Real-time College and University Transcripts Coming

Published by Jim Farmer May 2nd, 2008 in Higher Education and Open Source, Open Content, Open Access. 4 Comments

This is a guest post by Jim Farmer.

“Today the four firms providing electronic transcript services [to U.S. colleges and universities and school districts] have agreed to form a network so transcripts will be delivered to any user of their service regardless of where the transcript originated.” Speaking from hastily-written text, Larry Furth, Executive Director of the School Interoperability Framework Association (SAIFA) announced the agreement at the 5th Annual Conference on Technology & Standards in Washington, DC. The panel discussion on Emerging Standardization was delayed fifteen minutes as the four panelists reached agreement. The agreement is expected to be announced formally later this week. Mark Johnson, President of the National Transcript Center, John O’Connell, Senior Vice President of Business Development for Docufide, Craig Powell, President of ConnectEdu Inc., and J. Michael Thompson, Chief Executive Officer of XAP Corporation were speaking on Emerging Standardization Efforts and Trends.

Continue reading ‘Real-time College and University Transcripts Coming’

From the archive: My Nominations for the 2007 Edublog Awards

Published by Michael Feldstein November 3rd, 2007 in Blogging, Higher Education and Notable Posts. 1 Comment

Since I have urged all of you to nominate your favorite blogs for the 2007 Edublog Awards (or “Eddies”), I figured I should put my (virtual) money where my (virtual) mouth is and put some of my own nominees on the table. So here are mine:

Best Individual Blog: Cole Camplese and Seb Schmoller. The reason for both is the same; I find that I actually read and learn from a very high percentage of posts on both blogs. If I only have time to look at a couple of edublogs on a busy day, these are the two that I’ll check for new posts first.

Best Group Blog: Terra Incognita.  Ken Udas has done a fantastic job of assembling a large and impressive group of guest bloggers on the topics of open source and open educational resources.

Best New Blog: Terra Incognita again and Mara Hancock’s Promptu. In addition to the fact that she writes about a very important topic (user experience for educational software), I just enjoy Mara’s writing style.

Best Blogged Research Paper or Project: The eLearning Maturity Model (eMM) on Stephen Marshall’s blog. eMM is one of the most interesting and, frankly, useful ongoing research projects into educational technology adoption and Stephen’s blog covers it admirably well. Also, like many of the others on this list, Stephen is an excellent writer (which is one of the reasons that I had him as a guest blogger on e-Literate).

Best Educational Tech Support Blog: As Much By Writing. This isn’t the place where you necessarily will go to get your ed tech support, but it is a model for how university IT departments should be augmenting their ed tech support to their campuses via a blog.

Best eLearning/Corporate Blog: e-Clippings. I feel a little funny nominating in this category since I’ve been out of the corporate side of things long enough that I don’t have a clear sense of what is most useful in that field anymore. But Mark Oehlert’s blog is one of the few on the corporate side that I still read and enjoy on a regular basis. It’s just plain interesting.

Best Educational use of Video/Visuals: MyGermanClass.com. Hilarious vodcasts of high school German lessons. I don’t speak a word of German and yet I find them strangely compelling.

OK, that’s it for me—for now, at least. Now it’s your turn.

At the JA-SIG Conference Next Week

Published by Michael Feldstein April 25th, 2008 in Higher Education and Open Source, Open Content, Open Access. 0 Comments

I’ll be traveling to St. Paul, MN on Sunday for the JA-SIG conference. I’ll be there all week, including the post-conference Sakai planning sessions on Thursday and Friday. I’m a co-presenter for one session with Unicon’s Cris Holdorph on integrating Sakai with Peoplesoft. Other than that, the most likely place you will find me during the day is in the sessions from the “Community Source Management/Governance” track.

Feel free to ping me or just track me down if you want to meet up and chat.

Is Blackboard’s Lawyer Calling D2L’s Customers?

Published by Michael Feldstein April 24th, 2008 in Higher Education and Tools, Toys, and Technology (Oh my!). 0 Comments

Here’s an interesting bit from D2L’s patent blog:

Clients have been calling us to let us know that Matthew Small, General Counsel of Blackboard, has been calling them. From what we understand, his purpose appears to be twofold: (1) to encourage clients to switch to Blackboard ; and (2) to create FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) with respect to alternative products and services in the eLearning space.

From what we gather, he has been making statements that are not supported by the record in the Court or by the actions of the Patent & Trademark Office. If your organization is called, we invite you to suggest to Mr. Small that we are always willing to engage in an open dialogue with you and him.

We remain confident that Learning Environment version 8.3 is an appropriate design-around to the patent claims – as we announced nearly one month ago. We also remain confident that the patent’s claims are invalid and that the Courts and the PTO will ultimately invalidate the patent.

As there is no www.factcheck.org for this litigation, we continue to encourage you to review the documents and the facts. We are happy to discuss any questions that any client, or other interested people, may have. Just let us know!

John Baker, President and CEO (John.Baker@Desire2Learn.com)
Diane Lank, General Counsel and Director, Legal Services (Diane.Lank@Desire2Learn.com)
John McLeod, Director of Marketing (John.McLeod@Desire2Learn.com)

It’s unsurprising that an aggressive company engaged in a lawsuit with its competitor would use the suit to try to poach customers. But I’ve never heard of a company having their lawyer act as a sales guy. If it’s true, it certainly demonstrates a pretty high level of chutzpah.

I’m very curious to find out more.  If you’ve received a call like this or know anybody who has, let me know. I’m particularly interested in who called and in what factual claims they made about the legal situation.

SpikeSource Supporting Moodle on the Microsoft Stack

Published by Michael Feldstein April 22nd, 2008 in Higher Education and Open Source, Open Content, Open Access. 0 Comments

Jim Farmer has an interesting guest post over at Seb’s blog about SpikeSource supporting Moodle on Windows/IIS. Both the creation of supported softwares stack for higher education and the mixture of proprietary and open source software in at least some of those stacks strike me as natural steps. I expect that we’ll see more of this kind of thing.

Great Open Source Conference in Upstate New York

Published by Michael Feldstein April 22nd, 2008 in Higher Education and Open Source, Open Content, Open Access. 2 Comments

Update: The dates of the conference are actually June 19-20. Sorry about that.

(Patrick will never let me live this down.)

My friend Patrick Masson has put together a two-day conference at Delhi, NY on May 23-24 that looks terrific. The first day, which is about open source in higher education in general, has tracks on quality, total cost of ownership, and external support. The second day is a Moodle Moot. I’ll be one of the speakers.

Be there or be rectangular, as they say.

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