Author: sleslie

WCET/Edutools LOR Comparative Research Released

http://edutools.info/lor/final_report.doc and
http://edutools.info/lor/final_reviews.xls

Regular readers will know that one of my two jobs is working with the folks at the Western Cooperative on Educational Telecommunications (WCET) on the Edutools project to compare course management systems. In fact I just returns from their annual conference, this year held in San Antonio, Texas, which will be the basis for a few posts.

A few months back I wrote about a project we did last spring with 4 state systems to compare existing Learning Object Repository software. Well finally we have released these findings to the public (part of the agreement was that the partners had exclusive use for 6 months before we published the results).

The final report (co-authored by fellow bloggers Bruce Landon and Brian Lamb, as well as Russ Poulin from WCET) is now available. Probably of more interest is the actual side-by-side comparison of 6 products. I would be very interested in any feedback people had on the actual comparative framework we employed, that is, the features and their groupings on which we reviewed the software. We did base it on a bunch of different LOR architecture and use case documents folks have shared on the web, and I used it in our own LOR project here in BC as the basis for our initial requirements set, so I think it stands up pretty well, but I am always interested in hearing whether others think it presents a valid framework for comparison. It shoud be noted that these reviews are now 6 months old, and these products have been rapidly evolving, so caveat emptor. – SWL

EDUCAUSE REVIEW – Evolving Technologies 2004

http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm04/erm0464.asp

Worth a read as a high level overview – most of the topics will be unsurprising to those working in higher ed institutional settings. Topics include Spam Management, Legal P2Ps, Learning Objects, Convergence of Libraries, Digital Repositories, and Web Content Management, Nomadicity and Regional Networks. – SWL

Ariadne Article – ‘What Do Application Profiles Reveal about the LOM Standard?’

http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue41/godby/

Score one for the librarians!

This article by Carol Jean Godby of the OCLC is an absolute bombshell and a must-read for folks working with learning object metadata standards. She follows up on works by Norm Friesen and Lorna Campbell that survey existing application profiles of the IEEE LOM with a view to answering three main questions:

  1. Which elements are most widely adopted?
  2. What are the prospects for interoperability given these profiles and the entirely optional nature of any of the elements
  3. What can be learnt about the motivation for developing an application profile (a.k.a. why can’t us educational technologist just submit to one standard way of describing things or let the librarians do it)

Somewhat unsurprisingly, like Friesen and Campbell before her, she reports that the most used fields from the LOM can be easily mapped to the existing Dublin Core fields, and that we’re pretty much all over the map when it comes to all of the special ‘pedagogical’ type fields that were supposedly the motivation for this whole exercise in the first place. (more…)
Continue reading “Ariadne Article – ‘What Do Application Profiles Reveal about the LOM Standard?’”

New IMS Specification Download Pages and License

http://www.imsglobal.org/specificationdownload.cfm

IMS has a re-designed website, and a fairly unwelcomed addition to getting access to the specification documents. As they state on the individual specification pages “HTML documents may be viewed online, but may not be printed without permission. To download an electronic copy for printing, please go to the specification download page.” I guess this makes some sense. They aren’t restricting access, just asking people to agree to their license, which on the surface seems o.k., though it is not straight boilerplate, and systems implementors will want to think through what if any implications Section II, “License Terms for Implementation” have to them. (That said, I can’t wait to read Stephen’s reaction when he finds out he needs to re-enter his personal data everytime he wants a new copy or a different file) – SWL

CETIS ‘Interoperability in Action’ Video

http://www.x4l.org/video/index.shtml

Derek Morrison at Auricle points to this video from CETIS called ‘Interoperability in Action’ which is well worth a watch. It takes you through a step by step scenario of a user adding an object to the Intrallect Intralibrary-driven JORUM repository, and then a second user accessing that object, extending an existing course, and uploading that course to a variety of CMS/VLE.

At the very least, this illustrates one possible scenario and can serve as a starting point for discussion on other possible authoring and re-use scenarios (trust me, with my perfect 20/20 hindsight vision, you do want to start with scenarios).

Is this the last word in learning content authoring and reuse systems and scenarios? Of course not. It’s more like the first word – a start in demonstrating ’round trip’ content authoring and re-use using de jure standards, which is more than a lot of us can say. – SWL

UThink’s Blog Directory Page

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/ (then follow the ‘Blog Directory’ link – for whatever reason, MT is gawking on the actual URL)

You’ve likely seen the UThink site before, the University of Minnesota’s MoveableType-based blogging site. But I wanted to point out the ‘Blog Directory’ sub-page on that site for the little things it does right to direct new readers to existing blogs.

