What is a learning object, technically?

There’s a discussion going on currently at the ETUG list, British Columbia’s Ed Tech Users Group list hosted at C2T2 (http://www.c2t2.ca/, and just happens to be where I work 😉 that has me thinking again about learning objects. I’m planning to post something there if I can get my thoughts together. The thoughts are along the lines of the connection between learning object model and approach and pedagogical approach, not unlike some of the motivations I think are behind the Educational Modeling Language out of Europe or the recent sequencing work at IMS. In trying to gather my thoughts on this issue I did a few google searches on the connection between learning object models and pedagogical models and came across this article by three folks in Australia. I wanted to capture the URL here as I really liked the line of thought (although am not sure I 100% agree with the conclusion) and want to follow up with more in this area.

For me, this is actually the best aspect of the discussions on learning objects (and related ones on CMSes and some other educational technologies) – they constantly spur us on to think and talk more and more deeply about the nature of teaching and education. I think this ongoing investigation and dialog is far more important, and has improved the quality of our collective teaching and edtech practice,  than the conclusions we may end up drawing. It is this collective shift towards increasingly reflexive practice that I think is often overlooked when trying to cost out the returns on investment of technology in education. – SWL

Microsoft announces its intention to acquire Placeware

“Microsoft Corp. today announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire PlaceWare Inc., a leading provider of Web conferencing services that enable businesses to conduct real-time, interactive presentations and meetings over the Internet.” 

Saw this announcement first in Kevin Kruse’s newsletter e-learningGuru (http://www.e-learningguru.com/, where he also prognosticates that 2003 could see MS acquire Macromedia – oh please don’t let that happen!) I remember first finding Placeware in 1997 when looking for a synchronous system for Mount Royal College. We didn’t choose it as it had a bit of a price tag and I had a budget of $0, but I remember being blown away by the product at the time. Not only did it have advanced communication and presentation features, it was playing around with an auditorium model at the time that tried to locate people ‘next’ to each other in virtual space. I thought this last part was great but then never saw it again in later releases. It seemed like they moved away from Higher Ed as a target market, somewhat understandably giving the much more immense corporate training or marketing markets. Still, even if it is MS acquiring them hopefully this means they will have a future. – SWL

reply to Joe Hart’s post on Inspiration Software, Cognitive Maps, and the Web

Joe Hart, who runs the informative EduResources site, posted an interesting piece on the possible use cognitive maps to (as he says) “organize the many web sites that [he’s] identified that relate to higher education online instructional resources. What I want to do is categorize and organize the resources so that the EduResources portal that I’m designing will be easy to use; I want the portal web site to be an effective entryway to online instructional resources for faculty and instructional designers.”

I started drafting a response to Joe directly in email, but then decided it made more sense to just post it here.

Joe’s probably well aware of this movement, but it strikes me that what he is trying to do is similar to what others are trying to accomplish by visualizing Topic Maps, concept maps and other taxonomy visualization projects.

I only follow these peripherally, but my sense is that these things have been evolving for years, and certainly are far more real than when I was first introduced to the techniques and technologies in the early 90’s. But what I find exciting is what I perceive as a movement towards the more organic creation of order, and visualizations that are not pre-set drawings into which we can locate resources and knowledge, but instead representations of semantic meaning that are created dynamically on the basis of some replicable and (eventually) recognizable algorithm or patter and that further improve with use.

In any case, Joe’s post prompted me to dig back and find some URLs that might be of interest on the topic. I definitely appreciate his motivation as I too find myself swamped by the sheer mass of information and the immense inter-connectedness of the various knowledge spaces and domains I work and play in, and long for good visualizations of this complex knowledge. – SWL

Topic Maps

The TAO of Topic Maps – http://www.ontopia.net/topicmaps/materials/tao.html

Easy Topic Maps – http://easytopicmaps.com/index.php?page=TopicMapFaq

LiveTopics for Radio – http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/outlines/liveTopics.html

Ten Taxonomy Myths – http://www.montague.com/review/myths.shtml

Taxonomy and other visualizers

Touchgraph Link Browser – http://www.touchgraph.com/browser/LinkBrowser.html

Wordmap (Taxonomy mapping software, a bit expensive) – http://www.wordmap.com/index.html

Antartica Visual Net (hierarchical directory visualization software, also likely expensive) – http://antarctica.net/products.html

Conzilla (Prototype Concept Browser) – http://www.conzilla.org/

WebOnto (neat Java-based taxonomy browser, not sure of availability or release status) – http://eldora.open.ac.uk:3000/webonto

and finally, for a completely different kind of blog mapping:

Blogmapper – http://www.blogmapper.com/

TextWeaver

I’ve been waiting a while to see this – the new threaded-discussion tool that was developed by Andrew Feenberg and the folks at San Diego State has now been released. It is open source. There is a B.C. connection – it runs on top of CourseReader (developed out of SFU/TL-NCE/Linda Harasim). I am going to download and look at a copy as soon as I get a chance. – SWL

Semantic Interoperability, Communities of Practice and the CanCore Learning Object Metadata Profile

This is a great paper by Norm Friesen (of Cancore fame) that backs up the conclusion we came to this afternoon concerning the value of the Cycle project. The Cycle is providing expert context and evaluation of the learning objects that are best left out of the rigid meta-data definitions and instead best developed within the communities of practice. To quote the abstract:

“The vision of reusable digital learning resources or objects, made accessible through coordinated repository architectures and metadata technologies, has gained considerable attention within education and training communities.  However, the pivotal role of metadata in this vision –and in more general conceptions of the semantic Web– raises important and longstanding issues about classification, description and meaning.  These issues are of special importance in indexing educational resources, where questions of application and relevance to particular learning contexts often supersede more conventional forms of access such as author, title or date.  This paper will survey the controlled vocabularies defined in a number of educational metadata specifications (in particular, the set of values such as “quiz”, “simulation”, and “exercise” used to identify a “learning resource type”). Understanding these vocabularies in terms of their potential harmonization or rationalization in the CanCore Profile, this paper will illustrate the problems inherent in specifying educational and subject contexts and types.  It will propose that the specification of these and other elements can best be approached not through further formalization and abstraction, but via careful study of their use, currency and relevance among existing communities of practice.  It will conclude by emphasizing that a similar acknowledgement of the importance of community and practice will also be significant for further developments in XML and the semantic Web.”

Lancaster team present evaluation engine for e-learning resource brokerage platform.

“A team from the Department of Communication systems at Lancaster University developed an evaluation engine that helps rank e-learning resources in the ‘Universal Brokerage Platform for Learning Resources’.”

– reposted from : [CETIS: Standards in Education Technology]

Very interesting – need to find out if the assessment data is also becoming part of the meta-data and if so how they are doing that – have they extended one of the existing standards (or did it already exist in one of the standards)? – SWL

‘Through the Web’ Editor Widgets

Really useful reference on WYSIWYG web page editors that are usable over the web (much like what I am writing in right now in Radio8!) More and more there is no excuse for any application that uses forms to create web content not to include this – many are free or cheap components that one can just include in larger applications. – SWL 

Extending the Pedagogy of Threaded-Topic Discussions

FINALLY! Maybe others are thinking and writing in this way, but this is the first article I have come across that throws into question the efficacy of threaded discussion forums. This feature is included by default in so many ‘course management’ suites and yet I have  seen it used well in only a few occassions, and badly in many. I was waiting for someone to propose a better solution – I first started introducing educators to the idea of using threaded discussions to support class discussion in 1994 and knew there was a better model ! – SWL