Flexknowlogy – Jared Stein's ARCHIVED blog – update to jaredstein.org

At 11 o’clock this morning I decided to sit in on David Wiley‘s Intro to Open Ed course, so after a trudging drive to the heart of Provo I parked my car at the public library and walked three blocks and up a delightful hillside path to the BYU campus. (more…)

WebCT was infamous for it’s calculated column formula textarea that you couldn’t type in. When John Krutsch developed a clever Javascript hack for it (just one of several cool IE-only hacks packaged as WebCT PowerTools), crafting unusual formulas was suddenly more viable, and we began dropping not just the lowest score, but several low scores (more…)

Doug Johnson wrote a short post decrying “competitive blogging” as suggested by various awards, such as the “Eddies” and authoritative ranking systems such as technorati. Doug rhetorically asks, “Do we really want competitive blogging?” I posted my answer in the comments: “Yes.” But I should have been more specific (more…)

Today we received the official word that UVU is willing to support and approve publishing faculty-authored content as opencourseware or open educational resources through our well-planned UVU Open project. This decision is limited by an administrative final approval process, but at least the process is there, and the President is willing to let us join this international experiment of sharing (more…)

Mike Caufield asked that I put up a screencast on the OpenShare mod for Moodle. Here’s one that comes in just under 8 minutes–shorter even than my hatcheted and curtailed preso at MoodleMoot ’08 SFO (more…)

Darren Draper stirred up another conversation on his blog yesterday (Hacking the Curriculum) which intersects a number of my interests: independent study, reusable course content, and open education, and reiterates the question, what is not replaceable in teaching? In the live classroom? In individual instructor-developed curriculum? And how far can we stretch the re-usability of online educational materials? (more…)

The OpenShare block in Moodle

Tonight I’ve released the first all-new version of the OpenShare modification for Moodle 1.9, which I demonstrated last week at OpenEd 2008.

You may view OpenShare documentation or simply download the OpenShare mod now.

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Now that Open Ed 2008 is over (I think I’ve written more PHP in two weeks than in the past two years to kick out the re-release of our open educational resources mod for Moodle … more on that next week), I am finally able to direct my energies toward the Next Project: an all-day pre-conference workshop for the 2008 WCET conference held this November in Phoenix, AZ. This workshop is titled Creating Personal Learning Environments with Web 2.0, and I’ll be collaborating with the inestimableChris Lott and Scott Leslie (more…)

Our Chief Information Office, Ray Walker sent me an article in The Chronicle: Blackboard Customers Consider Alternatives. It’s a great read to gauge the current state of the corporate LMS leviathan.

One passage in particular percolated my sense of irony. In addressing the idea that institutions may have more flexibility to innovate with open source solutions, Michael Chasen… (more…)

George Siemens posts frequently and with clarity on his blog elearnspace, and often I find myself nodding my head as I read or questioning my assumptions or bouncing around to other web sites as I hunt down reinforcing or contradicting information. Today I challenged a couple claims made in his posting, Explaining leads to information (more…)