"Designing for Change: Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments", is the best paper I have read on Learning Design by far!

Essentially, Learning Environment Design is the missing link. I agree. Tools within the LMS are rudimentary and not generally exposed to Students as creators. The paper introduces the Mash-UP Personal Learning Environment (MUPPLE) system and a Learner Interaction Scripting Language (LISL) which works as a Domain Specific Language (DSL) behind the scenes. LISL is powerful, making it easy to combine content and activities which can then be deployed, shared and adapted (evolved). LISL just needs a GUI addon to be super intuitive and adaptable.

OK so now I think I have worked on something similar. A tool called Interactive Media Enhanced Teaching (IMET) that was available in QUT’s inhouse built OLT system. The M in IMET had a different meaning depending on who you spoke to - M for Media or Multimedia and now I’m thinking M could actually have stood for Mashup. A paper entitled “Putting the ‘me’ into media: Exploring different strategies to embed the integration of streaming media with cognitive tools, into learning activities” was presented at the OLT 2003 conference. I’m not an author of the paper, but I was the developer of IMET. I did present a Flex powered version at Ausweb 06.

"Empowering Online Learning - 100+ Activities for Reading, Reflecting, Displaying and Doing" is set to be an amazing resource for Academics, Tutors, Teachers, Students and Learning Designers. I have not read this book yet, but really like the approach taken. The learning design model (reading, reflecting, displaying and doing) just makes sense at a very practical level and rather than just remaining theoretical sample activities are listed (100+ to be exact). The activities seem like ideas to me, ideas that could inspire….

…Now would it not be great if the LD model (reading, reflecting, displaying and doing) was available as an idea explorer within an LMS or something more social like Facebook, where activities could be selected, customized and then deployed.

May the force be with those who use it

Google trends graph is starting to look interesting in the LMS space. Has Moodle become more popular? Maybe the question is are people researching Moodle via Google as a viable alternative?

Wibbit is a Media Wiki extension that allows tabular data to be dynamically converted to various visualizations such as maps, filtered tables and detail views. Essentially all the functionality of Exhibit is now easily implemented with some simple Wiki markup. It would be great to see this as a Confluence Plugin or Blackboard building block, if the license permits.

Scott Leslie has consolidated a list of ‘get out of LMS (um - jail) free’ content migration tools. Its a good sign that more tools are becoming available and hopefully this will put an end to proprietary lock-in. It was not so long ago that I had to build a tool to export content and activities from an in-house built LMS to the IMS-CP Blackboard format. Seeing the list Scott has put together gives me hope that I will never again be forced to build such a tool. To say it was a nightmare is an understatement!

Justice seems to finally be on the way to prevailing - the PTO has found all of the 44 Blackboard patent claims to be invalid. It is however a non-final action - not sure what this means in legal terms. I hope it won’t be too long before a final verdict is made.

Wondering what impact this will have on the BB vs D2L Trial?

My happiest career moments have come from developing add-on’s for Learning Management Systems, so it is not hard to see why Michael Feldstein’s post on Widgets used to extend the LMS brought a smile to my face. The truth is that there has been a need for a non-proprietary extension framework for the LMS for a long long time. …Even better if the API allows for data persistence.

I hope to build a few simple Facebook apps and then plan to look at Sakai again. I last looked at Sakai a few years ago and this is a good sign that it is moving ahead in leaps and bounds.

Read "Anatomy of a Bogus Patent" and then feel sick with disbelief if you actually build applications to help people "learn". C’mon this is EDUCATION!

Feel sick??? OK now read "Desire2Infringe" and I guarantee, you’ll be even more disillusioned!!!

Time to start reading the Desire2Learn patent blog….

It’s a trial by Jury and will take approx 2 weeks!

Can’t wait till March for the verdict!

It’s not often that I read an edu blog and agree 100% with the authors views.  Well I am pleased to say that I agree 100% with Michael Staton’s views on the current state of blast from the past edu tools and why refreshing change is about to occur. Micheal’s Blog is Edumorphology - I highly recommend that you add it to your feed reader now! I should mention that Micheal Staton is also the creater of Courses on Facebook - an LMS built on the Facebook platform.