EduGeek Journal

The Borg has struck again: this time Elluminate and Wimba are being assimilated. I can’t say that this makes me sad for either of those two companies. I have long held the position that synchronous tools destroys the killer aspect of online learning – it removes the ANY from “any time, any where learning.”  But [...]

For the few that haven’t heard yet – Blackboard and Desire2Learn have both reached an agreement to stop all legal activities against each other. And that is about all we know about it, because both sides are not revealing any reason or motive for this move. Many are happy to hear this and are proclaiming [...]

Yesterday I got to meet the original EduPunk himself, Jim Groom.  Not sure who Jim Grrom is?  Well, watch this video for an idea:

Jim has some great ideas for what you can do with blogs in education.  The basic ideas can be found here:
http://blog.uta.edu/~jgroom/presentation/
Also, you can see how they actually use these ideas at UMWBlogs.org.
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I read an article about some new lawsuit Blackboard is filing against someone that they really shouldn’t because… well, the Borg has so many lawsuits out there now that I just can’t keep the details straight.  But the deal is… it’s another lawsuit.  That million dollars your institution is spending to use with Bb over [...]

The nets are ringing today with the shot heard ’round the LMS: a federal appeals court finally invalidated Blackboard’s silly 1999 patent.  I  have to admit, at one point I had lost hope that sanity would ever prevail in this case.  This is far from over, but at least someone out there in our court [...]

If you were at the session that Harriet and I presented recently at the Sloan-C Emerging Technology conference, you probably saw us take a different approach to the session.  Well, other than the play dough and Tupperware Shape-O-Ball toys we used.  Props are just standard for us.  No – what we first did was asked [...]

Okay… scratch my last post.  What if the browser was your LMS?  Think about it – what is the biggest problems with most social networking sites?  Privacy and ownership of content.  Huge battles are being fought over who owns what when you upload it and issues like “how private is your stuff anyways?”  Opera released [...]

I was pondering Learning Management Systems this morning. I do that way too much.  Maybe Google Wave will get released soon and it really will be able to deliver on the hype and all my problems will be solved!  But until then… got to ponder….
FireFox plug-ins are pretty nifty little deals.  And many of them [...]

If you haven’t already read the interesting article on how some colleges are weighing using blogs instead of Blackboard at The Chronicle, check it out here:
Colleges Consider Using Blogs Instead of Blackboard
It has a fairly balanced look at both sides of the issue. The last paragraph proves my point that I have made over [...]

I guess it was inevitable. As much negative press as Blackboard garnered over recent legal actions (in addition to the negative experiences some of their customers are always complaining about), they had to do something abut it.  I can see the board meeting now:
“We’re taking a beating over this lawsuit. What can we do to [...]