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Reaching Nirvana in my Personal Learning Environment
2007-04-18 23:52:00
The flurry of recent posts over the last couple of days regarding Personal Learning Environment s or personal learning environments - to be honest, I am sometimes a little lost with all the buzzwords - has made me think about how I learn and whether I am using my learning tools as effectively as I could be. After reading Clive Sheppard's post on Stephen Downes personal learning environment presentation at the recent eLearning Guild conference, I wanted to find out more about "personal learning environments" and what I could do to improve my own.  If I have already lost you , then a great explanation of what a personal learning environments is can be found on Michele Martin's Bamboo Project blog  What has made these thoughts even more pertinent is that I only joined the edugator team five months ago, having previously worked on various projects in the financial services industry. Getting to grips with eLearning and educational technology has been an interesting a...
More About: Nirvana , Earn

WiFi iPod to beam education to the masses
2007-04-16 20:35:00
Edugator tries not to participate in the tech rumor mill. However, our ears pricked up when we read a recent article in The Register that claims that Apple is preparing a WiFi equipped iPod for release later this year. The article notes that WiFi-enabled song sharing has not been a killer app for Microsoft's doomed Zune player, suggesting that if the new feature is to be included on the iPod, it will probably be tied directly to the iTunes store, allowing the user to receive content updates automatically and without syncing their device. Audio and video podcasting has already become a powerful and growing medium for educators. Combined with the huge, wildly popular, easy-to-use distribution channel that is the iPod/iTunes juggernaut, it has a very bright future indeed. Schools like Princeton, Yale, and MIT are already using iTunes to distribute free lectures and videos to the poor punters who hesitate to sell their souls and/or their kidneys in order to afford the privileg...
More About: Education , Ipod , Wifi , Mass , Ducati

We?re back?
2007-04-16 19:51:00
Edugator is back after a long hiatus. To be honest, we?re still trying to figure out how so many of our colleagues out there in the blogosphere (Edugator shivers when we find ourselves using words like blogosphere?god help us!) manage to keep up and still find time to?emmm?get work done, take vacations, have a life, and all that. But in any case, we?re back, and we?re committed. So please stay tuned.
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Demystifying OpenID
2007-03-28 23:15:00
Edugator wrote a post a few weeks ago championing the adoption of Open ID within eLearning. But, still to many users OpenID is confusing. What exactly is OpenID and why should you care? We hope that this short video will help clear things up. In a recent interview at the Future of Web Apps Conference in London with Bobby Johnson from the Guardian's tech blog, Simon Willison, formerly of Yahoo, gives a simple and clear explanation of the benefits of the project that if you have ten minutes is really worth a look.
More About: Myst

Pearson Education accepts the Edugator challenge
2007-03-23 03:38:00
Edugator doesn't like to brag about our influence ("With great power comes great responsibility, Peter"), but it was only yesterday that we were saying that the academic publishers seem to be surprisingly oblivious to the paradigm shift that is reshaping the media landscape. That is why we were flattered to see Pear son Education , the largest U.S. textbook publisher, react by announcing that they are working with Google Video to make Lectures and other content available for download. According to Pearson, Lecture videos and Test Prep videos to accompany Prealgebra by mathematics author Elayn Martin-Gay are now posted at Google Video and can be downloaded to a PC, Mac, video iPod, or Sony PSP. A section of the Lecture videos and a chapter of the Test Prep videos can be downloaded at no charge from Prentice Hall Free Lecture Videos and Test Prep Videos. Students can also purchase sections of the Lecture Videos for $0.99 each; a chapter of the Test Prep videos for $1.99; a...
More About: Cat , Challenge

Will academic publishing go the way of the recording industry?
2007-03-22 06:23:00
An article (subscription required) in today's Wall Street Journal calls attention to the fact that CD sales, long in decline, are now accelerating into a full-scale tail spin. The latest data, it seems, shows a 20% decline in the first three months of the year from a year earlier. Edugator blinks and then yawns. All we have to say: "No shit, Sherlock. It's not like you weren't warned." But wait! The Journal has more non-surprises in store, noting that: The music industry has found itself almost powerless in the face of this shift. Its struggles are hardly unique in the media world. The film, TV and publishing industries are also finding it hard to adapt to the digital age. This trend has important implications for educators. The consumers who are rebelling in the face of over-priced, underwhelming pop CDs today, are the very same consumers who will balk at paying $100 and up for textbooks tomorrow. Textbook publishers, the oligarchs sitting in their ...
More About: Academic , Industry , Recording , Publishing , The Way

The Death Rattle of the Commercial LMS? -or- Hey BlackBoard: Patent This!
2007-03-18 05:23:00
"The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated", goes Mark Twain's most famous witicism. However, those of us who are watching recent developments in the elearning space might turn the phrase on end and ask ourselves if some of the more important symptoms pointing to the imment death of the commercial Learning Management System (LMS) are being overlooked. Edugator has seen bloggers writing on this very subject with increasing frequency, mostly speculating that Web2.0 will move online learning out of the fenced-in confine embodied by the typical LMS of today, in favor of the wilds of the Social Web of wikis, blogs, and the like. The accelerating adoption rate of the far-superior (and free!) open source Moodle platform is another sign of the times. Paying exhorborent per-student fees for a limited, technologically backward commercial LMS solution just doesn't make sense. Possibly the strongest evidence to support this thesis, however, is the recent Black ...
More About: Commercial , Board , This , Death

