TedCurran.net » EdTech

Did You Know? A Screenshot is Worth a Thousand Words

tcnet — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 20:25:38 +0000

There are lots of situations where a screenshot of your computer can communicate much more than words. From giving students detailed directions to helping your tech support people (ahem) solve issues you’re experiencing, screenshots can make it easier for people to see what you’re talking about.

Screen capture software lets you take an image or a video of your computer’s desktop, annotate it with text, arrows, shapes, and more, and then post it online or email to friends. There are many great free and low cost options for screen capture software for Mac and Windows.

Create Your Own Diagrams

I took this screenshot of ZygoteBody.com (formerly Google Body) and then added the numbers in my screenshot program so I could draw students’ attention to certain areas. When you have the power to capture images of everything you see on your computer, the possibilities are only limited by your imagination.

Share, Not OVERshare

Many good screenshot tools have a blur tool to help you obscure sensitive information. The benefits here are clear (not blurry!)

There are a number of great tools for taking screenshots. Let’s look at the best of the best:

Windows: Snagit

Snagit is a full-featured tool for taking, annotating, and sharing your screenshots. I could list off the features but it’s better if you just read about them here. Basically, if you want to do it with a screenshot on Windows, Snagit has you covered.

Mac: Skitch

Mac users can use the built-in Cmd+Shift+4 for basic screen grabs, or use the fun, free Skitch for full featured annotation and sharing tools.

Once you master the art of taking screenshots you will find opportunities to use them everywhere you look! These great tools, which can be summoned with a single keystroke or click, will free you to communicate visually in a way text just can’t convey. Happy shutterbugging!

Just a note– I wrote this article for work, promoting tools that would be easiest for our faculty to adopt. I actually created this post using a different screen capture program that I’m just trying out called Clarify. It takes a novel approach to screen capture, allowing you to write full articles as a series of “steps” of images and text. This fits my needs beautifully as a tech support and blogger who often writes step-by-step documentation guides for people. As I say, I’m just trying it out but I can see Clarify becoming my new go-to screenshot tool.

Did You Know: Skitch for Visually Telling a Story (evernote.com)
Presentation Tools – Create Great Screen Instructions With Clarify: The Screenshot Editor (bluemangolearning.com)
7 Good Screen Capture Tools for Teachers (freetech4teachers.com)

Who Needs Gamification?! Student-Centered Lesson Design Using Just Your LMS

tcnet — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 01:15:53 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

2011 brought us the buzzword craze of “gamification” in education, or the quest to make learning online more like a video game. Inspired by FourSquare‘s achievement badges as a way of motivating users to check in to location-based services and Mozilla’s promise of outcomes-based badges in lieu of diplomas, we ed-techies went a little nuts for gamification this year. In my post about “The Angry Birds Guide to Online Lesson Design“, I tried to distill what makes video games so motivating, challenging, and fun to see if we could use those insights to enhance online learning. I’m now working on a “proof of concept”, helping a faculty re-design his course to be more student-centered and leverage the tools we have built into our Learning Management System. I hope to prove that online can match the motivation of video games without trying to “mimic” them with leaderboards, badges, and the outward trappings of games. Instead, we need to look at what works in games and use that to think critically about the way we approach delivering instruction online.

I have been focusing on helping a faculty re-design his course to make it more student-centered using some of the insights I documented in the Angry Birds post. These are not as technically involved as setting up an achievements system, but they use the existing features of our learning management system to reinforce good lesson design. There are many tools in the LMS that enable courses to feel like games, if not outwardly look like them. I think that badges are great for motivating students, but so are grades! The hard part is motivating students to do the readings, master the material, and think critically about material. A lot of this is caused by outdated and debunked thinking about teaching and learning itself.

As in the best video games, students need a safe place to try and fail until they succeed. To that end, we are putting formative reading assessments in the LMS using the Blackboard Tests tool that students can re-try until they’re satisfied with their score. These are really meant for a reading comprehension check and to make sure students understand the assigned readings. We are also using the “feedback” feature in Blackboard’s tests tool so we can give students “clues” after they get a wrong answer– showing them where to find the correct answer in the book. These tests will also inform class meetings, as the faculty can see which concepts students had problems with and address those during the class meeting.

