Desire2Blog

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...

About a month ago I tossed out a challenge to Desire2Learn and all other VLE developers to build some new functionality into the virtual learning environment. A couple of days ago I received this response from Matt Fisher, a Lead Product Designer at D2L. I will reproduce his response below in its entirety. +++++++++++++++ Barry, A few weeks ago you posted a “challenge to D2L [or other LMS] developers” which called for LMS vendors to provide software that focused on the creation of student content and would allow for students to collaborate in an online environment that had a web 2.0 feel. The challenge that you have proposed is something that we (Desire2Learn) have just recently released – ePortfolio 1.0! An ePortfolio allows users to create and collect digital artifacts that can be shared with others for feedback and assessment. ePortfolio also has tight integration with the Learning Environment which allows users to leverage such tools as Dropbox, Quizzing, Grades a...

This video shows an embedded Zoho Notebook inside Desire2Learn. Zoho Notebook is a powerful and unique tool that allows you to combine just about any type of web content and place that content anywhere on the different pages of the notebook. Audio, video, webpages, embed code from various sites, file attachment, images, text, etc. etc. Very cool indeed. Here is the link to my Blip.tv site in case the embed doesn't work.