CETIS writeup on Alt-I-Lab 2005 Demonstrators

http://www.cetis.ac.uk/content2/20050901184010

It’s been eagerly awaited (at least by me!), and likely delayed because of all the other stuff going on at CETIS and the need for the good folks there to take a well-deserved break this summer, but we are all fortunate to finally get a more detailed write-up on the interoperability demos from the past Alt-i-lab sessions held in June in the U.K.

While this writeup does put some more meat on the bone and help us understand more about Learning Design, Tools Interoperability Profile and repository interoperability, I can’t help but think that recording some of these sessions (and maybe some screen recorded demos too) would be helpful for spreading the word and illustrating the concepts to a wider audience. Maybe next time 😉 Still, seems reason to hope that we’re moving along from abstract specs to support interoperability to actual working systems, hooray! – SWL

Remote Question Protocol

http://mantis.york.ac.uk/moodle/course/view.php?id=14

You know there has to be something to this because a) it hasn’t been widely hyped, as far as I know b) they actually seem to be shipping code and working specifications. What a nice contrast. A high level description of this web services protocol to provide remote processing of assessment items on behalf of assessment systems, independant of specific CMS, can be found in this PDF file. Apparently Moodle is already supporting this, and it is on the radar for the people working on the Tools Interoperability Profile. – SWL

New O’Reilly Publication – Using Moodle

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/moodle/

As if more proof was needed that Moodle has “crossed the chasm,” along comes this new publication from O’Reilly written by Jason Cole. The majority of the content you could likely glean yourself from Moodle’s various online communities, help docs and demo courses, but if for instance you have an administration that remains skeptical about the widespread nature of Moodle adoption, maybe this might help convince them. – SWL

Report Comparing eXe with other elearning authoring packages

http://eduforge.org/docman/view.php/20/243/
eXe_report_sbritain.pdf

This report by Sandy Britain was commissioned by the University of Auckland and released back in April, but I only just stumbled upon it. I’ve been arguing for at least a year now that one of the next places we need to focus our attention on is better tools for authoring, especially for authoring XML-based, standards compliant elearning content. XML is not a fringe technology, and it’s far past the time when we should be requiring content in higher ed to be well structured and easily re-published in other formats, something I take it that these editors can help with and that continuing with outmoded HTML editors doesn’t. Britain acknowledges that there are potentially far more tools to examine than the 4 he compares eXe with (Burrokeet, Lectora, SoftChalk Lesson Builder, and Lersus); I would have liked to see at least ThinkingCap Studio and the ICE System in there as well, and to this end am hoping we at Edutools can get a comparative analysis project going to look at these and more. [If you have a pot of money lying around 😉 and would like to see such a comparison happen, please feel free to contact me.] Still, a good overview and introduction to the issue. – SWL

Moodle Forum – Blogs, Forums and the nature of discussion

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=27338

One of the things I love about the Moodle community is that, far more than almost any of the other open source CMS, they seem to have really rich discussions about the pedagogical uses of the tools they are building, not just their functionality utility or technical challenges (AND, you can even view them as a Guest if you are adverse to new accounts). And this particular one is no different – starting with a post from Moodle’s founder, Martin Dougiamas, this thread (55 posts long in 2 weeks!) discusses some of the ins and outs of blogs versus discussion forums, and starts to tackle the issue in light of the secured environment that CMS like Moodle provide, and that in many contexts (read K-12) likely cannot be dispensed with. The Blog feature itself is promised in an upcoming (1.6) release, but a demo can already be seen. – SWL

D-Lib Article – Reflections on a Decade of Metadata Consensus Building

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july05/weibel/07weibel.html

Rarely do you get a chance to read reflections by someone with as much experience as Stuart L. Weibel, the Senior Research Scientist with OCLC, on 10 years of work around Dublin Core and digital metadata standards. And frank too – he concedes that we’ve all perhaps been too optimistic about the ‘author contributed’ model of metadata submission, and also that metadata in general has to find its place (if it has one at all) in the full-text searchable digitized world of the web. Check out also the great pictures of the bogeys (wheel carriages) that move entire trains between railway lines of different gauges between China and Mongolia. – SWL

