Let’s face it. We’re all looking for the killer app when it comes to sharing information and allowing us to work the way that we like to work.
Ray Ozzie of Grove Network’s thinks his company’s new Groove Workspace 2.5 is just that. It is an entirely collaborative space that features presence management along with great content management and communication tools, and integrates seamlessly with Microsoft SharePoint Team Services. It is also an ideal product for developers as the new Groove Developers Kit makes it easy to extend the product to meet your needs using any SOAP-aware language. Continue reading ‘New, Collaborative Solutions for Sharing Information’
Dealing with spam is an interesting proposition in Higher Education. We’re all about freedom of speech, intellectual property, and privacy, and even worse is the fact that it’s an extremely heterogeneous community. What that means, in particular, is that universities are somewhat difficult places to practice content filtering. Continue reading ‘Still Dealing with Spam After All These Years’
I am frequently asked questions about the viability of “mobile education.” This is different from distant education, which is already an overwhelming force. Mobile education means exactly that — education on the go. It means education that is relatively device-independent and ubiquitously accessible regardless of my location. Compare this with the current distant model that still assumes a relatively fixed location — just one that happens to be different than the central source of information. Continue reading ‘A Few Things to Make Mobile Education More Mobile’
Well, the wires were hot with the big news over the weekend — Pyra is being purchased by Google. What, you say? What or who is Pyra? They’re the people who run Blogger and who have also been big players in blogging’s rise to prominence. Continue reading ‘Blogging Takes Another Step Towards the Mainstream’
When you’re talking about integration, the bottom line is ultimately user experience. Whether it’s the battle for home entertainment of e-learning portal dominance, the user, like the customer, will always be right. Online teachers face this phenomenon everyday. We are integrating learning styles, tools, technologies and stuff we can’t even imagine into this thing we call a course. We do our best to anticipate what the users want in this integration and try to guess how they will respond. Sometimes we are successful while, other times, the results are interesting, disastrous, or just funny. Continue reading ‘Integration and User Experience — An Interesting Lesson from the Trenches’
For years people have talked about chat. For years vendors have been including it in their learning management systems. Just like a classrom, right? All those people gathered in one place to talk chaotically and with little or no control, even for the moderator. Continue reading ‘Chat is Dead! Long Live IM!’
In this chapter on their 2001 work, The Internet and The University, authors Christensen, Aaron, and Clark talk about why four-year universities have grown slowly while corporate universities and corporate training has exploded. Take a look at some of the statistics presented (and their discussion about budgetary crises — written two years ago — is haunting in light of the real problems universities are facing today). Continue reading ‘Disruptive Innovations Create Opportunities for Education’
In one of the most hotly contested decisions since the 1996 deregulation of the telecom industry, the FCC ruled yesterday that the established big-hitters of the telecom industry (Baby Bells–Verizon Communications, BellSouth, SBC Communications and Qwest Communications International) do not have to give their competitors both access and discounted rates for broadband facilities such as fiber-optic networks that they might build in the future. In addition, the Bells will no longer be required to lease high-frequency portions of their copper lines to DSL providers under so-called line-sharing arrangements, a measure that could boost costs for companies that currently rely on such deals.
The decision will impact the broadband market in different ways. Continue reading ‘The FCC Brings the Future a Little Closer’
I had the educational privilege of attending a junior high where the extra curricular activities included pitching pennies outside the gymnasium and shooting craps in the bathroom. I learned enough during my two years there to know that no one really has a chance in las Vegas. I also learned that in craps, while you can kiss the dice or invoke a powerful muse, it’s really all about luck.
That’s about the state of the union in the market for mini or ultra-mobile devices. The good news for manufacturers is that, unlike craps, there are far fewer possibilities (approximately three) on which to gamble. The bad news is that no one yet has any idea which of those three possibilities is the one customers will prefer or choose. So here’s the deal. Manufacturers know that mobility is in and that users want integrated devices for computing and communicating. Continue reading ‘New Devices are Betting on How Computing Mobility Will be Defined’
One of the most interesting phenomenon to come out of this week’s DEMO 2003 show in Scottsdale, Arizona was the emphasis on security and just where that emphasis was placed.
At my last count, more than one third of the presentations at DEMO 2003 have been related to security. And to be certain, products from Sigma Security, PreventSys, and BigFix focused on network and preventative security. But the real emphasis has been on distributed security. Many other technologies and products introduced focused on “security” at the level of a single application or, even better, at the level of the individual user. The big winner? Probably the various anti-spam technologies debuted. Continue reading ‘Security is Good but Distributed Security is Even Better’
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