We started designing this course with Bloom’s Taxonomy in mind after I read a great paper on student-centered learning techniques in health sciences ed. It found that over 91% of questions asked of undergrad and graduate level health sciences students are limited to the “Knowledge” and “Comprehension” domains– the two most basic levels of cognition. [annotated link][original article].

We recognize that comprehension questions are essential to ensuring that students have a basic grasp on the content, but that they’re not the be-all, end-all of instruction. As in games, students need to take the basic skills they’ve mastered in one context and apply them to other situations.

To that end, we have adopted a problem-based learning strategy where students are studying real-life clinical problems and trying to apply new learnings from the book to solve those problems. During class meetings they brainstorm in small groups and propose action plans based on what they’ve been reading. They then complete discussion reflections where they answer a writing prompt designed with higher order Bloom’s verbs to stimulate specific thinking skills.

Today was the first class meeting where students did the whole program but the initial feedback has been very positive. I’m going to be checking the LMS to see student performance but it’s definitely been a stimulating and fun exercise in reforming a course! Expect updates here as this experiment progresses.

What are your experiences with student-centered learning? Do you think courses should be like video games, and if so, how? Please leave your thoughts in the comments section below.

What is Gamification? and Why it Matters to L&D Professionals (learningcircuits.blogspot.com)
Learning Technology – Assessment Tools Needed in Every Classroom (scoop.it)
2012 – The Year of the LMS (elearndev.blogspot.com)
Students report improved grades via Technology/LMS use (moodlenews.com)
This Time Its Personal (thejournal.com)
Broadening the Definition of Gamification for L&D Professionals (learningcircuits.blogspot.com)
7 Things You Should Know About Gamification (educause.edu)
Breaking Up the LMS: K-12 District Selects Part of LoudCloud Systems’ LMS (mfeldstein.com)
Is Gamification Really a Bad Word? (edstuckinthecloud.com)
What You Need to Know about LMS Alternatives (thecorkboard.org)

Commons in a Box: Open Academic Collaboration for Higher Ed.

tcnet — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 01:13:47 +0000

Image by Casey David via Flickr

As long as I’ve been interested in WordPress for Education, CUNY Commons has stood as the example of what’s possible when you mash up WordPress, WPMU, BuddyPress, and MediaWiki with some special, custom goodness. Built on open source tools, it has enabled the dedicated team at CUNY to build it into exactly the tool their community needs.

I have been trying with very limited success to create a similar tool at InterLearn.us, but now I might not have to….

The project has announced that they will be offering Commons in a Box, a version of CUNY’s customized social network that can be freely installed at any educational institution to provide a social network of blogs, wikis, and collaboration tools.

This is exciting news for those of us who want to free our users to collaborate at a higher level using open tools. What I don’t fully cogitate is how the Box’d version will differ from a Buddypress install with the full list of CUNY’s custom plugins and MediaWiki integrated.

I’m waiting with barely-contained excitement for “Step Two– Put Your School in the Box“. Are you? How does your school facilitate online collaboration?

I develop free software because of CUNY and Blackboard (teleogistic.net)
Why “Commons in a Box” Matters (hackeducation.com)
New BuddyPress plugin: BP Better Directories (teleogistic.net)
Creating New Academic Networks With ‘Commons in a Box’ (chronicle.com)

Open Source or Proprietary LMS? Your Answer, My Friend, Is Floating In the Cloud

tcnet — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 19:53:24 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

A colleague recently asked me if I could explain the distinction between open source and proprietary learning management systems, especially as it might affect a K-12 school looking at the best kind of LMS to implement today. She wanted to know how schools assess open source vs. proprietary systems–

“So, the ‘limiting context’ I am interested in is how the decision to acquire an open source or a proprietary LMS is determined – is it cost, functionality, usability, easy to implement, requires little training, etc., etc. ”

There is another, equally important consideration when you’re looking at open source vs. proprietary learning management systems– cloud hosting and support. These services have arguable a larger impact on your computing experience than whether the software is open or closed. Here’s how:

Professional Hosting and Service– Whether You’re Open or Closed

Our small university is currently on Blackboard‘s “Managed Hosting” plan which means that they (not us) run the servers, pay the IT personnel to keep everything running, and hire support personnel to answer our technical questions. We could choose to host Bb ourselves and potentially save money by having our own staff do all that service work– then we’d only be paying for the software license (since Blackboard is proprietary software) and whatever it costs us to keep the system running and all of our users supported. This university used to run Blackboard on its own servers (before my time), but we switched to paying for hosting after experiencing reliability issues with that model.

