Monthly Archives: August 2008

Bring On Da Noise: The Backchannel Panel

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 [...]

Posted in Guest Bloggers, Tools, Toys, and Technology (Oh my!) | Tagged , | 5 Comments

Blackboard, Inc. Analysis, Part 1: Software Licenses

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.

Posted in Guest Bloggers, Tools, Toys, and Technology (Oh my!) | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Social Constructivists and eLearning

This is a guest post by Jim Farmer
On July 15th Luke Fernandez, Weber State University and frequent Sakai contributor, posted “Moodle and Social Constructionism: Looking for the Individual in the Community” on Academic Commons. Broadly interpreting his post about attending the San Francisco MoodleMoot US 2008, he identified two issues: (1) How does the [...]

Posted in Guest Bloggers, Higher Education, Openness, Tools, Toys, and Technology (Oh my!) | Tagged , , , , | 7 Comments

Looking for Suggestions on Mapping Software

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 [...]

Posted in Tools, Toys, and Technology (Oh my!) | 5 Comments

Moodle Developer Martin Dougiamas Honored at OSCON 2008

This is a guest post by Jim Farmer.
Martin Dougiamas was named Best Education Enabler at last week’s OSCON (Open Source Conference) 2008 in Portland. The Google-O’Reilly Open Source award was made for his contribution to Moodle, an open source learning system. This is the first year anyone from education was nominated for the annual awards.
Other [...]

Posted in Guest Bloggers, Openness | Tagged , , | 1 Comment
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