“Six years have passed since course management system vendors began selling products to universities. Today’s customers often feel shoved into a corner by their expensive CMS investment because the system is too costly, unstable, inflexible, and too clumsy for most faculty to learn and use effectively…
…CMS products from the vendors Angel (www.cyberlearninglabs.com), Desire2Learn (www.desire2learn.com) and eCollege (www.ecollege.com) were uniformly praised by their users. In contrast, WebCT (www.webct.com) and Blackboard (www.blackboard.com) were routinely criticized for skyrocketing prices, bugs, and ease-of-use problems.“ [my highlight – Campus Technology]
Some of the other stats are equally shocking, it’d be great to get a complete breakdown / more details of the study.
A. How many K12 schools ban IM?
B. How many University / Higher Ed Institution firewalls block it?
C. How many on-campus labs, cafes are fitted with ICQ, MSN & Yahoo on the desktop?
I’m just guessing here but I’d wager this is the story for the vast vast majority of organisations is:
A. Lots and lots… 90%+
B. Every single one
C. None (unless they have been user installed)
“74% of online teens use instant messaging. In comparison, 44% of online adults have used IM.
69% of online teens use IM at least several times a week.
19% of online teens say they use IM most often to contact their friends when they are not with them; and 8% use email.”
And this is especially interesting when compared to the forums we rely so much on:
I’ve spent all day reading predictions so am loathe to try it myself but what the heck :o) Forget RSS, blogs, wikis, open source etc. etc. etc. 2004 has been the year of SMS (txt & pxt) and 2005 will be when that explodes where IM and SMS meet, and then perhaps we’ll stop banning/prohibiting and making the most of the inevitable embrace with the most powerful communication tool since email…. or perhaps not…
Well, it would seem fairly clear that despite my bestefforts at persuasion ;o), BB and WebCT just don’t wanna go ‘a blogging so welcome to an incorporated subversion sub topic “Not the Blackboard & WebCT Blog”!
For some reason the pubsubs I set up for our two favourite LMSs haven’t seemed to work (which is a shame as pubsub looks better and better and with Steven Cohen now on board are going to go good places!) However, I’ve created some Bloglines & Feedster searches and am sure it won’t be long before the items come flooding in!
However, that’s not to say that we’re out of things to talk about! In particular Scott Leslie raises some very relevant and worthwhile points in response to my thoughts on the WebCT ‘compile’ tool.
First up there might be a bit of a confusion regarding exactly what the ‘compile’ too does, this unfortunately, is compiled (whoops) by the fact that it no longer exists. Yes, as far as I can see in Vista 3.0 ‘compile’ has been replaced by ‘Create Printable View’ – so I hope you haven’t spent too much time training / building awareness / developing materials! This is however a bonus in some ways as it explains essentially what it does: that is it allow you to select a number of items for example discussion board messages or html pages and create a printable version, like so:
…
Which is wonderful for sales – imagine the flexibility, the use, the opportunity, the…
But pointless / terrible in reality, because when it comes to reading discussion board messages, who wants to carefully select the messages they want to print without actually reading them (and if they had read them who wants to go back to compiling them, why not print them then and there?) and why are we trying to encourage printable communication anyway?) – I’d wager that this is used 99% of the time as a tool to simply scroll through discussion board postings without clicking on each bloody one… and guess what, to get there you need to ‘Expand All’ the threads, ‘Select All’ the postings, click on ‘Create Printable View’ and then you get the messages in a pop up without visible threading (unless you read all their metadata).
(do you see, perhaps, why I might complain about the overly complex nature of these tools and the fact that you DO need tutorials / training / support to explain how to use them… when they should be easier than email!)
In terms of content then we’re in a similar boat, how often do you imagine learners would like to print, say, a few sections of the study guide… and if this were the case wouldn’t they simply click on ‘print’ once they’d read that particular section? I really don’t think that anyone is creating their own offline virtual textbooks! This is also based on the assumption that all the content is in html and if, like me, you’ve had plenty of opportunity to check out what individual teachers are doing then you guessed it, it’s in .doc, .ppt, .pdf etc. etc. etc. but not in html.
And the bit about being able to compile discussion board postings and content together is a myth too… or at least I can’t figure out how to do it so I don’t hold out much hope for a newbie educator.
Finally Scott asks “can you demonstrate to me within any of the wiki, blog or community software (Drupal, etc) you use an easy way to combine content from disparate sections into one easy printable/offline version?” to which I say that I don’t think it’s necessary. Simply create the content in html (as it has to be here) and then offer it as a complete document and a separate bits if you so choose. Alternatively the ‘book’ function in Drupal certainly allows you to create content that would work like this, but in the end why bother?
Looks like it’s mostly K12 and home-schooling (well, there’s a blogosphere I didn’t know about!) but great to see Hipteacher & Pedablogue getting some recog there… they’ve also got much nicer badges than the eddies… roll on 2005, we’ll kick their…
[More seriously, they’ve got an interesting if slightly drawn-out voting system involving legit email addresses & CAPTCHA – I like the email idea but not the verification for each post… surely registering would suffice and then you could vote at will. Also, FARRRR to many ads]
And one more thing, go help out Hipteacher and Pedablogue by voting for them… looks like they could do with a bit of an edu-push!!!
Phew, back on the case and just the 1500 or so Bloglines items to get through this morning… thanks to everyone who commented on the festive post, looks like I really needed the break, couldn’t even spell “Christmas” ;o)
Well, that’s pretty much it from me this year, I’m off until the 4th Jan and am also sworn off weblogs, wikis, CMSs, email, IM, SMS, podcasting, pedagogy, technology, community, digital imaging, multimedia, MySQL databases, PHP, hosting, support, laptops, desktops and any ideas / thoughts / projects / conferences / papers related to any of the above until at least the 3rd :o)
I’ve had a crazy year, professionally more interesting and frustrating than I’ve ever known and personally more devastating, powerful and edifying than I could have every imagined.
Am not sure I ever want another year like 2004, but it’s with hope and belief that I look forward to 2005 and I’d like to share that with all of you out there.
Adrian Miles explores getting enclosures for vogcasts with MT. Call me a cynic, but isn’t the beauty of podcasts that they are audio which we’re accustomed and happy with floating through our ears as we do other things… doesn’t vogging sit more comfortably on our desktops & sofas?
Actually, subscribing to the RSS feed for all publications through Inderscience has yielded up a ton of really interesting materials, on a regular basis. Highly recommended!
This article from 
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