Desire2Blog

From Stephen Downes and Clayton Wright comes a handy dandy listing of Educational Technology conferences for 2007 .

Start the audio file first, and then advance the slides when indicated. D2L User Conference 2007 from Barry Dahl Photos courtesy of SunFlowery (Flickr, Creative Commons) and Dennis O'Hara of Northern Images dot com .

I'll post one more snippet from the recording of the phone interview I gave to Jonathon Lunardi. The first post was here. This is the last question that he posed to me. We attempted to discuss what the LMS (IMS) of the future might look like. I don't think that it is a very thorough answer and primarily points out how hard it is to envision a future LMS when the future of education and e-Learning seems to be somewhat unclear. I would love to get some comments on this post with other thoughts about how the LMS platforms may need to change in the coming years.

Interesting snippet on the Internet Time Blog from Jay Cross on 11/30 : "BlackBoard is picking up the tab for an endless flow of wine and hors d’oeuvres for the speakers. The BlackBoard name and logo are all over the lanyards that hold our badges. BlackBoard’s European chief tells me people have totally misinterpreted the lawsuit arising from their patent. He says it doesn’t cover the LMS. It’s very specific. I suggested BlackBoard hire a Robert Scoble because the word in the blogosphere is that BlackBoard is unreasonably and unethically taking advantage of the broken U.S. patent system. Some participants refuse to wear the BlackBoard lanyard in protest." Blackboard officials seem to have only one retort: "People don't understand us or our patent!!" If "a" Scoble was "hired" to improve their blogoshphere P.R., that would clearly backfire just like the rest of this has exploded in their (BB) faces. Jay was probably just making a point that sho...

Lots of new information posted Dec. 1 on the Desire2Learn Patent Info blog . Suffice it to say that they are seeking relief from the USPTO to re-examine the validity of the patent, and they have petitioned the Texas court for a stay of proceedings while the re-examination is being considered. Read their post for more information. D2L had to pay $8,800 to ask the USPTO to examine itself to determine whether they are a bunch of idiots. Good luck with that. There are at least 8 prior art claims made by D2L in this request, including the oldies but goodies, Topclass and ClassNet. Even more fun is their reference to WebCT as prior art. They list six publications about WebCT that illustrate prior art where each of the publications came more than a year before the Blackboard patent filing (pages 37 & 38 of the USPTO request, linked in the D2L Patent blog).

cNet News reports on the latest attack against Blackboard for suing Desire2Learn and also the error made by the USPTO in the granting of the patent. "The Software Freedom Law Center said Thursday that it has asked the U.S. Patent Office to re-examine a patent awarded to education software company Blackboard . It claims that the patent is bogus and could undermine three open-source education software projects it represents--Sakai, Moodle and ATutor." Blackboard's Matthew Small gives the standard rebuttal in the article. BTW, he spoke for a while on a webcast by the Ohio Learning Network TeachU series earlier this week and he didn't sound at all like the devil. Probably a decent enough guy just on the opposite side of the barbed-wire fence. More on that webcast later (maybe).

I recently received a request to be interviewed by Jonathon Lunardi about the Blackboard patent suit against Desire2Learn as well as other things related to e-Learning and learning management systems. Jonathon is the CEO of SINAPSE Consulting and the COO of SyncRoots and is generally interested in the e-Learning marketplace.  This podcast only contains two of the six questions and answers from the interview. To keep the podcast length a bit smaller, I've divided the interview into chunks. I'm not sure if I'll post the first two-question chunk because I'm not so sure that it's very interesting ... in my own opinion my answers were rather boring and long-winded.  What I'm posting below is the audio from questions 3 & 4 that Jonathon asked during our nearly hour-long interview.     00:50 - Jonathon asks if D2L is the main competitor to Blackboard, are there others?  03:15 - Angel's competitive position  03:50 - eCollege and others  04:15 - Open sou...