Now, we pay Blackboard for the license to their proprietary software, the resources required to keep 100% uptime, and user support services like 24 hour help, access to help materials, etc. This is what’s commonly referred to as “cloud” computing– paying a fee to a 3rd party for the use of its software, computing power, and technical expertise instead of maintaining our own. The reason we can do that is not because Blackboard is proprietary software– it’s because they offer that particular bundle of services at a price we can afford. This kind of cloud service package is possible (actually common) with vendors running open source software as well.

If we decided to go with a hosted, supported open source solution like MoodleRooms, we would not be paying for the license to the software– we’d only pay for the “cloud” uptime and support services that come with it. In this way, our consumer experience is very similar to paying Blackboard for hosted, supported service. We are still paying for the “trouble free” experience of using their servers, their trained personnel, and their support materials, but it ends up costing much less without the licensing costs (tens of thousands in Bb’s case).

If we decided to run open source software on our own servers, then the cost of service and hosting drops out almost completely. We would only be paying whatever it cost us to keep the system up and running– server costs, IT personnel, and supporting users. Many K-12 schools have adopted this model and run Moodle on their existing servers basically for free. They will often have a tech admin or even a tech-savvy teacher who admins the system part time. The help materials are freely available online in discussion forums at Moodle.org, but they do not have a support number that you can call for help in emergencies. This way of working depends on having a critical mass of users who are actively developing their skills in mastering, troubleshooting, and maintaining the tool. This approach can be dirt cheap– as long as nothing breaks. You always have to consider the possibility that a catastrophic crash of one kind or another might bring down your school’s ability to deliver courses. This is why paying for good support is like an insurance policy against that. This is also why proprietary services like Blackboard (who offer these support services) have historically been viewed as “trouble free” while open source solutions (which generally don’t) have been thought of as “play at your own risk”. This distinction also grew up at a time when cloud computing was not a widespread phenomenon– when anyone who wanted a free LMS had to run it themselves on a shoestring budget. Modern advances in cloud technology have drastically changed the economics of running an LMS, as we’ll soon see– but first, let’s talk about extending the tools we have.

Extensibility: A World of Tools

Open source software offers the added benefit of enabling users to write new modules to add into the LMS to add new features. They are also free to share those additional features with other users, opening up a worldwide free “app store” of plugins that extend the software in extremely valuable ways. If you use Firefox as your web browser, you may be familiar with the Firefox Add-Ons website which gives your web browser amazing new abilities for free. Since Firefox is open source, this kind of collaboration and extension is a natural outgrowth of people’s freedom to explore, alter, and build upon the source code. I think that a healthy ecosystem of developers is the strongest asset that an open source project can have.

The freedom to expand our tools (and the inability to easily expand Blackboard) is my main motivation for wanting to switch. Blackboard sells its products in packages, where you have to add tens of thousands of dollars to the price tag in order to get additional services like a mobile web interface, e-portfolios, file storage, or social media features. Many of these features are available as free plugins (or even part of the core product) in Blackboard’s open source competitors like Moodle, Sakai, and Canvas. This recent proliferation of competitors to Blackboard’s monopolistic model means that schools can choose the service that best addresses their educational goals on whatever budget they have.

Our university is likely to switch to Canvas, a hosted, supported open source LMS which offers several features in its core product that would be financially unattainable for our university if we bought them from Blackboard. Since Canvas is open source, we do not pay for the licensing of the product– only the costs of maintaining and supporting it. Canvas will give the university the new ability to offer outcomes-based grading, e-portfolios, video sharing, collaborative cloud documents, and social media features for about 30% of what we’re paying for Blackboard’s most bare-bones product. We will basically be getting a similar level of support and uptime to what we get from Blackboard Managed Hosting, but the overhead costs of the software licensing are drastically reduced.

Is it the same for K-12 as it is in Higher Ed?

