Web2 art at last

Thank you Tracky. We’ve been waiting for you come and put all this in some sort of perspective for us. Thank god you’re here!

TrackyBirthday website

Thanks to Dave for pointing it out to me.

We live in public

A chilling counter to an Anthropological Introduction to Youtube.

We live in public.

Andrew Keen and other monkeys will love this, as will the more hard core cyber punks.

Migrating from Blackboard to Moodle (via the web)

Otago Polytechnic’s leadership team announced last week that it is migrating from Blackboard to Moodle this year.

Migrant workers in Michigan, 1940. CC By: bobster1985

I would like to be able to say it was an ethical decision prompted by Blackboards intollerable patent grab, and offensive behaviour towards the education sector generally…

I would like to be able to say it is because Otago Polytechnic wishes to engage with the open source software and educational content community around Moodle and free software generally…

I would like to be able to say its because Otago Polytechnic reads major reports that recommend the use of free software as a way to cut costs and improve people’s skills.. in short paying people’s salaries and professional development instead of license fees…

And I would like to say the migration was because back in 2005 staff at Otago Polytechnic conducted research comparing Moodle to Blackboard and recommended that [Moodle] showed significant potential and should be seriously considered for further investigation…

But all I can do really is quote the leadership team:

This has been driven primarily from the uptake Moodle is getting within the sector.

To be fair, this sort of decision can’t be taken lightly, and I’m sure other’s had good reason to stay with Blackboard all this time.. what we have now however, is a large number of disgruntled staff who need to find time to migrate content from one system to another. The end in the use of Blackboard was inevitable if you’ve been following the NZ eLearning sector, and the Educational Development Centre (EDC) has been doing its best to inform and encourage staff to become independent of any particular Learning Management System so that they are not so affected by changes like this.

The EDC is recommending 4 possible approaches to those faced with this migration:

1. Simply migrate content from Blackboard to Moodle and utilise the technical support from the IT support unit. A word of caution on this – there will no doubt be high demand on the IT Support people for this, so expect delays and get in early.
2. Take this opportunity to review your content and find more up to date materials, review the way you teach or facilitate your online course and the interactions you set up, and consider your options before acting. EDC offer support for this option.
3. Load content to the web by way of the OP Website, Blip.tv, Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikiversity or Educator, Survey Monkey, Blogger, Google Docs, GoogleMaps, etc and represent this now independent material in your Moodle by simple links and embed codes. Doing it this way frees the content up so that any migration is possible and simple. Getting to this level of independence is not for the faint hearted. EDC offers support for this option.
4. Load the content to the web (as above) and run the course on the web without the use of a Learning Management System like Blackboard or Moodle. This approach will set you free 🙂 EDC offers support for this option as well.

Eyespot hits the dust

There’s always been a few people around ready to call “web2” a bubble that will burst. The email news that Eyespot will be no more may add confidence to that idea, (which of course for us in free range world is an inevitable future and should be planned for):

We deeply regret to inform you that Eyespot Corporation will no longer be able to continue serving you.

For our users at eyespot.com, we’re no longer allowing you to upload new videos. You can retrieve your uploaded video and mixes by going to your mymedia gallery and clicking the download link below the video thumbnail.

For our business customers in the eyespot video network, your site will continue operate unaffected for a limited period of time. We encourage you to migrate your video solution to one of our competing providers in the video mixing (e.g. http://corp.kaltura.com/) and video publishing space (e.g. http://www.fliqz.com/) immediately. We’ll soon be providing you with the means of downloading your community videos from within your dashboard at http://eyespot.com/partnerDashboard].

We have spent three years providing over a hundred thousand of you with a unique video experience. We believed that by putting creative tools and rights-cleared media into the hands of influencers and connectors, Eyespot would enable social media and participation culture like no other company.

After playing over two hundred million of your video creations, we have to stop. After assembling possibly the most potent team in digital media ever, we’re now moving on.

Thank you all for being apart of our community over the past three years.

Jim Kaskade
President & CEO

Ourmedia and Archive.org (the ones that started it all) are still chugging along, and as far as I can tell, will continue to do so for some time yet. 3 years of the Eyespot service is not something to forget either! That’s longer than many an institution’s “solution”, and they were very innovative when they arrived too – offering web based collaborative video editing long before the rest. Now Kaltura takes their place.

I had a few videos on Eyespot, but I try never to load media to one service only, partly for distribution and exposure reasons, partly as back up. I used to use the service Heyspread.com to get my videos across multiple services in one hit, but they started charging. Not long after, TubeMogul came along to replace that free service space and with a possibly better economic model. Blip.tv has been offering cross uploading for quite a while now too. When you load to Blip, it gives you the nice little option to load to Archive.org as well (Once you’ve set your Blip account to be able to do that). And of course, I keep a version locally as well.. just for when the Net goes down. I still need to transfer video to film mind you.. might save that for the best 10 and when we have a pedle powered [film] projector for when the lights go out too.