This is a guest post by Jim Farmer.
Delayed several days by a database failure at the District Court for the Eastern District of Texas Friday, May 2nd, the Final Judgment and associated orders for Blackboard v. Desire2Learn are now publicly available.
This text is based upon publicly available records. Because much of the record is “sealed” and not available to the public, and the transcript is available only upon payment to the court reporter, the complete record, as available to counsel, may provide a different perspective.
Continue reading ‘Blackboard v. Desire2Learn: The First Final Judgment’
When I was a tourguide at Rutgers (part of my undergrad experience), I learned an interesting (though possibly apocryphal) story about how the sidewalks were planned on the Livingston College campus. Apparently, the university deliberately refrained from putting down any sidewalks for the first several years. (For those who don’t know Livingston College, there are no roads inside the campus; hence there are no obvious paths for sidewalks.) Instead, the planners waited to see where students wore tracks in the mud from their frequent comings and goings. They then laid sidewalk in a pattern that closely resembled those student-created paths.
I often think of KM the same way. More often than not, the goal is not so much to figure out how people should or would use knowledge as it is how they do use it. Once we have figured out how people think then we can lay the sidewalk and save them the energy of slogging through the mud every time.
Which brings me to the e-Literate web site.
Continue reading ‘From the archive: KM as Tracks in the Mud’
I’m at the IMS Learning Impact conference. Another conference, another T-shirt. I expect to get at least 5 conference bags and T-shirts this year. I already have way too many T-shirts and way too many bags. At this point, I am starting to use them to insulate my attic. It’s absurd.
Therefore, I am hereby starting the Conference BYOB (Bring Your Own Bag) movement. Here’s how it works:
If you’re a conference organizer, offer to give a gift card (Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble…whatever) to anyone who brings their own bag and shirt. Just put your pile of stuff out, with gift card on the top, and I’ll gladly cram it into one of my 57 existing bags. You save shipping costs on all that bulky stuff, I get something I actually want rather than extra stuff to haul home and stuff in my attic, and we both help to save the environment.
Deal?
Published by Michael Feldstein May 10th, 2008
in About This Site.
Ugh. I have so much to say about the JA-SIG conference and had just dug out enough from my work backlog to think about writing a few blog posts. Now I’m going away again and will have my head crammed full of even more stuff to blog about.I’m going to try to get to at least some of the JA-SIG stuff before it fades from my memory, but in the meantime, Sakai Foundation Executive Director Michael Korcuska has a few good posts up about it on his blog.
At any rate, if you’re going to Learning Impact, look me up. I’ll be around for the entire conference (including Thursday morning) and will be participating in the “Analytics and Learning Outcomes” panel on Tuesday at 1 PM.
A while back, I picked up on D’Arcy Norman’s complaint about how Moodle doesn’t export content to a standard. In a response to one of the comments on my post, I suggested that open source LMS communities like Moodle’s should encourage adopting institutions to consider the cost of exit as a selection criterion for their LMS. Doing so would encourage them to invest in export capabilities at the time when their commitment to the platform is high.
Well, as Chuck Severence notes, Oxford is considering doing exactly that with Sakai. Check out his post for some good notes on the pros and cons of various export strategies.
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’