While LMSs seem to be the norm in higher ed, I haven’t seen as many K-12 schools that have an LMS in place (though maybe that’s changing since I last taught high school in 2009). Most of the teacher bloggers I follow online use free cloud tools like blogs, Google Docs, wikis, Edmodo, and Engrade to provide a lot of the services we use an LMS for. With the many capabilities that Google Apps for Education makes available to schools for free, it’s possible to save the massive costs of administering an LMS altogether while still benefiting from commercial-quality cloud uptime and an acceptable level of user support. Google Apps also has its own app store of complementary cloud services that can be patched into their existing service, enabling schools to extend their computing capabilities at little to no cost. This includes new cloud LMS products like Pearson’s OpenClass which leverage the power of Google Apps to offer an LMS that’s “Completely Free”. The proliferation of free, high-quality cloud learning tools is causing many institutions to question whether their legacy LMS is providing the same value that it used to when it was the “only game in town”.

Part of the reason that I think it’s still a good idea to pay for a dedicated LMS is so we have complete control over (and access to) our data. By switching to Canvas, we can actually access the data that’s produced by our LMS, and we can devise analytics that will provide insights about the level of teaching and learning that’s taking place. Centralizing all of that data in one system that’s controlled by the university means that we aren’t forcing instructors to use external tools (where we can’t get their grading data back into the system for analysis). This is a burgeoning science but one that depends on all faculty and student performance data ending up in the same place– something that LMSs are good for.

Image by Dru! via Flickr

Notice that there is little distinction between open source and proprietary software when you’re talking about cloud services. Many cloud-based Web 2.0 giants like Facebook, Google, Twitter, and YouTube have figured out ways to make (lots of) money while providing valuable free services to end-users. They do this by selling your personal information to advertisers, up-selling users on additional services, or charging for support services. The paradigm that the LMS has historically had to exist within– local vs. cloud, proprietary vs. open– is growing more fluid as entrepreneurs seek to break into this market and figure out ways to provide equivalent value for lower costs. It remains to be seen where the sweet spot will rest between fully-featured Learning Management Systems and the many nimble little tools that are streaming in to take their place.

Open Source vs. Proprietary Software (pcworld.com)
Freeing the LMS (downes.ca)
The Battle For Openness In The LMS Market (downes.ca)
Blackboard: Now More “Open” (hackeducation.com)
Why Sakai Rocks! (dr-chuck.com)
Linux, Open Source Still ‘Money’ in Financial Services (linuxinsider.com)
Open source is winning where it counts, so where to next? (technollama.co.uk)
Emerging Trends in LMS / Ed Tech Market | e-Literate (mfeldstein.com)

Google Plus Puts the Social in Learning with Google Apps for Education

Ted Curran — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 21:00:50 +0000

With the news that Google Apps for Education will be integrated with Google+ in a few days, it’s time to start thinking about how social media and collaboration can be a reality for schools. Many universities and K-12 schools have already adopted Google Apps for Education because of its powerful suite of free communication and collaboration tools like GMail, Docs, Calendar, Reader, Groups, Sites, and others. While many of these productivity-focused apps have helped modernize the classroom toolset, schools have been secretly pining for a tool to help students, teachers, families, and administrators stay in constant contact the way we’re getting used to doing in Facebook. Several small players have offered Facebook-style social classroom apps– tools like Edmodo, Schoology, and HootSuite have grown up to fill the need for a full featured social network for schools. If Google gets this right, the socially linked classroom with be a reality before the year is out! This is exciting for me, as someone who has been looking at enterprise-level microblogging tools like SocialCast and Yammer as a way to make campus communications easier and more free-flowing. I think this type of technology can revolutionize organizations by making it easier for stakeholders to hold sustained, data-informed conversations with asynchronous tools.

Most social classroom apps I’ve seen organize course activities (like commenting on discussion questions or sharing relevant links) into a Facebook-style activity feed where recent events appear near the top of the home screen. Photos, videos, and links to outside websites are automatically previewed inline, making it easy for people to see where they’re being linked to. Users can send private messages or public ones, deciding how they want to communicate and with whom. Discussions can be formed around any kind of posting, from a quick status update to a long-form blog post or multimedia artifact. These conversations can last long after the original posting, only drawing attention to themselves when a new comment is added. Users can form friendships, groups, and organization pages to support the many different types of interactions that people have.

