Tek4L

If you want a bit of light relief check out the youtube video that an enligthened member of our lms review committee had made in order to generate some student interest in the review process.

I have just started installing an early release of the Mahara eportfolio system that is being developed with funding from the New Zealand Ministry of Education. The specs for it look really good, and it is being put together by a very compentent development team from Catalyst, so I am hopeful that it will live up to expectations. I just need to get my test server rebuilt with a newer version of php to cope with the json functions that they are using to implement the user interface, and hopefully next week I will be able to give some feedback on first impressions.

http://learnonline.wordpress.com/2007/02/08/flexible-learning-in-new-zealand

Some good thoughts here from Leigh. It is this type of thinking that is needed to really turn tertiary education on its head and bring it into the 21st century. The one thing I would add, and unfortunately destroy Leigh’s business model in doing so, is that we also need to seriously question the relevance of traditional assessment and accreditation models.

Just in the process of rewriting the Forum module in Interact and using the dojo framework to add some ajax functionality to the interface.

Despite the rise of blogs, and other forms of asynchronous communication, I think there is still a place for the good old threaded discussion forum, particularly in online learning, but the Interact version is in desperate need of a revamp. Have had a look around for some other forums that have added some ajax to the interface and came up with the following:

http://bbpress.org/
http://www.planetblur.org/beta/
http://getvanilla.com/

I have some ideas about what the perfect forum in a learning context should include:

• Easily identify new threads, posts, or old threads with new posts
• Ability to easily view all posts by a particular learner and see their posting profile
• Wisper function so comments on a particular post can only be viewed by a selected learner
• Easy quoting system for referencing other posts
• Subscription options, email, rss, etc.
• Draft/Published options
• Tagging options
• Bulk downloading of threads into a spreadsheet for more detailed analysis of discussion

to name a few - now just need to get busy coding. If you have any features that you would love to see in a discussion forum let me know!

An interesting new applications that takes the 43 things to-do list type functionality and applies it in a tertiary learning context (thanks to Derek for this link):

Lots of discussion around about the iPhone. There is some talk already on various education blogs/lists on whether this is  the device that will push mobile learning forward. It may help, but I think it would be dangerous to pin any learning delivery to a proprietary device.

Although the iPhone has some great interface innovations there are a few reasons why it may not be the killer device that mobile learning pundits have been waiting for, mainly due to the limitations listed at http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2007/1/10/6559 and http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2007/01/10/the_five_bigges.html, but apart from these things, I think it would be dangerous for anybody to pin mobile learning delivery on a proprietary device.

None of the key functions of the iPhone are unique to it, voice calls, text, camera, video, email, mp3 player, etc. It may do some of these things in a more useable/stylish manner than other devices, but that would be no reason to limit any possible learning opportunities to it. As I am sure most people would agree, mobile learning, or for that matter web based learning should be as device independent as possible.

Well, finished the moved from http://glen.interactlms.org/

Needed to try and refocus a bit, and a change is as good as a holiday! After bit of messing around, managed to get all the old posts imported to the new blog. Gone with WordPress instead of plog. I was hoping to just host it at Wordpress until I discovered you can’t add any javascript on their free blogs so have had to install my own copy.

ok - just for fun I have decided to invent a whole new software development methodology - SAD (Solo Agile Development).

This methodology is similar to other Agile development methodologies but the difference is that the whole project from analysis and design and production and release is undertaken by a single developer.

More details about this exciting new methodology available here soon …..

Have spent the last couple of months head down coding some complicated features and have competely lost the plot as far as agile methodologies go and it really hasn't been an enjoyable process. Deadlines kept getting extended, and there was minimal user input into the design and development. Amazingly the end product seems to have turned out ok - but there was no joy in the process.

Definately committed to getting back onto a very tight develop/release cycle