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largely failed to empower the strong and effective imaginations that students need for creative citizenship

First, LMSs are generally organized around discrete, arbitrary units of time — academic semesters. Courses typically expire and simply vanish every 15 weeks or so, thereby disrupting the continuity and flow of the learning process.

Second, LMSs are teacher-centric. Teachers create courses, upload content, initiate threaded discussions, and form groups. Opportunities for student-initiated learning activities in the traditional LMS are severely limited.

Finally, courses developed and delivered via the LMS are walled gardens, limited to those officially enrolled in them. This limitation impairs content sharing across courses, conversations between students within and across degree programs, and all of the dynamic learning affordances of the read-write web.2

personal learning networks (PLNs) to manage information, create content, and connect with others

personal cyberinfrastructures

Campbell argued that we should embrace technologies that enable co-learners to frame, curate, share, and direct learning "engagement streams

Value accrues to the system as a whole because the more users or ‘nodes’ there are in a network, the more possible connections there are

several significant weaknesses and challenges associated with PLEs

support

support

Teachers and learners should be encouraged and supported in their efforts to find and use the most appropriate and effective best-of-breed tools outside the LMS

the University of Mary Washington deployed an instance of WordPress MultiUser (WPMU) as an alternative teaching and learning platform (UMW Blogs)

enabling the creation of blogs that automatically enroll students in courses as "members" of class blogs created by instructors

A pilot currently under way at Duke University (http://blogs-dev.oit.duke.edu) is aimed at assessing the viability of WPMU as an alternative platform for instructors teaching undergraduate and graduate courses. The list of potential uses on the pilot site includes using a WordPress blog as "the central course administrative tool" instead of Blackboard.

The LMS paradigm assumes that since some data must be kept private and secure, all data must be kept private and secure.

As depicted in Figure 1, proprietary applications and data such as the student information system (SIS), secure online assessment tools, and a university gradebook should be situated inside the private, secure university network. Personal publishing space, social networking, and collaboration tools live in the open, flexible cloud.

a loosely coupled gradebook is perhaps the essential module that brings all of the "small pieces" together.

instructors and students need a private, secure way to communicate about student performance on assignments, quizzes, and tests

If these artifacts are published on the web, they are individually addressable via URLs, so the OLN’s loosely coupled gradebook would simply require the submission of the URL instead of requiring students to upload the artifacts to a traditional gradebook. Instructors would then see a list of student names and links to the artifacts they published on the web

25% of the per-course publication costs (not technology infrastructure or external outreach costs – I’m talking about costs directly related to publishing a course) derive specifically from the desire for the final publication to employ an open license.

Would users still receive this benefit if MIT OCW were posted online with a traditional, full copyright statement?

it's worth looking at Office 365 for what it is, which is Microsoft continuing to move some of the very complicated pieces of its Office software ecosystem into the cloud--in part to make it easier for businesses large and small to get going. The Office software itself is a separate part of the equation--one that's well on its way in that direction.

The good news is that in our brief testing, everything worked as advertised. The bad news is that you can't get it right now, and it's still a long ways off from something that lets you every feature out of the Office ecosystem without installing software.

The first thing we should say up front is that Google Apps this is not.

Notably absent from Office 365's overall interface is Microsoft's suite of Office Web Apps, which is where many of those comparisons to Google Docs have centered

If you actually want to create something, there's still a reliance on having to have the Office software, or go off to the Office Web apps site itself, where users can save to their SharePoint.

The net result of all of this is that Office 365 is not yet quite the true jump to a cohesive set of all of Microsoft's services, gone online and tied together in a way where you can hop from task to task between different 365 components.

In our preview with it, the Web client of Outlook was fast loading and had a few nice tricks up its sleeve, like letting you open up Office attachments in a pop-up Window--something that's quite useful if you're on a public computer that does not have Office installed.

Lync is Microsoft's an instant messaging system with presence; an audio and video conferencing tool; and a voice call service. By design this is something that users install and run locally,

How Lync translates to the Web experience is that users can get a slightly less capable version of it inside a browser window--all without having to install the software client