These features will come as no surprise to Facebook users– the social network has so thoroughly revolutionized the way we think of online collaboration that its influence is felt in every tool in this category. Google Plus is no exception, but it also advances the form in a few key ways:

It gives simple and precise controls to help users share information only with the people they want to reach. No more accidental overshares.
It provides an integrated interface where chat, video conferencing, and RSS news reading intermingle with social status updates.
Google has stated its commitment to integrate its many diverse services into G+, and it will continue to grow into a central hub for communication and collaboration.
It remains to be seen, but a G+ for Apps could very likely help schools to keep communications inside the school community instead of defaulting to public status. This may allay privacy- and copyright-related concerns caused by the wide-open nature of Twitter and Facebook. This is a prime selling-point of these education-focused social learning apps as well as the enterprise microblogging apps.

Even this week’s announcement of Pearson’s OpenClass Learning Management System may be disrupted by a G+ for Apps, as it looks to be little more than a social “glue” to organize students and teachers into courses so they can share documents in Google’s suite of free services. If G+ provides simple tools for schools to organize students and teachers into courses, cohorts, programs, organizations and the like (maybe by interfacing with Student Information Systems?), it may give the LMS a serious run for its money.

What are your thoughts on Google Plus for Education? Please let us know in the comments.

Pearson adds free learning management tools to Google Apps for Education (betanews.com)
North Carolina A&T State University goes Google (googleenterprise.blogspot.com)
New Presentation Options in Google Docs (freetech4teachers.com)
Tradition meets technology: top universities using Apps for Education (googleblog.blogspot.com)
Google in Education and Chromebooks (Sept 2011) (speedofcreativity.org)
Back to School with Google Chromebooks (hackeducation.com)
Tradition meets technology: top universities using Apps for Education (googleenterprise.blogspot.com)

LMS Disruption– Free Web 2.0 Tools Can Co-Exist with the Centralized LMS

Ted Curran — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 20:16:50 +0000

[Question from a colleague] It appears that OpenClass has the same mission as Canvas – OpenClass: “disrupt technology for education”, Canvas: “disrupting the Learning Management System (LMS) market.” Does this new partnership introduce any concerns about Canvas’ future. Blackboard has to change if it’s going to survive. Canvas too? The thought crosses my mind – will we make this disruptive change (i.e. switching to Canvas) only to make another one in two years? Should that speculative thinking be a factor for consideration?

My parents are stockbrokers, where the phrase “market correction” is used to describe what’s happening to the LMS market right now. Schools are realizing that we have been paying too much for a big, integrated system with many features we don’t use, and we’re exploring smaller, cheaper systems. Canvas is attempting to offer all of the services that Blackboard does for less money by using free and open source components. Other disruptive tools (like OpenClass, CourseDirector, and LoudCloud) appear to be flirting with offering fewer total features and encouraging educators to plug multiple free Web 2.0 tools together to provide whatever functionality they want to add to their courses. In this way, the LMS is becoming more modular—less “one size fits all” and more “make it what you want”.

For example, faculty can use Vimeo.com for their video streaming needs instead of buying a streaming video server. They can use Google Apps to post and collaborate on documents, and even to maintain a gradebook! Instead of dedicated clickers, you can get a free web application that uses the cell phones and tablets that students are already bringing to class. Truly, every function of a traditional LMS can be disrupted with freely available Web 2.0 tools. As a matter of fact, this is the norm amongst K-12 teachers—most of the teacher blogs I follow are all about harnessing the power of free tools, not enterprise ones.

This approach has many benefits—the teacher who strings together Web 2.0 tools can match the tool to the educational objective without worrying about the price tag. Most Web 2.0 tools are cross-platform, so students can use them on their home computers and mobile devices.

This approach comes with some challenges and hurdles as well. Teachers need to be highly skilled with technology (moreso than the average LMS-dweller) in order to master the different interfaces and feature sets of various Web 2.0 tools well enough to see how they work together. The DIY U and EduPunk movements are all about cobbling together free educational tools to meet the needs of modern students and faculty. This is great, and it requires us all to be cobblers as well as teachers/learners. When we talk of disrupting the LMS, we are talking about making teachers into the connective glue that holds their edtech tools together—a job that was previously handled by the LMS. Some faculty will be freed by that, and others will really reject that role.

