Monthly Archives: August 2006

Conflicted about my beat

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I haven’t posted much this summer. I guess it’s a combination of a new job, a good bit of travel, and a general need to take a bit of a break. As I consider getting back to it I find myself conflicted about my “beat.” This blog isn’t too focused anyway, but I’ve largely stayed away from the IT side of educational technology and focused more on the curriculum side instead. My new job as a Director of Technology means that I’m doing a lot more IT work than I used to. As a result, most of my thoughts about technology lately have had more to do with servers, software, and tech support.

So what does it mean to have a “successful” blog? Is it the number of readers? The personal reflection that happens in the writing process? There’s no one answer, of course, but part of the measure for me is my perception that what I write here is useful to the people who read it. (Except for my mom. She’d probably read this if I blogged about early 20th century monetary policy.) I hope that I can write about IT and technology in the curriculum and avoid alienating readers.

I guess I’ll take the chance. So stick with me as I add the geeky filling to the curriculum crust. I hope it will turn out to be a delicious combination.

New gadget

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Timex Bodylink system

I’ve been running quite a bit lately in an effort to shed some weight and improve my fitness. My old heart rate monitor just gave out so I picked up a new Timex Bodylink on eBay. It’s got a GPS receiver that straps to your arm and tracks distance and speed as well as heart rate. I also signed up for a trial with a cool fitness tracking Web site called FitnessJournal. One of the features of the site is a map that gets updated with every workout and shows your progress in a mythical cross-country journey. You can see my progress here.

This really doesn’t have anything to do with education technology, of course, but if nothing else the FitnessJournal site is one more example of a Web application that replaces what would have been a normal application just a few years ago.

Blackboard more evil than I thought

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What do you do when your technology isn’t enough to set you apart? How about making questionable patent claims and suing your chief competitors? That seems to be Blackboard’s new strategy.

In a nutshell, Blackboard has apparently received a broad patent that seems to cover almost all learning management system concepts in current use. As a big Moodle fan you might think that I would be concerned by this. I’m not particularly worried. There’s a great effort underway to document all sorts of prior art to demonstrate that Blackboard hasn’t really invented anything new and isn’t worthy of patent protection. Let’s just say that I’m not going to hold off installing Moodle on a new server in my new job.