haiku LMS

The National Educational Computing Conference  (NECC) is the largest convention of its kind in the states, and one finds that a convention of its size can  swallow a poor blogger whole.  There have been a plethora of posts about this  convention already, but I for one needed a few days to digest what I saw...and more importantly...learned.

1) Web 2.0 (in Education) is at last among us

Last year many a teacher came by our booth and asked us about Haiku LMS.  "Interesting name, they would say...but what makes you different?"  I would say, "It's an exciting new LMS, Web 2.0 style."  Instantly eyes would glaze over.  Web 2.0 was a conversation killer, a techie term and possibly something to hide from your students (and teachers).  It was at best bleeding-edge, and at worst something to set your firewall to "Kill on Sight".

This year was different. When Web 2.0 would drop from my lips teachers nodded, technology coaches brightened, and one IT member said "Oh, Yes...we love it...and we just unblocked YouTube".

This is promising.  The potential of Web 2.0 in a learning environment is powerful, and something that turns traditional publishing and teaching on its head.  What it means for the future of Education, I don't know.  What I do know was that this year, we passed the first milestone, recognition that "Web 2.0 is among us."

2) SCORM appears to be recieving more than just lip service.

One of the catchphrases from NECC 2007 was..."We love your LMS, and is it SCORM compliant".  Our response was "Not yet, but tell us, do you actually use SCORM?".   I think I went 0 for 10 on that question last year.

This year was different.  It appears that there are a collection of exciting tools on the market that are getting attention and starting to pick up speed.  Macromedia Captivate, PointeCast and Fuse Elements were some of the names thrown around as our vistors mentioned modules they were authoring themselves.  It sounds like there are a number of SCORM repositories in the makings, with sites soon to be released like scoport.com, creating social communities of SCORM module authors and users.

This makes us excited, this has been a long time in coming, and it means that we are going to join the collection of SCORM adopters in the near future.

3) Social Communities of Students and Teachers are creating an exciting new environment for learners

News that came out just before NECC was Blackboard's release of a Facebook app.  This was just the beginning of the Ed/Business  recognition of the value of social networking in education.  Although we are not a social networking community ourselves, we like the pioneers that are forging new territory with social networking in education.  We made some good friends among the admirable Curriki.org people, creators of an Open Content community where users can create and share content for free.  We are excited to find what communities of open source content creators can do and we hope to be doing some work with them soon.   Also, the advent of a new social networking community, SayWire, occured at NECC this year.  They set up a wonderful booth two rows away from us for their NECC debut.  They haven't launched yet, but we like what we've seen.  We wish them well as they get their communities off the ground.

In conclusion, what did I learn?  I discovered that K12 education is ripe for content collaboration in this country.  Educators are asking for it, and companies are responding.  As for us? We've got our next list of features prepped--we are beginning the design process today.  We are pumped to be a part of the Web 2.0 movement.