EduGeek Journal

So today Apple announced some new apps that will basically make it easier and cheaper (assuming you secure a loan to buy an iPad in the first place) to create, publish, and purchase eTextbooks. Or iTextbooks? I confess I haven’t tried the tools or watched the keynote yet – just read a few reports on [...]

Last year it seemed like every new LMS company was trying to position itself as the “Facebook” of online learning. Then Facebook started to make everyone angry (or bored, or both), and we saw that idea dry up pretty quick (well, for the most part). The new catch phrase battle seems to be heating up [...]

The recent announcement of the partnership between Pearson and Google is certainly an interesting one. Many people have been calling for Google to get into the LMS business for years and years (although, I believe most were hoping that Google would actually design one and not just add someone else’s ideas to their Apps for Education). New ideas are [...]

In my last post about re-thinking everything in online education, I don’t think I made it clear that I was thinking about a specific technological breakthrough and not an idea like “Personal Learning Environments.” Personally, I love the idea of PLEs, but in some ways the technology to make them practical just isn’t there yet. Sure, we [...]

As many of you know, I have been trying to come up with something new. I’m not even sure what it is supposed to be. I just know I haven’t seen “it” yet. I see parts of “it” here and there, but I still just don’t know what “it” is I am looking for. But [...]

Blackboard recently announced that they have melded the two video conferencing services they bought (Wimba and Elluminate) into one service. The new service is being called a new version of Blackboard Collaborate. The usual language accompanied this news – they took the best of both worlds, tested it with universities, got feedback, etc. Blackboard always promises [...]

Katrina turned me on to a new Course Management System called CourseKit.  The kicker about this one is that it was conceived and designed by three students with full time course loads because they weren’t happy with Blackboard. First of all, I have to say that if students are having problems with Blackboard, to the [...]

Seems like Blackboard’s legal battle to enforce one of its patents is finally over.  Patent No. 6,988,138 basically made the claim that Blackboard invented the idea that a single course-management software user could have multiple roles in multiple classes. The patent was initially granted but soon overturned.  Blackboard vowed to fight. But so did the [...]

Is Google planning on creating its own Learning Management Systems? They already have (or are working on) manyof the pieces that come together to make an LMS, and with Google’s tendency to gobble up companies, they could easily acquire the missing pieces…

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 [...]