Learning Objects – Page 5

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

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

Timeline and Discussion Extraction Tools from UBC

http://careo.elearning.ubc.ca/weblogs/michelle/
archives/000545.html

Michelle Lamberson has a note about two really interesting tools recently released by the instructional technology support folks at UBC’s Faculty of Arts. The first is a forms-based Flash Timelines builder. The second a tool to extract and then re-import distinct pieces of threaded discussions from inside WebCT. – 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

HunterStone THESIS – another Office to SCORM convertor

http://www.hunterstone.com/eduProds.aspx

Another in the growing list of Office-to-SCORM-package conversion products. This one is, in fact, certified as ‘SCORM conformant,’ as testified to on the ADL site. Which led to another handy discovery, a concise (as concise as you are going to get from the American military) description of the various SCORM certification levels and what they actually mean. – SWL

Academic ADL Co-Lab Learning Repository Community wiki

http://www.academiccolab.org/projects/
repositories/community/wiki/index.php?
page=LearningRepositoryCommunity

“This site supports continuing discussion of the many issues raised during our successful Learning Repository Summit over October 7th and 8th, 2003.” Looks fairly new but maybe worth keeping an eye on. – SWL

June Lester on the ‘SME’s Viewpoint’

http://thejuniverse.blogs.com/afterhours/
2003/10/surviving_cours.html

June Lester is a mathematician and an educator, and one of the people brave enough to help facilitate the ‘blogtalk’ we tried over the last few weeks. She’s posted a great piece on the frustration a ‘SME’ can feel in the so-called ‘course-development wars.’ She’s right of course – subject matter experts in education have also often taught the material before and understand quite well how to communicate it’s intricacies, and treating them solely as providers of content will almost certainly produce a lesser learning experience (as well as antagonize them.) …
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FAST (FACETED APPLICATION OF SUBJECT TERMINOLOGY)

http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla69/papers/
010e-ONeill_Mai-Chan.pdf

When it comes to controlled vocabularies, one of the most successful is the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). This paper, presented to the recent World Library and Information Congress by Edward O’Neill and
Lois Chan, outlines an attempt to adapt the LCSH with a faceted schema, in theory to make it “easier to understand, control, apply, and use.”

The eight facets proposed cover: Topics, Geographic (Place), Personal Name, Corporate Name, Form (Type, Genre), Chronological (Time, Period), Title, and Meeting Name. A nice attempt to leverage what exists into new technologies and ways of working. – SWL

– via [ResourceShelf]

E-learning Competency Centre’s Learning Objects Competition Website

Stephen pointed to this ongoing competition site as a chance to view a fair number of learning objects in one place. More than that, these are all what you would call “rich” multi-media objects, most often done in Authorware or Flash, with each typically covering a distinct ‘unit’ of learning.
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Proceedings of the OLN Institute –

http://careo.elearning.ubc.ca/weblogs/
michelle/archives/000194.html

Via Michelle Lamberson comes mention of an important collection of papers on learning objects that came out of the recent OLN Institute at Ohio State called “Building and Assessing Shareable Content.” The proceedings for the conference, a book titled “Learning Objects: Contexts and Connections” (Catherine M. Gynn and Stephen R. Acker, Editors) are now available online.

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