They purchased ANGEL in 2009, Wimba and Elluminate in 2010, and acquired the data analysis firm iStrategy in early 2011 to begin their foray into learning analytics.  Now, Blackboard is aggressively pursuing the one area of the learning management system (LMS) sector that, up until this point, has seemed somewhat out of reach of their corporate arms: The open-source community.  While Blackboard can’t dissolve the open-source LMS completely, it can sure try to get a piece of the action by acquiring the organizations that offer paid support for Moodle, one of (if not) the most popular open-source LMS solutions.  The Chronicle of Higher Education broke this story (at least to me) and has a fine analysis of some of the major points of contention that could arise from these purchases.  But I do have a few direct questions that concern me and, I believe, will concern many others.

Will the purchase of these support units of Moodle and subsumption into Blackboard’s corporate entity and its newly created Blackboard Open Source Services arm generate a wave of concern from those who have chosen Moodle for their campuses in part or in whole due to philosophical leanings to support those organizations whose goal is to innovate, support, and give back to the campus community devoid of profit?  Yes, Moodlerooms and NetSpot made a profit, but the Moodle does not.  It exists as a community to innovate in this particular area.  Moodle will still exist as an open-source LMS.  That does not change with these purchases.  What does change is how campuses view their contracts with Moodlerooms and NetSpot.  Are they serving the community (even if for-profit) or are they now serving the monolith that is Blackboard?  It depends on your vantage point, I suppose.

This activity marks Blackboard’s first direct shots across the bow at the open-source community.  The  inevitable question ensues: Is Blackboard trying like it has with other areas of the market to dissolve and/or subsume competition?  If you believe that their Open Source Services initiative is relatively harmless and actually beneficial to institutions who need the support structure that Blackboard can support than you’re less concerned with this question than I am.  I’m skeptical though.  Not only has Blackboard purchased Moodlerooms and NetSpot, they’ve also enlisted Charles Severance, the chief architect of Sakai, to lead Sakai support projects on their behalf.  Strategically this makes sense.  Who better to support Sakai than the one who understands its technical framework the best?  Understandable.  Much like Verizon and AT&T’s control of the “pipes,” Blackboard is strengthening its grip on the communication lines between institutions and open-source LMSs by removing freely acting support companies and absorbing them into their structure.  The skeptic in me is concerned about the type of persuasion that may be used to lure institutions towards Blackboard Learn (their own LMS) and away from open-source alternatives.

Finally and most importantly, what effect will this have on the innovation and evolution of Moodle and its brethren if the perception becomes that nothing, even the stalwart open-source LMS, is free from the reaches of Blackboard?  Contributors to the project may not wish to see the fruits of their labor picked by a company that has caused such animosity due to its aggressive business tactics.

I’m in the midst of prepping my syllabus for a summer course entitled “Digital Tools, Trends, and Debates.”  One of my modules – in fact, one I’m most excited about – is focused on digital learning and digital literacies, so I think it’s relevant in this week’s worth of material to include in our conversation some talk about badge systems, especially considering that we will be talking about Gee’s learning principles in games.  There certainly is some overlap.  And while I’m not quite convinced that badges go beyond “shiny new toy syndrome”, I think the emerging research indicates that there is something worth our attention that, while not necessarily needing our full focus, warrants a general understanding of the topic, especially for LIS professionals where learning and libraries overlap more often than not.

A peer-reviewed, open-access journal published biannually, The Journal of Learning Spaces provides a scholarly, multidisciplinary forum for research articles, case studies, book reviews, and position pieces related to all aspects of learning space design, operation, pedagogy, and assessment.

We define learning as the process of acquiring knowledge, skill, or understanding as a result of study, experience, or teaching.

Learning spaces are designed to support, facilitate, stimulate, or enhance learning and teaching. Learning spaces encompass formal, informal, and virtual environments:

• formal: lecture halls, laboratories, traditional classrooms
• informal: learning commons, multimedia sandbox, residential study areas, huddle rooms
• virtual: learning management systems, social media websites, online virtual environments

We invite submissions of practical and theoretical works from practitioners and academics across a wide range of subject disciplines and organizational backgrounds, including Architecture, Interior and Product Design, Education, Information and Library Science, Instructional Technology, Sociology, and Student and Residential Life. Submissions should focus primarily on learning spaces and their impact on or relationship to teaching and learning.

I can’t help but identify a key argument in this ongoing discussion that is seemingly flown over each time we fall back on our strident claims of patron privacy: There’s been a major shift in the power over privacy between libraries and commercial interests.

