A Promising Start

Today, Blackboard Learn President Ray Henderson announced in his blog that Blackboard will be “ramping up its commitment” to standards support, starting with a pledge to support import and export of the IMS Common Cartridge standard. If Ray actually makes this happen, and happen in a timely manner, this would be a pretty big deal. It would mean that textbook publishers and faculty members alike would have an easier time sharing content across multiple systems and migrating from one system to another. To be clear, ANGEL had a consistent reputation for leading in the implementation of standards, while Blackboard frankly has been known to make promises that they haven’t kept in this area. So if Ray is able to deliver on this (and we can’t know until the code ships), it will be a very positive step hopefully a portent of more good things to come.

Let’s put this in perspective. On the one hand, of the three tests I suggested for the “new” Blackboard, this was the one that I was most confident that Ray would pull off. He has been personally committed to Common Cartridge and has helped drive it forward. LIS will be a tougher test, and the patent suit will be a much tougher test.

On the other hand, Ray has only been a Blackboard employee for a handful of weeks. I think this an excellent beginning.

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Cracking the Code

I sometimes get frustrated with the strong allergic reaction that even many good educators have to the request for hard data as part of an educational decision-making process. This allergy shows up in all different ways in all different places. In elementary school, for many years (and this may still be true today, for all I know), you could predict a person’s position on reading education based on their political disposition. Liberals liked whole language and conservatives liked phonics. James Moffett wrote a riveting if ultimately one-sided account of the conservative attachment to phonics (among many other things), with the more extreme proponents making claims like, “Phonics cured my daughter’s asthma!” (No, I’m not joking.) I have seen no corresponding documentation of the liberal version of this bias, but I have known many teachers, invariably liberals, who have vehemently asserted the value of whole language, where the only evidence they had was that most of the (middle-class) kids (from educated families) in their classrooms learn to read just fine. Nowhere in these debates was a discussion about whether it might be a good idea to construct some empirically rigorous tests to indicate which approach might provide what kinds of benefits under which circumstances. There are some things in education that do not lend themselves to rigorous empirical study, but this is not one of them—especially these days with the improvements we have in brain imaging equipment.

Another example: When I was a PhD student in English, I called a meeting of my fellow graduate students to discuss what we could do to improve the quality of our pedagogy. Mind you, this was at a department with a strong composition program that prided itself on its commitment to teaching. One suggestion I raised was that we could run a norming session for the English 101 final essays so that we could share best practices and ensure we were grading progress consistently across the program. This wasn’t a crazy suggestion from out of the blue; it was a successful practice that was already being employed in other universities. Yet you would have thought that I was asking everyone to get bar code tattoos on their foreheads. Somehow, taking such an step would violate their fundamental rights to individuality as professors, and besides, you can’t “norm” a thing like that. Teaching is an art, I was told.

The same sort of tension frequently creeps into educational technology conversations when it comes to anything remotely smacking of assessment, grading, or analytics. Test engines and grade books are derided as mere “management” tools, while retention early warning systems are apparently the first wave in the Rise of the Machines. As with the cases of phonics and final exam norming, these conversations are immensely frustrating to me in large part because I often find myself arguing with some of the talented, creative teachers who I respect the most. And I don’t always handle these situations well. (See for example, my somewhat snippy response to my friend Joe Ugoretz regarding the value of grade books and test engines or my regrettably snarky swipe at Jim Groom regarding the death of the LMS.) I think it’s mostly because I’m trying to convince myself that I’m not crazy, that I’m not some kind of Cylon or Terminator sleeper bot. Why am I the only teacher who sees it this way? What’s wrong with me?

It is therefore with great relief that I read Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s comment on the value of analytics:

Using technology to improve student achievement makes teachers feel almost as if “they’re cracking a code,” he explained. With adequate student data, teachers come to realize that effective instruction is not based on “just a guess or an assumption or a hunch, and all that is being driven by technology.”

Yes. That is how I feel.

I think there is a fear—a legitimate fear, bourne out by history and experience—that the bureaucracy will take the raw data as a substitute for judgment of teachers and students. I get that. It’s something to be fought vehemently. And maybe the tools we have today have more bureaucratic influence on their design than they should. But this is no reason to reject the value of data, or the scrutiny of peer review, or the use of tools that provide visible and measurable data regarding student activities. Like doctors and engineers, teachers are professionals. Nobody seriously imagines that the existence of an fMRI machine makes a doctor’s judgment less important. To the contrary, the more data we have, the more we benefit from the judgment of a trained and experienced expert.

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Sakai 3 As Mac OS X, Part Deux

At the risk of sounding a little silly, I’m going to attempt to extend the analogy between Sakai 3 and Mac OS X that I made in my last post. The reason I think this exercise is worth trying is that the Mac OS X transition is a relatively clear and uncluttered example of a successful rearchitecture of a product with an installed base, and it provides us with a good model of what could happen with Sakai 3 if the initiative is executed well over a number of releases. Please understand that I am not predicting anything here. I’m just trying to model possibilities so that we can set a ceiling on expectations.

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Sakai 3 Is Like Mac OS X

There’s an important point about the the forthcoming Sakai 3 that probably has escaped most casual observers. It is close to a ground-up rewrite. Sakai 3 is to Sakai 2 as Mac OS X was to Mac OS 9, in the following ways:

  • The technological heart (or kernel) of the new version is completely different from the old version.
  • That kernel leapfrogs many current-generation architectures (which are really aging legacy architectures, for the most part) for software of its category.
  • Some of the applications that run on the old version will be able to run on the new version with some modest to moderate development.
  • Other applications on the old system will have to be completely re-implemented on the new system.
  • Still other applications could run on the new system with some tweaking (and probably will for a couple of versions), but they will seem awkward in the new environment until they are re-implemented.
  • Users who have lots of apps that they want to carry over in the old environment will probably want to run that old environment together with the new one in some sort of co-existence mode. New adoptees will care less about that and skip co-existence mode, provided that the new system has the apps that they need.
  • At some point, co-existence mode will go away and adoptees will have to migrate to the new system to stay current. How current adoptees respond to this transition will be largely a function of how well the migration path is done, but some users who are attached to the way the old system worked will have trouble letting go regardless.
  • The first release is likely to have some very impressive capabilities as well as some feature gaps and rough edges. It will be suitable for full replacement use by some, for piloting by others, while still others will want to wait for another release or two. (Whether the 2010 milestone release of Sakai 3 is more like OS X 10.0 or 10.1 in this respect remains to be seen.)
  • The new kernel will likely enable accelerated innovation and impressive progress from release to release, with feature gaps getting filled quickly and new capabilities that nobody has seen before coming too.

I think there is a good chance that, within a few releases, Sakai 3 will be a trend-setter in its category much like Mac OS X is.

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Blackboard Learn President Ray Henderson Starts a Blog

This is good news. Former ANGELista and current Blackboard Learn President Ray Henderson has started a blog, where he says he will respond to conversations in the blogosphere and generally try to make Blackboard more transparent. He has also turned blog comments on, which he acknowledges is a small deal in the wider world but a non-trivial deal for a corporate blog. (This is true.) Maybe he’ll respond to my post on three tests for the”new” Blackboard.

In marginally related news (under the heading of “openness”), I learned from Blackboard folks on Twitter that Blackboard’s API documentation is available without requiring a contract or login at their EduGarage site. FWIW.

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