BigBlueButton -- Open Source Web Conferencing | www.bigbluebutton.org Lisa’s Not that long ago, there were exciting new things to try in ed tech. It was easy to get enthusiastic about not only new products but the way the web was going, and to encourage faculty to jump in. But in the last few years, the web has gone stagnant. Certain models of development, and certain tools, have become dominant, and online teaching has become far less excitiing. 1. Education, as Apple has known since 1981, is a market. 2. A couple of years ago, I got a note from an irate blogger because I was using her education blog to try out a feed aggregation plugin for WordPress. We have pulled people away from the idea of creating their own web spaces, because it’s so much more convenient to just use Facebook or Google. 3. When faculty were afraid to work with web 2.0 tools, we used to talk about the possible creativity. 4. This is true pedagogically and technologically. And the tools themselves just perpetuate the same ways of doing things. 5. 6. cc BK at Flickr 7. Lessons of technology
Quandary Home Page Quandary is an application for creating Web-based Action Mazes. An Action Maze is a kind of interactive case-study; the user is presented with a situation, and a number of choices as to a course of action to deal with it. On choosing one of the options, the resulting situation is then presented, again with a set of options. Working through this branching tree is like negotiating a maze, hence the name "Action Maze". Action mazes can be used for many purposes, including problem-solving, diagnosis, procedural training, and surveys/questionnaires. Quandary is only available for Windows (although it also works perfectly on Wine under Linux). The Quandary site has now been moved to the University of Victoria.
danah boyd Learning Management Systems – The Choices | WordPress Specialist Learning Management Systems (also termed Course Management Systems (CMS) learning content management systems (LCMSs) and sometimes Corporate Learning Systems (CLS)) have significantly enhanced learning capabilities within educational institutions (universities, schools, training providers etc.) as well as within individual organizations (government departments, businesses etc.). LMS solutions are becoming more attractive to organizations through enhanced features and reliability as well as reducing costs, in particular as a result of significant improvements in Open Source LMS products. LMS Categories and Considerations Learning Management Systems (LMS) are available in two broad categories; Open Source (and free) and paid-for (propriety). It has already been mentioned that implementing a LMS is a significant task. LMS Products Free (all Open Source) Most of the Open Source Systems are based on Apache, PHP and MYSQL making installation simple and inexpensive (or free). Paid-for
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