CTLT and Friends

This awesome little application will walk you through creating windows install CDs that you can tune in hundreds of ways. It makes slipstreaming SPs a piece of cake. You can also preload drivers for targets installs. Making unattended install discs is simple. I've found it quite useful for trimming out all of the $#!+ that you really don't need making for an install of XP that really screams.

There are some work arounds cited in the bug tracker referenced but they include shutting off critically useful parts of Firebug. This is only an issue for people using recent Firefox and Firebug versions. I'm keeping a close eye on this one and will keep you all updated.

A bad bug I've run into and am tracking. Basically if you combine the latest Firefox with recent Firebug you can get some rather nasty looking errors.

at last a decent article on rubric development--a good place to jump off.

for investigation

Blogpost (BYU ?) mentions the HGB.

Penn State Learning Design Hub Link to the Harvesting Gradebook.

blogpost and link to test drive of HGB

This Powerpoint from the Keynote at Canada Moodlemoot 2009 has two references to the Harvesting Gradebook and interest in the comments below the presentation.

"A student majoring in computer science at San Jose State University said he fought against a professor who had tried to force him to remove his homework from the Internet, and won..." For computer science assignments where a working solution to a specific problem is the expected response, the implications are clear. But what are the implications for assessment (and for higher educaiton generally)?

In this 4-minute video, Jim Groom articulates the "LMS is out-of-date" argument, and suggests that the future of online education depends on re-imagining the "form". He points to issues like openness of code and owndership of data.

Developer / Debug Tool for Internet Explorer. This doesn't work for IE8. Internet Explorer 8 includes its own developer tool though.

Joshua and others have requested this in the past. I'm throwing it here in Diigo so others can benefit as well. It isn't Firebug by a longshot, but it is much better than nothing at all. I prefer to use this over Microsoft Script Debugger when debugging in IE. As noted though, it doesn't work with IE8. IE does however include its own developer tools. -- Matthew

CRITIQUE OF E-LEARNING IN BLACKBOARD "Just as utopic visions of the Internet predicted an egalitarian online world where information flowed freely and power became irrelevant, so did many proponents of online education, who viewed online classrooms as a way to free students and instructors from traditional power relationships . . ." In "A Critical Examination of Blackboard's EˆLearning Environment" (FIRST MONDAY, vol. 14, no. 6, June 1, 2009), Stephanie J. Coopman, professor at San Jose State University, identifies the ways that the Blackboard 8.0 and Blackboard CE6 platforms "both constrain and facilitate instructorˆstudent and studentˆstudent interaction." She argues that while the systems have improved the instructor's ability to track and measure student activity, this "creates a dangerously decontextualized, essentialized image of a class in which levels of 'participation' stand in for evidence of learning having taken place. Students are treated not as learners, as partners in an educational enterprise, but as users."

Educating the Net Generation is a collaborative project involving the University of Melbourne, the University of Wollongong, and Charles Sturt University. The project, funded by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council, began in June 2006. It involved an investigation into students' and teachers' use of new technologies and the development of eight case studies in which emerging technologies were implemented in learning settings across the three participating universities.

Digital identity management in ePortfolio contexts, from AAEEBL

If you're not following AAEEBL, this is a good chance to check out an issue we want to track.

"A University of Toronto professor who got students to grade their peers' work has seen the practice blocked by the Ontario Superior Court of Justice. The union that represents teaching assistants and sessional instructors at the university filed a grievance against the university when it discovered that psychology professor Steve Joordens was using specially designed software to have students grade and comment on one another's written work."

A workaround for the broken "Add a Web Part" bar when using Firefox or Safari

If you're in FF and need to add a web part to any SharePoint page with a web zone, just click this bookmarklet