Humans have hunted from the earliest times. Maybe that’s why we often accept the burdensome quest for information. We’re accustomed to the chase—even fooled into thinking we’re doing something valuable. Yet time lost in pointless pursuit means something is sacrificed. In the case of college enrollment, a drawn-out chase can mean losing top candidates to other institutions and ending up with a mediocre catch.

During peak season, enrollment office employees frenetically pursue information and answers, compiling scattered documentation in the hope of making quick, prudent decisions. Admissions, student aid, registrar, scholarship committees and other areas each have separate forms requiring distinctive information.

Yet as each department collects what it needs, useful information that could be shared is often requested again…and again. Information that could move decisions forward sits idle, garnering little or no attention.

Regrettably, as processes are deferred, institutions risk losing top candidates to other institutions.

Make informed decisions, quickly

Whether we’re considering undergraduate or graduate admissions, student financial aid, scholarship applications, or faculty search, the overriding goal is to garner and retain top people. Even though roles and responsibilities differ among departments, most draw vital information from transcripts, applications, test scores, essays, and references. Often, specific data found on forms is valuable in multiple places. Unfortunately, departmental software systems that store this precious information create data silos, resulting in information that is unknowingly collected multiple times for varying purposes.

Gathering information several times—even if it’s done efficiently—wastes resources, results in redundancy, generates errors, and causes delays.

Why not re-use your information to satisfy current needs and anticipate what lies ahead? Enterprise content management (ECM) and business process management (BPM) software, integrated meaningfully with your business systems, redefine efficiency. By centralizing and securing access to content, then pushing and pulling information wherever it’s needed according to your pre-set business rules, ECM and BPM free your staff to work efficiently and focus on the services for which they were hired.

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Imagine a world without the collaborative tools we take for granted today. Decades before the emergence of the Internet and World Wide Web, computer pioneers were building Plato, a system that pioneered chat rooms, e-mail, instant messaging, online forums and message boards, and remote screen sharing. 

When the mind is thinking it is talking to itself. -Plato

Plato (Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations) was the world’s first computer-aided teaching system and it was built in 1960 at Computer-based Education Research Lab (CERL) at the University of Illinois and eventually comprised over 1,000 workstations worldwide. It was in existence for forty years and offered coursework ranging from elementary school to university-level.  

Social computing and collaboration began on Plato in 1973. That year, Plato got Plato Notes (message forums), Talk-o-matic (chatrooms), and Term-talk (instant messaging).  

Plato was also a breeding ground for today’s technology innovators. Ray Ozzie, the creator of Lotus Notes and Microsoft’s chief software architect, worked on the Plato system in the 1970s as an undergraduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Many others including Dave Woolley, who wrote Plato Notes at the age of 17, Kim Mast, who wrote Personal Notes (the e-mail system) in 1974 at the age of 18, and Doug Brown, creator of Talk-o-matic, continued to develop collaborative technologies in their careers.  

Don Bitzer, credited by many as the “father of Plato,” is the co-inventor of the plasma display and has spent his career focusing on collaborative technologies for use in the classroom.  

This week we celebrate Plato’s 50th anniversary. Why a week and not a day? I spoke with Brian Dear, whose book on Plato (The Friendly Orange Glow: The Story of the Plato System and the Dawn of Cyberculture) will be published later this year,told me “[I]t’s hard to pin down an exact date, due to a) it being open to interpretation as to what qualifies as the first day — when the project got green-lighted? when they started designing it? when a system was actually up and running? when they did the first demo? — and b) there’s little lasting documentary evidence from those earliest weeks.”  

“May 1960 was when Daniel Alpert’s interdisciplinary group that had held meetings for weeks about the feasibility of the lab embarking on an automated teaching project, finally submitted its report to Alpert. He read it, thought about it, and decided to ignore the group’s recommendation to not proceed. Instead he asked if a 26-year-old PhD named Don Bitzer wanted to have a go at it, and Bitzer agreed. Consequently, on June 3, Alpert wrote up his own report to the Dean of the Engineering School, which instead of reiterating his group’s recommendation to not go forward with a computer education project, stated that they were indeed going forward. Bitzer went right to work on it, brought in others to help with the hardware and software, and they had a prototype up and running pretty quickly that summer. The rest is history.”  

