Category: Learning Objects

A nice list of existing learning object repositories

The latest issue of the U.K. publication The Journal of Interactive Media in Education is structured around expert commentary on the recent book, edited by JIME editor Alison Littlejohn, Reusing Online Resources: A Sustainable Approach to eLearning, (Ed.) Allison Littlejohn. Kogan Page, London. ISBN 0749439491.

Such elearning and learning object luminaries as Tom Carey, Ed Walker and Terry Anderson offer commentaries on the 19 chapters of this work that covers the gamut of issues surrounding learning objects, and there is an associated discussion forum that the authors appear to be responding to. Worthwile just for the references one can mine in the citation areas! The commentary by Terry Anderson on chapter 19 “Reuse of Resources within Communities of Practice” seemed particularly timely. – SWL

– via [CARETblogging]

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

“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]

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

“Learning objects and e-learning standardization bear the imprint of the ideology and culture of the American military-industrial complex–of ways of thinking that are related either marginally or antithetically to the interests and values of education generally and public education in particular.“

Wow, I’m glad somebody said it! But then in reading this informative paper by Norm Friesen, it looks like somebody already had in a major way – he cites a reference to a work that sounds really interesting in this regard, The Classroom Arsenal: Military Research, Information Technology, and Public Education  by Douglas D. Noble.

I’m not sure I actually hold out that much hope of the educational community’s voice being heard in the larger arenas where commercial developers and industrial training agendas seem to dominate. But it is great that these kinds of objections are being aired openly, especially by someone as knowledgeable in the field as this paper’s author. – SWL

http://www.bloglines.com/public_display?username=EdTechPost&folder=322938

This links to a page I’ve built which aggregates RSS feeds from all of the LORs that I know of that produce them.

There’s been a lot flying around recently concerning the use of RSS to syndicate RLOs. I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the implications but haven’t fully managed to. This list, rather than being an attempt to create some sort of authoritative resource on the subject, is instead a way for me to see with my own eyes, all in one place, the results of current efforts to match RSS technology with LORs/RLOs. I need to do this because when the topics get this complex, my brain seems to need to work at the problem from both ends – both by trying to construct a theoretical model of the problem based on my understanding of the issues, the technologies and concepts at play, and also by literally looking at examples of what exists or what a solution could look like and then trying to bring these two together into some fit. In any case, that’s my motivation for throwing this together. – SWL

Another piece that helps to fill in some of the histroical context of why we are where we are generally when it comes to metadata initiatives, again found in the CMS/LMS/LCMS/Standards Archives of the always valuable elearningpost. – SWL

This will be old hat for many as this conference took place over a year ago in Montreal, but I stumbled across this archive of presentations by chance (whilst googling the collision of ‘LORS’ and ‘LCMSes’) and thought there may be some of general interest. The field has definitely moved on from here, but still not a bad place to get an overview of many of the projects that have taken place or that are currently underway in Canada. – SWL

“SciQ just went live. It’s a K-12 theme for CAREO that is being used to push learning objects into the classroom in Alberta.”

Go see the one of the products of D’Arcy’s (and many others at U of Calgary) long hours of work and an actual implementation of learning object respository software! Exciting stuff! – SWL

– from [D’Arcy Norman’s Learning Commons Weblog]