Forget digital natives

Sometimes you come across a weblog that really blows your mind. I mean, the posts on the weblog blow your mind (or make you think!). The weblog called "Ed Tech Journeys" is one of them. I can't seem to find a name of the author, but the URL is http://preilly.wordpress.com, so the author's last name is Reilly I suppose. She (or he) is a teacher, or someone who consults with teachers and managers within education. Most of the posts are on leadership, management and the like. They are always worth the read. I would like to point to one post specifically that I read recently.

One of them is Polychrons in Our Classrooms. It summarizes a recent online discussion on the use of wireless devices in the classroom. Some think is it bad, some think it is ok. An interesting angle comes from Anthony Fontana. He tells us someting about a polychronic personality and the implication for education. A very nice read indeed.

And while you are at it, please read the story of Tim also on the same weblog. It is not a happy story, but it will make you think.

Back on track

I was away for a few weeks, sunbathing in Sri Lanka.
Yesterday I have tried to touch my Bloglines.... Ough! A lot of stuff is waiting to be read....
This afternoon I will be present at a meeting at the SURF offices where all community managers of SURF special interest groups (SIG's) will be present: Sakai (my group!), Webstroom, Portfolio, Standards etc. We will investigate where we can strengthen each other with our activities.
My last meeting with my group, the Sakai SIG, was on January 31. The meeting notes (in English) are here.

ICT bedrijvendag

Surf will organize a bedrijvendag on March 7, 2007. Read this (in Dutch): "Het hoger onderwijs heeft te maken met belangrijke maatschappelijke trends zoals klantgerichtheid, flexibilisering en efficiëntieverbetering. Dit stelt niet alleen hoger onderwijsinstellingen voor nieuwe uitdagingen, maar ook leveranciers die zich in de ICT-markt bewegen. Tijdens de ICT Bedrijvendag buigen hoger onderwijsinstellingen en ICT-leveranciers zich samen over vragen als: Hoe kan ICT een rol spelen bij de vertaling van deze trends in het hoger onderwijs? Hoe spelen ICT-leveranciers hierop in? Wat betekent dit voor hun producten- en dienstenaanbod?"
Meer informatie en inschrijving via de SURF website.

How to archive courses on your VLE

Through a mailinglist I am subcribed to (I really don't recall which one, anymore), I was directed to a great paper, published in November 2002 (!). The paper discusses the issues that we all have: what to do with 'old' courses on our course management system (or LMS or VLE).

The author, Clifford Lynch, who is Executive director of the Coalition of Networked Information (www.cni.org), argues that this is essentially an information management issue. He proposes to deal with this in that matter and comes up with some interesting steps to take.

I know that at our institution this issue was not really dealt with on this level..... We just, in a very pragmatic way, have decided that we keep 'courses' on our production system for 2 academic years. After that they are archived, which means that only teaching staff and faculty have (read-only) access. Students don't have any privileges on this archive. It seems to work OK.

You should sign!

Several national ICT-bodies urge you to sign their petition that will be handed over the European Commission.
What are you signing for? For freedom, for open access to research findings and results: "The following actions could be taken at the European level: (i) Establish a European policy mandating published articles arising from EC-funded research to be available after a given time period in open access archives, and (ii) Explore with Member States and with European research and academic associations whether and how such policies and open repositories could be implemented."

JISC is worth every penny!

JISC is worth every penny that they get! That's the message that i get from a report that was published yesterday.
Or in their own words: "For every £1 spent on the JISC services budget, the UK education and research community receives £9 of demonstrable value. This is one of the findings of a newly-published value for money report commissioned by JISC to uncover some of the ‘hidden’ value of its activities in support of education and research."
I am quite sure that SURF has the same value within The Netherlands. Think, for example, about the licensing agreements that give us access to software at much lower cost than the market price. On the other hand: what if we would exclusively use opensource software within Higher Ed? Well, think about it!
Read all about it.

Distance education in Europe

Thanks to Helge Städtler from the University of Bremen (Germany), I was directed to an interesting European project, carried out from Norway by NKI Distance Education.

This project is called "Megatrends in E-Learning Provision". In one of their workpackages, that recently got finished, they have delivered some interesting case descriptions (based on interviews) of virtual universities and the like from all over Europe.

This specific workpackage started with a nominations round apparantly, whereby everyone (?) could nominate an institution to be included in the research. This list of nominations is quite long. But a lot of nominations were not investigated further because of failing to pass criteria like the number of enrollments per year (should be more than 5000) or the number of courses on offer (should be more than 100).

The project has identified, based on these criteria, no virtual universities within countries like Austria, Sweden, Belgium, Czechia and The Netherlands! There are case studies available from institutions from Germany, Estonia, the UK, Norway, Spain and Italy.