Simply Blown Away by Silicon Chalk Demo

Both Michelle Lamberson from UBC and Bruce Landon had raved about its potential to me before, and I take recommendations from both of them seriously, but in checking out the company website a few months back and downloading a trial version of the software, I must say I was at the time left a bit puzzled about what all the foofraw was about.

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Beer with the MERLOT edutech_bloggers

Although I had to leave early to catch the ferry back to the island, in truth meeting up with all of these folks was one of my main reasons for heading to the conference yesterday. Partly to put faces to urls, and partly to help foster the burgeoning sense of community in the way that only face to face communication can.

I love the fact that everyone there came at educational technology from such different backgrounds; between us we had 1 psychologist, 2 geologists, 2 english majors, a zoologist a philosopher, and a critical theorist. 

And surprise surprise, these edutech bloggers are sure a gregarious bunch! I’m glad the bar was otherwise empty/noisy as I’m sure we would have caused some head-scratching as the conversations flew from learning obects and blogs to the more important topics of the phenomenom of American college football crowds and hockey as a Canadian religious experience.

We almost had a grand slam – if we had managed to get Bernie Dodge and Jim Sibley there, the only two other edutechblogger names I recognized from the attendee list. If there were more I missed, come out and play!

So for me, definitely the highlight of the day. It would be great if somehow we could figure out another way to get all those folks who we missed together face to face, I’m certain the synergies would be unbelievable. Still, to get 8 together from the one conference was simply great! – SWL

Reflections on Thursday’s MERLOT sessions – Part 3

Merlot Federated Search

This one was well attended by the edublogging crowd, and you can see much more comprehensive notes over at D’arcy’s, Alan’s or Brian’s site.

This was an important topic for me as we’ve been looking into a wildly federated solution to try and accomplish a single portal to access distance ed in BC. So what was interesting to me was to compare that problem with this one for similarities and differences.

I guess mostly differences – in this model (quite rightly) they don’t worry about lack of response from any of the federated catalogues – if, for whatever reason, the catalogue’s not responding in time for one particular query session, it is just left out of those results. This seems fair enough, though the decision on MERLOT’s part not to indicate this lack of responsiveness back to the user seems strange. Their answer was that it was confusing to the user, but it seems to me a little ‘Catalogues not responding to this query’ link or list is simple enough.

They’ve made a bunch of decisions that seem pretty sensible:

  • limit responses to 25 per service, partly to limit harvesting and partly I assume to assure better overall responsiveness (and probably only that many are needed in any case);
  • model their service partly around the google API (I think I’m getting this right) which I assume is in part because this is one people are now becoming acquainted with and thus can repurpose interfaces/learning;
  • offer an intermediary page between query and results to deal with response-time waits, keep user informed of status.

They seemed to think that network latencies weren’t a problem (one of the first federated partners is in Australia) and that this would scale very easily, which againbecause of the lack of requirement that all catalogues MUST respond is probably quite true.

All and all seemed quite promising – SWL

Reflections on Thursday’s MERLOT sessions – Part 1

Spent the whole day yesterday in Vancouver at the Merlot conference, though I must admit I probably spent as much time catching up with colleagues as I did in the sessions themselves. Rather than re-post my session notes here verbatim (which I must admit doesn’t typically do a lot for me as most of the context is lost and difficult to reconstruct) I thought I would just post some of the notable points I heard.

Session on Transforming Curriculum – U of T’s ATRC/TILE

If you ever get a chance to hear anyone from the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre at the University of Toronto speak, go and see them. So far every one I have met from there impresses me – they really *get* this stuff in a deep way. Specifically, when they think about the issue of accessibility, they get that it contains the smaller word but bigger concept of “access”. So that in addition to designing sites that work for disabled users who need to use assistive technologies, you can also be addressing issues of viewing sites with alternate browsers, alternate devices, in other languages, at different connection speeds. These are not all the exact same issue, but many of them can be addressed by very similar strategies and approaches. They also bring the idea of learner preferences into the fold so that both prior learning and learning styles become just other things to consider in re-presenting content. They are working on using the IMS learner information profile (LIP) as well as accessibility extensions to it, and have been building out technology (most notable the open-source CMS ATutor).

They outlined 5 major strategies (I missed one of them; the other 4 were:

  1. separate content & structure from presentation
  2. the independence of function from control
  3. implement session specific preferences
  4. use the standards

These probably all seem like pretty straightforward to some but I am consistently impressed with the breadth of their attempts and implementations.

Two other noteworthy things for me in their demo of their learner preferences system were:

  • one of the choices was for the learner to specify the location of their own style sheet. I’ve seen this before but it makes tons of sense in systems (like a CMS or portal) where one can expect the user to return many times
  • in asking the user to identify how they wanted the content to be adapted, instead of focusing on technology (‘give me a version that works with a screen reader’) or on the user’s ‘condition’ (give me a version suitable for color blind people’) they simply asked, in clear language, what you’d like the system to do: “make the text easier to read” “give me alternatives to auditory content.” They then followed that screen up with more specific choices, but I liked the way they phrased the question.

This was the first session I made it to that day (it’s a surprisingly long trip from Vancouver Island to Vancouver) and I think probably the most satisfying of the day for me. – SWL

TechDis – UK centre for accessibility issues in higher ed

A massive set of resources from the UK post-secondary system aimed at “improv[ing the] provision for disabled staff and students in higher and further education through technology.” Some of the valuable resources on offer here include the Accessibility Database (an example itself of good practice in accessible design and coding – view source to get a sense) and a large collection of papers on accessibility issues. My favourite from that collection was the report “Accessible Curricula: Good Practice for all” (http://www.techdis.ac.uk/pdf/curricula.pdf) which highlights a huge range of accessibility issues, for both classroom-based at distance education. – SWL

RSSJobs Home

“RSSJobs allows you to create and save searches for Monster, Dice, HotJobs,and more in one location, then delivers the results to your favorite RSS Reader.“

This is not really an ed tech related piece, but since I ranted about this back in June I felt I had to post it. As has been noted elsewhere, one of the amazing aspects of the ever-evolving net is the diminishing rant-to-actual-deployment ratio! – SWL