Author: sleslie

Workforce Connections – Us Dept of Labour “online knowledge exchange”

http://www.workforce-connections.com/

A site from the U.S. Department of Labor that “provides an interactive on-line knowledge exchange environment. Multiple Federal agencies are using Workforce Connections to support knowledge transfer in a Section 508 compliant, SCORM conformant environment.”

The longer document I received by email (and am not sure how public it is) describes this further as “Workforce Connections is a flexible environment that enables personnel without programming expertise to create, acquire, and share knowledge.  This knowledge-based environment can be presented as a traditional web site, as an on-line self-paced course or presentation, or as a community of practice/interest web site.”

Now this sounds pretty cool.

– SWL

Sun Microsystems The Java Problem

http://www.internalmemos.com/memos/memodetails.php?memo_id=1321

This may be getting larger play and I’m just not hearing about it – I haven’t been keeping as close tabs on many of my news sources for the past two weeks as I normally do. For any one who’s worked a bit with Java there’s actually nothing that shocking here, but this internal memo from Sun’s own engineering team affirms what everyone kind of thought but so far was, for me at least, just anecdotal conjecture. Stunning. – SWL

IRRODL: XI: International E-learning Specifications

http://www.irrodl.org/content/v3.2/tech11.html

A decent annotated list of resources and definitions for elearning standards from Norm Friesen and Rory Mcgreal in the latest International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning.  I’m having a hard time comprehending, though, how one would consider JA-SIG or EML as “Learning Object Repositories.” EML is certainly relevant as an emerging specification or technology, and maybe just mis-filed. JA-SIG, well I guess in that it is being developed within higher ed it might, just might, fall in here someplace, but I’m not sure the extent to which it is a ‘specification’ or specifically related to e-learning. In any case, a decent starting point to a huge field. – SWL

IRRODL: When is a Learning Object not an Object: A first step towards a theory of learning objects

http://www.irrodl.org/content/v3.2/soc-hes.html

Hooray!

 I know this isn’t the first article to do this, but this is a really coherent, thorough and technically savvy explanation of why it is not a good idea to try to define ‘learning objects’ through references to object oriented programming (OOP). I think a lot of the people I respect working on learning objects have already left behind the effort to try and define them strictly (or at all) in terms of OOP concepts. And like these authors, most of them seem to be moving on to clarifying the questions of

“What is the point/purpose of learning objects? Are they here to solve problems in the education system? Are they here to enhance current instruction? Do they form part of a revolutionary front that will transform the provision of face-to-face or distance education? ”

– SWL

About Me

Scott Leslie is an educational technology researcher and emerging technology analyst. He currently works as the Manager of the BCcampus Learning Resources Centre, a multi-disciplinary ‘open content’ repository. In addition, he researches course management systems, repository and eportfolio software with Dr. Bruce Landon as part of the Western Cooperative on Educational Telecommunications’ (WCET) Edutools.info team.
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Whiteboard- possible Open Source Competitor to Blackboard?

Quote: “Whiteboard is a fully-featured and -integrated courseware system, targeted toward colleges and universities.  It is written in PHP with a MySQL back-end, and is fully administrable through its web interface.” – source: [Serious Instructional Technology]

Well, I will give this a proper look examination in due course through edutools, but I had a quick look based on this posting. On the surface it does look a bit like Blackboard. It’s not impossible that is in fact a lot like Blackboard – up until version 5 at least, Blackboard was definitely cobbled together and could have been produced through an open source process. My sense, though, is that it is fairly far along as a mature product with a more sophisticated code-based now, and I would be surprise if the resemblance here was more than superficial. – SWL

Languages for the Java VM

This is pretty far off the EdTech map (probably completely off) but I wanted to include this here as it is ammunition in the ever unfolding religious debate about Java versus .NET – this page has a huge “list of programming languages for the Java virtual machine aside of Java itself.” – SWL