Synchronous CMS compared.

This is a great reference. Compares commercial systems and Moodle (open source, I think). I want to do a chart from this information, maybe it would make it easier to use and a little more objective.

DEOS-L: Blackboard, WebCT and Moodle.

Here's a very interesting DEOS-L post talking about WebCT, BlackBoard & Moodle... guess which comes out on top... [via Serious Instructional Technology]

[incorporated subversion]

UPDATE (10/23/03):

Scott Leslie (EdTechPost) advises:  Bill, in regards to comparing Moodle with BB and WebCT, for what it's worth you can view a comparison at http://www.edutools.info/course/compare/compare.jsp?product=182,144,176

On the surface Moodle stacks up pretty well, though I think on digging deeper a few concerns might come up (one major one would be that since it is PHP-based, scalability might be an issue for large - 10,000 users+ - installs).

Thanks, Scott! Since you pointed that out, I have found several dozen interesting comparison/commentary entries by doing a Google search on webct vs moodle. (Blackboard vs moodle turns up a subset of webct vs moodle, so there's not much point doing both.)

12:02:00 PM    

Continuing the conversation about communities and courses.

Elearnspace's thoughts on communities / courses.

"...In my opinion, the solution lies in well-designed communities and networks." [elearnspace blog]

Some good dot points here. Am enjoying this discussion!

11:55:46 AM    

Content Management Technology.

An issue for faculty and for anyone who provides distance education via the web or internet, whether synchronous or asynchronous. The tools are still too complicated for most people other than specialists. It needs to take less time and attention to use the tools. Only then are we going to make progress.

Basic Strategy for Providing Faculty Web Presence. Dan Mitchell at DeAnza College adds another nugget to this day of highly relevant posts in my aggregator:

A basic and easy web-based content-management system is a first priority. Most faculty members simply need to create a few web pages that can quickly and easily be updated, and possibly post some other file types for downloading. Frontier from Userland (and its Manila component) is the one I am most familiar with. Yes, it is a "blogging" tool, but it does a lot more than that, and I can vouch for the ease with which faculty can adopt this solution.

11:50:35 AM    

Interoperable Metadata.

Two Paths to Interoperable Metadata.

http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/
archive/2003/godby-dc2003.pdf

It used to seem that the problem we had was not having enough metadata. Now it is becoming clearer that not only do we have a lot of existing metadata, we have a lot of competing metadata standards and schemas - different ways of describing what are either the same or similar objects.

This paper, presented at the recent 2003 Dublin Core conference, proposes one (in fact two) model to translate between this proliferation of schemas in order to present users with a unified search interface to diverse collections tagged with different metadata schema.

11:46:40 AM    

Confused by RSS? Don't know what a "feed" is?

Don't despair. Check out this post via Roland Tanglao.

Chris Sells - What is an RSS Feed?. (SOURCE:The Sells Spout)- Nice, gentle intro.  My favourite RSS readers are Radio and NetNewsWire.  For non techies, though, I recommend Bloglines.

QUOTE

While RSS is fairly unreadable for normal humans, computers eat it up. For example, if you read the RSS feed from my site on a regular basis, whenever I make a new post, youll see a new entry in the RSS feed. RSS feeds aren't useful for you, but when fed to an RSS reader program, you can keep up to date on literally hundreds of web sites without having to browse to them manually. The RSS reader will check each RSS feed to which you subscribe, letting you know when something new on a web site has happened and showing you what it is, giving you the option to follow up or ignore the new thing. Thousands of sites have RSS feeds, letting me keep up on a bunch of things:

• My friends' writings
• Global and financial news
• People talking about topics of interest to me, like my favorite technologies or my latest book
• My favorite comics strips (I need my daily Dilbert!)
• The latest product and articles releases from Microsoft
• Practically anything else I care about on a regular basis

I keep up on all of this without ever visiting the web sites themselves them til something of interest catches my eye.

There are a bunch of RSS readers in the world, but my favorite is SharpReader. If you install this program and start it up, SR will check all of the RSS feeds that you subscribe to on a regular basis in the background while you work, notifying you of something new by changing its icon from blue to yellow. If you decide to install SharpReader, your next stop should be NewsIsFree.com, where you'll find all kinds of RSS feeds in any number of categories. After subscribing to a few of those, you'll want to stop by Tapestry, where you can find RSS feeds for tons of daily comic strips. If you want to get fancy, you can go to GoogleAlert, where you can subscribe to searches so that whenever Google finds something new on your search topic, your RSS reader will let you know.

If you find the ability to track hundreds of web sites without surfing to each of them manually, RSS is for you. If you find my instructions intimidating, ask a computer friend to help you out (I'll be home for Christmas, Mom).

UNQUOTE

10:46:23 AM    

Thanks ...

... to Jeremy Hiebert, Scott Leslie, and James Farmer for their help in getting me the right URL to subscribe to the RSS feed for Jeremy's great weblog to my Radio aggregator.

Bill

10:29:40 AM