Category: Learning Objects

Academic ADL Co-Lab’s Database of Repositories

http://projects.aadlcolab.org/repository-directory/

New from the Academic ADL Co-Lab is this searchable database of existing learning object repositories. Most of these are not software you could download to run your ‘own’ repository but instead existing institutional or subject-based repositories in which you *might* be able to participate (which raises the entirely sticky issue of ‘how many repositories do we actually need?’ but that’s for another post!)

In particular pay attention to the ‘Advanced Search’ feature – it seems to confirm the same set of repositories that support RSS as I have previously discovered, but also lets you do some neat things like find out which repository projects support the OAI Harvesting Protocol, or which ones support Global Unique Identifiers (GUIDs). – SWL

New page for ‘RSS feeds from learning object repositories’

I just noticed today that people still refer to the old page I built illustrating RSS feeds from known Repositories. That page was built on my old Radio site using a simple Radio macro that rendered RSS as HTML. Since then I’ve moved the site into MoveableType and onto another host, but I have only recently got around to recreating this page. This time, though, I did it using a public Bloglines page (one of the beauties of a web-based aggregator that lets you share!)

The new page illustrating the results of these feeds is at http://www.bloglines.com/public_display?username=EdTechPost&folder=322938. It’s actually pretty interesting to have them in one’s aggregator as you get a better sense of how regularly materials are being added (not that regularly). As before, the page includes feeds from:

  • Campus Alberta Repository of Educational Objects (CAREO, http://www.careo.org/)
  • Maricopa Learning Exchange (http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mlx/index.php)
  • The MedWeb Testbank Search (http://medweb5.bham.ac.uk/databases/interop/mcqs)
  • Humbul database (http://www.humbul.ac.uk/help/rss.html)
  • UK Centre for Materials Education (http://www.materials.ac.uk/index.asp)
  • Edna Online (http://www.edna.edu.au)
  • Merlot (http://www.merlot.org/)

Originally when I built this it was mostly to try and illustrate for myself the results and the utility of such feeds. The page is still fairly referenced, though, and so I have tried to add new ones as I find them. If you know of other Repositories that offer RSS feeds please let me know and I will add it to the list. Eventually I will decomission the old site, and will probably do something to re-direct this particular page.

‘Institutional Digital Repositories’ and ‘Learning Object Repositories’ – What’s the Difference?

The title of this post is a question, and I’m actually interested to hear a few different things from people out there:

  • not only what you think the difference between ‘digital repository’ software (e.g. DSpace) and ‘learning object repository’ software (e.g. CAREO) actually is, but also
  • are any differences you think exist there because these types of systems really are trying to accomplish different functions, or are dealing with heterogeneous resource types, or are they different simply because they originated in different camps within educational institutions (libraries and archivists versus educators or educational technologists)? Other reasons?
  • should institutions adopt a single institutional repository system for both archiving research publications and their learning objects? Do you work at, or do you know of, an institution that is adopting a single repository software solution for all of there needs?

more…
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Medical Rounds – Multimedia Grand Rounds

http://www.medicalrounds.com/

This site, in part the work of the Lion’s Gate Hospital in North Vancouver, presents a large collection of talks on a variety of medical topics in the form of quicktime audio streams and slide shows. One could argue for a variety of reasons that these aren’t ‘proper’ learning objects, but it seemed a good way of disseminating some of the knowledge, as well as some of the dialog, that is found in teaching hospitals and medical rounds across the country. The issue it did raise for me, though, was how quickly some of this scientific knowledge becomes dated, and how important it is to be clear about when a certain presentation took place. – SWL

Best Faculty-level presentation on Learning Objects from the last 18 months

http://www.designingwbt.com/content/
madison/objectkeynote.pdf

I’m working on a number of different learning object repository projects at the moment and have been spending the last few days digging through masses of material I’ve bookmarked and blogged over the past few years. All of which brought me back to this presentation given by William Horton at the 18th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching & Learning in 2002. I know it’s saying a lot (maybe not) but it gets my vote for the best non-technical presentation on learning objects and related issues that I’ve seen over the last few years. I’d especially highlight the third slide on page 19 – ‘What Needs to be Communicated’ – as the best explanation EVER of what SCORM is meant to facilitate without ever mentioning the acronym itself. If your task involves explaining the value, issues and context of learning objects to faculty, you could do worse than borrow some ideas from this presentation. – SWL

MERLOT’s Development Process Documents and other background tech information

http://conference.merlot.org/projects/technology/

I don’t know if I could tell you exactly *why* MERLOT published all of this – possibly for the greater public good or possibly to maintain a fairly high degree of transparency and formality given so many stakeholders in their development process. In any case, they have shared the policies shaping their development framework as well as a number of other technical background documents, all of which should prove of some use to people developing their own repositories or even just deciding on what strategy to take in implementing one. – SWL

Scirus – science-specific search engine

http://www.scirus.com/

New to me was this search engine that focuses solely on sources of scientific information and returns results either from qualified web sites or from only scientific journals. It points to a different strategy for finding learning resources – highly constrained and vetted search catalogs that instead of relying on metadata simply use good search engines on the already qualified catalog. Some might claim that this falls into the same human scalability trap as Yahoo-style directories, but in my mind it is actually the happy medium between such directories and full-scale internet searching that has little or no knowledge of the quality of the information and relies on (falliable, vis a vis the ‘pagerank blog effect‘)algorithmic techniques like ‘pagerank‘ to calculate the relevancy of a resource…
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KnowledgeAgora – public interface to CanLOM database

http://www.knowledgeagora.com/subjects/index.cfm

I’m sure someone on the Edusource project would know more about this (maybe Stephen, since it does seem to be in his backyard). On the surface, it doesn’t look a lot different than the old Telecampus Online Course Directory, though drilling down into the subject menus reveals that the contents are not identical. – SWL

Camp CLOE blog

http://learnware.uwaterloo.ca/projects/cloe/bulletin/

CLOE is the Co-operative Learning Object Exchange, an Ontario-wide LOR. Camp CLOE was a 5 day workshop they ran last spring for representatives from the 17 partner institutions. They’ve set this ‘blog’ up in support of the cohort from that session. I say ‘blog’ in quotes as it seems a bit sporadic and not overly personal, but the terminology isn’t important – it seemed like a nice albeit small attempt to keep some of the momentum going for a group of learners after the flush of the f2f workshops had passed. – SWL