Practical Interoperability from the Reload folks

http://www.reload.ac.uk/interop.html

Recognizing that saying one complies with a standard and implementing a system that does so (especially when some of the standards seem to change nightly) are two different things, the good folks at Reload have built this page that reports on various real world users’ attempts to import content packages built with Reload into a number of “VLEs” or course management systems, including WebCT and a few of the open source options. One hopes that some of the ‘hiccups’ described here are simply a sign of the relative immaturity of the systems and standards that will dissipate with time (right?….) – SWL

ALOHA II

http://aloha2.netera.ca/

New site for the release of Aloha II, the reworked metadata editor/content packager from the University of Calgary, which is now based on the RELOAD tool from the U.K. The version available right now is an alpha release – no news on their news page (and no RSS feed!) about when to expect beta or gold releases, but hopefully things are moving along swimmingly. – SWL

iCommons Canada Project

http://www.cippic.ca/icommons-canada

Via Mike Mattson at the U of C (thanks Mike!) comes mention of this initiative to “develop Creative Commons licences for Canadian artists” (and presumably other content creators as well). They promise that the final draft of the Canadian Creative Commons licenses will be available by September 30th. I’m interested to find out how this would diverge from the existing CC licenses (as I am a Canadian already publishing material under that license.) – SWL

Wiki for Retreat on Mellon Open Source Projects

http://rit.mellon.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome

Who knows if this was meant to be public, but as the link isn’t password protected and I stumbled across it on the web, I’m assuming it’s open for viewing. This wiki was built in support of meetings held this past February concerning higher ed open source projects funded by the Mellon Foundation. The notes are worth perusing to glean some insight into what some of the biggest minds in educational institutional computing in the States are thinking about, but maybe most interesting is simply to ponder the list of projects that Mellon funds in this area – Sakai, Chandler, OCW, DSpace, uPortal … the list goes on. Without a doubt, a number of these projects have already changed the landscape in post-secondary educational computing, and have the potential to change it even more dramatically in the years to come. – SWL

LORNET Website

http://www.lornet.org/eng/index.htm

While this project was announced last fall, it seems to be up an running now and has this website. For those who missed the announcement last October, this is the NSERC-funded $7.5 million/5 year project that, as far as I know, represents the largest ongoing learning object repository research initiative in Canada.

The project has 6 themes and stretches across 6 Canadian research Universities. I don’t know if it is fair to call this ‘edusource II’ as the aims of the project seem farther reaching, but it does involve some of the same principals from Canada’s last ‘nation-wide’ learning object repository research project. – SWL

Finding Learning Objects – Walking the Talk

Can our intrepid search find a learning object in time to figure out how to calculate ‘Z-scores’? Tune in and find out!

Today (like many days) I was faced with a task I was not 100% sure how to do. I had a set of ratings for different evaluators, and had been told by someone who knew better than I that I should be trying to calculate their ‘z-scores’ in order to standardize the numbers.

As I was about to enter a handy-dandy Google search, I thought – “no wait! Why don’t you see if there are any ‘learning objects’ out there that could teach you what a Z-score is, and how to calculate it.” So I set out in search of my closest learning object repository to see what I could find.
Continue reading “Finding Learning Objects – Walking the Talk”

http://www.educause.edu/pub/
eq/eqm04/eqm0421.asp

Given that the idea of perpetual email accounts is enough to make most IT administrators packup and run, the innovations in offering lifelong learning environments presented in this Educause Quarterly article by Ellen R. Cohn are likely to fall on similarly unreceptive ears in many IT departments. Still, the ideas are worth considering. But are they worth considering because the technology seems to enable this, or would the value proposition behind them still be there without the technology? Via Ray Schroeder’s Online Learning Update. – SWL

Learning resource discovery based on the LOM and the OAI-PMH’

http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/powell/

From the latest issue of ARIADNE, comes this article by Andy Powell and Phil Barker detailing the development of a LOM-based application profile and the sharing of these resources using the OAI-PMH. Lots of good references, and I found the sections regarding their vocabularies and the issue of identifiers quite helpful. – SWL

Presentations from the Digital Library Forum Spring Forum 2004

http://www.diglib.org/forums/Spring2004/
springforum04abs.htm

Thanks to Dr. Tom Carey for passing on the reference to the presentation archive for the DLF’s 2004 Spring Forum. There’s lots of interest here; in particular, one of the 9.00am-10.30am sessions from April 21, titled “Digital Repository Interoperability with Learning Systems” gives some insight into how the library/archives world is approaching the issue of interoperating with various learning systems, notable not only CMS are mentioned but also weblogs! (Ironically, for all of the focus on metadata, this page itself is unstructured HTML, hence my lack of ability to point you directly to the section containing this presentation’s references). – SWL

Personal Bugaboo – no pointers to online map services

This is not an edtech related post but I felt the need to rant and well, it’s my blog so I’ll rant if I want to…

It is beyond me how there still exist any institutional websites that offer ‘Contact Pages’ with their address but that don’t also use one the myriad online maps services that exist to point to an online map of their location. You know, handy sites like Yahoo Maps or Mapquest. Maybe these are the same people who think the Internet is simply a ‘fad,’ just like ‘horse-less carriages.’

Unless my relationship with the person is restricted solely to face to face or the phone (which is increasingly rare for me) I basically refuse to write out in long directions to anywhere anymore – instead, I simply point folks to a URL and let them build their own map. For instance, if you ever want to come visit my office, you can find me here. Lucky for me, there is a campus next door to the one I have to visit tomorrow (that visit having prompted the above rant) that gets it. – SWL