Any eLearning tool, no matter how openly designed, will eventually become indistinguishable from a Learning Management System once a threshold of supported use-cases has been reached.
They start out small and open. Then, as more people adopt them and the tool is extended to meet the additional requirements of the growing community of users, eventually things like access management and digital rights start getting integrated. Boil the frog. Boom. LMS.
I was asked this morning for my take on Turnitin and other anti-plagiarism tools. Here’s the response I sent1 - may as well share with the rest of the class… The usual disclaimer likely applies: I don’t speak for the University. I could easily be wrong about the institutional policy implications, etc…
There have been some instructors who use Turnitin in an attempt to reduce plagiarism. It’s not foolproof, and raises a couple of issues:
We continue our intensive coverage of what has now become known as The Great Abject Outage of Aught Thirteen.
It has now been 4 days since Brian Lamb closed down his Internet newsletter, or Webb-Log, leaving only this cryptic message:
509 BANDWIDTH LIMIT EXCEEDED.
There was no further explanation. Cryptographic and steganographic analysis of the message have turned up no clues. There is no indication of what is meant by the number “509”. Is it a prophesy of the number of days until Mr. Lamb will return? A portion of a numbered Swiss bank account? An area code? If so, it suggests that Lamb and his followers may be hiding in the Cascade mountains of America, a short drive south from his last known hideout.
The Teaching & Learning Centre at the University of Calgary is putting on a conference on May 15-16 2013, intended to bring together people who are interested in collaboration for learning (and teaching).
For the last few weeks, I’ve been making a “hammerhead” on weekend mornings. It’s probably the best cup of coffee I’ve had. Anywhere. Here’s how…
Basically, a hammerhead (or High Test, or Shot in the Dark) is just a good, strong cup of coffee, with a shot or two of espresso added for good measure.
Start by getting the espresso going. I got a little 2-cup Moka Express1. It ain’t no fancy schmancy push-a-button-and-insert-disposable-plastic-pod thing. It was designed in the 1930’s, is made of solid aluminum, and goes on your stove top. It takes about 10 minutes to make, so get that started first. I’ve been using illy medium roast espresso, pre-ground. 1 big scoop into the hopper of the Moka Express, and it’s set.
Additionally, educational technology can be prone to cycles of hype and fetishism, where new tools and applications are rapidly adopted by individuals who are seen as innovators in the field, with little time for thorough or rigorous investigation of the pedagogical strategies that may be enabled by the affordances of these new tools.
Norman, D. (2013). A Case Study Using the Community of Inquiry Framework to Analyze Online Discussions in WordPress and Blackboard in a Graduate Course. (Master’s thesis, University of Calgary). Retrieved from https://darcynorman.net/thesis
the City of Calgary Route Ahead project’s twitter feed just posted a link to this awesome timelapse of a C-Train ride from the far northwest terminal (near my house), past my office (right before the first tunnel), through downtown, and then to the Deep South. I love me some HD timelapse train videos…
So the University of Phoenix was awarded a patent recently, and on first glance it looks to be another round of “patent the LMS and destroy the competition”. But it’s not.
It’s about automatically sequencing a series of learning objects based on the activity of students. Someone does something, and the order of presentation of some items is shuffled in response.
This is not a patent on learning management systems. This is not a salvo in an ed tech war to end all ed tech wars. It’s learning objects. Remember those? Yeah. Just barely. But now there’s a patent for one aspect of automatically sequencing them.
Season 3, Episode #19 of “Who gives a crap?” - the one where the guy moves bookmarks around
I’d installed a copy of Scuttle a couple of years ago, and have been happily saving bookmarks on my own server since then. But I got frustrated when stuff didn’t play as nicely with my stuff, when compared to delicious.com or diigo.com or the like. IFTTT scripts. Importers. Evernote import-bookmarks-into-a-note stuff. etc…
