17 octobre 2018

Blackboard Inc., Partners with Leading Academic Publishers
Blackboard continues to make news as it announces a deal to integrate various learning applications into the LMS. According to the press release, "The development project, titled 'ChalkBox,' will go beyond simple importation of textbook-related electronic content to accommodate more sophisticated integration between the publishers' hosted instructional applications and Blackboard-powered course web sites at client institutions." Partners in the project include Houghton Mifflin, Pearson Education and Thomson Higher Education. More...

Learning to do Social Science Research in the Knowledge Economy: A Manifesto
Gosh, I love papers with the word 'manifesto' in the title. And while the topic of this tract diverges a bit from the usual e-learning fare, it is a nice counterpoint to Jay Cross's comments on edubabble and also some of the discussions I have had here about research methodology in public policy. More...

Calendar extension for NewsGator
Not sure how this will play out, since we're mixing Outlook, a NewsGator extension, and RSS 2.0 (none of which bodes well for portability), but the discussion in the RSS community has turned to events listings. This is something that has been needed for a while, and forms another bit of glue in the semantic social network. More...

Jilted Entitlement
A lengthy discussion has erupted on the Invisible Adjunct over the job prospects of non-tenure track academics. The comment begins with the observation that large numbers of fully qualified people are able to obtain only temporary employment. More...

MIT’s Double-Secret Hidden Agenda
I'm not sure that the agenda - getting other universities to put their course materials online - was such a secret, but it offers a bit of a hook into this account of the OpenCourseWare project. More...

IDEO: Stanford Center for Interactive Learning
Most of the places I've worked - including my current location - have been really badly designed for any sort of academic work. Even new buildings seem to focus on long, narrow hallways into which people disappear into their offices. Not that I dislike offices - I do, and I wish I had one, because people need their privacy. More...

Edubabble From Ontario
Nice commentary from Jay Cross which is, if anything, too kind to the Organization for Quality Education, an organization that is, as he says, "a group of Ontario citizens up in arms over the poor quality of their public schools." Cross quite rightly criticizes this group for reliance on buzzwords, the use of straw man arguments, and unthinking aherence to a dogma. More...

Online Communities 'are old-skool' says Amy Jo
George Siemens picked up this item citing Amy Jo Kim, known for a book about online communities, suggesting that the wave of the future is centered around social networks, buddy lists and blogs. Of course, this is a change only if you felt previously that online communities were top-down creations, which while characteristic of some accounts (such as hers) is not universally believed. More...

The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes
What is the ideal size for an online group? According to this item, somewhere in the range of 45-50 people. It's an interesting article, looking at group size in primates, weblog analyses, Ultima Online guild sizes, and more. More...

More Firefox Search Plugins
If you use Firefox as your web browser (and you should), you may have seen the search field in the upper right. You can add your own search engines to this list by placing the search file and image to the searchplugins directory of Firefox. Brilliant. You can get an Edu_RSS search plugin here: search file and image. More...