Iconex LOR

New to me, this object repository was developed in the U.K. by the University of Hull as part of the nation-wide Distributed National Electronic Resource initiative (I’m sure I have this wrong, but I have  a difficult time sorting out the players and funding envelopes in the U.K.)

Not certain the extent that this was intended for prime time yet. I could access it in IE but both Mozilla and Opera seemed to fail. The reason I checked is that the front end seemed to be done in Flash, but either  they are doing browser detection on these other browsers that is failing or else this isn’t Flash but maybe some IE specific technology. In any case, there are a number of good multimedia objects in there – the one that drew me here in the first place is a Flash-based card sorting exercise that is familiar to anyone who has ever had to facilitate a design session with a customer who won’t set priorities.

The app is very good, you can download it and change the cards by editing an XML file. If you do manage to access the site you can find it in the ‘Generic’ category. Which points out another flaw with this approach – the individual objects do not appear to be directly addressable. – SWL

PORTAL – Presenting natiOnal Resources To Audiences Locally

A number of useful background resources are available as a result of this project in the U.K., funded by the FAIR Programme of the Joint Information Systems Committee to “explore issues around the deployment and use of portals within the higher and further education community.” 

Of note so far are the ‘Stakeholder Requirements for Institutional Portals’ (www.fair-portal.hull.ac.uk/downloads/stakereq.pdf) and a report detailing the available metadata standards for the description of portal users (www.fair-portal.hull.ac.uk/downloads/Metadata.pdf.) – SWL

Web Design for the Elderly

The latest newsletter from Human Factors International contains what was for me a thought-provoking piece on designing usable web sites for the elderly. Seems like potentially a large issue/market opportunity for online learning folks looking for markets to expand into and seeing the retiring baby-boomers as one of these. – SWL

Taxonomy of Open Source Licenses

Via a discussion thread at slashdot on the closing of opencontent.org comes a reference to this handy little table that compares the license-type (shareware, freeware, various forms of open source) with the various ‘features’ of these licenses (redistribution, usage limitations, source code availability…). Quite handy for sorting out some of the subtle points of the various types of open source licenses. Could be used in conjunction with the current list of approved open source licenses from the Open Source Initiative. – SWL

MiCTA/ATAlliance Announces eLearning RFP Award

http://www.micta.org/programs/elearning/
awards/default.asp

While the RFP from MiCTA was first released in Novemeber 2002, this is still newsworthy as they continue to announce the availability of liscence agreements with the ‘winners’ of that RFP, the latest being last week’s announcement that the agreement with WebCT had been signed.

This is potentially of widespread interest – for those not familiar, MiCTA was formed in 1982 as a group of telecommunications directors who gathered regularly for information sharing purposes. This then grew to a body that aggregated demand, initially for telecommunications services but more recently for a host of goods and services, now including ‘eLearning CMS.’ It brings together a membership base of 19538 organizations (1432 institutions of higher ed) and negotiates with vendors to offer ‘preferred customer status’ to its members. Membership is open to ‘not for profit organizations’ at the annual cost of $75.

They have posted the full details of their extensive RFP process for these eLearning CMS online. – SWL

Stanford University Releases Coursework Open Source Course Management System

Stanford University announced today the Open Source release of its course management system, CourseWork. This is big news as it is one of two reference implementations for the OKI project that are to be released as part of the Phase 1 milestones (the other being MIT’s Stellar). I will be reviewing this for the edutools in the not too distant future so will spend more time on it then. – SWL

The LCMS Council

“If you’re losing sleep over learning content management systems, here’s a resource that may help: LCMS Resource. I have some mixed feelings on the role of LCMS’ in elearning. If deployed within an organization, it makes sense…but learning objects (the things that LCMS’ manage) are apparently valuable because they are shareable and reusable. In that sense, an LCMS is too closed (i.e. inter-organizational sharing). Open repository models are much more attractive (and more web-like).”

– from [elearnspace blog]

GuruNet Free

I have kind of mixed feelings about this next one – up until 2 days ago one of my absolute favourite system tray apps was called Atomica. Atomica returned results of an online dictionary lookup from a word clicked in absolutely any open application. In addition it offered you other suggested words in a thesaurus pane, as well as an encyclopedia definition and technical definitions for tech terms. You could get any of these from specific online sources, but the beauty of this was the one-click feature. It really was a beautiful little application.

Then two days ago, I ‘one clicked’ a term in a document I’d just received and got hit with a message telling me that the service I’ve long enjoyed for free is now being replaced by something called ‘GuruNet’ and that I’m going to have to pay $39 bucks a year for it! After looking into it further, it turns out there is still a free version of the product (linked to above). And it mostly works like the old one, except now I have to put up with ads, an ugly interface and a diminished set of resources to refer against, issues I can dispose of for $39 bucks a year. Oh well, I guess it was naive of me to think it could last for free, at least in its relatively unadulterated form. Time will tell if I keep the new ad-ware supported version installed. So not necessarily a ringing endorsement, but functionaly still worth checking out. – SWL