It’s honorable of us to uphold the enlightened value of patron privacy. In many circumstances our values have secured the freedoms of our users against scrutiny by law enforcement, but we do not own eBooks and therefore do not own the data rights to those eBooks. When a physical tome exists in our collection and it is our system that maintains that collection, we are the stewards, the protectors of the data that the checkout experience creates. And so we fervently choose to expunge patron records because of the control we have.

So, in the case of eBooks, we’ve lost that control (or, more accurately, never had that control) because commercial interests have created a product that they are the stewards of. To ask – or in Sarah’s case, demand – them to abide by our values and ideals to protect patron privacy is simply an unattainable request. It is laudable that our profession speaks out in defense of our patrons, but I envision that these efforts will come to naught.

Unlike others in this conversation who scream foul play and in response to some who argue to back out of eBook deals like Amazon and Overdrive’s, I’d suggest a much different and purposeful response. Continue to provide access to this great source of reading and also use it as an educational moment to engage your patrons in a discussion of privacy. Use this time to talk to your users about how library’s protect their data and how commercial interests use their reading and browsing records. Of course, discuss the risks of commercial data archiving and how it could be used against them but balance it with talks of how it leads to more efficient information and material finding. Simply, let them make up their own minds about their privacy.

(Thanks to Kate Sheehan’s post which motivated this response.)

Mullenweg on how his focus on usability continues to dominate some of the design decisions – decisions that continue to promote WordPress users like myself to extol the user-friendly aspects of the CMS:

I learned a ton about code and programming and back end systems… mainly because I had sort of a vision of something that I wanted a user to realize…. and so we made certain design choices from a technical view that to me are more intuitive.

Buytaert on the role of architecture in the extensibility of Drupal and its developer-friendly community:

When I finally released Drupal as open source, it really attracted an audience of developers.  The initial community was a developer community and began to expand to more and more developers.  That emphasis on architecture was reinforced.  [We're] trying to change that and it’s slowly starting to work – it’s very much historical.

(Video embedded in post for you RSS readers…)

In short, here’s the background of the court’s finding (via ArsTechnica):

A Monday ruling suggests that educational institutions are entitled to stream legally purchased DVDs on campus without the permission of copyright holders. A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit charging UCLA with violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and other provisions of copyright law by ripping DVDs and streaming them to students.

If you read that and only that you may, in fact, believe that your library – or you, as a library professional – have every right to go ahead and Netflix yourself.  And I think Library Renewal may have gotten a little excited a little too quickly:

This really paves the way for public libraries to try a similar move, and rip and stream educational videos from their own collection to users, whether they’re in the building, on the bus, or in the Himalayas.

The crux of the issue is really what is defined as “educational”?  Library Renewal suggests that Dora the Explorer is an educational series and, therefore, public libraries would have the right to stream the video.  In academic libraries we can provide, in my opinion, an easy and defendable academic context for streaming videos: They’re for classes.  But unless public libraries can claim the same or similar contexts (e.g., it’s for an online workshop, I’m streaming it for an in-library class, it’s part of our continuing education series, etc.), it is simply entertainment.  UCLA claimed fair use under the educational provisions of 17 U.S.C. § 107, which provides freedoms for nonprofit educational uses.  Streaming content without the educational context may provide future troubles for you as a library professional and the library you serve.  At this point, I’d wait it out for the appeals process to dismiss or uphold and clarify the ruling before investing time, energy, and money in infrastructure for streaming at public libraries.

With the proliferation of custom content types sprouting in a variety of WordPress projects these days I thought it would be an interesting side-project to create a pack of custom post types meant solely for libraries.  So, three custom post types have been created and packaged into one handy plugin pack.  Check out  “Library Custom Post Types” at the WordPress plugin repository to play around with a custom post type for journals, databases, and a staff directory.

Each custom post type has special metaboxes (or fields…), taxonomies, and custom columns to display some of the custom field data when viewing all items.

While I don’t have an official roadmap, I hope to add some example templates for displaying the data, clean up my code, add better inline documentation, and implement integration with the media library for including staff directory photos.  The plugin pack is in development mode at the moment but it completely works – mainly, it’s just not up to my own expectations yet.

Peruse the screenshots below to get an idea about what it does, then download and play with it, and feel free to post questions to the official forum at WordPress or get a hold of me on Twitter.

