Course management systems

Moodle and Social Constructionism: Looking for the Individual in the Community

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Luke Fernandez reviews a recent Moodlemoot in San Francisco. Listening to Martin Dougiamas and John Seely Brown about the promise of social constructivism and communal learning, Fernandez gets religion...almost. Read his account of the good in Moodle and the things Moodle would do well to remember in its creation of communal learning environments.

NERCOMP Event: Blackboard and WebCT User Group

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Come learn about how your peers in the Northeast area are using Blackboard and WebCT for innovation in teaching, learning and community building and to learn more about the Blackboard vision and strategic direction as well as the latest products and services.

The Future of Art History: Roundtable

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Three art historians discuss how their most urgent needs might be addressed by cyberinfrastructure. While they hold themselves responsible for fostering new forms of scholarship as they appear, the bottom line, they agree, is that CI will be useless if it can not revolutionize image access and metadata management, and cannot help us think differently about vision and objects: "what kind of image work is the work that matters most?"

Cyberinfrastructure: Leveraging Change at our Institutions. An interview with James J. O'Donnell

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Provost O'Donnell, author of Avatars of the Word, is fascinated by how "institutions full of creative, innovative, iconoclastic people" are paradoxically "bastions of conservatism." Guiding us through the texture of change since the Internet hit 15 years ago, O"Donnell posits that incremental change is perhaps the best we can do until the fundamental instruments of scholarly communication and the academic reward structure change: "until the problem we have to solve is defined persuasively enough that we get enough people interested in solving it."

Managed Cyber Services as a Cyberinfrastructure Strategy for Smaller Institutions of Higher Education

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Todd Kelley takes Francis Starr's recommendations for pooling computing resources across campuses one step further by discussing the advantages of outsourcing managed cyber services: "Bringing institutions with common needs together in a shared organizational network and aggregating many of their common technology needs through cyber services [is] a powerful idea."

Profiles of Key Cyberinfrastructure Organizations

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We present here a collection of short profiles, specially written for Academic Commons, on key service organizations and networks that will be poised to assist and lead others who are working to bring a rich cyberinfrastructure into play. Some are older humanities organizations for which cyberinfrastructure is a totally new environment, others have been created specifically around the provision of digital resources and support.

Open Source Software Tools: Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration

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Tim Berners-Lee presented the second annual Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration (MATC) yesterday at the Fall Task Force meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI). $650,000 in prize money went to 10 nonprofits for "leadership in the collaborative development of open source software tools with application to scholarship in the arts and humanities."

While more information is available on the CNI site, the winners are as follows:

  • American Museum of the Moving Image (Astoria, NY: www.movingimage.us) for the development and release of the OpenCollection museum collection management system (www.opencollection.org) [$100,000].
  • Duke University (Durham, NC: www.duke.edu) for leadership and development work on the OpenCroquet open source 3-D virtual worlds environment (www.opencroquet.org)[$100,000].
  • Open Polytechnic of New Zealand (Wellington, NZ: www.openpolytechnic.ac.nz) for leadership and development work on several open source projects including the New Zealand Open Source Virtual Learning Environment (http://eduforge.org/projects/nzvle/) [$100,000].
  • Georgia Public Library Service of the University System of Georgia (Atlanta, GA: www.georgialibraries.org) for the development and release of the Evergreen open-source library automation system (www.open-ils.org) [$50,000].
  • Middlebury College (Middlebury, VT: www.middlebury.edu) for the development and release of the Segue interactive learning management system [$50,000].
  • Participatory Culture Foundation (Worcester, MA: www.participatoryculture.org) for the development and release of the open source Miro media player (www.getmiro.com) [$50,000].
  • Talboks-och Punkstkriftsbiblioteket (The Swedish Library of Talking Books and Braille: Enskede, Sweden: www.tpb.se) for the development and release of open source tools supporting the Daisy Project for talking books for the visually impaired [$50,000].
  • University of Illinois (Champaign-Urbana, IL: www.illinois.edu): one award for the development and release of the Firefox Accessibility Extension (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1891) [$50,000]; and one award for the development and release of the OpenEAI enterprise application integration project (www.openEAI.org) [$50,000].
  • University of Toronto (Toronto, Ontario: www.utoronto.ca) for the development and release of the ATutor learning management system (www.atutor.ca) [$50,000].



 

 

Version 2 of bFree, the Blackboard Course Extractor

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We've received this news from Chapel Hill --

The popular bFree application has been revised to extract far more material from a Blackboard course archive, and to make your exploration and use of that material easier.

The program now extracts Announcements, Discussion Board entries, archives, and attachments, as well as Digital Drop Box and group File Exchange uploads. It continues to extract wiki entries and attachments, Staff Information and attachments, and Content Area pages, including folders, descriptions, links, and attached files of all kinds. Tests, Gradebook, Surveys, Assignments, and Pools are among the content items not yet supported...

 

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