Learning Objects – Page 2

Project Pad – web-based media annotation and collaboration

http://projectpad.northwestern.edu/ppad2/index.html

Staying with the Sakai-theme for a bit (but in fact the more interesting theme emerging for me is “affable web-based tools for rich media manipulation,” more to come), in the Sakai wiki I came across Project Pad from Northwestern University. It is a suite of audio and video annotation tools, including tools to annotate quicktime a/v files, flash movies and mp3 audio streams, still images, and do audio transcription. The suite includes two tools for searching and managing content stored in external digital media repositories such as Fedora systems, Z39.50 library catalogs, and Google and uses the Common Query Language. And it looks to be becoming integrated with Sakai. Not sure this is a flickr-killer (but who says it needed killing anyways) but maybe one alternative worth investigating for those attracted by some of that functionality (it is actually much broader) but uneasy with sending their faculty off to 3rd party commercially hosted services. – SWL

On Using DSpace as a LOR

www.edtechpost.ca/gems/coppul-lor3.ppt

Pheew! Back home now after a hectic (for me) week of travelling and talking, one of which was a talk I gave to the Council of Prairie and Pacific University Libraries (COPPUL) Distance Education Forum on the feasibility of using DSpace as a general learning object repository.

I have been pretty hard on this idea in the past, so I was glad to be given the opportunity to revisit the idea in more depth. And while it might not seem so from the slides, I actually found myself softening to the idea, in part because of some innovations from MIT and others to accomodate learning materials. But my main message, which was perhaps buried a bit at the end of the talk, was that it is one thing to evaluate DSpace against an abstract set of functionality that a LOR should have, (which is kind of what I did here) and quite another to say that it will solve the problems of finding, sharing, remixing and reusing learning content, a question some would say has already been asked and answered a few times. – SWL

RepoMMan Project

http://www.hull.ac.uk/esig/repomman/index.html

To keep going on the apparent ‘open source repository’ theme today, this JISC-funded project appears to be using Fedora and Sakai to investigate automated population of metadata based on contextual information provided by the portal environment, to examine the boundaries of personal versus institutional digital resource management, and to develop some workflow aroud common repository tasks based around Service Oriented Architecture. Phew. Fedora is a different approach than DSpace, though both originated from the library/institutional repository world, and yet in my earlier investigations it too seemed to also have some limitations to its effectiveness as a LOR. Early days yet for this project, but maybe some promise in moving it closer to serve those (and other) needs better. And you just gotta love the name. – SWL

Presentation on Archiving Course Websites to DSpace, Using a Content Packaging Profile & Web Services

http://cwspace.mit.edu/docs/ProjectMgt/Reports/
DLF-Spring2006/MIT-CWSpace-DLF-Spring2006.ppt.htm

For a long time I’ve been asked about available open source learning object repositories, and specifically about whether DSpace could work as a LOR. My answer regarding DSpace, up to now, has always been – well it depends on what your use cases are. If you didn’t care about things like IMS Content Packages and learning object metadata, then sure, maybe it could work, but it always seemed like a stretch, that those asking the question were looking to adopt a system because of its license but not because of its functionality.

In this regards, I had always held out some hope on the CWSpace project. As I have mentioned before, CWSpace is a project looking to archive the educational materials found in MIT OpenCourseWare using DSpace technology, and in so doing provide a valueable extension in functionality to DSpace itself.

With the presentation above it looks like they are making some progress – it details how they plan to deal with two major issues, mapping OCW’s object model to DSpace’s object model, and improving the interfaces to DSpace to make them more conducive to working with living (not archived) materials. NOTE: this presentation really only useful for standards geeks and other interoperability weenies (like myself, I guess). Not for the faint of heart.

It’s unclear to me whether they are shipping code yet for this, but it is still encouraging to see some progress, and for me really encouraging to see the library/institutional repository crowd take seriously the differences between their standard use cases and the ones from the LOR world; a big step forward from the red flag that’s been waving from the DSpace site for years claiming it can accomodate ‘learning objects’ (whatever that meant). – SWL

DOOR – Digital Open Object Repository

http://door.sourceforge.net/

OK, I know NOTHING about this, so don’t even ask, but it seemed like something of interest (if you are still flailing away at that LOR hobgoblin) – an open source Learning Object Repository written in PHP and using MySQL as the backend which supports both the IMS metadata and content package specifications. Looks exactly as uninspiring as every other LOM-based, forms driven LOR, but if that’s what you want, well then at least it’s open source, right? Can you tell I’m having a LORrible day? (grimace) – SWL

CLOE Partners with Desire2Learn

http://www.desire2learn.com/news/newsdetails_21.asp

An announcement from the CLOE project that they have adopted Desire2Learn as their repository technology. CLOE is significant as a Canadian project for early on investigating different models of ‘exchange’ to motivate faculty and institutions to participate in sharing networks. Will be interesting to see this once it has been deployed. – SWL

Why does ‘Freesound’ succeed when so many learning object repositories fail?

http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/

Bryan Alexander posted a link to The Freesound Project and it was interesting to me for a whole slew of reasons.

