Monthly Archives: April 2007

Testing a ePortfolio tool.

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I was asked to review the ePortfolio tool from Epsilen. Here's my page and initial effort. http://ken.plymouth.epsilen.com So far it has been fairly straight forward, but I haven't seen the ability to allow faculty contributions to the portfolio, which I believe would be a requirement in our environment.

ePortfolio, education, higher education, instructional technology

Second Life Resource - Higher Education

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Here's a good resource to guage Higher Education activity in Second Life. http://www.simteach.com/wiki/index.php?title=Second_Life:_Universities_and_Private_Islands

I've been in 2nd life for a bit, but I haven't had the time or inclination to really dig in. I understand that they have or are developing voice/conferencing capabilities. That would take the game up a notch for potential impact on distance learning opportunities.

Second Life, Education, Distance Education, Higher Education

Building Community

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I've been thinking a lot about what a web 2.0 higher ed portal community would look like. Mind you I believe our current portal at Plymouth State is successful, but the challenge is to make it even better. This post by FutureBoy caught my eye as it has some contrary insights. I particularly like this line: "Successful Web 2.0 enterprises are very good at creating accessible walled gardens." Hmmm.

portals, web 2.0,

Keys to building a viable online University environment?

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Keys: stability, content, usability, functionality and some secret sauce.

I've been involved with the portal initiative at Plymouth State from the inception. It had, and continues to have several operational objectives: provide a secure, single sign-on, role based, environment that aggregates institutional web based services that is self-customizable by the users. The strategic objective was and is to build a more engaged community through "birth to bequest" services aligned with strategic initiatives ranging from developing roles for prospective students through alumni and for good measure, a role for parents. To date, we have been very successful by some measures in the execution of that vision.
That said, the portal is not perfect. The highly integrated environment has been, at times, a challenge to support; when any sub-system breaks it is quite possible that the entire portal performance suffers.

Recently, I had the opportunity to hear some feeback from some of my colleagues regarding areas for improvement.

  • Calendar - Not easy to use, support is difficult, i.e. sync'ing with PDAs has proven problematic. It has not keeping up with Google or Yahoo calendar
  • Email - The email client that comes with the portal was inefficient and is not keeping up with yahoo or google email in functionality.
  • Auto Timeout - Not role based. One-time-fits-all is not supportive of office staff needs.
  • Releveant Content and services - Need more content - especially for student life.
  • Groups tool - Is difficult to use, particularly file upload.
  • myPlymouth down time - when myplymouth goes down, access to all systems is unavailable.
  • logon page - Login page needs more relevant content
  • Student life - Is not interactive

    • We are planning to upgrade the underlying technology at the conclusion of this semester. And will be attempting to address many of these issues.

    portal, university, online community

    myPlymouth V4 Trailers

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    I'll be posting links to assorted trailers for the release of our upgraded myPlymouth here. Comments appreciated. They need to view with PPT.

    myPlymouth_t_v4 - This is a draft of the FIRST production trailer for myPlymouth4
    myPlymouth_t_v5 - Same as above just faster on the text lead in and the dissolve is slower on the screen capture of the new site.
    myPlymouth_t_v6 - Smoother and with tag line.

    Luminis, portal, university