On the false binary of LMS vs. Open
D'Arcy Norman, D’Arcy Norman dot net, 2014/09/16

I'm happy to accept D'Arcy Norman's contention that "We have a responsibility to provide a high quality environment to every single instructor and student, and the LMS is still the best way to do that." But I think he goes overboard i8n his defense of it, and in particular, I think this is wrong: "Any eLearning tool, no matter how openly designed, will eventually become indistinguishable from a Learning Management System once a threshold of supported use-cases has been reached." The history of "history has ended" statements like that is, well, long. And undistinguished. Sure, if you want to keep being a university and teaching classes and such, maybe the LMS is the way it gets done. But why should we believe progress has stopped with the model of the university?

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Protecting Personal Data in an LRS
Ingo Dahn, Google Docs, 2014/09/16

More from the ongoing discussion around the formalization of the eXperience API specification for learning record stores. "These notes intend to contribute to this discussion on a functional and architectural level in order to form a basis for more detailed specifications at the level of data models, communication protocols and bindings."

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Licence information in schema.org and LRMI
Phil Barker, Sharing, Learning, 2014/09/16

The LRMI (Learning Resources Metadata Initiative) had from the start a property called useRightsUrl, "The URL where the owner specifies permissions for using the resource." But as Phil Basrker notes, Schema.org skipped useRightsURL when it adopted most of the LRMI properties, pending further review. Then last June, it adopted a rights property which, says Barker, does everything LRMI wants. "It does everything that LRMI wanted by way of identifying the URL of the licence under which the creative work is released," he writes,  but also it "allows one to encode the name, url, description, date, accountable person and a whole host of other information about the licence."

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Digital Storytelling: Power to the People
Sandy Brown Jensen, League for Innovation in the Community College, 2014/09/16

This post briefly outlines digital storytelling and makes the direct link with literacies, listing a set of five literacies invoked by the concept: digital, global, visual, technology, and information (presumably it also invokes good old traditional literacy). The post refers to Jim Grrom by name and says "The ds106 conception of digital storytelling is much broader and more free-wheeling. As a Faculty Technology Specialist teaching digital storytelling and social media to the Lane Community College community, I have found the ds106 site to be a useful, flexible, foundational Web presence." It makes me think, what would Jim Groom have to say specifically about literacy.

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