Desire2Blog

I returned Saturday night from the Tennessee Board of Regents e-Learning Summer Institute on Web 2.0 and now I'll be heading back to Memphis in 3 weeks for the Desire2Learn User Conference - FUSION 2008. I had a great time in Memphis and met some really great people, many of whom will also be at the D2L conference. On my last night I went to Corky's BBQ and definitely Put Some South in My Mouth. After returning home I was catching up on some email and RSS feeds when a couple of things caught my eye about the D2L conference: According to the D2L Patent Info Blog , the judge will be hearing Blackboard's Motion for Contempt against D2L's proposed workaround (version 8.3) on Monday July 21 and Tuesday July 22 which are the first two days of the conference. This is pretty amazing timing. I'm sure that it's pure coincidence, but some of those Blackbeard conspiracy theorists out there (you know who you are) are probably thinking that Bb somehow influenced the judge t...

This podcast episode is an interview with Jeannette Brewer of Desire2Learn. Jeannette told me about many of the new features of Desire2Learn version 8.3.  The word Blackboard (or even Blackbeard) didn't come up once (until now). The title is a "Birds-Eye View of Version 8.3." We discuss several things including:  1) The look of the new My Courses widget,  2) Some of the other homepage management features,  3) New widgets,  4) How can 8.3 help me to manage my Schedule better? and  5) What are some of the lesser known features of 8.3?  Jeannette Brewer is the developer of Desire2Learn’s ePortfolio training programs. Prior to joining Desire2Learn two years ago, Jeannette completed her MSc at the University of York in the UK. She travels to clients across North America and the UK to help them set up their sites and train their staff. One thing that we didn't get around to in the (20 min.) interview was the HTML editor, which has seen a few changes. It i...

Today I made a brief post at OLDaily (brief, because that's the way OLDaily rolls) about a relatively new research report about Inter Partes Reexaminations by the USPTO. This will be a bit longer post about more of the info contained in the report from the Institute for Progress . Patent attorney Michael C. Smith sent me a link to this information, but it took me a month to pay attention due to all kinds of lousy reasons. Here are a few quotes from the report: "Despite a mandate for "special dispatch", the time required to complete an inter partes re-examination is much longer than commonly believed." "Reexamination, particularly inter partes reexamination is not simply used as an alternative to litigation, but an integral part of litigation strategy – more than half (52%) of patents in inter partes reexams are known to be in litigation during their reexamination" "Without appeal, the average pendency period for inter partes re-exam is 43.5 mont...

Wow. It's kind of hard to come up with anything else to say about the letter D2L sent out today and also posted on their Patent Info Blog . Needless to say, D2L isn't taking Blackboard's press assault last week laying down. In particular, they refute several of the public and private comments made by Blackboard's Chief Legal Officer Matthew Small about Blackboard's Motion for Contempt against D2L. D2L's legal response will be filed next week. In the meantime they respond on their blog to some of the comments made last week. As I tend to say about this stuff, it will probably get more interesting before it gets more dull.

If part of your educational game plan is to provide music listening choices to your students, you have an increasing variety of choices for how to accomplish that. You can direct them to any of these sites or you can embed selected playlists into a blog post (as shown here) or inside your VLE or any other webpage where you have authoring control. My favorite for some time now has been imeem.com. Below is a reprint of part of my post when I made imeem my #5 free web tool for 2007 . imeem is now my (free) music provider of choice. I still like Pandora which was on my 2006 list , but imeem has gone a long way toward making it legal for me to listen to almost any full-length track that I want to, in the order that I want to, as often as I want to. You can create playlists using any music that you can find on the site, such as the one embedded below with a selection of holiday music. Here is the link to this playlist at imeem . The fact that you can embed a playlist like that on any webpa...

That title just seemed like such a nicer way of saying that BLACKBOARD SUCKS! But then again, there's nothing newsworthy about that. It's pretty hard to find anyone that doesn't think that Blackboard is really a terrible corporate citizen - except of course for those Turnitin-haters like me who think Bb is the second-worst higher ed vendor in existence. The D2L blog reports that Blackboard filed a Motion for Contempt in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. They (D2L) say that they learned about it first from a reporter. Is that anything like when a baseball manager hears that he's been fired from his job by watching SportsCenter? I'm thinking it's pretty similar. As Michael points out , Blackbeard apparently coordinated their filing announcement so that they would get maximum online press coverage with articles appearing in at least three online news sources at basically the same time. According to the Chronicle article : "Diane M. La...

Jason Ohler from the University of Alaska will be the closing keynote speaker at the 2008 Desire2Learn User Conference next month in Memphis, Tennessee. Jason and I talked for about 20 minutes on the telephone yesterday about the work he does with new media, new literacies, and digital storytelling.  This podcast episode also includes a few hints about his conference keynote which is titled: Web 2.1 and the World of the Multimedia Collage. The first 19 episodes of this podcast series have been published using Odeo.com, however I am having increased difficulties with the site and finally had to post this episode at the Internet Archrive ( archive.org ) which is why the player above looks different from the rest of the series. Maybe Odeo will start to work properly again, but I am beginning to lose faith. After uploading the file three different times and not having it processed properly, the exact same file was rendered quickly and easily by the Internet Archive.

It's been a while since the last installment in the Desire2Pod series, but it's time to start getting geared up for the 2008 Desire2Learn User Conference this summer in Memphis. Last year I started the practice of interviewing the keynote speakers for a brief preview of their upcoming presentation at the conference. This year I am continuing that very short tradition. This is a 20-minute teaser about the upcoming keynote address by George Siemens . His Keynote topic is: "Connectives and Collectives: Learning Alone, Together." George is a proponent of a learning theory called Connectivism . At that same site you will find one of his blogs as well as other useful information such as this wiki . Another blog of his, elearnspace, is one of the required readings in my educational blog roll. George is a very frequent speaker at educational technology events, but he certainly has not reached the point of over saturation. One reason I say that is that this is the firs...

This video shows how you can use an alternate home page in the newest version (8.3) of Desire2Learn. I chose to use a Netvibes start page in place of the normal home page in D2L. With Netvibes you have the ability to create custom pages (via different tabs) that allows you to drive content to students. In order to make this appear to students you would need to use the public page, not the private page. Here's my public Netvibes page NOT embedded in D2L. Here is the link to my Blip.tv site in case the embed doesn't work. The audio is a bit choppy in spots. Sorry about that, but close enough for me.

I had the good fortune of addressing a group of high school teachers yesterday morning as a kick-off for their venture into e-Learning. They came from various high schools in a section of the state where there are declining high school enrollments and ever-increasing encroachment from online high schools in the state and beyond. This is really a visionary journey that they are embarking on as they are not trying to create a charter school, or a private school, but rather create e-learning opportunities for the students in their district while still operating as the existing high schools in the district. In this first set of slides I'll show the information that I gathered from them at the beginning of the presentation. I wanted to know a little bit more about them, about their hopes and fears, and about their expectations for what their experiences will be with online learning. My presentation came at the beginning of a two-day professional development opportunity where they were g...