Category: Elearning Standards

Integrating Library Reserves and Course Management Systems: Aleph, RSS, and Sakai

http://www.educause.edu/LibraryDetailPage/
666?ID=MWR0566

Hey, I’m as excited about the potential of service-oriented architectures and the ‘loosely coupled’ appproach as the next guy, but on a regular basis I find myself lamenting the seeming lack of real world working examples one can currently point to.

Yet every time I feel this way, along comes another presentation like this one, in this case describing the use of RSS to display library resource holdings within the Sakai CMTools application, that help me believe the grand vision of diversity and choice with stability and integration may actually come true. So don’t dispair; ‘network economy’ effects to the contrary, slowly cracks are forming in the vendor lockdown and silos we all lament … really … I think. – SWL

JISC’s non- technical guide to E-Learning Frameworks

http://www.elearning.ac.uk/features/nontechguide1

I expect this is actually as ‘non-technical’ as one should expect a document to be about something as nerdy as E-Learning Frameworks but it’s not necessarily for the faint of heart. (actually, it really is pretty well non-technical!) Still, I’d encourage you to have a go if you’ve come across the Framework before but aren’t really sure what it’s about.

For my part, I keep wondering how long its going to be before the ‘small pieces’ folks (you know who you are!) protest this – these needn’t be antagonistic, but if your goal is to abolish all enterprise computing (instead of the silo’d monolithic systems that are the target of this type of approach) then you’d better come out shooting! Seriously, I’m just taking the mickey, (it’s Friday afternoon and all,) but certain calls to arms would have you believe we’d do better to have a student information system on every desktop (or better yet, none at all!) – SWL

DC-Education Application Profile

http://dublincore.org/educationwiki/
DC_2dEducation_20Application_20Profile

Possibly of interest to some of you metadata mavens out there is this wiki where you can find ongoing work of the Dublin Core Education Working Group, including this early draft of an application profile of Dublin Core to apply to educational materials. It’s not exactly ‘knock your socks off’ kind of stuff but then let’s hope metadata never is considered such.

Clearly an improvement over straight ahead Dublin Core in adding things like ‘Education Level,’ but as some folks from the library community recently reminded us, it’s not like anyone’s actually using much more than the equivalent of Dublin Core anyways when they use the LOM. Oh yeah, I keep forgetting, automatic metadata generation/harvesting is going to save our souls and use all the LOM elements to then rapdily (magically, automatically…) re-assemble personalized learning. LOM mani padme LOM. Boy, am I having a rough Saturday! – SWL

Great Post/Article on Metadata (really!)

http://www.computer.org/multimedia/mu2004/promo1.pdf

Raymond Yee helpfully points out this great article by Dick Bulterman titled “Is it Time for a Metadata Moratorium” from which Raymond extracts this true nugget:

“For nontext data – such as video, images, audio, and so on – direct mining is difficult, but exactly at the point that metadata might be useful, manual creation simply doesn’t get done because creating useful metadata descriptions (the proverbial thousands of words) is not in the critical path of content creation.”

Seems obvious, right? And yet, hyperbolic testimonials to the wonders of flickr and del.icio.us aside, this seems exactly the problem (one of many) that countless repository initiatives seem destined to replicate in positing a repository ‘container’ that isn’t even loosely coupled with either the content creation or content use/re-use environments or workflows. Mea Culpa. Mea Maxima Culpa. – SWL

A Repository of Metadata Crosswalks

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december04/godby/12godby.html

It’s been such an insane couple of weeks for me with work and travel that the best I can do is simply point to this new D-Lib article by Jean Godby and friends. But if her last piece for Ariadne surveying application profiles of the LOM was any indication, you should go read this now. – SWL

CWSpace Poster at SPARC Institutional Repository Workshop

http://cwspace.mit.edu/docs/ProjectMgt/Reports/SPARC-IR-Workshop/sparc-poster.html

Via a post on the Dspace-LOR mailing list by William Reilly of MIT comes mention of this poster concerning various content packaging methods for LOs. The poster was produced for use at the SPARC Institutional Repository Workshop by the CWSpace project, a project investigating the use of Dspace to archive MIT’s Open CourseWare materials. The poster is an awkward size, but well worth a look as it gives a good overview of the issues and some of the alternate approaches to content packaging that are currently converging.

‘I hear that train a coming….’ – SWL

Ariadne Article – ‘What Do Application Profiles Reveal about the LOM Standard?’

http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue41/godby/

Score one for the librarians!

This article by Carol Jean Godby of the OCLC is an absolute bombshell and a must-read for folks working with learning object metadata standards. She follows up on works by Norm Friesen and Lorna Campbell that survey existing application profiles of the IEEE LOM with a view to answering three main questions:

  1. Which elements are most widely adopted?
  2. What are the prospects for interoperability given these profiles and the entirely optional nature of any of the elements
  3. What can be learnt about the motivation for developing an application profile (a.k.a. why can’t us educational technologist just submit to one standard way of describing things or let the librarians do it)

Somewhat unsurprisingly, like Friesen and Campbell before her, she reports that the most used fields from the LOM can be easily mapped to the existing Dublin Core fields, and that we’re pretty much all over the map when it comes to all of the special ‘pedagogical’ type fields that were supposedly the motivation for this whole exercise in the first place. (more…)
Continue reading “Ariadne Article – ‘What Do Application Profiles Reveal about the LOM Standard?’”

New IMS Specification Download Pages and License

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

IMS has a re-designed website, and a fairly unwelcomed addition to getting access to the specification documents. As they state on the individual specification pages “HTML documents may be viewed online, but may not be printed without permission. To download an electronic copy for printing, please go to the specification download page.” I guess this makes some sense. They aren’t restricting access, just asking people to agree to their license, which on the surface seems o.k., though it is not straight boilerplate, and systems implementors will want to think through what if any implications Section II, “License Terms for Implementation” have to them. (That said, I can’t wait to read Stephen’s reaction when he finds out he needs to re-enter his personal data everytime he wants a new copy or a different file) – SWL

Article on ‘Intro to the Search/Retrieve URL Service (SRU)’

http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/morgan/

Related to the last post, this article from the latest issue of Ariadne gives a good introduction to the Search/Retrieve URL Service, a protocol designed to “define a standard form for Internet search queries as well as the structure of the responses.”
Even if the specific topic isn’t greatly of interest to you, the article may be useful in having one of the most stragithforward explanations of the difference between SOAP and REST-based web services, and why, contrary to all the hype, there is still some value in SOAP-based services. – SWL

Discovery+ : Federated searching of bibliographic resources for elearning

http://devil.lib.ed.ac.uk:8080/dplus/

Via the latest CETIS Quarterly newsletter (thanks Stephen) came news of this interesting U.K.-based project. According to the precis on the E-Learning Framework site, the project will deliver “web services and toolkit[s] capable of searching various library and resource gateways and transforming the search results to reusable and standardised schemas for e-learning purposes.”

If I’ve understood correctly (and it’s entirely possible I haven’t) what will be provided is middleware that will enable the core services of search/expose, request/deliver, and submit/store, across heterogenous repositories (from Z39.50 library systems, to LORs, to Amazon and more) through a single set of web service interfaces. Crikey! – SWL