Podcasts and exits

I should mention that I did take something away from Scott McNealy’s keynote — the cost of exit. He made the point that when choosing a technology the cost of exit is often not considered. We should all know that any platform — OS, CMS, ERP, etc — will not be around forever and at some point we will “exit” from it. We often as a profession don’t factor that cost into our choices. I think that actually factored into our CMS choice of moodle, though we didn’t exactly think of it that way. With a move from Bb 5.5.1 to 6.x we knew there would be faculty training involved. We surmised it would be equivalent to changing CMSes. Most of our faculty were on the left side of our “Hybrid Environment” spectrum so many of the skills they’ve developed with Bb were transferable to another CMS. In addition we created a means for them to place content in their personal network folders and that content would be displayed within their courses in the CMS. We knew a few years ago that a CMS change would be coming so we wanted to have faculty rely less on the CMS as a content management system, because it does that poorly. The faculty that were using our content system had a transparent move to moodle — their content would be available in the moodle course automatically. Sure, it is displayed in a new window that requires a click by the student, but the faculty member didn’t have to do anything different to have the content displayed there. I’ve rambled enough about this. Basically I think my colleagues in IT are a smart bunch and I’m glad to be working with them.

Ok, podcasts. I just had to say again how great the podcasts are from the conference. I just got done listening to Rebecca Alm from MCAD talk about distance learning, studio learning and online critiques. I wish I had seen her session in 2004! Our department has talked to her department (all 2 of them!) over the past few years so it was great to see (hear) her interviewed. I think it’s important for Educause to highlight the kinds of things being done by small departments at small institutions. Much innovation can spring forth when resources are constrained.