Desire2Blog

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...