VLE Discussion Forum

http://www.ltsn-01.ac.uk/resources/vle/ViewData

Kind of a wacky site out of the U.K. It seems to be a wiki dedicated to Virtual Learning Environments, Brit-speak for Course Management Systems. As far as I can tell it is run out of The Learning and Teaching Support Network, a UK wide network that promotes high quality learning and teaching in higher education through the development and transfer of good practices in all subject disciplines. Sadly, it wasn’t immediately apparent to me how, in the spirit of all things wiki, one could contribute, as some of the material was dated. Still, worth a look, if only to stumble across even more products in this space that you’ve never heard of before. – SWL

SCORM Skin viewer (2002 Albert Ip)

http://www.dls.au.com/SCORMSkinViewer/viewer.html

An interesting piece from the folks at Digital Learning Systems developed for Avilar. It allows you to re-skin SCORM objects on the fly. The way they do this is not currently part of SCORM, but it doesn’t seem like a huge derivation – they do a javascript API call for the style sheet from within the SCO, and the LMS needs o be able to recognize this call. Very cool. – SWL

http://home.avilar.com/corporate/
press_releases/20030212.pdf

“Avilar® Technologies, Inc., announced today that its WebMentor® Learning Management System (LMS) has been issued the first certificate of compliance with the SCORM specification, Version 1.2, under the new certification program administered by the Academic ADL Co-Lab in Madison, Wisconsin.”

“To be certified, an authorized Certification Testing Center must independently verify and validate the successful processing by the LMS of the SCORM Test Suite, Version 1.2.3.”

I haven’t had a chance to catch up with the various news feeds that I follow for over a week now, so I’m not sure what kind of profile this announcement is already receiving, but this is no small thing. We reviewed Webmentor, the Avialr product, on edutools, and I was impressed with it as a training product (which in theory we don’t review, only CMSes, but some of them slip through because they do have post-secondary clients, one of our selection criteria.). – SWL

The Reusability Paradox

http://rclt.usu.edu/whitepapers/paradox.html

Really interesting article by the previously mentioned The Reusability, Collaboration, and Learning Troupe. The following quote was what first brought me to the article when it was reposted in a mailing list I follow: “The purpose of learning objects and their reality seem to be at odds with one another. On the one hand, the smaller designers create their learning objects, the more reusable those objects will be. On the other hand, the smaller learning objects are, the more likely it is that only humans will be able to assemble them into meaningful instruction. From the traditional instruction point of view, the higher-level reusability of small objects does not scale well to large numbers of students (i.e., it requires teachers or instructional designers to intervene), meaning that the supposed economic advantage of reusable learning objects has evaporated. “

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The Reusability, Collaboration, and Learning Troupe

http://rclt.usu.edu/people.html

“The Reusability, Collaboration, and Learning Troupe (RCLT) is a loose-knit group of faculty and graduate students at Utah State University with common research interests, including Andy Gibbons, David Merrill Mimi Recker, David Wiley, and Andy Walker“

I was led here by a post to a newsgroup containing a quote from a paper by this Troupe. Great concept, and interesting paper (more above), although it is not clear how active the site is – the publications list in the Research area all date from 2000-2001. – SWL 

Tom Carey talk on widening the object repository net

http://www.tltgroup.org/collectionsregistration.htm

From the TLT listserv: “Tom Carey, co-chair the board for the highly respected MERLOT collection (http://www.merlot.org) will be co-leading a free Webcast on March 11, 2003” For registration (required in advance for free Webcast)see: http://www.tltgroup.org/collectionsregistration.htm

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Maricopa’s object repository available as RSS stream

http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mlx/feed.php

Another posting based on an item seen in Brian’s blog – Maricopa has created an RSS stream of their learning objects.

As a blog enthusiast I am thrilled to see this, although I am still not certain why. I haven’t personally figured out the sweet spot for the combination of learning objects and blogs or RSS aggregation. 

I must admit that after the initial enthusiasm wore off, I found myself actually questioning a lot of the idea’s presented in Stephen Downes’ presentation at the IMS Open Technical Forum. He challenged the IMS folks with a vision of learning object networks based on RSS and OAI. I am going to ponder some more on my objections, but I think they have something to do with the lack of ‘objectness’ in rss streams. more late, I have to go deal with a wriggly 9 month old who is sitting on my lap. – swl

UBC’s Learning Objects site

http://www.learningobjects.ubc.ca/
You’d have thunk since they are only across the Straight of Georgia I would have known about this site already, but I only saw this site today by following a link on Brian Lamb’s site (see below post). Nice job here Brian – I will add it on to our own list of authoritative learning objects pages that I maintain at the C2T2 site. – SWL

Object Learning

http://www.reusability.org/blogs/brian/

Spent most of last week at events in Vancouver relating to Learning Objects and Standards, and for a variety of reasons haven’t managed to make it into the office this week, but wanted to post a few things from home to keep on top of them.

Met Brian Lamb last week at the Eduspecs sessions in Vancouver. He’s the Learning Objects Coordinator at UBC (how cool a job is that!). He also is into blogs, which is the main reason I went up and talked to him. Based on our 1/2 talk it seems like there might be a burgeoning community of bloggers within education in B.C. which would be very cool. Brian’s work blog, Object Learning, is at http://www.reusability.org/blogs/brian/. Already I’ve seen 2 or 3 really interesting posts there that didn’t make the mainstream edtech blogs, which is great – I’m getting a bit tired of seeing the same urls do the rounds in 6 different blogs, one after another.

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