Sakai is alive and well and on the move
Rumor of Sakai’s demise is grossly exaggerated. Au contraire, it’s alive and on the move. Continue reading Sakai is alive and well and on the move
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Category: 21st Century Learning
Disruptive Education – Or Encouraging Education?
It is disruptive. But it shouldn’t be. Putting myself in faculty shoes, the hardest part is mastery of this new online stuff, which, really, if I’m being honest, I don’t want to do myself and I probably don’t have time … Continue reading Disruptive Education – Or Encouraging Education?
Data, Research, Education and … Hunches
A national gas station chain opens a neighborhood store, adds a customer loyalty program, puts up a website to collect registration data, gets people to swipe the card at the pump whenever buying gas, while inside asks again for the card and/or zip code, pays out their incentives: coffee, frozen drinks, snack packs, cookies, crackers, 2-liter pops. A video camera records it all. Another day, a researcher working on a project to determine the snacking habits of obese people versus non-obese people has just struck a gold mine if they can agree to responsibly treat this data in the aggregate … Continue reading Data, Research, Education and … Hunches
Disruption in the Force of Higher Education
When online degrees by the commercial entity University of Phoenix began in 1989, it introduced a new market segment. When Your Town Community College began offering online courses, it was a new revenue stream. When Your State University added an online component of its face-to-face courses in order to optimize its use of brick and mortar classrooms by reducing the number of classroom meeting times per course, it was cost effective. Now It’s Online and Free The real disruption, which David Brooks last Thursday likened to that which has already overtaken newspapers and magazines, is about to happen to the … Continue reading Disruption in the Force of Higher Education
Blackboard Open Enrollment Announcement
In another move following Blackboard’s March 26th announcement (aggregated responses on e-Literate site), yesterday Blackboard announced that Instructors using their CourseSites™ can make their courses available for enrollment by anyone, effectively supporting an open courseware model. It means individuals can set up open teaching initiatives, community outreach and volunteer training, as well as collaborative research programs. Of course, Sakai Project Sites also support these activities, but Sakai servers are not usually set up outside institutions. Instructure Canvas is another company that also supports these activities, with their “Free for Teachers” version. I don’t know whether it supports open enrollment. Yet. … Continue reading Blackboard Open Enrollment Announcement
Observations on Entrepreneurialism, Startups and Education
Normally I write about higher ed and educational technology of some sort. This post is about the startup weekend I attended at Innovation Park, Notre Dame’s entrepreneurial incubator. Bear with me there *is* a connection. The competition’s finalists all presented evidence of their proposition’s value addition to the marketplace. This included the ideas which, as solutions, were “solutions” to pretty trivial problems in the grand scheme of things. One of the finalists, for example, will be launching a smartphone app which creates a connection between you and the clubs you attend – effectively moving you to the head of long … Continue reading Observations on Entrepreneurialism, Startups and Education
Stalking Sakai
I’m new to the open source model. To supporting it. To participating in the community. To seeing how it’s built and how features are added. But I’ve been watching for nigh unto 15 years. And I’m here to tell you: higher ed is generally bullish on software derived from this open source model. It’s almost as if open source were the answer to all the budgetary , visionary, and advocacy issues we all face. From Community Jr. College to State School to Private – we’ve summoned open source to give us more freedom, more features, more revenue, more integration points, … Continue reading Stalking Sakai
