I have just spent an excellent two weeks in Austria and Italy with the family walking in the mountains. The mountains where awesome, the kids really did enjoy the walking and we had great weather. I was especially impressed by the limestone Dolomites. Extremely vertical and imposing.
On the downside I was saddened to see what state the glaciers and northern slopes where in. There was very little snow to be seen. And seeing as I was preparing for a course climbing snow and ice I was a little worried...

Two Dutch writers (Inez Groen and Jeroen Boschma) have written a book on the present day youth. They have described them as the 'Einstein generation'. It is not that they are so much more clever, but rather that they are extremely socially connected and involved (especially through the web). They are well trained in selecting from large sources of information.

The things that struck me in this description are of course the similarities with the net2 generation, the digital natives. On the other hand this view places the youth in a broader perspective than technology alone. It is not the moaning of the older generation about the present youth but an optimistic view of students with a responsibility and a desire for authenticity.

A collegue from the arts faculty is visiting the annual WebCT conference in Chicago and I was very interested by his postings. The roadmap is out and the plans are out to merge WebCT and Blackboard. In fact: they were planning to phase out the WebCT brand as quickly as possible. The new combined product will be called Omni. I do hope they will not try to produce a best of all worlds solution. WebCT and Blackboard are both constructed on different principles and I do not expect simply merging the two to work...

Anyway, you can read all about it on the weblog. I hope it will be up soon, it was down when I last visited.

More news from the world of VLE's: We had a meeting with the Surf special interest group on Sakai. It was very interesting to hear what the various institutions had to say on Sakai and especially what their ideas where on the adoption of this community source VLE.

Wytze Koopal has already written a report on the meeting which is available on the Sakai-nl blog. Willem van Valkenburg has also given his views on his weblog. So what is there left for me to add?

My general impression that everybody present was enthousiastic. People were also rightly critical. However it is quite a job to get a large institution to switch to another VLE and mentioning such a switch is something one has to do carefully. I believe now is the time to start up pilots and to invest in Sakai. If we wish to have a say in the direct... more

It's been a while since I wrote last on this weblog, so I have a lot of catching up to do... I will start off with some news on Virtual Learning Environments (VLE's, CMS's, LMS's whatever).
At Utrecht University a committee has spent a while considering the options for one VLE for the whole of Utrecht University. A number of options where considered but the final decision was: not now, we will wait two more years!

I believe, taking into account the circumstances, this to be a wise
decision. WebCT and Blackboard have not got Omni on offer yet (more about that later), Sakai is not grown up enough yet to deploy in on such a large scale and as a critical tool, the Service Oriented Architecture approach still needs some refining and Sharepoint just isn't what we need at the moment (is Sharepoint really a VLE anyway?)

More important still in my opinion are the arguments referring to our own organisation. How on earth do you plan to support a central VLE without a ... more

Just in case you were looking for a quick and amusing tutorial on how to video podcast...
Do watch French Maid TV.
Or watch the podcast directly here.

It has been quiet for a while on my weblog. The main reason is that I have been rather busy preparing for the new year. In a faculty with 2000 first year students coming in every year there is plenty of preparing to do. We organise a workshop for all the first year students to get them acquainted with the ICT facilities they will be expected to use during their study. I have just selected a team of students who will be giving the workshops.
Quite noticeable is that the information in the workshops is less and less technical in nature. A large part of the workshop is not directed at teaching ICT skills, but simply explaining how the organisation works and what the procedures are, which are so important in organising their studies.....

It is now public: the Edutrip 2006 weblog is online. You can find it at: http://edutrip2006.blogspot.com/. Here you can read all about the preparations for the edutrip and read all about our findings in Dallas...

We also have a Flickr at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/43095792@N00/. I really should not have put on that orange polo shirt ;-)

We also have a WIKI we will maintaining at: http://www.wiki.risbo.org/wiki/.

It is being maintained by our very own edublogger: Gerard Dümmer. You can visit his weblog at: http://www.gerarddummer.nl/blog/

There we are, that should be enough links for now ;-)

Wytzke pointed me to a posting on his weblog on the direction SAKAI appears to be taking. One development that definitely attracted my attention is the 'Swiss Army Knife' approach.

'He sees Sakai becoming the Swiss army knife that does it all. And by all, we do not mean that Sakai will become a monolithic system that we all have become to hate more or less. No, actually Sakai will talk all sorts of 'languages' and standards in the near future (2-3 years from now). So think RSS, webservices, REST, SOAP, CalDav, WebDav and iCal!'

I am encouraged by this news and am also pleased they are already taking internationalisation into account. I can remember problems in the past with certain VLE's which did not support various character sets...

I have been asked to be an Eduguide for SURF. This means I will be attending the Educause conference in Dallas in October. I will be attending sessions, collecting reports, conducting interviews regarding the theme: the new generation of VLE's.

I am curious as to the plans of extending VLE's to allow for a more social learning process. Which VLE's are incorporating aspects of a more social learning style in their architecture? Are VLE's becoming more open(minded) and offering an exchange of information and interaction which is broader than the traditional class room setting?

Last year at Educause was the year when the Open Source VLEs really were in the picture. I am intrigued what the news this year will be in this field. Are they moving on? Are they being adopted by higher ed? Is there news from the e-learning framework initiative?

It will also be an... more