Top Blog Boing Boing tells us that McDonalds is trying to patent the sandwich, or at least a series of idiotic devices for making sandwiches. It goes so far to describe the proper way to assemble a hamburger on the piece of paper that you are going to then wrap the burger in. No prior art there, I'm quite sure. The best part is found on pages 32-33 where they describe the "Method of Making a Hamburger Sandwich with Cheese." They actually include a line art drawing of a piece of burger wrapping paper with a target in the middle of it where the burger should be assembled (reference to figures 41-49 on pages 16 & 17). "A food worker stacks, in order, cheese 42, onions 64, and a sliced pickle 68 on a staging area 142 of a hamburger sandwich wrapper 140. The staging area may be marked by indica 14Z as shown in FIG. 41 to assist the person who assembles the sandwich." (blah, blah, blah) "For a breadless sandwich leaf lettuce may be substituted for the bread ...

While reviewing e-learning courses for an ITC awards competition , I laughed when I saw this announcement immediately after logging into a Blackboard site at one of the schools: Mon, Sep 18, 2006 -- NOTICE: Must Use Firefox Browser To all Blackboard users: since the recent upgrade to Blackboard 7.1, there have been many problems with HTML errors when viewing Blackboard content in Safari and/or Internet Explorer browsers. Please be sure to use the Firefox browser to view all content in Blackboard. Thank you. Why is that funny? Well, I think it is funny because there is supposedly this big partnership or relationship between Blackboard and Microsoft , and yet their products seems to be incompatible. Maybe that's more sad than funny, but go ahead and pick your own emotion.

The conference schedule came out today for the ITC E-Learning 2007 annual conference to be held in Albuquerque on Feb. 17-20. ITC is the acronym for the Instructional Technology Council . I attend a lot of conferences each year, but none have been more productive and informative for me than this one. It is a smaller conference than many, but includes many of the big hitters in e-Learning at both the 2-year and 4-year/grad school levels. The quality of presentations is usually unmatched by other conferences. I am scheduled to give my Web 2.0 Whirlwind presentation at the first regular session time of 9:45 Sunday morning. This session deals with just about everything EXCEPT blogs and wikis. I try to demonstrate or point people to as many of the other tools as possible ... especially those that have a legitimate academic use. Looking at the schedule, I am already looking forward to the following: A pre-conference workshop on the Open Source CMS Solution of Moodle and Sakai. Benchmarkin...

Although not exactly the same as yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater, how do we handle the restriction (or lack thereof) of free speech within the online classroom? One of our instructors asked the question about whether he could/should delete a post by a student that takes a scientific discussion into a religious one, even though the instructor had asked (warned?) the students not to go down that road in this science class, but rather reserve that discussion for the religion or philosophy classes. Our Student Code of Conduct addresses this issue but not from the perspective of a posting in a discussion forum but more along the lines of someone exercising their right to free speech in the hallways or in the traditional classroom. In my mind these are different online because of the permanent nature of the posting, whereas in the bricks-n-mortar world the words evaporate into thin air as soon as the free speech is concluded. This was my explanation: "A layperson's ex...

(Better late than never. I meant to post this more than a week ago) IMS ... LMS ... CMS? Whatever! I attended a session at WCET titled "The Future CMS." The first presenter was Scott Leslie who works as the Manager of the BCcampus Learning Resources Centre and also researches course management systems as part of the WCET Edutools team. Scott asked his Magic 8 Ball the following question: "Will BlackCT be the future of CMS?" The photo from twistedtigger shows the answer. Another question: "Will open source CMS continue to evolve and gain adopters?" 8 ball says "Signs point to Yes." Seriously, he used a magic 8 ball in his presentation. I figure that it's as good a guess as any. During the presentation he spoke briefly about the developing concept of a learning management operating system (LMOS ) and touched lightly upon some of the lesser known open source or open community projects being developed in this field. Unfortunately, he wasn...

