I noticed several m-learning posts in the blogs I read. Here is a link to mlearnopedia.com in case you want to read more about m-learning.
Things haven’t been too exciting for me in the blogosphere as of late. But from the Online Learning Update, this article on m-learning for ‘hard to reach’ young people is interesting. I could see how the Net Generation (still working on that book, I’ll summarize soon) could take to m-learning. In case you haven’t heard, m-learning is the term coined for mobile learning often with cell phones or PDAs. I don’t think it would work for me. I still have a cautious truce with my cell phone. It’s never glued to my ear nor do I enjoy looking at its little screen. But I am not of the Net Generation.
From weblogg-ed, you can find the wiki for the national curriculum of South Africa ( grades 10 – 12 ) at http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/South_African_Curriculum . There is already a free physics textbook there as part of the free high school science texts initiative. Also note that California is looking at producing its own textbooks to address the rising ($400M) cost of K-12 texts — California Open Source Textbook Project. Is the wiki going to shake up the publishing world?
Ah-ha! Now I realize why I didn’t see eye-to-eye with that article. Their motivation for changing CMSes was to standardize on 1 CMS and thus save money, understandable for a large university system. Our motivation is first pedagogical and secondly financial. Our faculty’s teaching goals are not being met with Blackboard. I believe moodle will meet them now and in the future as they grow and change. We don’t need a course management system, we need a virtual learning environment. I should banish the CMS acronym from my blog….
The latest issue of the Educause Quarterly has an article called “Changing Course Management Systems: Lessons Learned.” It describes the NDSU switchover from Blackboard to desire2learn. We had evaluated d2l for our campus too. It’s a nice CMS and a company with the right direction (see my ramblings here and here). Though cheaper than Blackboard, it’s still too expensive for a school of our size.
But as I was reading the article a few things started to gel in my head. First, there is a problem inherent in talking about “conversion” from one CMS to another. If you convert a course from Blackboard to d2l, you will be retaining the constraints of the old CMS that you are running away, um, getting away from. To leverage the benefits of the new CMS, you need to consider a redesign of some depth:
Or some gradation of the above.
Their findings also caused me to react. Yes, there will be costs in time and money for the faculty in switching CMSes, depending how much they invested in the CMS. If you do something like AugNet Course Docs then your content is external to the CMS so migration is much less painful. The time of CMS transition can been framed as a time for change and re-evaluation of courses. As you can tell from above, I disagree with their concerned focus on conversion tools. But I do agree with their implication of CMS-neutral design (SCORM anyone?).
With my recent posts about the articles about laptops in the classroom, this Wired Campus Blog entry seems appropriate. It points you towards a list of Universities that require laptops and provides some basic info on their programs.
The first comment posted on the blog raises the same concerns that I feel. Requiring students to bring laptops opens you up to a world of pain in IT. But with IT providing and managing the laptops you can control many of the (in)compatibility variables that can negatively impact the classroom experience with laptops, and hence the learning.