CTLT and Friends

ummary: Community features are spreading from "Web 2.0" to "Enterprise 2.0." Research across 14 companies found that many are making productive use of social intranet features. Includes guidelines for implementation of "Enterprise 2.0" based on the experience of surveyed companies.

worth exploring

One of the biggest challenges for a document management system built on SharePoint is scaling lists.  There is actually quite a bit of knowledge spread across the help files, technet documentation, in whitepapers and on blogs… but it's still quite difficult to navigate this challenge.

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."

I note Washington gets a check mark for learning outcomes.

States need strong higher education systems, now more than ever. In the tumultuous, highly competitive 21st century economy, citizens and workers need knowledge, skills, and credentials in order to prosper. Yet many colleges and universities are falling short. To give all students the best possible postsecondary education, states must create smart, effective higher education accountability systems, modeled from the best practices of their peers, and set bold, concrete goals for achievement

Learn more about how Google Books works and the recent settlement agreement between Google and a broad class of authors and publishers.

"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."

Note shift in NCATE accreditation to make the authentic or clinical training central; the classroom should supplement the authentic. There is also an emphasis on bringing change or transformation to the world.

Iran's Twitter Revolution posted by Ari Berman on 06/15/2009 @ 12:15pm Forget CNN or any of the major American "news" networks. If you want to get the latest on the opposition protests in Iran, you should be reading blogs, watching YouTube or following Twitter updates from Tehran,

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.

Google is not the only way to mashup.

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.

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.