Version 8 of D2L E-Learning Environment includes a new Blog Tool. Click on the graphic to go to the D2L Website , then scroll down to learn more about the blog tool or to open a larger screen shot of the tool. In this 14 minute podcast I chat with Kenneth Chapman of D2L about the new tool. Questions about permissions, roles, privacy and the like are all addressed.   2:00 Accessibility testing of blog tool 2:40 Blog watch for blog reading 3:50 publish RSS feeds 4:30 managing permissions (private or public?) 8:15 supported file types in posts 10:30 appropriate use concerns 12:00 what about wikis? 13:00 my passing shot at Blackboard

On Friday at WCET, I attended a session where two presenters had radically different approaches for tackling the student authentication “problem” in distance education. It was exactly one year ago at the WCET conference in San Fran when Steven Crow of the Higher Learning Commission put a scare into the audience by saying that Congress was poised to include harsh distance education requirements into the Higher Ed Reauthorization Act. He was right at the time, but then Congress backed off (temporarily?) and passed a partial law dealing with the financial parts of the Act, but held off on the academic parts. However, this age-old question for e-learning still lingers:“How do you know that it really is Billy Bob at the end of the fiber optics who is taking the exam?” I’ve never worried too much about this question, because I really don’t believe that it is that much of an issue. However, Congress and now the accrediting bodies seem to be zeroing in on this question, so I do think that we w...

This particular podcast probably doesn't apply to anyone not affiliated with MnSCU . Congratulations to Minnesota Online for receiving the Tekne Award for 2006 . An awards ceremony was held on October 26, 2006 at the Minneapolis Convention Center. MnOnline will also be receiving an award on November 10 at the International CAEL Conference in Boston. These awards are indicative of the good work that has been done since the inception of Minnesota Online about five years ago. Obviously, receiving these awards begs the question of why I am proposing that we need to make several changes to MnOnline and to the governing council. I have the pleasure of serving as the Chair of the MnOnline Council for the current academic year, which puts me in a precarious situation of being critical about the (award-winning) organization that I also support and am helping to lead into the future. At the recent CAO/Dean/CSSO meetings (includes basically all academic and student services administrators ...

While attending the WCET annual conference in Portland today, I spotted a nametag indicating that the person was from the University of Memphis. So I head on over for a little chat. Turns out that it has been announced internally in the state that the Tennessee Board of Regents Online has chosen D2L to replace WebCT for the entire state system. It took 36 days to get confirmation on this one , but now you can add Tennessee to the long list of major consortiums that have chosen D2L after a thorough review of the various alternatives. Apparently, the Blackboard patent lawsuit is not curtailing D2L's ability to sign major clients. Technorati Tags: D2L , Desire2Learn , Blackboard

What’s in a name? Well, I guess it can mean anything you damn well want it to as long as it's your name to play with. The reason I bring this up is because I am involved in two new initiatives with Desire2Learn and they have created a couple of new names that might need some clarification. The first new thing is the 2007 D2L User Conference to be held in Duluth next July. The company has chosen the name “ Fusion 2007 ” to be the identifier for the conference. I admit that I didn’t really get it at first, so I had to ask Simone at D2L what it meant. She gave a very good answer that centered on the idea of bringing together all the different users as well as all the different tools in the D2L Learning Environment. Basically, it is the idea of bringing together higher ed, K-12, and corporate users, from all over the globe to share ideas and learn together about the various tools created by D2L. Some basic definitions of the term deal with 1) an occurrence that involves the production...

This is a 17-minute podcast about using the Desire2Learn Learning Object Repository (LOR).  This DOES NOT look at the  definition of learning objects,  creation of learning,  the sharing of learning objects, or  the tagging of learning objects with meta data.  SO! What does it cover? Listen to the podcast to find out.       Thanks to Kenneth Chapman of D2L for lending his expertise to this podcast.

