It really is funny how these things work – last night I was lying in bed reflecting on the phenomenom I’ve been experiencing as a blogger in relation to other types of discussion or conferencing software I’ve used in the past (usenet, mailing lists, threaded discussions…) and then this morning I come into work and see this post from David Wiley – (Will the “real” community please stand up?), and this one by George Siemens (Current Edu-bloggers).
Author: sleslie
another elearning ‘blog’ – September 15
This site has some decent resources categorized into:
but NO RSS FEED! Which is o.k. I guess if it doesn’t see itself as a ‘blog’ or want to update people regularly about its contents, but looking at the source code (to see how easy it would be to scrape) it even calls itself a ‘blog’ in the comments!
Note to self – Maybe it would be helpful to gather a collection of pointers to creating RSS feeds from various different sources and from different formats, or what you should do if hand-creating content to make sure you don’t cut certain avenues off – there seems to be hundreds of ways and suggestions out there (can someone point me to an existing list?). In many cases instead of people having to change tools they use to create the more effective approach in some cases is to lead them to ways to bootstrap their current content. – SWL
Huge thanks to David Wiley for pointing to this huge trove of research resources on open source software. He’s right, this is the ‘motherlode.’ – SWL
– via [autounfocus]
Cisco Virtuoso 2.0 released
I typically pay more attention to apps focused on higher ed, but Cisco’s authoring tool, Virtuoso, came to my attention via it’s partnership with Unicon Academus, a CMS based on the JA-SIG uPortal framework. I guess the other reason to pay attention is that Cisco does have some history in the RLO world. Still not clear to me what one would have to do to get this product, though. – SWL
Notes on the Background of Back-Links
Nice synchronicity – D’Arcy and Brian are talking with Alan Levine from Maricopa about using Trackback (which I’ve never totally got as a Radio user that doesn’t have it built in) with learning objects, and then along comes this piece from Seth Gordon which is exactly what I’ve been missing to help me understand the uses and usefullness of trackback-like functions. (Do you think Ted Nelson will finally embrace the web now that it’s got trackback 😉 – SWL
Google Search: learning object reference models -SCORM
O.K., so this search is a little bit facetious – the fact that it returns lots of hits but none of them excatly what was intended is not proof that the only learning object reference model going is SCORM or that no other such thing is possible. I did this search in response to the line in David Davies recent reply to Norm Friesen’s paper that “If you have a strong pedagogic model and are serious about learning design then forget SCORM.” I don’t disagree – it seems clear that while SCORM might work for a pure 1 learner-content training model it is unsatisfying.
But, as they say on the ADL site, SCORM does try to “define(s) a Web-based learning ‘Content Aggregation Model’and ‘Run-Time Environment’ for learning objects …[which]… provides a comprehensive suite of e-learning capabilities that enable interoperability, accessibility and reusability of Web-based learning content.”
Maybe I’m misunderstanding hwo this will all unfold, but I kind of assumed that, like the below diagram of how SCORM instantiates various standards and methods into a reference model against which proposed objects can be tested, a similar reference would eventually emerge against which ‘units of learning’ could be compared? Does anyone know is this right?
(from http://www.adlnet.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=scorm12&cfid=368801&cftoken=17257342)
How (and why) to include an xhtml:body in a Radio UserLand RSS feed
“Sam Ruby and Don Box have both demonstrated valid RSS 2.0 feeds (Sam, Don) that include a <body> element, properly namespaced as XHTML. Quietly, last week, I joined the party. My primary feed now includes: …”
I’m pretty sure that this is relevant – it seems to me that if D’Arcy Norman had a look at this with his newfound experience in XML databases, and paired up with what Stephen Downes’ seems to be getting at in his distributed learning object network architecture, they’d come up with a solution pretty darn quickly. Just a hunch. – SWL
– posted in [Jon’s Radio] via [Bruce Landon’s Weblog for Students]
open-education.org :: open education content
It looks like George Siemens, Stephen Downes, Charles Lowe and a number of others have got their site going to support their emerging work on ‘open education,’ which looks to promote the creation and use of open source content. I expect we’ll be hearing a lot from this group as it appears to be made up of many of the most active minds in the elearning blogosphere. – SWL
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