I have worked with learning applications and Learning Management Systems for the majority of my career. First I worked on an in-house LMS, called OLT that was developed, enhanced and maintained by QUT. It was a great experience - there is nothing like being able to access every bit of code and make the enhancements/customisations that your users require. When the transition was finally made to Blackboard, as a Developer I found it hard to work within its extension framework (Building blocks).  The mindset was different - you could plug in tools buts not interact with other tools. The only way to change terminology was via the language pack. Simple things like adding a field to a form were just not possible. My impression was that you had to adapt your institution to the LMS. …and this lead to me having a tainted view of commercial software and a general view that off-the-shelf can’t be customizable.

I have since moved on - still in edu land, but away from the LMS. I now have an opportunity to learn and implement Microsoft Dynamics CRM. I have spent the last few days reading and experimenting with the software. It has been a big eye opener for me. Dynamics CRM from the ground up has been built to be customised. The business world is not content to adapt their process to off-the-shelf software! I can’t help but think that learning management systems would be much more useful (educationally sound), if they allowed the 11 ways that Dynamics CRM can be customised. 11 is not enough, but its like 11 more than the LMS allows today!

…. and fingers crossed that Dynamics CRM will one day soon run in FireFox. So I guess thats 1 thing Dynamics CRM can learn from the LMS.

Some resolution seems finally to be on its way from the Blackboard Vs Desire2Learn patent infringement trial. The trial starts Feb 11, 2008 and will run for approximately 2 weeks.

Good luck Desire2Learn!

There was a time when all I spoke about was SVMs! That was a fun time and perhaps I should have continued my PHD and not gotten consumed by my day job (where I built a tool to translate content to the Blackboard XML import/export). Will I ever get over it????? Maybe if I complain more!!!

SVM’s are now easier than ever to use without having to implement the complex Mathematics yourself. Jeez — the Ruby and Python libs put SVMs at your fingertips. Check out this article on using SVM and Ruby to implement a SPAM filter. SVMs are great at complex classification eg document classification. This could be the most enlightening thing you read all year and the year is still young. Save yourself from the CRUD that is web development. Save yourself while you can!!!

Janison, an Australian company that builds Learning Management Systems will be teaming up with the University of Woollongong on an ARC grant to “create strategies and tools to help university teachers design effective online learning experiences“. Based on the previous output of the University of Woolongong (eg multimedia and learning design work), I look forward to the outcomes and tools. Its great to see new Australian developments in this space and competition is always a good thing. Educational Institutions need to take an active role in the design and development of learning tools instead of the rather passive installation and release of systems that look like they are from 1996.

There’s a new version of TinyMCE. Don’t look for too many new features, but you can look for valid XHTML output.

Three months ago I would have tried the copy from Word cleanup, but as I no longer work on a LMS, I really don’t care. ….and believe me at my last job I had enough of migrating content from one LMS to another that had bad HTML. Word cleanups only went so far and JTidy never got updated.

I have a tip. If you really want to convert that Word doc to HTML:

1. Get a Gmail account
2. Send the word doc as an attachment to yourself
3. Receive the email
4. Click the link to view the attachment as HTML
5. View the source and see clean, pure HTML

Finally got some time to take a look at the Facebook app catalogue. Lots of apps that have no use or would just get annoying. I did however come across CourseFeed that integrates with Blackboard to show course content, announcements and rosters.

… But your school/uni must be supported - there is a list of supported school which will hopefully grow.

Some useful features even if your school is not supported:

• Course Wall
• File storage
• Share Course posts (feeds) with other students
• Who’s Online - via Facebook Profile

Kinda best of Facebook social collab mixed with content from Blackboard. … So why is Blackboard not doing the social stuff be default! Why?

via Mfeldstein.com. ….so 2 Judges have now ruled that claims 1-35 are not valid….

accessED is a Firefox plugin that tests for accessibility compliance. The plugin does all the work so no data is transfered across the Net. Great for password protected sites (eg content in a CMS/LMS) and sensitive content. accessED also does a great job at teaching good accessibility design.

Tools to assist with Learning Design:

• Compendium
  OU mind-mapping tool
• LessonMapper
  Visual graph driven lesson planner