A few recent posts about Blackboard. One of the coolest things I seen in quite some time is Educause's call for Blackboard to drop the lawsuit against D2L. Brian L. Hawkins, the president of Educause, and the group’s Board of Directors said “We have never sent this type of a letter to one of our corporate members before.” Apparently that is because there has never been such an egregious abuse of patent law by one Educause partner against another. Another choice piece from the Educause letter: "EDUCAUSE engaged the services of a highly reputable, independent law firm to review the patent. The preliminary conclusion is that the patent was very broadly defined and was inappropriately approved by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office." (scroll to the bottom of the minutes to see attachment A) Michael Feldstein posted his thoughts about the economic impact of the Blackboard suit. This is something that I have also been thinking about a lot lately. I agree with Michael that ...

Extra, extra!! Read all about it (or listen)!  This morning, October 24, Desire2Learn is announcing that the 2007 D2L User Conference will be held in Duluth, Minnesota. Lake Superior College (LSC, that's my school) will be co-hosting the event with the University of Wisconsin Superior (UWS). I've created a short podcast telling all listeners why they want to come to the Duluth/Superior area for this conference on July 8-11, 2007.  Links to info about the area:  The Minnesota Connection:   LSC website: www.lsc.edu   Visit Duluth: http://www.visitduluth.com   Northern Images Photo Galleries: http://www.northernimages.com/webgallery/   Duluth Canal Park and Harbor: http://www.superiortrails.com/duluth_lake-2.html   Duluth Canal Park: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canal_Park_(Duluth)   Duluth Aerial Lift Bridge: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_Lift_Bridge   Minnesota North Shore Info: http://www.northshoreinfo.com/ ...

Day One of the League of Innovation Conference on Information Technology in Charlotte is in the books. The best session I attended today was titled "The State of Open Source in Higher Education" by Rob Adel, CIO of the IMS Global Learning Consortium . Here is a link to some PPT slides that are very similar to what was used today (Sunday), although he tailored the slides and comments to the community college audience that he was addressing. Here are a few takeaways from his session: 60% of higher ed institutions have some open source infrastructure software in use such as Linux, Apache, or MySQL. 42% of institutions have implemented or chosen open source applications software such as Kuali Project , Sakai CMS , uPortal , Moodle CMS , or Open Office . 56% of survey respondents who have implemented open source software said that they experienced a lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) . Average priority for I.T. initiatives, not at top of list (slide 24) which indicates that I....

Richard MacManus publishes a popular tech weblog focused on Next Generation Web Technology called the Read/Write Web . Richard posted two useful entires this past week reviewing Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2.0 . These articles don’t help us ascertain potential problems to be encountered when using the new browsers with D2L, but they are very useful in learning about the new features of the browsers.

First, this message is sent out by our system office: “As you may know, Microsoft has released IE7, and plans to release it as part of its automatic updates as early as November 1st. Since our current version of D2L, 7.4.3 MR1, does not support the use of Internet Explorer 7 (IE7), D2L has recommended that you DO NOT take the upgrade to IE7 at this time.” Next, this email is received from a D2L user: “At what point can we tell D2L to step up to the plate? IE7 is kinda like a 10 ton truck, it hasn't exactly snuck up on the IT community. Rolling out measures to prevent end users from installing IE 7 is as painful as the actual install.” To which I reply as follows: “... we need to remember that this has always been the case with the IMS packages, as well as many other academic software packages that we use. This is not unique to D2L in any way. Back in our WebCT days, the single biggest cause of user support issues related to browser incompatibility. People constantly were installin...

This is a 27-minute interview with Susan Bentley, Instructional Technologist at LSC, who is also experienced as an online teacher and online student. We talk about some of the challenges and solutions for training faculty members who are just getting started in e-learning.

This is the third podcast in this series. The focus this time is on web accessibility issues, although much of the discussion is general in nature and not just related to accessibility within D2L.  Why worry about web accessibility? D2L wish list for accessibility (approx. 6:45) Tips for course designers (approx. 11:15) MnSCU system accessibility concerns (approx. 21:30) This is a 33-minute recording with James Falkofske of Metropolitan State University in St. Paul.  Some of the resources referred to include:  W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)  Access e-learning website (Site used by LSC faculty and staff)  MnSCU Web Accessibility Guidelines   CSS Zen Garden   Firefox Extensions for Accessibility (scroll down for list)  D2L Consortium: Importance of LMS Accessibility (10/04/06 article)  Once again I need to apologize for somewhat less than wonderful sound quality. This time I recorded a Skype call using Pretty May , which ap...

