Tag: Learning Objects

More RSS feeds from Repositories

It seems like the idea of using RSS as a means to syndicate new items in learning object repositories is steadily catching on. The page I’ve set up to aggregate a number of these feeds now has three more, two of them thanks to Ian Winship from Northumbria University.

The new feeds are:
– latest additions to the EEVL repository, a UK-based guide to Engineering, Mathematics and Computing
– latest additions to the Learning and Teaching Support Network Centre for Economics’ collection of resources
– a ‘by subject’ feed from Chalkface, a UK-based publisher of K-12 online courses and photocopy-master lesson plans

LionShareWiki

http://lionshare.its.psu.edu//cgi-bin/twiki/view

Announced with no little fanfare at the end of last year, the Lionshare project has since been quietly chugging along. In addition to the above Wiki pages, which give some insight into what they are actually working on, you can follow the project’s latest news through their RSS feed (another one to add to the list of LOR projects with RSS feeds). – SWL

BECTA Paper on ‘Open Source Teaching’ and the Kaleidoscope Learning Object Repository

http://www.becta.org.uk/page_documents/
research/open_source_teaching.pdf

Likely you will have already seen reference to this paper in today’s OLDaily, but I felt it was worth reposting as it is a good paper and early on makes an important distinction that I think is too often left dormant in LOR projects and leads to no end of confusion about what people are trying to achieve.

This distinction has to do with the drivers behind the use of learning objects/repositories. The paper outlines 4:

– The efficiency route: the argument that learning objects and repositories enable scaleable reuse of materials and are thus a more efficient way to develop materials
– The teacher-centred route: sharing LOs will enable cross the board improvement of teaching materials
– The pupil-centred route: LOs, in that they also promote the separation of content and presentation and can be traversed to present new versions, enable accessibility and learning-style-centric versions of online materials
– The freedom argument: the LO approach allows instructors to take control of the means of production and share the intellectual product widely

more…
Continue reading “BECTA Paper on ‘Open Source Teaching’ and the Kaleidoscope Learning Object Repository”

SCORM 2004 Photoshop Examples Version 1.0

http://www.adlnet.org/index.cfm?
fuseaction=DownFile&libid=641&bc=false

There’s likely to be a few posts circulating today on this as the ADL sent out a news release via its RSS feed to the effect that they were releasing a number of new items.

The ones in particular that were of interest to me are these example content packages – interesting because the collection illustrates a number of the different sequencing scenarios that can be addressed under the current ‘Simple Sequencing’ specification. In particular, I found the powerpoint presentation bundled at the root of the zip file (warning, it is about 11MB in total) to be helpful in laying out visually how these different scenarios unfolded. – SWL

RSS Feeds from Repository Projects

http://www.bloglines.com/myblogs_display?
folder=621267&since=9&Display=Display

Note what I mean here are the LOR projects (not the repositories themselves, which you can find over here) that are producing RSS feeds as a way to communicate about their projects or otherwise coordinate their efforts. These include:

– D’Arcy Norman’s Learning Commons Weblog (for the CAREO/APOLLO projects)
– The Resource Pool, a Eduspecs-funded test pilot of a CAREO implmentation
– R2R: Learning Design – a new initiative out of University of Calgary to implement a Learning Design tool

– APOLLO-DEV, the proper technical blog for the Apollo project at U of Calgary
– Stòr Cùram, a blog from the University of Strathclyde in Scotland on their LOR initiative, apparently employing Intrallect’s Intralibrary

I haven’t listed CogDogBlog in here, as Alan posts on so many other things beside the Maricopa Learning Exchange, but it’s certainly not because it doesn’t deserve attention. I expect I missed other’s as well, or maybe have you filed somewhere else in Bloglines but still cover your feed. If you are working on an LOR implementation or development project and running a blog, I’d love to hear about it, include it on this list and follow along.

And what, you ask, about my own project… embarassingly, I am so swamped trying to meet our initial project requirements phase deadlines that we haven’t created anything public to date, except this space here, which is not an official ‘organ’ of the project. Stay tuned for more news, though… – SWL

Professional Development Model & Resource Re-Use Scenarios from Flexible E-Content Project

http://www.fp.ucalgary.ca/maclachlan/
projectdiffusionintro.htm

For people either building new repository software or even figuring out what they need in implementing existing software, this might be of interest. Not quite a set of use cases, but maybe close – a set of scenarios which “attempt … to map the process that an educator might walk through to implement digital resources in classroom or online environments….
While the exemplars focus on K-12 learning, the Model and Workshop could apply to post-secondary instructors and designers as well. Developers may find the Case Examples informative in the development of flexible content tools.” – SWL

The Gateway to Educational Materials: An Evaluation Study (Year 4)

http://www.geminfo.org/Evaluation/Fitzgerald_03.06.pdf

Before there were ‘learning object repositories,’ educators were already trying to catalogue instructionally useful Internet resources in ‘subject-based catalogues’ or gateways. In the K-12 world, one of the more significant of these has been the Gateway to Educational Materials, or GEM. This report, from last June, evaluates the successfulness of the GEM project and provides some insight into what repository users might be looking for and problems they might face based on qualititative research done with 50 or so users. There’s nothing necessarily that revolutionary here, but it’s a good reminder to not re-invent the wheel and make mistakes that may already have been made before in similarly-motivated projects. Thanks to Solvig for pointing this out. – SWL

A Short Course on Structured Course Development, Learning Objects, and E-Learning Standards

http://careo.prn.bc.ca/losc/losccourse.html

From Gerry Paille and his team (a partnership of BC School District #60, Open School BC and the Open Learning Agency/BC Open Univeristy to develop a ‘CANCORE-compliant’ resource network that will house materials from some of their older resource collections) comes this useful 3 module course on “using a structured language such as Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) or eXtensible Markup Language (XML) as a basis for producing a learning design and describing course content, activities, and assignments.”

Gerry has also gone to the effort of packaging the course as an IMS 1.1.3 Content Package. Gerry notes on the project blog that the course has yet to receive a ‘technical review’ but is still quite worthwhile. One neat feature of how they implemented this is the ‘Module Resources’ links in each of the modules, which seem to be keyword searches to the backend CAREO database to provide related supplementary resources for each module. – SWL

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

Raymond Yee’s notes from Canadian Elearning Workshop 2004

http://raymondyee.net/wiki/
CanadianElearningWorkshop2004

Well, I can’t be there myself, but reading Raymond’s notes in his wiki is the next best thing. He is involved in the hugely intriguing Scholars Box project, part of the Interactive Univeristy Project at UC Berkeley, and brings his own great context to these notes. Thanks for sharing these, Raymond! – SWL