David M. Goldes is the president of Basex.

Perhaps because I like to think of myself as a constant learner, I like to keep keep my eyes open for what is happening with learning/course management systems. CMS Report has been covering Moodle since the early days of our website and I believe it to be one of the more popular open source LMS out there. Moodle 2.0 is currently under development and with an estimated release date of July 20, 2010.

Although Moodle 2.0 hasn’t been officially released, the developers did reach important milestones this month with the release of Moodle 2.0 Preview 1 and  Preview 2. These previews give you an idea just how all the new features and improvements are coming together for the next release of Moodle. There are a ton of new features and improvements coming to Moodle to be excited about. Below is a list of major new features we’ve gleamed of the Moodle 2.0 release notes.

• Community Hubs – Anybody can set up a Community Hub, which is a directory of courses for public use or for private communities. The code is implemented as separate GPL plugin for Moodle.
• Repository Support – Moodle now supports integration with external repositories of content, making it really simple to bring documents and media into Moodle via an AJAX interface that looks like a standard Open dialogue in desktop applications.
• Portfolio Support – Modules can now export their data to external systems, particularly useful for portfolios where snapshots of forums, assignments and other things in Moodle are useful to record in a journal or a portfolio of evidence
• Completion -  Teachers can now specify conditions that define when any activity or course is seen as completed by a student.
• Conditional activities – Access to activities can be restricted based on certain criteria, such as dates, grade obtained, or the completion of another activity.
• Cohorts – Also known as “Site-wide groups”, these are site-wide collections of users that can be enrolled into courses in one action, either manually or synchronized automatically
• Web Services Support – Support for standards-based web services across the entire Moodle code base, allowing the admin to expose particular functions of Moodle for use by: 1) Administrative systems such as HR or SIS applications and 2) Mobile clients.
• IMS Common Cartridge – Moodle can now import courses in IMS Common Cartridge format (commonly used by publishers)
• New blocks - Comments block, Private files block, Community block, and Completion block.

Moodle 2.0 Preview 2 can be dowloaded from the Moodle download server.

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Packt is pleased to announce a new book on Plone that helps website creators maintain, manage and edit educational websites. Written by Erik Rose, a member of the Plone 4 and 5 Framework Teams, Plone 3 for Education will help website creators represent educational courses using Plone’s various built-in content types such as news items, collections, and events.

Plone is a free open source Content Management System (CMS) that’s built on top of the Zope application server. Plone lets non-technical people create and maintain information for a public website or an intranet using only a web browser. It is because of its superior security and advanced back-end, that it holds a technological edge over many major CMSes.

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Dec 3, 2009.  Wilmington NC.  Roger Wyatt, President and CEO of Tynken Interactive announces Signal, a breakthrough in technology that allows teachers to post class notes, homework, schedules and a myriad of other content to their web pages by simply sending an email.   All users need to do is type a code in the subject line, and the system directs the contents of the email to the appropriate section of their web page. “What is really great about this is that it turns the system on its head. What I kept hearing is that the majority of teachers don’t have the time or desire to be web designers, and that they are therefore stuck either doing nothing or spending time learning new software” said Wyatt. “Now all they have to do is send an email, and the system does it for them.  This saves a significant amount of time, and makes better, faster classroom communication very easy. First we completely changed the way teachers interact with their web applications. Now we are bringing about a second revolution – allowing them to post to their sites using only email”

“I had been talking with teachers about some of their issues. One of the main ones was not having the time to learn software to maintain a teacher web page. In fact, only 10% of the teachers in any school create a teacher page when given the opportunity. They all said the same thing – “I don’t have the time to learn a new system”. Now they don’t have to. This new system is unbelievably powerful. It is set it up to allow posting of just about anything – scores, schedules, menus, etc – in addition to class notes, homework, and the other class information” said Wyatt.  “And there is no need for training – they just send an email for the instructions and the system emails them the user guide – all 1 page of it. So the technology coordinators don’t need to spend any time training the teachers in using the application – there’s no training required. And there are built-in safeguards.  For example, if the teacher forgets to put a due date on the homework assignment, the system will not post it, but send an email asking for the due date before posting.”

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