Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

Blackboard Patents the LMS…The End of Moodle and Elgg?

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Dave Cormier just Skyped me with a link to this article that details the patents on learning management systems that were just awarded to Blackboard. By the looks of it, Blackboard now owns learning management systems. The day the patent was awarded, Blackboard sued Desire2Learn for infringement, and although the Moodle board doesn’t seem to indicate a great deal of panic, I’d be interested to know what people in this community make of this. Dave says it’s not good…here is his depressing Skypequote:

“DOPA takes all the open sites, and Blackweb all the closed ones…”
Oy.

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School 2.0

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So I got a chance to spend half a day with Chris Lehmann and his full staff at the Franklin Institute in Philly yesterday talking about how the Read/Write Web might work at their new school, the Science Leadership Academy which opens in about six weeks. It was the last day of an 8-day intensive planning session, and they were probably more tuned into the “closing ceremonies” to be held at a neighborhood restaurant in the afternoon than on listening to me, but I was extremely impressed by their attention, their questions and their thinking. And their thinking was all over the place…on a Moodle site where they have been capturing all of their work, on newsprint post-its all over the walls of the planning room, in their conversation. I sat there just envious as all get out that Chris had this opportunity to really build “School 2.0,” and I said as much to all of them.

I know I for one will be watching SLA with a great deal of interest, because it is already one of the first schools to be pretty transparent in the planning process and it will be pretty transparent in the product. At one point in our conversation as his teachers were working on their personal technology plans, Chris said something to the effect that his process had been informed by people all over the world, and that by being transparent about it on his blog, it had been a richer, more effective experience. (Chris, if you read this, maybe you could embellish that thought with a comment…but not from the beach!) And I thought it was interesting that one of the interview questions his teachers were asked was “How do you feel about teaching in a fishbowl?” Partially, that comes from SLA sharing the stage with the Microsoft-funded “School of the Future” which is also opening this fall in Philadelphia. But it also stems from the fact that part of the philosophy is to share widely and to be open about the process. Pretty cool.

So I won’t go as far as to say that this is the first big test of a Read/Write Web school. It’s not. But it’s a big step on that road. It’s a new model that we might all watch. It has an amazingly creative and forward thinking school leader at the helm, an eclectic and passionate group of teachers, and a very democratic vision that makes it unique in my experience. I am very, very excited to see what happens.

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Moodle as EPortfolio

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I’m becoming more and more enamored with Moodle the more I dig into it. And the discussion of late on the Moodle blogs forum has been nothing short of amazing, I think. (Here’s the feed address if you want to follow it.) For instance, the idea that we could use Moodle as a platform for eportfolios has been making the rounds of late, and Eastern Kentucky University is doing just that. Here’s a snippet of the conversation:

When trying to envision how to set-up an eportfolio for students from within Moodle, I kept running into problems until I stopped thinking about how to set this up for Moodle “students” and started thinking about setting it up for Moodle “teachers”.

What we will be doing this Fall is creating a Moodle course for each of our students to use to create their eportfolio. We will make each student a “teacher” in his/her own course and will not enroll students…access to the eportfolios will be via guest access and each eportfolio owner can require an enrollment key or not to view their eportfolio. We are in the process of customizing the language files…renaming “course” to “eportfolio”, “Teacher” to “Portfolio Owner”, “Student” to “Portfolio Visitor” etc.

Now I know that may not have much relevance if you’re not a Moodleite (Moodleist? Moodler?), but the semantics just blow me away. It comes close, I think, to this new model of learning that we’re looking at, the idea that as learners, we are all to some extent going to be the teachers of our own courses, take ownership of our own learning within the context of a larger social network that supports us.

Have I mentioned lately how much I love the transparency of all of this early thinking about how we can use these tools in new and interesting ways? Way too much fun.