Author: sleslie

Another open source CMS – Interactive Learning Environment

http://virtualschool.edu/ile/

Again new to me but maybe not new (why does no one put dates on their pages!), an early version of a new open source ‘cms’, this time in part notable because it is written in Ruby.

Also, you may or may not have noticed that I am slowly moving over some of the more trafficed resources from the old site. So far I’ve reposted the list of open source course management systems, which I am now trying to keep more up to date. More to come. – SWL

Open Learning Management System (O-LMS)

http://www.psych.utah.edu/learn/olms/

New to me is this java-based open source ‘LMS’ from the Department of Psychology at the University of Utah. This system is designed to support “vigorous shared knowledge communities” and as such focuses very much on communication and collaboration tools and seems to recognize the role of shareable learning content though it is unclear to me what kind of actual functionality it offers there. One thing that seems slightly unfortunate is to base an open source project on Oracle and Solaris, but this may well have been what was literally at hand. – SWL

Draft paper on using community software for rich constructivist education

http://tecfa.unige.ch/proj/seed/catalog/
docs/sevilla03-schneider.pdf

This 39 page paper (draft 1.5) by Daniel Schneider is well worth the effort. On top of the ton of good thinking on why traditional CMS don’t suffice and what roles the instructor might play within different pedagogical designs, the paper was worthwhile simply for introducing (at least to me) the term “Community, Content and Collaboration Management Systems” (C3MS) to describe packages such as Plone, PostNuke and Drupal. As the author notes, these are often discussed as ‘content management systems’ but this term belies much of their true nature as collaborative and community-building content management systems. – SWL

– via [Kairosnews]

IMS releases elearning specification Abstract Framework

http://www.imsglobal.org/af/index.cfm

“The IMS Abstract Framework (IAF) is a device to enable the IMS to describe the context within which it will continue to develop its eLearning technology specifications. This framework is not an attempt to define the IMS architecture, rather it is a mechanism to define the set of services for which IMS may or may not produce a set of interoperability specifications.” It’s hard to describe how huge this is. A lot of work has gone into this. It is not for the faint of heart. Start with the white paper, that alone is worth a few days or reading and digesting, and is invaluable for the appendices alone. – SWL

Download IMS Specifications as Content Packages

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

You can now download the various IMS specification documents packaged as an IMS Content Packages themselves. The advantages, as their feed says, are that “by downloading the specification as IMS packaged content, you can see what a content package looks like and how it is organized. You can also import it as a learning resource into your Content Packaging enabled learning management system or repository.” – SWL

“The proper way to become an instructional technologist”

http://www.listserv.uga.edu/cgi-bin/wa?
A2=ind9803&L=itforum&P=R587&m=2140

Digging back through the ITFORUM mailing list archives for that last post brought me across this gem by Lloyd Rieber of The University of Georgia. It was originally delivered as the 1998 Peter Dean Lecture, but I’m linking to this version because of all of the interesting discussion on the mailing list it generated. – SWL

June Lester on the ‘SME’s Viewpoint’

http://thejuniverse.blogs.com/afterhours/
2003/10/surviving_cours.html

June Lester is a mathematician and an educator, and one of the people brave enough to help facilitate the ‘blogtalk’ we tried over the last few weeks. She’s posted a great piece on the frustration a ‘SME’ can feel in the so-called ‘course-development wars.’ She’s right of course – subject matter experts in education have also often taught the material before and understand quite well how to communicate it’s intricacies, and treating them solely as providers of content will almost certainly produce a lesser learning experience (as well as antagonize them.) …
Continue reading “June Lester on the ‘SME’s Viewpoint’”

More thoughts on ‘Surviving Course Development Wars’

http://www.xplana.com/articles/archives/course_dev_wars

This piece by Susan Smith Nash on Xplana made me laugh. I wonder if anyone working in online instructional development in post-secondary *hasn’t* experienced this kind of situation…
Continue reading “More thoughts on ‘Surviving Course Development Wars’”