Author: sleslie

BECTA Paper on ‘Open Source Teaching’ and the Kaleidoscope Learning Object Repository

http://www.becta.org.uk/page_documents/
research/open_source_teaching.pdf

Likely you will have already seen reference to this paper in today’s OLDaily, but I felt it was worth reposting as it is a good paper and early on makes an important distinction that I think is too often left dormant in LOR projects and leads to no end of confusion about what people are trying to achieve.

This distinction has to do with the drivers behind the use of learning objects/repositories. The paper outlines 4:

– The efficiency route: the argument that learning objects and repositories enable scaleable reuse of materials and are thus a more efficient way to develop materials
– The teacher-centred route: sharing LOs will enable cross the board improvement of teaching materials
– The pupil-centred route: LOs, in that they also promote the separation of content and presentation and can be traversed to present new versions, enable accessibility and learning-style-centric versions of online materials
– The freedom argument: the LO approach allows instructors to take control of the means of production and share the intellectual product widely

more…
Continue reading “BECTA Paper on ‘Open Source Teaching’ and the Kaleidoscope Learning Object Repository”

Educational Technology Conferences for 2004

http://www.imd.macewan.ca/imd/content.php?contentid=26

From Clayton R. Wright at Grant MacEwan College comes this handy list of Ed Tech related conferences for 2004. I found it helpful because as someone also located in Western Canada, Clayton has noted some conferences (like the May 20-22 Distance Education Technologies Symposium sponsored by Athabasca University in Banff, Alberta) that might not always make some of the other US-focused or international lists. – SWL

OpalTree’s CADRiA

http://www.opaltree.com/

Early this week, BCcampus hosted an event to take a closer look at some of the open source course/learning management systems that are currently available and commence (or really continue) a province-wide dialog on the viability of implementing one and the issues surrounding such a project.

In the afternoon we were given a demo of OpalTree’s CADRiA system, out of Australia (what are they putting in the water down there!?! These folks seem to be simply bursting with innovation in the learning objects/elearning field!). In my mind the demo was actually a bit out of place in that particular day’s focus – when I think Course/LearningMS, I think more of delivery and tracking capabilities (of which CADRiA appears to lack many basic ones) instead of authoring, aggregation and searching capabilities (more à la LOR/LCMS, of which CADRiA had some simply mind bending qualities).

So if what you’re currently seeking is an LMS, I wouldn’t necessarily send you in this direction. But if you are involved with more of a learning content management/object repository-type issue, you’d do well to wade through their site, maybe look at their ‘demonstration’ flash movies, and see what they are doing. Read on for more…
Continue reading “OpalTree’s CADRiA”

Unemployment level of college grads surpasses that of high-school dropouts

http://www.epinet.org/content.cfm/
webfeatures_snapshots_archive_03172004

This isn’t an ‘edtech’ related item, but it was so striking I couldn’t pass up on posting it. The first graph is sheer number of unemployed, and shows that in the U.S. there are now more of them with college degrees than are high school drop outs. This in itself is not that shocking – as the report says, “There are, however, far more college graduates than high-school dropouts in our current labour force.” The graph shown in figure two should be more alarming, though its trends be not so steep – it depicts unemployed as a percentage of those two populations, and actually shows a decrease in unemployment for high school drop outs, but a steady increase for college graduates. I saw this referred to in an interesting article in Salon magazine about globalization and off-shoring software jobs to India, and as someone who works in both ‘high tech’ and ‘high ed’ it’s hard not to be worried about the implications. – SWL

SCORM 2004 Photoshop Examples Version 1.0

http://www.adlnet.org/index.cfm?
fuseaction=DownFile&libid=641&bc=false

There’s likely to be a few posts circulating today on this as the ADL sent out a news release via its RSS feed to the effect that they were releasing a number of new items.

The ones in particular that were of interest to me are these example content packages – interesting because the collection illustrates a number of the different sequencing scenarios that can be addressed under the current ‘Simple Sequencing’ specification. In particular, I found the powerpoint presentation bundled at the root of the zip file (warning, it is about 11MB in total) to be helpful in laying out visually how these different scenarios unfolded. – SWL

Controlling your Language – Links to Metadata Vocabularies

http://www.tasi.ac.uk/resources/vocabs.html

In searching out existing controlled vocabularies for a project you could do far worse as a starting point than this extensive collection from the ‘Technical Advisory Service for Images,’ another JISC-funded service. Hats off to David Mattison for the pointer. – SWL

RSS Feeds from Repository Projects

http://www.bloglines.com/myblogs_display?
folder=621267&since=9&Display=Display

Note what I mean here are the LOR projects (not the repositories themselves, which you can find over here) that are producing RSS feeds as a way to communicate about their projects or otherwise coordinate their efforts. These include:

– D’Arcy Norman’s Learning Commons Weblog (for the CAREO/APOLLO projects)
– The Resource Pool, a Eduspecs-funded test pilot of a CAREO implmentation
– R2R: Learning Design – a new initiative out of University of Calgary to implement a Learning Design tool

– APOLLO-DEV, the proper technical blog for the Apollo project at U of Calgary
– Stòr Cùram, a blog from the University of Strathclyde in Scotland on their LOR initiative, apparently employing Intrallect’s Intralibrary

I haven’t listed CogDogBlog in here, as Alan posts on so many other things beside the Maricopa Learning Exchange, but it’s certainly not because it doesn’t deserve attention. I expect I missed other’s as well, or maybe have you filed somewhere else in Bloglines but still cover your feed. If you are working on an LOR implementation or development project and running a blog, I’d love to hear about it, include it on this list and follow along.

And what, you ask, about my own project… embarassingly, I am so swamped trying to meet our initial project requirements phase deadlines that we haven’t created anything public to date, except this space here, which is not an official ‘organ’ of the project. Stay tuned for more news, though… – SWL

Professional Development Model & Resource Re-Use Scenarios from Flexible E-Content Project

http://www.fp.ucalgary.ca/maclachlan/
projectdiffusionintro.htm

For people either building new repository software or even figuring out what they need in implementing existing software, this might be of interest. Not quite a set of use cases, but maybe close – a set of scenarios which “attempt … to map the process that an educator might walk through to implement digital resources in classroom or online environments….
While the exemplars focus on K-12 learning, the Model and Workshop could apply to post-secondary instructors and designers as well. Developers may find the Case Examples informative in the development of flexible content tools.” – SWL

Joint IMS/CNI Whitepaper on interoperation between different types of ‘repositories’

http://www.imsglobal.org/
DLims_white_paper_publicdraft_1.pdf

I can only assume that the only reason someone didn’t point this paper out to me during my recent thrashing about concerning the difference between ‘institutional’ repositories and ‘learning object’ repositories is that, like me, they had never seen it before (or maybe you’re all just sadists and like to watch me flail about in public!)

Well in any case, hallelujah! This draft paper by Neil McLean and Clifford Lynch from June 28, 2003 is in my mind a model of clarity on the reasons for why these beasts are different (for one, the ‘transient’ versus ‘archival’ nature of their contents) but also why and how they need to interoperate.

Which is where I’ve landed on this topic – we need distinct types of repository software because they fill distinct end-user needs. But by implementing both common open protocols and using structured markup languages that can be mapped, we keep open the possibility of interoperating if and when this make sense. And I stress that last ‘if’ – the next piece in the puzzle I am waiting to see are convincing use cases, or even better yet convincing demonstrations, of search interfaces across catalogues of heterogeneous materials (e.g. records for books, ‘eprints’ and learning objects all at once) that don’t just confuse the matter entirely. – SWL