It was interesting first off because I have been using the site myself for the last few months; I am getting more into making music with digital audio tools (yes, yes, I will post something, someday, give me time to build up my courage) and so turned to Freesound to find new samples for a drum machine. And it works; not perfectly maybe, but you can definitely find new samples fairly easily, and it has a number of other social affordances (‘users who downloaded this also…’ and folksonomies) that lead you to related stuff you might like.

I was interesting also on a personal level as it was built as part of the 2005 International Computer Music Conference. ICMC is dear to my heart because way back in 1995, I was responsible for building the first website to support a ICMC conference, when it was hosted in Banff (the only remnant of which I can now find is this reference, the ‘WayBack machine‘ not even going back that far, so safe to say Internet ancient history!)

And finally it’s also of interest as a ‘repository’ of shareable remixable content, and one that would have to be judged relatively successful at that, with around 10,000 ‘objects’ and almost a million downloads. So what makes it tick, why does it succeed when so many of our various ‘learning object repository’ projects are failing so miserably? Let’s consider (more)….
Continue reading “Why does ‘Freesound’ succeed when so many learning object repositories fail?”

LORNet Conference – Pre-Conference Workshops

Note to self: The start of November is a bad time to launch a new system if you also want to attend conferences 😉

So while I have no time to be away right now, I am lucky to be spending this week in downtown Vancouver with a good portion of the academic world’s best minds in the field of learning object networks research.

I am not going to even try blogging the conference. My boat anchor of a laptop’s wireless doesn’t work (2 weeks and counting until brand-spanking new laptop arrives!) and I’m a lousy typist to begin with. Instead, here’s a brain dump of questions the first few sessions triggered for me or quotes that roused me enough to write them down:

– if the metadata field isn’t mandatory, don’t even ask for it
– what is the equivalent of a ‘playlist’ for learning objects? Is it the re-aggregated form (lesson, course) or something else? (and how do we get the information? how do we build the last.fm of learning objects)
– handles/unique IDs *are* in fact an important issue (and URLs aren’t the solution for them, but neither is any system that requires manual work to create the handle).
– need to find out how people (mainly instructors at this point) make evaluative judgements on the potential usefulness of a learning resource? what do they base it on? how long do they actually take in making these judgements?
– identity management is *the* major nut to crack for the next tsunami of innovation to break (web 3.doh?!)

Sorry if these don’t make any sense to anyone but me (do they make sense to me?) Wish you were here 😉 – SWL

Connexions ‘Rhaptos’ Software Released

http://rhaptos.org/

The folks at Connexions have released the software that powers that site as open source code, so presumably you can now run your own instance if you wanted. Connexions is neat in that it shows a working example of learning content as XML being re-aggregated and re-skinned. For me the challenge with its particular implementation is in how the content is created – the Word-to-CXML convertor has got to be a great improvement over asking faculty to hand-code XML (where but at a Science and Engineering school could you even begin to get away with this), but it still strikes me as a barrier to the approach. That said, 115 courses/2000+ modules is nothing to sneer at, so clearly some users are willing to use the current set of tools on offer through Connexions. It should be noted too that the paradigm for reusable content has always been more reusers than original authors, and in this regard, reusing content in other contexts once created in Connexions seems reasonably straightforward.

Tools like eXe offer some glimmer of what an easier to use tool to author learning content that was also XML might look like, but I’m not sure I’m convinced yet. Some will no doubt rejoin about the virtues of RSS in this regard; again, I remain interested but unconvinced. Not of the virtues of XML or of the traction of RSS for syndication of content, but unconvinced that it represents the solution of how to easily author learning content in a format that is then easily findable, re-aggregatable or re-presentable (which I take to be the problem at hand, but maybe I’ve misunderstood). Structured blogging? Again, maybe.

I know that in my own project, our first attempt to get an approach working that made use of an XML database as a backend failed. Our second attempt, which went into pilot last week, uses The Learning Edge. It doesn’t deal with XML-native content at all, mostly because no one has any for us to deal with. It focuses on dealing with what people do have – all sorts of HTML, Word docs, powerpoints, PDFs, Flash movies. It tries to assist with re-use (the ‘re-aggregating and re-presenting’ above) by integrating a WYSIWYG authoring environment directly with the repository that allows people to drag and drop existing content into new collections. We will see how it works. I am definitely not holding it up as the way to do this either; in general I remain unconvinced (and exhausted) by the entire enterprise, and mostly just want to go off and play my bass. – SWL

Any B.C. or Alberta-based users of LAMS? Atutor?

If you are currently using or planning to use LAMS or Atutor and are located in B.C. or Alberta, please let me know. I am currently scouting out integration opportunities for our repository software, and these two are potential ones that have come up, but I need to know if its of any value to my current stakeholders (no, I’m not planning a takeover of Alberta; we have colleagues there who are also implementing the same repository software). – SWL