When Virtual Environments Collide

This fall, I'm taking a class online about taking classes online. (Next up for me? Writing a book about writing a book, and recording a podcast about recording a podcast.) It's being offered through ION (Illinois Online Network). ION's a great source for educators accross the state (in business and institutional environments). They are leading the way in the maturing area of online learning.

Recently, in the class I'm taking there's been some discussion of the merger of the online education environment companies WebCT and Blackboard and what this merger might mean for online educators. Both companies are in the business of creating online classrooms. They give you the basic stuff you need -- chat rooms, test editors, discussion boards, assignment submission tools, student tracking, etc -- and you, the educator, arrange it all to suit your classroom goals. Then students log in with a password to access the class. Online education has come a long way from the time when someone c0uld throw a few links up on a webpage and call it a resource.

ION itself uses Moodle (The Moodle link takes you to a page which is itself an example of what the moodle environment looks like), which is from neither. Moodle is open source, which basically means the software is free and you are free to change the it's code (assuming you know how). So you can see how the war between the VLEs (Virtual Learning Environments) is getting complicated.

With education budgets shrinking, colleges and university have to take a long, hard look at open source solutions to online course management. SIU uses WebCT, but I've heard that they are looking at other options. Are they going open source? I don't think so, but it's not because those alternatives aren't there.

SouthernTech Seminars

Two SouthernTech lunchtime meetings of note this month. Tomorrow is a discussion of Intellectual Property with a lawyer from St. Louis. (I hope they cover the creative commons copyright!) And on the 27th of this month is a meeting covering "financing technology development". That one is being led by a program manager from MoFAST (Missouri Federal and State Technology assistance center). Do they still finance dot coms? I wonder.

As always, pre-registration is required.

From Where He Blogs

Southern Illinoisan news reporter has a promising new blog: From Where I Blog. In his initial post Jim Muir writes, "As I move forward with this I will be posting my columns on this site and also talk about the news of the day (local, state, national and international.) I also plan to kick the crap out of some of the politicos that need it from time to time."

When Authoritative Voices start Blogging *

Can blogging be used to express an institutional point of view? The University of Chicago's law department faculty aim to find out. They've started a group blog that purports to be merely an extension of that university and that department's tradition of "lively conversation". Anyway, you be the judge (and jury! and litigant!).

Of the recent posts, I was especially interested in Professor Cass Sunstein's description of "group polarization". This is a phenomenon in which " like-minded people, engaged in discussion with one another, tend to go to extremes". So if you've got a group of self-avowed liberals given the task to make a statement about a social or political issue, they are more likely to make a statement that is more on the extreme end of the liberal spectrum than they would if the group were comprised of liberals and conservatives. Or than individuals within the group would likely make on their own.

Interesting concept. Question is, will this group blog bear that idea out? Will the mostly democratically-leaning law faculty of U of C express individual voices or will they coalesce into a more extreme collage of attitudes? Or will this experiment prove that technology trumps groupthink? And that the Internet is the new frontier for the lone individual voice?

Regardless, their blog is definitely worth an RSS feed.


* This title is a quote from the Institute for the Future of the Book's blog entry about the Chicago law faculty blog.