November 14, 2012
MS Global Learning Consortium Releases Initial Public Draft of Learning Tools Interoperability 2 ( 13/11/2012 )
Press Release,
IMS, November 14, 2012.
IMS LTI, as it is more commonly known, is the glue that cements learning management systems with various applications that may interface with it. The idea is that you can use LTI in your learning resource to activate an external program from an LMS, no matter which LMS it is. So the announcement today is that IMS has just released version 2.0 of the LTI specification. "LTI 2, which has been under development for several years, provides a more sophisticated and extensible platform for providing deeper integrations, and greater support for services and events. For example, tool providers will be able to specify where their links should appear in the LMS and provide support for user-selected languages."
Global e-learning campaign launched in UAE
Noor Nazzal,
Gulf News, November 14, 2012.
One of the things about e-learning is that it's the sort of thing that can provide economic development to pretty much any region willing to make the investment (and there is an investment you have to make; it's not a field you can seed once and expect it to perform forever, it is constantly changing as it grows). This is the context of an announcement to promote e-learning globally launched by university presidents in the Islamic world. 'President of ICDE and rector of the Indonesian Open University, Professor Tian Belawati announced the one-year global campaign to promote e-learning at the ICDE SCOP 2012 stating that: “In this one-year awareness campaign, we would like people to know more about the opportunities that are provided through open and distance online learning.'"
Five solid FTP clients that also happen to be free
Jack Wallen,
TechRepublic, November 14, 2012.
The average web user has probably forgotten File Transfer Protocol (FTP). It is what internet users used to transfer files before they started using web browsers. FTP is especially useful for people who want to upload files, especially large files, quickly and easily. FTP is one of the tools I use every day in my own work, and my client of choice on both Mac and Windows machines is FileZilla. On Linux I use gFTP.
Establishment Opens Door for MOOCs
Paul Fain,
Inside Higher Ed, November 14, 2012.
According to this article, "the American Council of Education (ACE), which announced Tuesday that it will work with Coursera to determine whether as many as 8-10 MOOCs should be worth credit." The effort is being funded by the Gates Foundation. This is a long and detailed article, and I will say in passing that Inside Higher Ed has really improved with some of its coverage recently, especially with reports like this on subjects like MOOCs. See also this article, also on the Gates grant (p.s. the Gates Foundation can support me with money any time; the email address is at the bottom of every page on my website ;) ). And also this article, on MOOCs versus performance funding.
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