Desire2Blog

I offered a one-hour workshop last week about using Meebo and MeeboMe inside D2L as another way of communicating with students. According to the Meebo website : "Meebo is a web based IM that lets you log into your IM networks from any computer with a browser and internet connection with no firewall issues. It employs technologies (like AJAX) to make it act more like a desktop application, which dramatically improves usability. Many users enjoy the benefits of a native DHTML application, as it does not consume as many system resources as a Java applet (such as ICQ2Go or Yahoo Web Messenger). Meebo also offers other services such as a chat room client and a personal IM client for your personal/corporate web pages." I've been using it for about three years now. I don't use the basic IM feature as much as I'd like, primarily because so few of my contacts use IM as a regular means of communication. However, I think the MeeboMe feature is just brilliant. You'll se...

I just finished watching the recordings of the D2L webinars from March where they demonstrate the Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) features of Desire2Learn. This seems like a major step forward, IMO. You can find the webinar links inside the D2L C ommunity . If you're not a member, I do believe that you will need to request access to view the recordings. The webinars were conducted by Chuck Severance of the IMS Global Consortium and Matt Teskey of Desire2Learn. I've spent the past several years demonstrating ways of embedding web-based tools into D2L and other LSM platforms. However, in all those cases there was only the appearance of integration between the tools and the LMS - but now this is possible to happen in a truly integrated process. "Truly integrated" means that your authentication credentials can be passed between the tool and the LMS with actual single sign-on. ( Screenshot above CC photo from Chuck Severance, dr-chuck on Flickr) Two specific appli...