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Run me through the Blackboard business model again
So Blackboard has won the initial ruling in Texas, with Desire2Learn ordered to pay $3.1 million compensation. Obviously a stupid and dangerous ruling, but as the excellent Michael Feldstein points out, who’s made money out of it anyway? It strikes me there are three ways to be the market leader in an industry: i) Have such cool products it doesn’t matter how you behave (cf. Apple) ii) Have an average product and bully everyone else out of the market so the customer has no choice (cf. Microsoft) iii) Work with your customers to develop your product and get good will (cf. nearly every other tech company). I don’t have an…
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Top widgets (or why Google runs the world)
(charlessc – http://www.flickr.com/photos/charlesc/100343106/) My favourite search tool, Lijit, has a feature on the top widgets. The top two by quite some distance are Google Analytics and Google Syndication (AdSense). Surprisingly mybloglog is third (well above Technorati and Twitter). The post also breaks them down by type, with ‘metrics’ being the most common type of widget people add. They also show the most popular tools within each category, and it’s here you really see the dominance of Google. In the Analytics category Google Analytics scores 39.9% compared with Sitemeter in second place with 16.2%. In Ads, Adsense has a whopping 84.8% share of the market, and in video, YouTube unsurprisingly sweeps…
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Blog as educational platform, VLE even
(http://flickr.com/photos/jbird/19650368/ JBrd) This is really an re. loads of other people post, but I wanted to pull them together for my sake anyway. There have been a few experiments recently in taking open content and putting it in a blog. Not mindbendingly innovative and yet very powerful when you see it. I remember Tony showing me something like this around the early 19th century which he had knocked together using a penny farthing, carrots and a chimney sweep (Update: it was Nov 06), and he comments on the recent stuff. Then recently David Wiley took some of his open education course and republished it in WordPress. It looks really neat,…
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The most difficult part of installing Linux?
Getting Windows to burn the CD in the first place. Doug Clow has a nice log on installing Ubuntu on an old laptop. This is really by way of outing Doug as a proper blogger now – welcome to the fold Doug, all your academic publications are behind you now…
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Blogs aren’t a luxury
(lawgeek – http://www.flickr.com/photos/jdawg/110174487/ – may take some looking at!) The recent kerfuffle over openlearn made me reflect on the relationship between the individual blogger and their institution. I’m not going to go into the debate about openlearn itself, but rather point out some things about the incident. From the OU Tony, Laura and myself have all responded. Laura’s probably counts as a semi-official response, while Tony’s and mine are independent to the extent that we could say what we like (although not independent in that we are obviously affiliated with the OU and to an extent the project). Here are some observations: i) There was a very quick response. I…
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The Social:Learn project
I’ve been working on a project at the Open University for a while now, which has the working title ‘Social:Learn’. It is born of the recognition that the OU (and higher education in general) needs to find ways of embracing the whole web 2.0, social networking world, and that the only way to understand this stuff is to do it. We’ve had some consultants working with us to develop the overall concept, including Stowe Boyd, Stuart Sim, Stephen Heppell and Euan Semple. There will be an official big splash announcement in July I think, but this is me doing some leaking. The project has gone through the initial conceptualisation phase…
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In defence of openlearn
Donald Clark weighs in with some heavy criticism of the Open University’s openlearn project. Some of his criticism is valid, but a lot isn’t. It’s really no more than a repository of old OU print documents with some tools on top. This is a naive view of just how much effort it takes to convert existing material. These aren’t simply PDFs of existing units. The trouble is with taking legacy material and converting it – often there are cross references that don’t make sense, outdated historical references, and mention of the overall course context (e.g. ‘In your assignment’). The openlearn team thus needed to create a system for ‘scrubbing’ material…
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What would Russell make of it?
John recently posted about Bertrand Russell and his essay ‘In Praise of Idleness’. When I was a student this was one of my favourite books, largely because I was idle and was trying to justify it (and you’ve got to admire someone who smokes such a pipe). I have been thinking about this a lot recently (sadly, this is true, this is what I think about), and considering what Russell would make of modern day Britain or the global society. He puts several arguments forward in the essay, the first being that work (which was physical work then), was a tool for governments. The second is that leisure is a…
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Downes vs Wiley – Cato and Cicero revisited
The official launch of the Cape Town Declaration getting a good bit of attention. I’m not going to critique the declaration specifically, but rather come at it from the perspective of the debate between two main protagonists, namely Stephen Downes and David Wiley. I hope neither takes offence as I like and admire both of them, but I think there is a means of understanding the issues around the declaration by exploring their differences over this. And I’m going to do this by revisiting a previous analogy, namely that of Roman senators Cato and Cicero. For the purposes of this post, Cato = Stephen and Cicero = Wiley. Cato and…
