Found the Educational Technology Trends 2010 quite interesting. Especially the part which predicts yet again (still?) the death of the LMS. Both learning and learning content are moving away from traditional centripetal models, in which everything happens at set locations and is controlled at the institutional/publisher level (top-down), and moving toward centrifugal models that are…
Some of you may have noticed me posting on Twitter using the #usgre10 hashtag. This was the recommended tag to use when posting about the conference. In talking to a director at a university in the University System of Georgia, he said something interesting which had been said to my CIO, “More good for the…
Occasionally I’ll want to see the usernames who use something like a user-agent property or were doing something during a range of time. Rather than report all the log lines and pick them out of the data, I use this which Blackboard (or maybe BEA added). Note  we’ve added user-agents to the webserver.log. The double…
It seems to me television programmers between college and professional football there would be at least 1,000 games per year which would provide the necessary data points for understanding how long these games typically last. Yet, consistently the games which start on time still run about an hour or more longer than the 3 hour…
We started in a conversation about an interesting grant seeking to help students from low-income families through OpenCourseWare and providing them better information. An Open Source LMS != open coureseware. OSLMS is running students through online classes. OCW is providing the content so anyone can download and use it. The better information section sounded to…
A former coworker, Cat Finnegan, worked on retention of online students. Recent articles about online students having higher drop out rates than face-to-face caught my eye. Especially the rationales. The recent articles all are about the work done at KSU (whose online class system we host, well one of them: Blackboard) which will be published…
A Weblogic managed node for a development cluster failed to shutdown when our shutdown script requested. The last managed node to shutdown becomes the JMS node and triggers a rewrite of the config.xml. We have scripts in place to check for the config.xml changing and alert us. Since I am the on call this week,…
It talks about mirror neurons as the key to why we feel empathy. This empathy is the foundation for why we do things for others. Nice thoughts.