Wilfred Rubens points me to OpenAcademic

Wilfred Rubens TE-learning centrum: technology enhanced learning: OpenAcadamic: "OpenAcademic is een op het eerste oog boeiend initiatief van de ontwikkelaars van Elgg, Moodle, Drupal en MediaWiki."
Seems like a real nice initiative where the best of four worlds (Elgg, Moodle, Drupal and MediaWiki) are merged together and are given back to the community at large. They are also working with the OpenID project for single sign on. So, that's the fifth partner in this ambitious effort.
Direct link: OpenAcademic

LMS Governance Final Report

I haven't read it yet, but this report from Australia already had quite some buzz around the elearning bloggers. So, it better be good. One of the authors, Lisa Wise, writes in her weblog about the LMS Governance Final Report: "The major conclusion from our research was that enterprise LMS software is primarily an administrative tool for delivery of subject-based content and for communication rather than a vehicle for pedagogical transformation of tertiary teaching. Therefore an LMS, as a piece of software, doesn’t require any particular special governance so long as good IT governance practices are already in place."
So, I've got me a first must-read in this summer holiday season. I wonder what more I want to read....

ELO Groei- en Verandermanagement

Yesterday I was the organizer of a seminar on Service-Oriented Architecture and (their possible role and use for) education. This seminar was organized as part of the project "ELO Groei- en Verandermanagement", that started about 18 months ago and was funded by the Digital University. If you would like to read more on this subject, you are welcome to read and browse through the presentations of the seminar (only in Dutch!), go to our wiki.
The seminar was quite successfull as far as our guests were concerned. We might do a reprise of the seminar in the coming months. As we already knew there is a desperate need for information on this subject within the Netherlands.
Update: there is a Dutch article available on our seminar on Edusite.

Dr. Petra Boezerooy

Dr. Petra Boezerooy, originally uploaded by PiAir.

Just a quick note here: Pierre made this photo while Petra defended her dissertation, that I wrote about earlier. Actually Petra did a very good job I think: doing very thorough research while working fulltime and that only in a three years timeframe. Congrulations Petra!

Update: the fulltext of the dissertation is available.

Wilfred Rubens: RSS, but not in education?

Reading through your Bloglines, there is always something interesting. Today this post by Wilred Rubens caught my eye (and made me think):
25 nieuwe manieren om RSS te gebruiken: "25 New Ways To Use RSS beschrijft -de naam zegt het al- vijfentwintig manieren om RSS toe te passen. Opvallend: er staan geen toepassingen voor het onderwijs tussen, zoals op de hoogte blijven van veranderingen in een onderwijsportal, leeromgeving en/of digitaal portfolio."
So, Wilfred is surprised that the article doesn't feature any educational uses of RSS. Well, I am not so surprised. For one: this article is written by a web design agency, which most possibly doesn't have any clients in the Education business. Secondly, and that is more fundamental in my opinion: we, the educational system, are really not so innovative in adopting new technology ("not invented here").
Ofcourse there are exceptions. I mean, at our University you can subscribe to 11 feeds, and also the University of Utrecht (where Wilfred is based) is offering RSS feeds as far as I know. But the creation of these feeds at our University have not happened because of some sort of university policy.
But in the end we will see things gradually changing (and because we are writing about it, we do our little push forward in the right direction). My prediction: the VLE of the not-so-distant future is called PLE, and one important glue in all this is RSS (but also iCal). Read Graham Attwell.

Education in 10 years from now?

Do you read ScienceGuide? I think you should. It is a very interesting website, with lots of articles and opinions, mainly from people in higher management levels in Higher Education in The Netherlands. So, this site gives you a great insight in what our board members and management are thinking and talking about and what is going on in Den Haag. The site is completely in Dutch.
Today I read an article where Mickey Huibregtsen is featured. He will be present at a discussion (next week) on what a university actually is ("het wezen van de Universiteit").
A small quote in Dutch gives you a good idea on what he foresees. He foresees a university to expand at three dimensions: "Bij het vooruit denken over mijn betoog straks bij het VSNU-café denk ik dat ik vooral zal benadrukken dat de universiteiten expanderen op drie van hun meest wezenlijke dimensies en dat zij daar voor hun toekomst heel erg mee bezig moeten zijn. Expansie ten aanzien van hun locatie, de leeftijd waarin men hun kennis opneemt en hun interactie met de omgeving. Op deze drie dimensies expanderen zij op grote schaal en dat bepaald niet alleen hier in Nederland."
As I said: ScienceGuide is definitely worth a read once in a while. It will keep your mind fresh.

Dissertation on E-learning strategies

Just a quick note here. Next week, on June 15, Petra Boezerooij will defend her dissertation, titled "E-learning Strategies of Higher Education Institutions" (exact timing and location).
I am very curious to what her conclusions are. If you are too, then you might be interested in attending too. So far, I cannot find the dissertation online. It'll be nice to see when (and if?) it will become freely available (think "open access, open content"etc).