Initial thoughts on RSS feeds from LORs

So I finally got a chance to actually look a little more closely at the feeds from the existing repositories that I posted last week and am slowly starting to get my thoughts together. Here are some reflections.

Not all <links> are the same

A seemingly small thing that jumped out for me is the different interpretation of what the <link> element should point to in D’Arcy’s CAREO feed – his is the only one that uses the object’s URL instead of the metadata record’s URL. I’m interested to hear from D’Arcy’s whether this was intentional and if so, the reasoning behind it. There aren’t any rules yet as far as I can see; at first I thought that pointing to the record made most sense because un-extended RSS doesn’t do a great job of displaying any of the existing metadata schemas I know of, but then I realized that this might just be anticipating extending RSS 2.0 through namespaces and so in fact the <link> field pointing to the object’s url might in fact be the right way to go.

Some metadata filters seem more exciting than others

I’m glad I placed multiple feeds from the same source that used different criteria together onto this page. While I can see some cases where presenting the latest entries to the LOR might be useful (and I understand that proofs of concepts need to start somewhere), streams like that are likely to be less interesting than ones that use more pedagogically relevant metadata fields – e.g. “latest history objects,” or “biology objects containing the word ‘blood’.”

Which led me to my next thought – unlike the way RSS currently supports news distribution where for the most part a ‘channel’ is defined by the content author , RSS as a distribution mechanism for learning objects repositories seems to get really interesting when the channel can instead be the latest results of a user-defined search using specific meta-data fields. So if you have user accounts in your LOR, a user could perform a search, be they an instructor wanting to know when any new objects are posted that might help in teaching fluid dynamics to 2nd year engineering students, or a student wanting to see new objects that could help with their term paper on mass production and the Civil War, and then be able to create a persistent URL that was the RSS feed for additional results for this search that could then be aggregated in their ‘news reader’ or whatever their personal learning object aggregator might be called.

Like I said, still early days in puzzling this through, but wanted to put something down. Off to bed (unlike Brian, I need some sleep before I die 😉  – SWL

An Ideal Courseware/Content Management Model

An interesting paper by Rob Reynolds on the new Xplana site.  He mentions OKI at the start but doesn’t pick up on it – this modular architecture that he describes was, in my mind, what OKI has the potential to bring about. In my understanding, once the framework existed, any component that had been written to operate within that framework could in theory ‘plug-in’ to any ‘OKI-compliant’ application (I have never found out what the correct language is for that). – SWL

Three Objections to Learning Objects – Norm Friesen

“Learning objects and e-learning standardization bear the imprint of the ideology and culture of the American military-industrial complex–of ways of thinking that are related either marginally or antithetically to the interests and values of education generally and public education in particular.“

Wow, I’m glad somebody said it! But then in reading this informative paper by Norm Friesen, it looks like somebody already had in a major way – he cites a reference to a work that sounds really interesting in this regard, The Classroom Arsenal: Military Research, Information Technology, and Public Education  by Douglas D. Noble.

I’m not sure I actually hold out that much hope of the educational community’s voice being heard in the larger arenas where commercial developers and industrial training agendas seem to dominate. But it is great that these kinds of objections are being aired openly, especially by someone as knowledgeable in the field as this paper’s author. – SWL

RSS feeds from Learning Object Repositories – Known Examples

http://www.bloglines.com/public_display?username=EdTechPost&folder=322938

This links to a page I’ve built which aggregates RSS feeds from all of the LORs that I know of that produce them.

There’s been a lot flying around recently concerning the use of RSS to syndicate RLOs. I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the implications but haven’t fully managed to. This list, rather than being an attempt to create some sort of authoritative resource on the subject, is instead a way for me to see with my own eyes, all in one place, the results of current efforts to match RSS technology with LORs/RLOs. I need to do this because when the topics get this complex, my brain seems to need to work at the problem from both ends – both by trying to construct a theoretical model of the problem based on my understanding of the issues, the technologies and concepts at play, and also by literally looking at examples of what exists or what a solution could look like and then trying to bring these two together into some fit. In any case, that’s my motivation for throwing this together. – SWL

The evolutions of LCMSes (from ASTD Learning Circuits – April 2002)

This piece is a year old (heck I might have even posted on this before) but it came up during extended searching on LORs vs. LCMSes and I thought it interesting because in describing the ‘evolution’ (mostly just history) of LCMSes it gave me some more context for why we have all these LOR initiatives that seem to be relatively isolated from the evolution of LCMSes and learning authroing tools. – SWL

CANARIE’s Second Canadian National E-learning Workshop – Presentations

This will be old hat for many as this conference took place over a year ago in Montreal, but I stumbled across this archive of presentations by chance (whilst googling the collision of ‘LORS’ and ‘LCMSes’) and thought there may be some of general interest. The field has definitely moved on from here, but still not a bad place to get an overview of many of the projects that have taken place or that are currently underway in Canada. – SWL

INSTRUCTIONAL ARCHITECT

Via a seemingly small reference in David Wiley’s blog, Autounfocus, comes mention of this application being developed by David and others in the Department of Instructional Technology at Utah State, that hints at where learning object repositories and object browsers need to go and seem to be going – towards more direct integration with authoring tools and tools that help instructors apply instructional design principles in (re)assembling objects.

(But isn’t this already the promise in large part of LCMSes within the scope of the training industry? I wonder what will end up being the difference between existing authoring tools aimed at industry [either ones like IBM’s Knowledge Producer, DazzlerMax, Avaltus Jupiter Studio or Cisco’s Virtuoso, or else any of the ones being bundled or built directly in enterprise LCMSes] and the ones being built in post-secondary institutions and for that market? I can guess but I expect some analysis of this would be useful for a continuing elucidation of the need for a CMS product-type separate from LMS/LCMS offerings and why LORs are evolving the way they are.) – SWL

Enterprise Software Redux: An Open Letter to Click2learn CEO Kevin Oakes

“Kevin Kruse writes an open letter to Click2learn CEO Kevin Oakes in response to the latter’s contention that enterprise software providers (such as, say, SAP or PeopleSoft) will not make major inroads into the learning management system market. With a few telling points, Kruse outlines some probable scenarios where this could be exactly what happens. His main advice to LMS vendors? Well, not in so many words, but: bail.” – comment and link reposted from [OLDaily]

I think the truth lies somewhere between these two positions, and one would certainly be naive not to be paying attention to a few of these behemoth enterprise players.

But the more important advice I would give to customers, instead of these vendors, is ‘don’t let up on any of these vendors when it comes to the implementation of standards, and lobby your political representatives (in Canada these would be people like Industry Canada) to implement national conformance testing programs that we can hold vendors accountable to.’ Without such programs, we will continue to see vendors not implement these standards in a full and compliant manner, for lots of reasons, some of them not without merit (e.g. they can be difficult and often present a moving target). But the fact remains that the only hope of not repeating the history of vendor lockins and other dubious achievements in the litany of large systems implementations is in the support of product-agnostic, independantly-developed ,and community-agreed-upon standards. Amen! – SWL