From an institutional perspective, cobbling together disparate tools makes it very difficult to get data back to a centralized repository where it can be preserved, shared, analyzed for evidence of learning, etc. Web 2.0 sites have varying terms of service regarding the intellectual property of their users, and may not provide tools to get data back out of their systems. If every faculty member uses a different free gradebook program, then students have to look in several places just to get an idea of their progress. School administrators would have even more problems trying to get a sense of student learning by looking at various systems. As we move closer and closer to measuring learning outcomes across the whole institution, we need to have everyone in the same system so we can get good aggregate reporting on how users are performing.

Another drawback to cobbling together free tools is the challenge of getting everyone together on the same network. More tools means more separate logins, more forgotten passwords, and people just not being able to find each other. This was something I had to manage as a classroom cobbler, and was amazed when I came to SMU to see my one set of login credentials passed securely (via LDAP) between all the various tools I use. This makes it seamless for faculty and students to stay in contact online, taking that stress off of faculty.

That’s why I agree with the ideas of David Wiley and Jon Mott that the best system is one that provides a secure meeting space where faculty and students can easily find each other and share information from any Web 2.0 tool. Wiley and Mott were early consultants on the creation of Canvas, and it has become the best existing example of the kind of “Post LMS” they had envisioned. An ideal system is one where students and faculty can work in whichever 3^rd party free tool they choose, but that all work is easily captured and preserved by a central LMS so they can have secure conversations about grades. Canvas does this.

: Mott’s Open Learning Network

I think that the dis-aggregation of the LMS is going to happen whether we like it or not, and that Canvas provides the “training wheels” that we would need at this juncture to help faculty transition from the LMS to a constellation of 3^rd party apps. It also provides the secure aggregated “core” that the institution needs so we can make sense of the various learning activities that are going on under our roof. Hopefully, this will mean that in 3-5 years, our average faculty will have had more experience integrating 3^rd party tools into their teaching repertoire and might feel more comfortable “cobbling” together tools the way the EduPunks do.

Pearson OpenClass: Judge It As Disruption, Not As Status Quo (mfeldstein.com)
Pearson and Google Jump Into Learning Management With a New, Free System (chronicle.com)
Brown University moving from Blackboard to Instructure’s Canvas LMS (mfeldstein.com)
ELI Releases New Brief on LMS (educause.edu)
ClassConnect: Rethinking the LMS (hackeducation.com)
Pearson’s “Free” LMS (hackeducation.com)
Breaking Up the LMS: K-12 District Selects Part of LoudCloud Systems’ LMS (mfeldstein.com)

Take Dramatic 3D Screenshots of Websites with Firefox's Tilt Plugin

Ted Curran — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 16:40:27 +0000

If you do a lot of presentations or tutorials about technology, you probably have to take screenshots of websites to illustrate your ideas. I really like to add a “wow” factor to my presentations whenever I can do it gracefully, and I’m already seeing the possibilities with Mozilla Hacks’ new project, Tilt. It uses the very latest in HTML5 WebGL technology to render web pages in 3D, showing its internal structure (the DOM) visually. While that’s all cool and geeky, it also means that you can take dramatic-looking screenshots of websites to show in your presentations.

How do you do it?

Go download the Tilt plugin for Firefox.
Navigate to the website you want to screenshot
Pull down Firefox’s Tools menu and invoke Tilt
Position your website in the most awesome way possible
Shoot and edit your screenshot with your favorite screen capture software like Jing, Skitch, or good ol’ Grab in OSX
Drop that screenshot into your presentation, document, or whatever creative piece you’re working on!

It’s really that simple! I’d love to see what you do with this tool– please leave links to your 3D presentations in the comments!

See Web Pages in 3D with Tilt, a Firefox Extension (labnol.org)
Tilt: Visualize your Web page in 3D (hacks.mozilla.org)
Quick-Tip An Awesome Browser Plug-in – Awesome Screenshot (compete.com)
Review: Firefox 5 Web browser (macworld.com)
Firefox Joy…stick that is (geektyrant.com)
The Most Important Parts of HTML5 (n01se.net)
Firefox Gets A Massive Speed Boost; I’m Still Sticking With Chrome. (thechromesource.com)
Firefox To Get Better Third Party Add-On Security (ghacks.net)

Blackboard Bought by Providence Equity Partners– What Does it Mean for Schools?

