Tag: Learning Objects

Latest CETIS briefing on IMS specifications

This latest in the CETIS series of briefings about e-learning interoperability standards deals with IMS Simple Sequencing. This is the fifth such briefing, the others having focused on the IMS Enterprise, LIP, Content Package and QTI specifications. If you haven’t seen these yet, they are highly recommended; short (typically 2-3 pages) comprehensible descriptions that explain these specifications from the perspective of what they enable. – SWL

– via [CETIS: Standards in Education Technology]

Article on issues with current LO approaches

This months ‘The Learning Marketspace’ newsletter from the Center for Academic Transformation contains a provocative article by Carol Twigg challenging LO projects that see the problem simply as one of scarcity of online resources. Twigg says this is simply not enough; in addition to the issue of access and availability, we should be focusing on issues of quality (providing ‘research-based’ materials that have been demonstrated to improve student learning) and strategies to foster faculty uptake and student usage. – SWL

 

RSS top-level namespace

“In order to be able to encapsulate RSS payloads into other XML applications, it will be necessary to explicitly place RSS into its own namespace. It’s been speculated that you can do that without causing any breakage. This posting tests that theory. “

So far there’s been a lot of talk in the edtech blogging space about using RSS to deliver different kinds of content (e.g. learning object meta-data.) What this post and test from Jon Udell reminds us is that RSS is just XML and should thus be capable of encapsulation in other XML documents or applications.

– from [Jon’s Radio] via [Bruce Landon’s Weblog for Students]

Canadian Forum

Library and Archives Canada will host a two-day Canadian Metadata Forum, to be held on Friday September 19 and Saturday September 20, 2003.

What is especially encouraging to me about this announcement is the number of notable Canadians in the field of learning object metadata (Norm Friesen, Gilbert Paquette, Stephen Downes and Jutta Treviranus to name the ones I recognize) who will be at this meeting. I don’t work full time in the area of learning objects, but every time I come in contact with the library community I am amazed at the work going on there and scratch my head as to why we all don’t seem to collaborate more when there seem to be, on the surface at least, lots of synergies. – SWL 

Educational Software and Learning: Subversive Use and Volatile Design

“Discussions about the use of information and communications technology (ICT) based learning environments often assume that use is defined, or at least severely constrained, by the inherent intentions of the designer. However, typical uses of educational software involve a subversion of the designer’s intentions to match contextual needs.“

Via a post in James Farmer’s weblog comes reference to this interesting paper, originally presented by David Squires in 1999 to the International Conference on System Sciences. Anyone who has ever actively supported a CMS in an educational setting (or any software for that matter) will agree – one can simply never predict all of the uses that both instructors and students will find for software.

(As an aside – a recent favourite hack I heard of with WebCT was an instructor who was using the file upload/download capabilities to send audio messages to his students that he recorded on his desktop with a simple mic setup – instant voicemail system! Maybe obvious to you, but I hadn’t thought of it and the software’s not specifically designed with this in mind.)

This paper goes deeper than that, though, arguing for a design process that accomodates such ‘subversive use’ of the technologies. One thing I think is missing here, and often missed in the debates on the effects of media types on instruction is the fact that a distinct characteristic of web-based applications/content is the ability to record (and aggregate and ‘playback’) *how* the software/content is being used. Putting aside for a second the big-brotherish aspect, this seems to me to point at a new source of design data – a way for designers to see, after the fact, how their design intentions are interpreted/mis-interpreted, used/mis-used and to make changes accordingly. – SWL

The Autism of Knowledge Management

Via a reference in the recent Macromedia white paper Challenges Impeding the Learning Object Economy comes this paper. One must give credit to the Macromedia paper for citing it, for it presents quite an invective against the objectified notion of learning that supports their notion of an LO economy.

I’m not sure I like the use of the metaphor of autism here, and hopefully that’s all it is here, accurate though it may seem on the surface to characterize the lego-like notion of learning and learning objects.  I think I prefer the less extreme explanations like those recently offered by Norm Friesen. Regardless, I think they are both mainly coming from similar places philosophically. But I think David Wiley is ultimately on the right track with this – we shouldn’t be turning this in to an either/or but try to find the middle ground. – SWL

BELTS – Basic E-Learning Tool Set

“ The Le@rning Federation has undertaken the Basic E-Learning Tool Set (BELTS) project to develop and deliver a delivery system and framework for a learning object discovery and presentation system. ”

Version 1 software available for download from sourceforge, released under a license that permits re-distribution and modification as long as attribution is kept attached to source code. – SWL

Iconex LOR

New to me, this object repository was developed in the U.K. by the University of Hull as part of the nation-wide Distributed National Electronic Resource initiative (I’m sure I have this wrong, but I have  a difficult time sorting out the players and funding envelopes in the U.K.)

Not certain the extent that this was intended for prime time yet. I could access it in IE but both Mozilla and Opera seemed to fail. The reason I checked is that the front end seemed to be done in Flash, but either  they are doing browser detection on these other browsers that is failing or else this isn’t Flash but maybe some IE specific technology. In any case, there are a number of good multimedia objects in there – the one that drew me here in the first place is a Flash-based card sorting exercise that is familiar to anyone who has ever had to facilitate a design session with a customer who won’t set priorities.

The app is very good, you can download it and change the cards by editing an XML file. If you do manage to access the site you can find it in the ‘Generic’ category. Which points out another flaw with this approach – the individual objects do not appear to be directly addressable. – SWL