hiatus

It must be late as I’ve tried to compose responses to 2 or 3 pieces over the last hour and just can’t get any of them to go.

In any case, I’m in uPortal training all next week, then trying to finish off an RFP for a web-services-based inter-institutional registration facilitation system (try saying that 3 times fast!) and then on holiday until May 19. At the speed things are going, I kind of frightened what I might find when I get back – multi-directional typed hyperlinks? CANCORE metadata showing up in my Radip aggregator? free learning objects and a spiffy new open source CMS to use them in? world peace?

(Apart from the joking, does anyone have any thoughts on how any sort of subject-based community that emerges in the blogosphere looks a lot like an ad hoc cohort in an educational institution, if such a thing existed, and why it can be tough to leave once you there, or even to close your darn aggreagtor sometimes!)

Bye for now, Scott.

Will the “real” community please stand up?

I’ve been thinking about David Wiley’s post all day now, as I ended up laying in bed last evening contemplating the differences I am experience as a blogger compared to being a member of a discussion forum, mailing list, usenet group or any of the various collaborative communications forums I’ve participated in over the years.

In some sense the answer to David’s questions seem straightforward

– yes, the reason the people he mentions on the list are not the same ones in this ‘conversation’ or community is probably largely because they don’t blog

– no, it’s not surprising, at least not to me, that there are so many groups in such a ‘small’ space because a) I don’t think it’s that small a space, b) they all seem to be coming together anyways (I would guess only 2-3 degrees of separation ‘in real life’ and even less online for everyone he lists and everyone on the edubloggers list George published today)

On the other hand, as I think the responses on David’s site by George and Brian are getting at, there are a lot of real subtle differences that a many people have been trying to get at for the past year or two (  

Google Search – blogs vs. usenet or why there’s no one community

It really is funny how these things work – last night I was lying in bed reflecting on the phenomenom I’ve been experiencing as a blogger in relation to other types of discussion or conferencing software I’ve used in the past (usenet, mailing lists, threaded discussions…)  and then this morning I come into work and see this post from David Wiley – (Will the “real” community please stand up?), and this one by George Siemens (Current Edu-bloggers).

another elearning ‘blog’ – September 15

This site has some decent resources categorized into:

but NO RSS FEED! Which is o.k. I guess if it doesn’t see itself as a ‘blog’ or want to update people regularly about its contents, but looking at the source code (to see how easy it would be to scrape) it even calls itself a ‘blog’ in the comments!

Note to self – Maybe it would be helpful to gather a collection of pointers to creating RSS feeds from various different sources and from different formats, or what you should do if hand-creating content to make sure you don’t cut certain avenues off – there seems to be hundreds of ways and suggestions out there (can someone point me to an existing list?). In many cases instead of people having to change tools they use to create the more effective approach in some cases is to lead them to ways to bootstrap their current content. – SWL

Cisco Virtuoso 2.0 released

I typically pay more attention to apps focused on higher ed, but Cisco’s authoring tool, Virtuoso, came to my attention via it’s partnership with Unicon Academus, a CMS based on the JA-SIG uPortal framework. I guess the other reason to pay attention is that Cisco does have some history in the RLO world. Still not clear to me what one would have to do to get this product, though. – SWL

Notes on the Background of Back-Links

Nice synchronicity – D’Arcy and Brian are talking with Alan Levine from Maricopa about using Trackback (which I’ve never totally got as a Radio user that doesn’t have it built in) with learning objects, and then along comes this piece from Seth Gordon which is exactly what I’ve been missing to help me understand the uses and usefullness of trackback-like functions. (Do you think Ted Nelson will finally embrace the web now that it’s got trackback 😉 – SWL

Google Search: learning object reference models -SCORM

O.K., so this search is a little bit facetious – the fact that it returns lots of hits but none of them excatly what was intended is not proof that the only learning object reference model going is SCORM or that no other such thing is possible. I did this search in response to the line in David Davies recent reply to Norm Friesen’s paper that “If you have a strong pedagogic model and are serious about learning design then forget SCORM.” I don’t disagree – it seems clear that while SCORM might work for a pure 1 learner-content training model it is unsatisfying.

But, as they say on the ADL site, SCORM does try to “define(s) a Web-based learning ‘Content Aggregation Model’and ‘Run-Time Environment’ for learning objects …[which]… provides a comprehensive suite of e-learning capabilities that enable interoperability, accessibility and reusability of Web-based learning content.”

Maybe I’m misunderstanding hwo this will all unfold, but I kind of assumed that, like the below diagram of how SCORM instantiates various standards and methods into a reference model against which proposed objects can be tested, a similar reference would eventually emerge against which ‘units of learning’ could be compared? Does anyone know is this right?   

(from http://www.adlnet.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=scorm12&cfid=368801&cftoken=17257342)

How (and why) to include an xhtml:body in a Radio UserLand RSS feed

“Sam Ruby and Don Box have both demonstrated valid RSS 2.0 feeds (Sam, Don) that include a <body> element, properly namespaced as XHTML. Quietly, last week, I joined the party. My primary feed now includes: …”

I’m pretty sure that this is relevant – it seems to me that if D’Arcy Norman had a look at this with his newfound experience in XML databases, and paired up with what Stephen Downes’ seems to be getting at in his distributed learning object network architecture, they’d come up with a solution pretty darn quickly. Just a hunch. – SWL

– posted in [Jon’s Radio] via [Bruce Landon’s Weblog for Students]

open-education.org :: open education content

It looks like George Siemens, Stephen Downes, Charles Lowe and a number of others have got their site going to support their emerging work on ‘open education,’ which looks to promote the creation and use of open source content.  I expect we’ll be hearing a lot from this group as it appears to be made up of many of the most active minds in the elearning blogosphere. – SWL