A cup of coffee? and elearning in context
2007-03-13 03:10:00
This week Edugator is on the road, taking a breather at one of our favorite places in the world-the Argentine Patagonia. I brought my laptop along with the intention of doing some writing, and as I sit here eating a croissant and drinking a cup of coffee, a thought comes to mind: At this moment, my surfing is shallow and leisurely, akin to flipping through the channels with the remote control after a long day at the office. I just read the New York Times, flipped through the Wall Street Journal, and had a look at the latest posts to my Google Reader account. If context matters, my current context is a decidedly informal one. Having said that, I am not studying for a degree, nor am I trying to complete an assignment. There will be no grade.  This morning's surf is all about the pleasure of serendipity and discovery, two user experiences that the current Web 2.0 is unparalleled at fostering. However, a large gulf separates what I am doing from what a purpose-driven, goal-or...
More About: Coffee , Earn , Text , Learning , Learn

OpenID: a step forward for elearning standards
2007-03-08 16:33:00
Edugator has written in the past about the stalled state of e-learning standards, and our new readers will soon discover that this (sore) subject is one of our major peeves. Usually the news that we have to offer is either cynical or just-plain-bad. However, recent events on one particular front are providing us with a small bit of hope. Open ID, an open source, decentralized system for single sign-on user authentification is clearly gaining traction throughout the tech industry. The system was recently adopted (albeit with varying degrees of seriousness and commitment) by heavyweights such as Microsoft, Technorati, Firefox, AOL, Yahoo, LiveJournal, and Digg. It is also telling that the TechCrunch's Michael Arrington has declared OpenID "a winner" and the single sign-on world a reality. Edutech bloggers like Stephen Downes are paying attention, and even the New York Times notes the emergence of OpenID in a recent article about the future of social networking. Edu...
More About: Standards , War , Standard , Earn

Standards?
2007-03-02 21:06:00
Let?s face it: the most important players in the online education space are still the commercial LMS platforms like Blackboard, Angel, eCollege, and WebCT. And we respectfully cede them their seat at the head of the table in recognition of the simple fact that many public and private institutions simply aren?t ready to embrace the haphazard, uncontainable nature of the Web2.0. For a long time to come, innovative e-learning content is going to find its widest audience when it is made available in the mainstream commercial platforms. And this is exactly why we are sick to death of the stranglehold that these platforms leverage on the marketplace by maintaining closed, proprietary standards. This black box mentality is pierced only ever-so-feebly by weak-kneed attempts to implement content standards like ADL?s SCORM and IEEE?s Learning Object Metadata (LOM) standards. Each of the mainstream commercial platforms claims some degree of compliance (or conformance?we really love that ...
More About: Standards , Standard , Anda , Stand

IMS Mess
2007-02-28 01:55:00
We think it is strange enough that IMS forces users to registration before they cough up access to basic information regarding standards. But what's even worse, the registration process doesn't seem to be working. We received the confirmation email, clicked the link, and have been stuck in the same loop for days now. Has anybody else out there had this problem? This blog plans to spend a lot of time on the issue of content standards and empty promises of IMS and the LMS platforms who claim to be supporting these standards. Common Cartridge?! Uhhh, yeah...sure. More to come...
More About: Mess

It's All in the Sauce, Steve
2007-02-21 14:58:00
Apple CEO Steve Jobs recently spoke out to suggest that the textbook oligopoly may someday soon be replaced in schools by online information sources like Wikipedia. We couldn?t agree more, Steve. But perhaps a slight reality check is in order?or at least a bit of clarification. Sites like Wikipedia certainly are gaining well-deserved credibility in the classroom?science journal Nature has even claimed that the monolithic online encyclopedia?s accuracy measures up to that of the stodgy favorite, the Encyclopedia Britannica. Unfortunately, Wikipedia is the exception to the rule. The Internet today is much more a wasteland of misinformation and balderdash than it is a fountain of wisdom. Wikipedia?s value as an educational resource is derived from a committed volunteer army of editors and fact checkers who dedicate untold hours of their time to ensure that entries are accurate. It is its active and conscientious community of curators, rather than its sheer volume of information ...
More About: Sauce

Meet the Jetsons
2007-02-21 14:48:00
A recent article in eSchool News analyzes the New Media Consortium?s 2007 Horizon Report, highlighting six emerging edutech trends that the report suggests we keep an eye on in 2007. I find it interesting that the author ignores some of the more worrisome trends identified by the report (information illiteracy, mass amateurization), instead preferring to highlight the ways that the mobile phone and Second Life are going to revolutionize education as we know it. So much of the discourse surrounding edutech has this sort of Next Big Thing focus, while many of the real obstacles that are crippling the potential of the online education revolution are left to the poorly-armed teachers in the trenches to deal with. One of eLearn Magazine?s recent Predictions for 2007 proved even more succinct at summing up the wonders that are in store: "Neal Stephenson's and William Gibson's metaverse is open for business: 3D, first-person, highly sensational, real-time. Yes, ther...
More About: Meet , Jets , Sons , The Jets