Below is a compilation of selected slides from various presentations about LSC Online that I have made during the past year or so. None of the topic areas are covered in complete detail, but there is probably more there than most people would want to view. One reason I am doing this is to test out the embed feature in a new service called SlideShare . It looks like a very good way of posting and sharing PowerPoint slides on the Web. It doesn't provide ways of creating slides such as Zoho Show , but this looks like a good choice for posting those already created slides. Even though I am trying to wean myself off of PowerPoint, it is hard to walk away from all the content that I have previously created in those presentations. Embedding in a blog or other webpage is just one of the ways you can use SlideShare. You can also send a viewer to the SlideShare site and they can view your slideshow full screen. You can't try that yet, but it should be available for public consumption any...

Planned podcasts (Desire2Pod) over the next few weeks include 1) New Faculty Training for Using D2L, 2) Using the Desire2Learn Learning Object Repository, 3) Web Accessibility for D2L Users. This fall marked a large increase in the number of virtual/online schools in the K-12 educational space. Here is one list that looks at the state-level school, but there are many other single schools that don't have statewide support. They have seen surprising enrollments in Washington state . Since I hail from Wyoming, I've been following their efforts to start their first online school, the Wyoming Virtual School . Homeschoolers there are balking. Regarding the Blackboard patent debacle against Desire2Learn, John Mayer of Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI) interviews Professor Mary LaFrance who teaches at the Law School at the UNLV. One little quote I found illustrative when they were talking about the patent dependent claims and the independent claims: "Th...

This is the second podcast about Desire2Learn. I am starting a new podcast series called Desire2Pod. These podcasts will look at various things related to D2L, including the tools in the system, interviews with users of the system, and other news about D2L that have an impact on the community of stakeholders.  This is a 23-minute recording with Kenneth Chapman of D2L regarding the new email tool in version 8 of the Desire2Learn Learning Environment.  NOTE: please accept my apologies for the less than stellar audio quality. Due to the recording configuration I used, Kenneth sounds like he is speaking through a tin can and string. I was in a hotel room and didn't have all the equipment with me that I would have preferred. It actually sounded worse before I changed several parameters in Audacity before converting to mp3.

Day Two (Friday) of the Beyond Boundaries Conference in Grand Forks. Rena Palloff and Keith Pratt provided a keynote titled “Online Learning Communities Revisited.” I missed the start of the session but I’ve seen them present several times so I’m not so sure that I missed anything new or fresh. They talked about developing a sense of community through five major elements: 1) Interaction/ Communication, 2) Reflection/ Transformative Learning, 3) Technology, 4) Social/ Constructivist Context, and 5) Presence. So here’s the problem: educators talk about this issue quite a bit and believe that developing a sense of community for online learners is super important. Apparently they’re not listening to the students, because the students DON’T CARE!! If they are listening to the students, then they must be assuming that the STUDENTS ARE WRONG! They (the students) must be wrong, right? Because we can’t be wrong; we’re the teachers, we’re the smart ones, and therefore we know what’s best for t...

I've been talking with Stephan Meyer (left) from D2L today at the Beyond Boundaries conference in Grand Forks, ND. This conference has a modest vendor area and D2L has a modest booth there. Stephan gave me a couple of tidbits to chew on today. First, D2L will be announcing a new client very soon, although the contract is not signed yet (knock on wood). This is a major statewide consortium and will be another very visible victory for D2L over their competitors (think Blackboard, BlackCT, or whatever else you want to call them). Probably the most important thing is that this client obviously was not put off by the black cloud of litigation that many people have opined would keep D2L from signing new clients. Apparently there are enough safeguards (indemnity, etc.) built into the contracts to help mitigate the perceived risk on the part of potential clients. Second, Stephan told me that a court date with a jury trial has been set and will be announced very soon. I'm already makin...