(screencast embedded in post for you RSS followers)

Unless you are building theory, you are most likely adopting someone else’s fine handy work.  But encountering that piece of theory that really gets you motivated and helps to frame your questions can be a struggle.

Over the years of my post-secondary education I’ve had the opportunity to encounter a lot of theory, if only tangentially.  As an English major, I remember the consternation that ensued from purchasing an edited volume of literary theory my freshman year.  When I pursued my secondary education teaching certificate I was required to take an educational psychology course.  And in this course I found myself steeped in learning theories developed by Vygotsky, Bloom, Gardner and others.  Chatman, Dervin, Rioux and Savolainen were introduced to me in information seeking studies courses during my masters and now in my doctoral program.  But – and I imagine this is the case for most students – theory does not provide that transcendental awe-inspiring moment that sparks grand thoughts and actions.  Most of the time it is a struggle.

Theory can be – and usually is – a struggle to read, a struggle to comprehend and a struggle to extrapolate.  It is tough stuff that requires deep, concentrated readings – plural.  It takes notepads of scribbles and extra research.  Sometimes you have to read what three other people have written about the theory before it starts to set in.  But after all the hard work of floundering and fighting to figure out what the theorist is saying, that moment of inexplicable understanding can be one of the most satisfying moments of your career as a student – and, in my case, as a future researcher.

For the past year of coursework I have been actively reading literature that builds off of McMillan and Chavis’ 1986 piece on sense of community (SoC).  For me, SoC helps to answer some of my questions:

• Why do people use social networking technologies?
• What motivates individuals to create, share, and consume knowledge in virtual communities?
• How do communities of practice – especially in LIS – form and persist?
• How can SoC be measured and what relationship does that measurement have with other variables of interest?

This investigation into SoC has helped me grow as a researcher and frame some questions but in many ways it has been limiting.  As a type of sociological inquiry, I felt that it was a bit too detached from the technology studies I wanted to pursue – I really had to force it into my research questions in ways that simply made them awkward or limited their potential impact.  But after a year of attaching myself to this theory could I actually afford to let it go and seek out something more applicable and inspiring?

A year’s worth of dedicated research in an area is, to say the least, a lot to give up – especially when it involves a framework for inquiry that has the potential to drive future research for some time.  But, in my case, I found that framework – as interesting as it was – lacked inspiration and the ability to constantly feed questions that I could investigate.  It simply lacked that aha! moment.  Theory can be bland and convoluted; it is not beach reading material.  So, when finally a theory causes you to sit up straight and take notice, you do not forget it.

Roberta Lamb and Rob Kling’s social actor theory provided just that moment as I read through this week’s readings in my social informatics course.  It is a long read, but, unlike a majority of the theory I have read, one of the most accessible.  In a nutshell, Lamb and Kling reconceptualize the definition of “user” as it is typically defined in HCI and technology studies.  The user as an atomic individual with preferences and choice making ability can select any number of information and communication technologies (ICT) that she wants.  Wrong say Lamb and Kling: The user social actor has affiliations, is affected by interactions, placed in environments and is limited by identities that shape the social actor and her relationship with the ICT.  Simply put: The user is isolated from the social context.  For someone who has been obsessed and concerned with the role of the learning management system as an ICT in higher education, social actor theory quickly started to frame many of my questions regarding its role and influence as an institutional technology.  I had the aha! moment and it was brilliant.

According to the always engaging and usually accurate annual Horizon Report put out by the New Media Consortium, learning analytics should be expected in four to five years:

Learning analytics promises to harness the power of advances in data mining, interpretation, and modeling to improve understandings of teaching and learning, and to tailor education to individual students more effectively. Still in its early stages, learning analytics responds to calls for accountability on campuses across the country, and leverages the vast amount of data produced by students in day-to-day academic activities. While learning analytics has already been used in admissions and fund-raising efforts on several campuses, “academic analytics” is just beginning to take shape. (p. 28)

Part of my ongoing research into e-learning informatics is focused on understanding the relationships between students to their instructors and course material in an e-learning environment.  Providing an analytical representation of these connections – and the strengths and weakness of them – would inform educators in much the same way that Google Analytics informs content strategists.

The larger promise of learning analytics, however, is that when correctly applied and interpreted, it will enable faculty to more precisely identify student learning needs and tailor instruction appropriately.  This has implications not simply for individual student performance, but in how educators perceive teaching, learning, and assessment. By offering information in real time, learning analytics can support immediate alterations, suggesting a model of curriculum that is more fluid and open to change. (p. 29)