true, it certainly demonstrates a pretty high level of chutzpah.

I’m very curious to find out more.  If you’ve received a call like this or know anybody who has, let me know. I’m particularly interested in who called and in what factual claims they made about the legal situation.

SpikeSource Supporting Moodle on the Microsoft Stack

Published by Michael Feldstein April 22nd, 2008 in Higher Education and Open Source, Open Content, Open Access. 0 Comments

Jim Farmer has an interesting guest post over at Seb’s blog about SpikeSource supporting Moodle on Windows/IIS. Both the creation of supported softwares stack for higher education and the mixture of proprietary and open source software in at least some of those stacks strike me as natural steps. I expect that we’ll see more of this kind of thing.

Great Open Source Conference in Upstate New York

Published by Michael Feldstein April 22nd, 2008 in Higher Education and Open Source, Open Content, Open Access. 2 Comments

Update: The dates of the conference are actually June 19-20. Sorry about that.

(Patrick will never let me live this down.)

My friend Patrick Masson has put together a two-day conference at Delhi, NY on May 23-24 that looks terrific. The first day, which is about open source in higher education in general, has tracks on quality, total cost of ownership, and external support. The second day is a Moodle Moot. I’ll be one of the speakers.

Be there or be rectangular, as they say.

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