Technologies for Learning, Thinking and Collaborating
“SciQ just went live. It’s a K-12 theme for CAREO that is being used to push learning objects into the classroom in Alberta.”
Go see the one of the products of D’Arcy’s (and many others at U of Calgary) long hours of work and an actual implementation of learning object respository software! Exciting stuff! – SWL
http://radio.weblogs.com/0110772/2003/03/18.html#a837
Posting by Sebastian Paquet on Blam from Alf Eaton
blam!has become a templating tool for writing reviews of (so far) books, CDs and DVDs.
The structure here is for reviews of books and records, but it would seem fairly straightforward to take the same idea and instead use Cancore or IMS Metadata fields to be describing learning objects (and could be extended, I suppose, with evaluative data too).
Isn’t this sort of what Stephen Downes was on about?
http://www.newsisfree.com/click/-4,14534085,2572/
A very useful explanation that has some good links in the ensuing discusions (cf “A Framework for Understanding and Classifying Ontology Applications“) and was also interesting to me for highlighting this site, metamodel.com. – SWL
– via [elearningpost]
http://commons.ucalgary.ca/weblogs/dnorman/000042.html
“I’m working on a new theme for CAREO that is defined completely via CSS. No tables, no image spacers, no HTML hacks. This will provide yet ANOTHER layer of theming for CAREO – at the CSS/presentation layer.”
If you haven’t seen it before, CAREO is well worth taking a look. This posting from D’Arcy Norman announces yet another interesting feature he’s implemented there. Recently he announced the availability of an RSS feed of objects, as well as threaded discussions attached to objects, both of which I think are going in the right direction of tying communities and repositories together. His blog (url below) is both a good way to keep up with developments in the project, and he also has been posting some great material generally about the interconnection of community and repositories and general repository technology. – SWL
I’m not sure exactly why I never see this site listed on the known list of object repositories – perhaps because they are K-12 focused, maybe because it seems to have started before the metadata standardization efforts and is thus maybe a bit out of this fold, or maybe because it seems dedicated solely to Java applets. In any case, seems worth a look as an example of another existing repository that ideally would be brought into the interoperable fold. – SWL
More from the knowledge management field, but this product is an example of how to integrate machine indexing activities with human classification. This is what I’m looking for in the field of learning object meta-data – a way to not only add a meta-data field contribution as a human in addition o ones generated automatically through various indexing algorithms, but in addition a way for the software to then aggregate the various human contributions so that additional patterns and classifications can be found. Does this make any sense? – SWL
http://radio.weblogs.com/0110772/
2003/02/25.html#a795
“Here’s a presentation on “The Economy of Distributed Metadata Authoring” by Stefano Mazzocchi . A few passages ring especially true to me.
- Artificial intelligence is just that: artificial!
- So: for a system that feels smart to humans, you need human-crafted metadata
- Do all efforts to make instant return on the investment of metadata authoring
- Don’t ask too much
- Be smart but not smarter
Some of the same wisdom went into the design of the Internet Topic Exchange.”
Don’t you just love when,
Continue reading “The challenge of getting people to author metadata”
This reference to a fascinating paper by David Wiley via Brian at UBC. Does anyone know what happened to Pattie Maes of Firefly fame? I know that Firefly got acquired/absorbed quite a while back, but I would be interested to hear if she was doing anything in this arena. – SWL
http://rclt.usu.edu/whitepapers/paradox.html
Really interesting article by the previously mentioned The Reusability, Collaboration, and Learning Troupe. The following quote was what first brought me to the article when it was reposted in a mailing list I follow: “The purpose of learning objects and their reality seem to be at odds with one another. On the one hand, the smaller designers create their learning objects, the more reusable those objects will be. On the other hand, the smaller learning objects are, the more likely it is that only humans will be able to assemble them into meaningful instruction. From the traditional instruction point of view, the higher-level reusability of small objects does not scale well to large numbers of students (i.e., it requires teachers or instructional designers to intervene), meaning that the supposed economic advantage of reusable learning objects has evaporated. “
http://rclt.usu.edu/people.html
“The Reusability, Collaboration, and Learning Troupe (RCLT) is a loose-knit group of faculty and graduate students at Utah State University with common research interests, including Andy Gibbons, David Merrill Mimi Recker, David Wiley, and Andy Walker“
I was led here by a post to a newsgroup containing a quote from a paper by this Troupe. Great concept, and interesting paper (more above), although it is not clear how active the site is – the publications list in the Research area all date from 2000-2001. – SWL