As reported by Andrea Porter in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required):
4 Colleges Collaborate on Open-Source Courseware
In what may be a big threat to commercial providers of course-management systems, four universities have announced a $6.8-million collaborative venture to create open-source courseware tools and related software for higher-education institutions.
The universities developing the system, called the [...]

The folks over at Learning Circuits just picked up on a recent article by James Glimore in Batten Briefings entitled “Frontiers of the Experience Economy” (pdf). While Gilmore and Pine’s “The Experience Economy” has been out for over four years, it seems that the eLearning industry has only recently begun to view itself through Pine and Gilmore’s analytic lens.

he reference may be a bit dated, but the idea certainly isn’t. Put simply, in “Community, Content & Collaboration Management Systems, Socio-Constructivist Scenarios for the Masses?” (PDF) Daniel K. Schneider “gets it.” See the following figure from his EdMedia 2002 short paper for a prescient diagram of how “1st generation” LCMS engines like Blackboard, eCollege, and WebCT will be usurped by the Moodles, Plones, Xarayas, Drupals, (and yes, even the Ellis Community Learning Platforms) of the world.

I wonder how many other successful (and failed!) online MBA degree startups will publish their own debrief? This one doesn’t contribute much new knowledge to the collective consciousness, but I give Michael Hergert and the San Diego State University kudos for putting pen to paper.

Ah, the joy of pix: 10X (38-380mm {Equiv} AF) Optical Zoom, 4.0 MegaPixels, program and manual exposure … what’s not to like?!? Well, thanks to Santa, we are the happy owners of a new collective memory recorder. The Kodak DX64090 has a lot going for it, and compared to our circa-1999, 1.0 MegaPixel HP dinosaur, [...]