Hieraki – Hierarchical Wiki Software

http://www.hieraki.org/

Just one of those things that I stumbled across through a dedicated Google search feed; Hieraki is an open source, Ruby-based (hence the reason you’ve probably never heard of it; many who try Ruby seem to rave about it but it never seems to gain traction versus its competitors) wiki-like system that structures pages by ‘Chapters’ and sub-sections to assist with collaborative book authoring. Someone has even tried building a ‘learning object repository’ named Noc on top of it. Not an endorsement, just a pointer to an interesting experiment. – SWL

Presentation: “Licences, Features, and Community: The Path to Sustainability”

http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/events/
2005-07-04/I050704F_OSS_Watch.pdf

Slides from the recent “Building Open Source Communities” conference held in Edinburgh have now been posted. My favourite so far was the above by Jim Farmer of uPortal and now Sakai fame. It’s quite a sprawling piece that covers many aspects of the “business” of open source and higher education. I appreciated the lack of dogmatism and the willingness to acknowledge some of the risks in software development, and also the notion that open source can help customers take care of the ‘core’ by helping to address the ‘context.’ – SWL

ConceptTutor

http://engage.doit.wisc.edu/tools/ConceptTutor/

From a reference in the Tools Interoperability demonstrator I mentioned yesterday came a link to this tool, ConceptTutor, built by the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Released under what looks to be an open source license (the source code is available here) it seems to be a glossary tool on steriods, with a structured approach to illustrating concepts and minimally assess the learner’s understanding of those that can be used to annotate and supplement core course content. The application apparently produces Accessible content and can draw content from repositories like Fedora (this I could not confirm), which makes it an interesting tool for re-using ‘learning objects’ in a way that perhaps retains some of the original connotation of the term and focuses it on the right level of granularity. It’s not clear the extent to which this tool can now be shown to practically interoperate and annotate content within existing CMS like WebCT, or Sakai, but presumably if that is not already present as part of the demonstrator it will be something being targeted soon. – SWL

Presentations available from 2005 Alt-i-Lab sessions

http://www.imsglobal.org/altilab/

June has been a busy month in the post-secondary elearning world; along with the release of Sakai 2.0, another major milestone happened this month at the Alt-i-lab sessions in Sheffield, England. The page above links to many of the presentations and demonstrations that took place there, possibly most notable of which was the first practical demonstration of the Tool Interoperability across multiple CMS. A summary of the demonstration by Chris Vento is available, which seems to be cause for cautious optimism; unfortunately, the only ‘independant’ report I’ve been able to find (not having attended myself) is this one from the Learning Technology Standards Observatory. One can only hope that Wilbert Kraan and the folks at CETIS will come to the rescue with another of their lucid and helpful write-ups to explain what this really all means.

But I would be remiss in not pointing to some other sessions of note; for me the one that jumped off the page as I read further was the working session on “A Common Cartridge for Robust Content Delivery.” This group basically proposed to tackle the problem of content interoperability once more in light of the current situation:

“It’s five years later. The major elearning providers have implemented IMS specifications; many customers mandate compliance with some form of them. However, software vendors and suppliers, consumers, and maintainers of content have not worked together to create a detailed de facto understanding of what implementation means. So while elearning firms market ‘compliance’ with IMS specifications, and some have been certified as compliant with a specific version of the specifications; the lack of practical interoperability has left us in a place not sufficiently different than where we were prior to the IMS specification effort began.”

It’s nice to see the problem being owned up to (no real news to folks in the trenchs who have become increasingly dismayed as the variety of implementations of IMS Content Packaging failed to bring them the content portability and freedom from vendor lock-in they had hoped for). Too early yet to say if the proposed idea of “Content Cartridges” can have any better effect, but the idea of compliance testing and publisher involvement in the standards both seem improvements. – SWL