Stephen Ryan

Accessibility guidelines

Very intersting post by Joe Clarke, highly critical of the new web accessibility guidelines.

Here is a taste
“In an effort to be all things to all web content, the fundamentals of WCAG 2 are nearly impossible for a working standards-compliant developer to understand. WCAG 2 backtracks on basics of responsible web development that are well accepted by standardistas.”

and

“The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group is the worst committee, group, company, or organization I’ve ever worked with. Several of my friends and I were variously ignored; threatened with ejection from the group or actually ejected; and actively harassed. The process is stacked in favour of multinationals with expense accounts who can afford to talk on the phone for two hours a week and jet to world capitals for meetings.

The WCAG development process is inaccessible to anyone who doesn’t speak English. More importantly, it’s inaccessible to some people with disabilities, notably anyone with a reading disability…”

May 24th, 2006|Teaching & Learning|Comments Off|

Edupress

Has anyone come across this? Edupress is a wordpress variant specifically for educators

“EduPress is WordPress for educators. That means it’s first and foremost a blog but an extremely flexible one which can be made into a fully featured multimedia extravaganza of a website! Like WordPress, EduPress is free and open-source, meaning it can be shared and modified however you wish. Check out the features below and see how you can use EduPress effectively in your teaching:

Automatic hyperlinking
Integrated audio player
Easy podcasting capabilities
Easy-to-use admin interface
Option to make whole or parts of blog password-protected
Comment spam protection
Compatibility with mobile devices
Contact form
Email encoder to prevent spamming
Header images related to education
‘Asides’ category to show mini-posts on sidebar (e.g. for homework)
Printable posts ”

It looks very nice. I wonder if the anti spam email encoding will work for some of our projects.

You can find it here. Edupress

May 23rd, 2006|Blogging|Comments Off|

Ping Pong

Has anyone come across this VLE. I was just sent the following email.

Dear New UCISA Friends,

It was a pleasure to meet many of you the other week in Blackpool. We learned a great deal from our conversations and came away with a few major themes ringing loud:

1. You are spending way too much money on hardware in order to run your existing WebCT or Blackboard solutions.

2. You are concerned that the Blackboard/WebCT merger threatens the competitive spirit of the VLE market.

3. You are open to a solution like Ping Pong that affords you the same VLE functionality at a fraction of the total cost of ownership that you pay today.

Case in point regarding the over-expenditure that you are forced to make with Blackboard or WebCT: we heard one amazing example in which over £200,000 of hardware was necessary to run a solution that would have only required an £8,000 hardware investment in conjunction with using Ping Pong!
Importantly, there is a way to save money while delivering an even better VLE service to your stakeholders. There is a viable alternative to WebCT and Blackboard.

Ping Pong will perform a road show throughout the UK in April and we would be happy to pay a visit to your university to tell you why this Scandinavian product can change the way you approach your VLE initiative. Please let us know if you are interested in booking time with us.

With kind regards,

Richard, Michel, Agneta, and Jeff

PING PONG® is Scandinavia’s leading Virtual Learning Environment (VLE/LMS/LCMS) developed and designed in Sweden. PING PONG offers a comprehensive range of functions for training, communication, collaboration, evaluation, testing, statistics, administration, and skills and competence management. The user-friendly interface allows both system administrators and individual instructors to choose relevant functions as they see fit for distance as well as campus-based activities.

March 29th, 2006|Tools & Technologies|3 Comments|

Open University announces £5.65 million project to make learning material free on the internet

The Open University today announced a GBP £5.65 million (US $9.9 million) project to make a selection of its learning materials available free of charge to educators and learners around the world. Supported by a grant of US $4.45 million from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation the University will launch the website in October 2006.

March 15th, 2006|Open Education, Teaching & Learning|Comments Off|

Blackboard Unveils "Blackboard Beyond" Initiative

Interesting that there is absolutely no mention of Webct or its products in this vision of the future, and this is a post merger announcement. Link here

March 2nd, 2006|Tools & Technologies|1 Comment|

Moodle v Sakai

A very interesting discussion with some statistics on this blog that support Moodle.

February 9th, 2006|Tools & Technologies|Comments Off|

But could you read your notes on an ipod?

From Derek Morrisions Auricle

The iTunes player automatically will associate album covers to tracks (which are PDF files) but some people have been extending the software further to organise all sorts of files such as their lecture notes and attaching them to audio files of the their lectures. They can then copy them to their iPods and carry them all around – audio lecture and notes together.

What a great idea!

February 8th, 2006|Images, Audio & Video, Tools & Technologies|Comments Off|

Webct6 and Moodle

There is now a comparision at Edutools between webct6 and moodle 1.5. Maybe it has been there a while but I have only just seen it.

The decsion tools looks interesting. You identify a series of criteria, weight them, score the 2 products on a scale and it will give you a “decision”. You need to be pretty familiar with the products to do it properly but as it will allow you at add your own criteria, we may be able to adapt itas part of our evaluation.

February 2nd, 2006|Tools & Technologies|Comments Off|

A brief overview of Sakai

In 1995, two major commercial learning management system providers, Blackboard and WebCT, merged, prompting many colleges and universities to investigate lower-cost open source alternatives. In the Places to Go column in the last issue, we looked at an alternative to commercial learning management systems called Moodle (Downes 2005/2006). In this issue, we continue our exploration with a look at Sakai.

Started in 2004, the Sakai project is a “community source software development effort to design, build, and deploy a new Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) for higher education” (Sakai n.d., ¶ 1). Its flagship product is the Sakai content management system, which is now being used in numerous institutions. For example, dozens of American universities have adopted the software; meanwhile, the organization itself recently gained its one hundredth partner and was recognized by 75% of the respondents in a recent Alliance for Higher Education Competitiveness survey (Abel 2005). These trends represent significant growth for open source software in a market that has otherwise been stable for the last few years.

February 1st, 2006|Tools & Technologies|2 Comments|

VLE Survey in FE

The results of a survey of vle use in FE were posted today. The survey was quick and dirty but the results are interesting.

72 responses from 3 lists

Learnwise 6
Blackboard 17
WebCT 6
Moodle 32
FD le 2
Teknical 2
Bodington 1
Plone 1
Fronter 1
Serco Virtual Campus 1
Bluespheres Create 1
2 colleges building their own

The anecdotal information that I keep hearing is that Moodle will soon
be in every FE college ( I make it 44% and rising)

November 25th, 2005|Uncategorized|Comments Off|