Like almost every ‘directory’ it has an alphabetical list of all the blogs on that site, but really, is that helpful? Sure, if you want to troll through hundreds of pages looking for interesting titles, but typically not. What is helpful, though, is how they highlight “Recent Posts,” “Blogs with the most comments” and “Blogs with most Posts” – yes I know this reinforces so-called ‘power laws,’ and that ‘more’ doesn’t always mean ‘better,’ but as someone coming in from the outside to this server, these provided great starting points to explore this sub-universe within the blogopshere.

This seems to me to be part of the trick in rolling out blogs in academic settings – they have their uses if they are only being read by the instructor and the rest of their class, but blogs have stood out precisely because the network the create and participate in is not formally bounded (as say a CMS-based threaded discussion is.) So you need to (or at least are able to) grow the readership/network; one way to do this individually is to use all of the tricks that existing bloggers do (post on other people’s comments, post links to other people’s posts, blogrolls). But pages like this directory page also serve as an institutional means to grow the community, and are aimed at (but not restricted to) the next grouping ‘up’ from the course level, the institution-wide audience. – SWL

EASE History Campaign Ads

http://www.easehistory.org

One thing I love about publishing this blog is that (along with all the spam) it brings in scores of unsolicited pointers to really great educational resources.

The latest one, sent in by Aparna Ramchandran, points to an amazingly timely site from Michigan State University that allows students to learn about US history, presidential elections and issues through the prism of their campaign ads. The campaign ad viewer’s interface is incredibly intuitive and the site also provides a learning guide with a number of suggested activities and questions. Highly recommended – only wish more US voters would take the time to study these in the next 7 days, it’s not hard to see the patterns repeating. – SWL

Program in Course Redesign – Round III Results

http://www.center.rpi.edu/PewGrant/Rd3Less.html

You may well see this a few times today – the Program in Course Redesign, a massive project across 30 partnering institutions to demonstrate how colleges and universities can redesign their instructional approaches using technology to achieve cost savings as well as quality enhancements, has released the results of the Round III redesigns.

This round looked at course redesigns in 10 institutions, and similarly to previous rounds found some of the biggest quality improvements through 4 techniques – continuous assessment and feedback, increased interaction among students, online tutorials, and undergraduate learning assistants (ULAs.) In terms of costs reductions, I was pleased to see that both course management systems and ‘shared resources’ were cited as two of the predominant cost-reduction techniques in this round.

I haven’t been able to find any numbers on how they measured changes in quality enhancements (one assumes grades and retention rates at least) but if they are anything like the costs savings they report, an average of 39%, then clearly the findings from this study warrant attention. – SWL

Next Generation Foundation’s ‘Map of Creativity’

http://www.ngf.org.uk/map/map.html

While you will likely find some useful educational sites through this Flash-based app, I’m pointing to it more because of the very nifty interface. It may seem disconcerting at first, but stick with it for a few more seconds. Mousing over the filters on the right-hand side will let you actually see how many sites will remain as a result (click the filter to then apply it), and clicking multiple filters will apply them one on top of the other. Thanks Trevor for pointing this out. – SWL

Using Emergent Classification as a Starting (Not End) Point

http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/

From elearningpost comes mention of this useful article by Peter Merholz (some may remember him from ‘peterme‘ days, one of my earliest regular blog reads).

D’Arcy, King and I had been trading emails a few weeks back on the value of emergent classifications systems like those seen in Flickr for use in learning object repositories. Clearly, the idea is getting a bit of play, at least within the blogosphere.

What troubled me was that some of the current executions seemed a little bit like a baby/bathwater thing – yes, emergent classification systems are interesting and reflect actual users’ language usage, but they are also problematic – in being flattened, they do not have the depth (and the corresponding teaching ability) that hierarchical taxononmies can offer their users, and are also plagued with some of the problems Merholz points to. I mean, have you ever actually tried to find something you know should be there but didn’t know the classification for, (as opposed to just serendipidously browsing), in an flattened keyword system?

Instead, I think Merholz describes better than I did in my emails to D’Arcy and King what I think we should be looking towards – using ’emergent’ temrs as the basis for creating connections between terms users actually use, as the basis for continual refinement of more complicated, less flattened, taxonomies.

How would this actually work – at the very least I think it could show up in things like ‘type ahead’ functionality that tries to complete the term you are entering based on previous ’emergenet’ terms, or else asking the user to confirm whether they were using a term in one sense or another after they have submitted their choice. – SWL