Ted Curran — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 22:00:35 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

You may have heard Blackboard’s announcement that it’s being acquired by Providence Equity Partners. If you are in the midst of an LMS Evaluation (like we are), you may be wondering what this news does to the level of service that Bb will be able to provide in the future. Though Bb CEO Chasen reassures us that everything will be just the same under the new regime, it’s instructive to look at what would motivate a private equity firm to buy Bb, especially since it’s been losing LMS market share quickly as viable alternatives emerge throughout the marketplace.

In Michael Feldstein’s article a while back–before we knew who the potential buyer might be–he speculated that it might be a private equity firm.

Let me take a little detour here and comment briefly on the possibility of Blackboard being acquired by a private equity company. Joshua Kim has publicly lamented about a potential acquisition of Blackboard by private equity as being bad for education. It is important to keep in mind that this would not be an entirely new phenomenon in the world of educational technology. SunGard, Datatel, and Cengage (my employer) are all owned by private equity companies. In general, there are two types of approaches that private equity takes to companies that they acquire. One possibility is that they milk the company for cash as much as they can and then sell off the parts. That’s the kind of approach that became infamous during the big leveraged buyout boom of the 1980s. But often private equity will buy a company because, for whatever reason, they think that company is under-performing and that they can turn it around relatively quickly. In that case, their goal is to build up the company and sell it at a profit, either to another private investor or through an offering on the stock market. It’s a bit like flipping a house. I make no judgment here about what the likely impact of private equity purchasing Blackboard might be. My point is simply that there is no particular reason to believe they would automatically do a worse job for customers than, for example, Google might simply because they are a financial services company.

It appears that Providence Equity believes Blackboard below its potential and wants to build it up into a more profitable company so they can sell it off at a profit. The Freedom of Information Act inquiries Feldstein referred to back then were all focused on universities that had left Bb for other competitors (especially open source LMSs). I think they were trying to figure out whether it was still worth its valuation despite the fact that it’s losing so much share of the LMS market. Their other products (like Bb Collaborate and Connect) may provide a larger share of the revenues as the company moves forward.

From the Bloomberg Article:

It’s the portfolio of technologies that Blackboard has built and acquired that makes them so attractive across online learning, mobile access to learning resources, distance learning, as well as tools to help schools communicate to their students,” Auty said in a telephone interview today.

I guess we will all have to wait and see what happens next. What are your thoughts?

Blackboard Buyout Arrives, At Full Value (BBBB) (247wallst.com)
Blackboard Seen Losing 50% Gain With Private Equity: Real M&A (businessweek.com)
Some Caveats in Considering Blackboard as a Buyout Target (BBBB) (247wallst.com)
Providence Equity Is Said to Be in Lead to Buy Blackboard (businessweek.com)
Blackboard Shares Popped: What You Need to Know (fool.com)

Make a "Hard to Guess but Easy to Remember" Password for Greater Cloud Security

Ted Curran — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 21:42:41 +0000

Image by hardeep.singh via Flickr

In my last post, I recommended using a password manager like LastPass to help you create strong, unique passwords for all of the different sites you use. If you don’t like the idea of storing passwords in the cloud, the next best way is to create a mnemonic password formula. The way it works is to create an easy-to-remember “formula” that enables you to use a different strong password on each site. It consists of a strong password that’s the same on every site(so you can remember it) but with a different component for each site.

Here’s one method:

Take the first letter from each word in a favorite song lyric. I just happen to have “Panic” by the Smiths on right now. The first line is

Panic on the streets of London/ Panic on the streets of Birmingham

If you take the first letters from each word, you get:

PotsoLPotsoB

Already, that’s pretty cryptic because it’s not a dictionary word and it has both upper and lower case letters. It’s also easy to remember because I can just hum it to myself. Then you can add numbers and punctuation to make it stronger

PotsoL/PotsoB4220

I added a slash where it would come in the lyrics, and I put my dog’s birthday backwards. Now I have a very strong password that’s easy to remember. This is the part I commit to memory. Very strong, but it doesn’t solve the problem of having different passwords on each site.

Next step is to add the first three letters of the site into the password. We’re going to have [memorized password] + [first 3 letters of site name].

