Technologies for Learning, Thinking and Collaborating
http://www.edtechpost.ca/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/
EdTechPost/ELearningGlossaries
As part of the background research for the Edutools project I am constantly on the lookout for new elearning glossaries with which to compare definitions of terms. Here is a list of the ones I know about (in a wiki, so feel free to add if you want) – most of them are generic ‘elearning’ glossaries though there are a few specific to ‘metadata’ and ‘learning objects’ here too. – SWL
http://www.ulist.org/index.htm
This is one of those accidental finds that ended up seeming highly relevant but for which I have no background info and really don’t know if it’s real or not. As the site says “ULIST is a website where Web Services interfaces for learning, training and related applications can be exposed for comment and evaluation and where organizations that require Web Services integration of multiple functions can go to find relevant Web Services interfaces.” The contact email address is from the QuestionMark.com domain, which seems plausible – to me it makes sense for a 3rd party tool builder like Questionmark to champion something this. There are no entries in the directory yet and almost no links to it from the outside world – this seems to be a bit of a proof of concept at this point; still, interesting. – SWL
http://www.edutech.ch/edutech/tools/Platforms-report-03-03.pdf
Summary report of an evaluation of 5 CMS platforms (a strangish mix of well known CMS, European ones and very training-focused Learning Management Systems) performed for the Swiss Virtual Campus in spring 2003. They looked at Blackboard, Clix, IBT-Server,
Qualilearning/Luvit, Globalteach, and WebCT Vista. None of them seemed to match exactly what they were looking for, but the recommendation seems to have been to provisionally go with Vista until something better came along. The full evaluation site, along with detailed reports on each of the products is also available. – SWL
Quite a bit of these are specific to the context of training in the American military, but the Use Cases presented here are still helpful in detailing many of the ways in which people may want to work with a LOR. – SWL
http://awd.cl.uh.edu/blog/blob-blogWeb2.gif
Ginger at Almost Audacious IT ran a blog workshop aimed at faculty recently, for which she produced the above hysterical graphic. Ginger says “I just swiped the graphic from the classic ‘The Blob’ movie and did some magic on it in Flash by tracing the bitmap. ” The ‘just’ sounds a bit modest to me – this perfectly captures the frenzied pitch that has accompanied a lot of the blog hype of late. – SWL
href=”http://sourceforge.net/forum/
forum.php?forum_id=328649
New releases of existing CMS don’t usually warrant a posting, but this one’s maybe an exception – the folks at the University of Toronto’s Adaptive Technology Resource Centre have been working hard to develop a full featured suite of accessible online learning and communication tools. Their latest effort is to include IMS compliant content packaging utilities for creating interoperable learning objects into the existing Atutor LMS. The software is PHP and MySQL-based. Where the software really excels, as might be expected, is in being immensely re-skinnable/reconfigurable to adapt to almost any device or user need. It is worth taking a look at if only for that reason, as an object lesson in adaptable, accessible design. – SWL
http://www.surf.nl/en/publicaties/index2.php?oid=21
This report is from the Digital Academic Repositories (DARE) program at SURF, a Dutch research consortium for network services and information and communications technology. It describes the decisions that are being taken in that country so as to enable interoperability of the different types of institutional repository systems and to keep in line with international standards. While quite a bit is enabled by the specific context of education within the Netherlands, there is lots here to learn from. – SWL
http://www.academiccolab.org/resources/
FinalSummitReport.pdf
Following up on earlier posts about their wiki and draft list of repositories, the final report by Colin Holden on the recent ‘Global Repositories Summit’ has been released.
The report ultimately contains as many (more) questions than answers, but reflects what was evidently lots of quality interchange amongst the participants, and could be taken as an effective state of the learning object union. I found it hard not to come away with a sense that a lot of learning object/repository projects feel like solutions in search of a problem, or at least a solution that’s not sure which, out of many, problems they want to address. One of the best pieces of advice contained in the report was “Those at the Learning Repository Summit recommended that administrators of developing learning repository projects … know the communities that they are serving” and, I would add, the specific problem(s) they want to solve. While this may seem obvious, if you reach a point where you start to have functional software but are still having to persuade users into using it, you have to wonder a bit. – SWL
http://staff.washington.edu/oren/
weblog/archives/000085.html
Also announced in Educause (the above was the only link I could find offhand, not an official release) came news of this collaboration from some of the original OKI players, but now with the addition of uPortal to the mix. It seems the goal is to build around the recent JSR168 specification, which will “define the portlet API and the portlet-container responsibilities as the runtime environment for portlets” in Java-based portal environments. – SWL
http://lionshare.its.psu.edu/main
“LionShare is an academic P2P system which will assist in the distribution of academic materials through the university’s network and beyond. The primary goal of LionShare is to provide a means for collaboration among faculty, students, departments, and eventually multiple universities.” Don’t have a lot more info on this – just one of a few nuggets brought back in a friend’s trip report from Educause.
Postscript – as a follow on, this article mentions a partnership with both OKI and the Canadian-based edusource project.- SWL