I received an email and subsequent phone call today from a securities analyst working for the investment arm of a major U.S. bank. Blackboard is one of the stocks that she covers for the bank and she had been reading my blog post (directly below, or go here ) about the number of higher ed institutions that have selected D2L over Blackboard during the past few years. She wanted to chat a bit about Blackboard's prospects for the coming years from a securities perspective. She clearly realized that she was speaking to someone with more than the usual dose of anti-Blackboard sentiment, but she was interested in what I had to say all the same. As she was analyzing their stock prospects, she seemed to be concentrating on the following factors: How difficult (costly) is it to change vendors? How long do most contracts run (how soon could schools consider making a switch)? What affect will the ongoing patent lawsuit have on D2L's ability to sign new clients? How does the higher ed mark...

There has been a fair amount of speculation lately about why Blackboard has taken a strategy that has clearly been ill-received by the education community that it so dearly depends upon. Some have indicated that it is the mark of desperation ... but most don't buy that argument since they have somewhere between 70-80% of the CMS market currently locked up. Why would the dominant player in the market be concerned, especially when it is widely thought to be such a tough thing to change from one CMS to another? Others have asked why they chose to attack D2L as opposed to eCollege, or Angel, or any of the others. It was amusing to read some posts where the authors didn't even consider D2L to be a contender in the market, some even admitting that they had never heard of D2L. Below is a partial list of the reasons why I think BlackCT is suing Desire2Learn (not necessarily in chronological order): Wisconsin (UW system) switched to D2L in 2003 Minnesota (MnSCU) switched in 2003 (BB n...

In the previous post I suggested that we needed to compare the demographics of the LSC PSOL students with the students in the peer group to see if there were any significant differences which might make the results not perfectly comparable. My conclusion was that there are several demographic factors where the groups differ, but in total they appear to just about even out without a huge bias either in favor of or fighting against one group or the other. One of the factors of possible differences has to do with the larger percentage of younger online learners (46.2% vs. 34.2%) that we have at LSC. At the Noel-Levitz conference this summer I learned that their research has shown that the younger students generally show significantly lower satisfaction rates than the older students. It finally occurred to me that I do have the data to study for evidence of this phenomenon, at least for the LSC students. The LSC data does show a huge difference between the two groups of learners. Those 24...

I posted recently about our 13-school peer comparison group for the PSOL and how this would be our best group for benchmarking since they are all two year schools. It is also necessary to look a little deeper to make sure that the respondents are similar so I compared the demographics of the two groups. Ours were 81.6% female, theirs were 78.7% female. Females generally give more favorable satisfaction ratings on such surveys (unless they are being surveyed about their husbands). Ours were 46.2% age 24 and under, theirs were 34.2% in that age range. Younger students tend to give lower satisfaction ratings than the older age groups. 58.2% of ours indicated that they were primarily online students, compared to 59.7% of theirs. It has been my experience that those who identify themselves as mainly online tend to look more favorably upon their experience learning online than those who consider themselves to be primarily on-campus learners just taking an online course or two. 61.2% of our s...

Desire2Learn has filed a response to the Blackboard patent lawsuit. Full pdf here. It's pretty safe to say that D2L disagrees with all the important stuff in the lawsuit. Many of the paragraphs in the suit are answered as follows - "ANSWER: Desire2Learn denies the allegations in this paragraph." As far of the affirmative part of their defense (meaning their attack mode), they say the following (selected pieces from a much longer list): 1. Blackboard’s claims are barred, in full or in part, because the claims of the ’138 patent are invalid under 35 U.S.C. §§ 101, 102, 103, and/or 112. 2. The ’138 patent is unenforceable because Blackboard failed to disclose all non-cumulative, material prior art of which Blackboard was aware to the Patent Office during the prosecution of the ’138 patent. 5. Upon information and belief, Blackboard, including every individual having a duty of disclosure, disclosed no prior art to the Patent Office during the prosecution of ’138 patent. 12...

