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July 2007

Jul
31
2007

Loosely coupled assessment

Here’s the thing — it’s 2000 all over. Eportfolio is the new LMS.
Watching a recent vendor presentation I thought “I can’t believe this is happening again.”
That single phrase. In a loop. In my head.
Because remember — this happened once before. The LMS vendors came in with an assessment and management tool, and told us it [...]

Jul
31
2007

EPortaro demonstration today (any help?)

I’m attending an EPortaro demonstration in about 50 minutes.
If you read this blog at all, you can probably guess what I think about such eportfolio solutions. It’s 2000 all over again, with vendors coming in to save us from the big, bad internet.
Still, my opinion is probably the minority one on my commitee, so there’s [...]

Jul
30
2007

Where will the wave come from?

I love talking the theory, but it’s even nicer to see practical notes from people implementing solutions. From a recent post over here, some Wordpress MU as class-space experimentation…
Teachers are finding WordPress MU easy to use and I’m very happy to see that. Currently, Teacher Assistants are recording students as they read their writings [...]

Jul
30
2007

Electronic Textbooks and CommentPress

Via bavatuesdays, I learn of CommentPress.
Obviously there are other non-WP group annotation tools. What’s really striking to me here, however, is how powerful the fit is between the CommentPress approach to text and the best bits of traditional literary exegesis.
So great is the fit, as a matter of fact, that I half wonder if CommentPress [...]

Jul
27
2007

Goal-based scenario/simulation vs. learning 2.0

The most invigorating job I ever had was working for CognitiveArts programming learning “simulations”. Founded by Roger Schank, CogArts was truly a company with a mission — to revolutionize education through technology rather than simply extend the current system. And we pushed the envelope in every way we could. I worked with a large team [...]

Jul
26
2007

You're already out there

This just in:
July 25, 2007 (Computerworld) — Millions of documents, both government and private, containing sensitive and sometimes classified information are floating about freely on file sharing networks after being inadvertently exposed by individuals downloading P2P software on systems that held the data, members of a House committee were told yesterday.
Among the documents exposed: The [...]

Jul
25
2007

In Which I Meet Our (Other) Allies

So, I’ve just stumbled into a gold mine. Via an inbound link from Stephen Downes, I’ve discovered that much of what I’ve been calling an inverted LMS has been called elsewhere a PLE (personal learning environment):
Helen Barrett receives an email from Mike Caulfield describing an Inverted LMS, which turns out to be the PLE, [...]

Jul
24
2007

It's not just Experts vs. Amateurs. It's Experts vs. Experts in Something Else.

So there’s not much subtlety in a recent comment on Jon Udell’s call to experiment with local weather data and look for trends. After reading Jon’s piece on using Many Eyes to determine local trends, Brendan Lane Larson, a Weather Informaticist, writes:
Your vague “we” combined with the demonstration of the Many Eyes site trivializes the [...]

Jul
23
2007

Send Bloggers

One of the absolutely consistent features of website development (at least in my neck of the woods) is that storytelling problems are miscast as technology platform problems.
Here’s a typical example. I’m currently working with a department to move them to a third party vendor, and in demonstrating a sample site one of the possible vendors [...]

Jul
13
2007

Marc Andreessen Supports the Inverted LMS (sort of)

This is fascinating, to me at least. Marc (are we allowed to call him Marca?) came late to blogging, but he’s clearly making up for lost time and talking to the right people.
But what I noted in his recent post was how much his view of the larger web (via Sifry) matches exactly what we’ve [...]