Tag: LOR

Giunti Labs acquires HarvestRoad

http://www.giuntilabs.com/info.php?vvu=15&pud=450

Increasingly I am focusing on things other than repositories (Amen!) but it still occupies some of my attention, so this news (even 3 months after the fact) still caught my eye. Apparently Harvest Road, an Australian learning object repository/learning content management system vendor, has been acquired by the Italian-based elearning product vendor Giunti Labs.

Harvest Road was a publicly listed company on the Australian exchange that has now been de-listed (presumably because of this acquisition.) They were extremely aggressive in trying to market their product around the world over the past 4-5 years. You can draw your own conclusions, both about what this says about Harvest Road and what it says about that market. From where I’m sitting, though, it would be hard to spin this in a positive way. – SWL

dLCMS – Open Source LCMS built on Silva/Zope

http://www.dlcms.ethz.ch/

Ahhhh, love those Google searches. Whilst searching (and still seeking) information about the standards compliance of WebCT CE 6 content exports, I stumbled across this find, the dynamic Learning Content Management System. Built as an extension of the open source CMS called Silva, dLCMS bills itself as a “content management system for web based learning materials” built on top of Zope and released under a BSD license. It stores resources in XML format and has created packages which have been successfully imported into OLAT, ILIAS, Moodle and WebCT. It looks to have been produced by ETH Zurich (and possibly on soft money that’s now run out) but possibly worth a look. – SWL

PROWE (Personal Repositories Online Wiki Environment) Project

http://www.prowe.ac.uk/index.htm

JISC-funded project that sets out to examine “in what ways could wiki and wiki-type environments be useful and useable as personal and informal repositories to support professional development within part-time tutor communities of practice?” While I think a lot of us already participating in the edublogosphere might think the answers self-evident, I am definitely looking forward to the results when they come out latter this year, especially if they come up with any useful insight into fostering adoption that isn’t to simply “wait for older faculty to retire” or “give faculty more PD time and training.” – SWL

On Using DSpace as a LOR

www.edtechpost.ca/gems/coppul-lor3.ppt

Pheew! Back home now after a hectic (for me) week of travelling and talking, one of which was a talk I gave to the Council of Prairie and Pacific University Libraries (COPPUL) Distance Education Forum on the feasibility of using DSpace as a general learning object repository.

I have been pretty hard on this idea in the past, so I was glad to be given the opportunity to revisit the idea in more depth. And while it might not seem so from the slides, I actually found myself softening to the idea, in part because of some innovations from MIT and others to accomodate learning materials. But my main message, which was perhaps buried a bit at the end of the talk, was that it is one thing to evaluate DSpace against an abstract set of functionality that a LOR should have, (which is kind of what I did here) and quite another to say that it will solve the problems of finding, sharing, remixing and reusing learning content, a question some would say has already been asked and answered a few times. – SWL

RepoMMan Project

http://www.hull.ac.uk/esig/repomman/index.html

To keep going on the apparent ‘open source repository’ theme today, this JISC-funded project appears to be using Fedora and Sakai to investigate automated population of metadata based on contextual information provided by the portal environment, to examine the boundaries of personal versus institutional digital resource management, and to develop some workflow aroud common repository tasks based around Service Oriented Architecture. Phew. Fedora is a different approach than DSpace, though both originated from the library/institutional repository world, and yet in my earlier investigations it too seemed to also have some limitations to its effectiveness as a LOR. Early days yet for this project, but maybe some promise in moving it closer to serve those (and other) needs better. And you just gotta love the name. – SWL

Presentation on Archiving Course Websites to DSpace, Using a Content Packaging Profile & Web Services

http://cwspace.mit.edu/docs/ProjectMgt/Reports/
DLF-Spring2006/MIT-CWSpace-DLF-Spring2006.ppt.htm

For a long time I’ve been asked about available open source learning object repositories, and specifically about whether DSpace could work as a LOR. My answer regarding DSpace, up to now, has always been – well it depends on what your use cases are. If you didn’t care about things like IMS Content Packages and learning object metadata, then sure, maybe it could work, but it always seemed like a stretch, that those asking the question were looking to adopt a system because of its license but not because of its functionality.

In this regards, I had always held out some hope on the CWSpace project. As I have mentioned before, CWSpace is a project looking to archive the educational materials found in MIT OpenCourseWare using DSpace technology, and in so doing provide a valueable extension in functionality to DSpace itself.

With the presentation above it looks like they are making some progress – it details how they plan to deal with two major issues, mapping OCW’s object model to DSpace’s object model, and improving the interfaces to DSpace to make them more conducive to working with living (not archived) materials. NOTE: this presentation really only useful for standards geeks and other interoperability weenies (like myself, I guess). Not for the faint of heart.

It’s unclear to me whether they are shipping code yet for this, but it is still encouraging to see some progress, and for me really encouraging to see the library/institutional repository crowd take seriously the differences between their standard use cases and the ones from the LOR world; a big step forward from the red flag that’s been waving from the DSpace site for years claiming it can accomodate ‘learning objects’ (whatever that meant). – SWL

DOOR – Digital Open Object Repository

http://door.sourceforge.net/

OK, I know NOTHING about this, so don’t even ask, but it seemed like something of interest (if you are still flailing away at that LOR hobgoblin) – an open source Learning Object Repository written in PHP and using MySQL as the backend which supports both the IMS metadata and content package specifications. Looks exactly as uninspiring as every other LOM-based, forms driven LOR, but if that’s what you want, well then at least it’s open source, right? Can you tell I’m having a LORrible day? (grimace) – SWL

CLOE Partners with Desire2Learn

http://www.desire2learn.com/news/newsdetails_21.asp

An announcement from the CLOE project that they have adopted Desire2Learn as their repository technology. CLOE is significant as a Canadian project for early on investigating different models of ‘exchange’ to motivate faculty and institutions to participate in sharing networks. Will be interesting to see this once it has been deployed. – SWL

Why does ‘Freesound’ succeed when so many learning object repositories fail?

http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/

Bryan Alexander posted a link to The Freesound Project and it was interesting to me for a whole slew of reasons.

It was interesting first off because I have been using the site myself for the last few months; I am getting more into making music with digital audio tools (yes, yes, I will post something, someday, give me time to build up my courage) and so turned to Freesound to find new samples for a drum machine. And it works; not perfectly maybe, but you can definitely find new samples fairly easily, and it has a number of other social affordances (‘users who downloaded this also…’ and folksonomies) that lead you to related stuff you might like.

I was interesting also on a personal level as it was built as part of the 2005 International Computer Music Conference. ICMC is dear to my heart because way back in 1995, I was responsible for building the first website to support a ICMC conference, when it was hosted in Banff (the only remnant of which I can now find is this reference, the ‘WayBack machine‘ not even going back that far, so safe to say Internet ancient history!)

And finally it’s also of interest as a ‘repository’ of shareable remixable content, and one that would have to be judged relatively successful at that, with around 10,000 ‘objects’ and almost a million downloads. So what makes it tick, why does it succeed when so many of our various ‘learning object repository’ projects are failing so miserably? Let’s consider (more)….
Continue reading “Why does ‘Freesound’ succeed when so many learning object repositories fail?”

Any B.C. or Alberta-based users of LAMS? Atutor?

If you are currently using or planning to use LAMS or Atutor and are located in B.C. or Alberta, please let me know. I am currently scouting out integration opportunities for our repository software, and these two are potential ones that have come up, but I need to know if its of any value to my current stakeholders (no, I’m not planning a takeover of Alberta; we have colleagues there who are also implementing the same repository software). – SWL