Today I received some new data from Noel-Levitz regarding the PSOL (Priorities Survey for Online Learners) that we gave for the third year in a row during spring semester 2006. The data have always been useful but the report received today is the most useful for benchmarking that we have ever received. Coming from a two-year public institution, our comparisons with the national results were interesting but not terribly useful for benchmarking purposes. Many of the schools included in the national results are very dissimilar from LSC. It includes graduate schools, for-profit schools, schools that are completely online (not blended as we are with both F2F and online), and overall just a hodge-podge of different schools that have used the survey during the past several years. This spring we received better data because 16 of our sister institutions in MnOnline also gave the same survey at the same time. This was definitely better because it gave us comparison data with a group of scho...

Very interesting project started about a month ago over at OpenAcademic.org in an effort to integrate four useful open source tools into an environment that would have lots of features for e-learning. The tools they are working with are Elgg , Drupal , Moodle , and Mediawiki . This integration should result in the following features being offered: a public facing web presence departmental intranets club/extracurricular sites online class sites a personal workspace for all members of the school community; this workspace includes web-accessible file storage, social bookmarking, a blog, a podcasting platform, and a presentation/portfolio creator a single user base -- no duplicate data entry, no need to synchronize users between multiple databases Additionally, these technologies/approaches are supported: Podcasting Safe social networking Tagging Informal learning Learner centric ePortfolios Personal Learning Environments Blogging Wikis They are still looking for development help in the ...

At the time that MnSCU adopted Desire2Learn (D2L) as our IMS there was some conversation about developing a unique system-wide branding for the tool. This conversation never really went anywhere and soon everyone was busy with installation, conversion, training, and so on. I think that was a tremendous opportunity that we missed to build some brand identity for Minnesota Online and MnSCU. Ohio State uses D2L but calls it Carmen. Excerpt from syllabus article : "To create identification with the new learning environment, TELR branded D2L at Ohio State “Carmen,” a reference to the OSU alma mater song, “Carmen, Ohio.” The TELR visual design team came up with an appealing graphic identity, revising it in response to feedback from students, faculty and staff. The Carmen icon is now instantly identifiable across campus, and anchors not just the CMS interface, but also our campus communications and advertising campaign. We believe this attention to brand has been a ...

A message from Brian Hawkins, President of EDUCAUSE See full text pdf "Like all of you, EDUCAUSE is concerned about the vitality of the supplier marketplace for tools and solutions that are essential to higher education. And, like you, EDUCAUSE is deeply concerned that laws and regulations recognize both the rights of intellectual property (IP) holders (our universities are significant producers of IP) and the incentives to invest in innovation. Our positions on advanced networking, CALEA, and Net Neutrality are just three examples where we have worked hard and well to promote and protect innovation in information technology." "With respect to the issues of course management systems, we have been actively engaged in conducting necessary due diligence; that is, we are trying to understand the situation so that we can educate our members and, if appropriate, establish an advocacy position. We at EDUCAUSE have consciously avoided any public statement about a position per se...

On Tuesday, September 5, MnSCU set a new single day record with 13,114,524 hits on our D2L installation. There were a total of 70,095 unique visits from 43,173 unique IP addresses. We knew that this fall would be record setting, but we still weren't sure what to expect when all 32 institutions (actually only 31 active user sites) hit the ground full steam for fall term. As Deputy CIO Al Essa proclaimed, "Let's keep our fingers crossed." Actually, I think it is necessary to note that the MnSCU staff have done much more than crossing fingers/toes and reciting voodoo chants. A major effort has been conducted over the past several months to upgrade and expand hardware and to begin addressing staffing needs at the Office of the Chancellor. This will probably be the kiss of death....but so far this is the best fall term we have had in terms of system performance, speed, and reliability. Now I'll start holding my breath and wait for the other shoe to drop. Technorati T...