Accidental Pedagogy

When your course management system gets you down

There's always CMS wine.

Photographed by Sarah Shreeves in Portland this weekend.

If only I actually needed T-shirts

This would be a great site. But alas, I have already missed some of the good ones, here, here and here...

S

Today's Blackboard patent postings

Via Stephen Downes we have a very personalized yet thoughtful take on Blackboard with Joe Hart's Personal History with Blackboard. It is an interesting read and an interesting take but I think Joe may be putting too much faith in especially the small schools willingness to vote with their feet or even to speak up against actions by vendors or others of which they disapprove. The whole response to the Blackboard patent and suit is reminding me  a bit of Albert Hirschman's Exit, Voice and Loyalty where he looks at people's dissatisfaction with organizations firms and products and how that dissatisfaction manifests itself in these three different responses. The exit and the voice parts I understand, its the loyalty that I don't (and maybe this is because I spent the first 27 years of my life living under fairly horrible authoritarian regimes and so I chafe easily at any strictures). But some of the types of loyalty toward Bb coming through in the discussions about Blackboard ("my LMS vendor, right or wrong!" - well almost) is very puzzling to me. There seems almost to be a sort of a Stockholm syndrome thing going on here, where people are almost unnaturally attached to companies to whom they have only a business relationship and pay large sums of money on a regular basis. I understand university-vendor partnerships and I have worked happily with many a vendor and count a number of people who work in that sector as good friends (hey Ellen!). But I don't understand the desire to have a blind faith in a product and a vendor and to not be willing to engage in a conversation about software patents and their effect on innovation and what this might mean to us as institutions of higher learning where we're meant to find those uncomfortable moments where my knowledge and point of view bumps into yours and we each come away enriched.

As a way to minimize this Vendor Stockholm Syndrome I always advise people not to use the actual names of vendors when they roll out their products to faculty and students. This is true of most products but I think it is especially the case with learning and course management systems. they're just technology and companies are going to come and go and at some point you'll change. Using a generic name rather than a vendors name not only  makes change easier but increases the likelihood that your users think about teaching and learning with technology as facilitator rather than "using product X."

On the humor side of things Alfred Essa posts a hilarious fictitious conversation between the Blackboard CEO and their Spinmeister. He pokes many holes in the current Blackboard communication strategy.

Curt Bonk also has a funny posting on Blackboard the Pirate. Arrr matey!

A new patent on learning

Now Socrates has gotten in on the action.

Theres a little sub-theme of humor going around coming up with alternatives for the Blackboard trademark Innovate. Educate.  Innovate. Everywhere (TM). Alan Levine comes up with

Question. Answer. Everywhere

in the Socrates press release above and today in a posting someone else suggested

Adjudicate. Litigate. Everyone.

I've also seen

Maximize. Profit. Everywhere.

Filed under satire

Lamest injury ever

Talking with a friend of mine 9also in academic technology) recently, she revealed that she had suffered a "sports injury" -- tennis elbow to be exact, from playing scrabble. This was so serious that she was unable to put on her underwear unassisted for several weeks. Turns out she and her husband have a serious scabble addiction which includes playing in bed on a travel scrabble set. This was the source of the injury. Turns out her husband has also kept an Excel spreadsheet listing the scores and statistics for every game of scrabble theyve ever played, since they started dating some time ago.

But this got me thinking about lame sports injuries and I wondered how many others there were out there. The Accidental Ball and Chain it turns out once sprained her ankle while lying down in bed and sprained a finger dailing a phone number. Another friend -- a philosophy professor at a large midwestern university broke her nose watching tv: she was resting her head on her hands and it slipped, slamming her nose into the coffee table.

Any others?

If Microsoft had designed the iPod

I saw this a while ago but just saw it again on John Battelle's Searchblog. Still lots of fun, and apparently it came out of Microsoft;s marketing dept. No!

Anti-social networks

Now this is something I can really sign up for. Stowe Boyd has a post talking about various anti-social networks eg Isolatr, Snubster and Nemester to link egoists, paranoid types and all my exes.

Isolatr has an IM client called IMolatr

Sign up today for the private alpha test of our inflexible instant messaging client. With IMolatr you are always listed as away, and if people try to contact you IMolatr will actually set their hands on fire.

These all sound like products that would work well with my suite of anti-productivity software. Talking of which we will maybe unveil a new feature in that suite, a spreadsheet called Underachieve.

On a more serious note, Bryan Alexander notes a new blog called MyCrimeSpace which is a blog devoted to crimes associated with MySpace and other social software.

Over at Many 2 Many Danah Boyd talks about some of the possible consequences of MySpace faltering because of the moral panic which it has generated.

She sees these consequences as a loss of free speech rights etc. I think her conclusions are a little overblown. Social spaces and communities of all types have all started in a free-wheeling sort of way but norms and regulations and regulatory bodies always develop or are imposed. The Sherriff eventally does show up in the Wild West and life continues and good things continue to happen.

The Daily Show does MySpace

I had seen this on a couple of blogs but was just reminded of it by Kathleen Willbanks. Jon Stewart of the Daily Show looks at MySpace. Very funny.

More anti-productivity software

Some new additions from the Accidental Ball and Chain

Operating system: Crash
Suite of anti-poductivity tools: The Office
Human resources tool: Micro-manage
Project management tool: Speedbump
And a calendaring tool called Blue Moon that only lists your fun activities (on the plus side, its only a 2K download)
Customer Relationship Management software: Dysfunctional
Student Information System: People ERP (Perp)

Anti-Productivity software

I have been buried for the last few days and hence no posting. This is likely to continue for the next few days as I move from one small California town to another small California town.

But during a break in the otherwise back-to-back meetings a few of us have been designing some conceptual anti-productivity software.

Thus far this is what we have.
Operating system: Crash
Suite of anti-poductivity tools: The Office
Human resources tool: Micro-manage
Project management tool: Speedbump
And a calendaring tool that only lists your fun activities. On the plus side, its only a 2K download