My Facebook password would be PotsoL/PotsoB4220+Fac

My PayPal password would be PotsoL/PotsoB4220+Pay

So what you end up with is a very long and secure password that’s different on every site and easy to remember. This is just one way of creating a mnemonic password, but it’s the best way I know to do this. Of course, the trick is that you have to be consistent in your formula. If you don’t stick with the exact formula it’ll be a nightmare to recall it. Not to mention what a hassle it is to have to type this every time.

Check your password – is it strong? (kozar.wordpress.com)
6 Password Protection Lessons Learned from the Sony Hacker Attack (savings.com)
I use only one password for all web sites (justmybloghere.tumblr.com)
The Password Problem (southwoodit.wordpress.com)
Protecting Your Online Life With Secure Passwords (lifehack.org)
Tools for Creating Strong Passwords (freetech4teachers.com)
Secure Passwords Sans Sales Pitch (securosis.com)
7 Tips for Creating a Secure Online Password (money.usnews.com)

Good Security Practices Keep You Safe(r) from Hackers when Using Cloud Tools

Ted Curran — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 21:24:11 +0000

Image by fixedgear via Flickr

Friends and colleagues have been expressing doubt about entrusting their data to “The Cloud”, especially in light of the recent high profile attacks on the CIA, the Senate, and Sony (among many others). As educators are increasingly adopting cloud-based tool in instruction, it’s very important to have a clear idea of what we’re really talking about here, and to clear up as much FUD as possible.

“The Cloud” is not one thing—while the many recent hacks are being lumped together in the mainstream media, there were different circumstances in each case, and each teaches us a different lesson about online security.

The Sony hack was a particularly bad one because they stored all their users’ passwords in un-encrypted text. Since so many people use the same password for multiple online services, it’s likely that your playstation password is also the password you use for your email, your bank, and your paypal account. Hackers got these poorly-protected passwords, Sony didn’t notify the public for 5 days, so the hackers had a field day with the data and got into several other accounts.

Lessons:

1. Use unique strong passwords for all of your different “cloud” accounts. This way if one password gets compromised it does not open up all the rest of your accounts as well. Using a password manager like LastPass can help (I swear by it), or you can also create a hard-to-guess-but-easy-to-remember password formula.

2. Don’t store your passwords in your browser’s memory. Again, LastPass is great for this because it encrypts them.

3. Investigate the security practices of cloud services you trust with your sensitive data.

Some of the most high-profile attacks by LulzSec (like the CIA & Senate website attacks) were Denial of Service (DOS) attacks—meaning that they did not actually gain access to any unprotected data. A DOS basically floods a website with so many requests that it can’t process them all and the website goes offline temporarily. It’s like getting everyone you know to go ring someone’s doorbell one after another until they stop answering the door. It might drive that person nuts, but it also doesn’t open the door. These attacks are now commonly performed with botnets—large armies of computers infected with viruses that allow one hacker to direct millions of computers (often unbeknownst to their owners) to access the target website and bring it down. Large cloud services like Amazon and Google are designed to withstand these attacks by re-allocating their enormous computing resources to meet all the requests and keep the websites up and running during the attack. Smaller servers without as many resources are most vulnerable to DoS attacks.

Lesson:

1. Use virus protection software on your computer and perform all necessary updates as soon as they’re released.

2. Keep your browser & plugins up to date. This tool will scan your browser and plugins for security vulnerabilities.

Of course, LulzSec and others have been perpetrating more sophisticated attacks than DoSes. They have been exposing security flaws in their targets’ websites which will eventually lead to better security practices across the board. I know it has forced me to be more careful with my personal security practices and it has been pretty easy to do. (My data was exposed in the Sony hack and last year’s Gawker hack, but I’ve taken some simple steps to minimize the damage that anyone can do.)

In the meantime, there is a lot you can do to protect yourself online—even in “The Cloud”.

Guard That Password (and Make Sure It’s Encrypted) (nytimes.com)
6 Password Protection Lessons Learned from the Sony Hacker Attack (savings.com)
LastPass Alternatives That Keep Your Passwords Safe From Online Hacking (gizmodo.com.au)
Hackers attack Sony network again (bbc.co.uk)
Sony BMG Greece hacked (go.theregister.com)
Why I Can Guess Your iPad Password (techland.time.com)

TedCurran.net » EdTech

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