Monthly Archives: October 2005

October 22, 2005

The Educause 2005 annual conference was held in Orlando, Florida October 18-21. 2005 There were a total of 144 concurrent sessions over three days, three general sessions and a eight featured speakers. Over 7,500 people attended the conference whose theme was “Transforming the Academy: Dreams and Reality”. I did a poster session on “Managing Evolving Content Along a Publication Continuum.”

Big topic at the conference was the merger of Blackboard and WebCT. In many ways, rather than stifling competition in the market, it seemed to heighten it as other CMS/LMS developers presented alternatives that seemed more flexible and open including Angel, Desire2Learn and eCollege and Sakai.

Spoke at length with developers of HarvestRoad Hive, a federated repository management system that is gaining in popularity. This system will save content from growing number of course and learning management systems including Blackboard/WebCT, Angel, Sakai, Moodle and others. Because it is independent of these content management systems , there is less danger of lock in to a given system and more flexible access to this content from a variety systems.

Quite a few presentations of application frameworks including Sakai and OpenACS. More and more open source CMS are built using such frameworks because they allow other developers to extend or add new functionality that can be shared with the entire developer and user communities.