Technologies for Learning, Thinking and Collaborating
http://www.tltgroup.org/collectionsregistration.htm
From the TLT listserv: “Tom Carey, co-chair the board for the highly respected MERLOT collection (http://www.merlot.org) will be co-leading a free Webcast on March 11, 2003” For registration (required in advance for free Webcast)see: http://www.tltgroup.org/collectionsregistration.htm
Continue reading “Tom Carey talk on widening the object repository net”
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mlx/feed.php
Another posting based on an item seen in Brian’s blog – Maricopa has created an RSS stream of their learning objects.
As a blog enthusiast I am thrilled to see this, although I am still not certain why. I haven’t personally figured out the sweet spot for the combination of learning objects and blogs or RSS aggregation.
I must admit that after the initial enthusiasm wore off, I found myself actually questioning a lot of the idea’s presented in Stephen Downes’ presentation at the IMS Open Technical Forum. He challenged the IMS folks with a vision of learning object networks based on RSS and OAI. I am going to ponder some more on my objections, but I think they have something to do with the lack of ‘objectness’ in rss streams. more late, I have to go deal with a wriggly 9 month old who is sitting on my lap. – swl
http://www.learningobjects.ubc.ca/
You’d have thunk since they are only across the Straight of Georgia I would have known about this site already, but I only saw this site today by following a link on Brian Lamb’s site (see below post). Nice job here Brian – I will add it on to our own list of authoritative learning objects pages that I maintain at the C2T2 site. – SWL
http://www.reusability.org/blogs/brian/
Spent most of last week at events in Vancouver relating to Learning Objects and Standards, and for a variety of reasons haven’t managed to make it into the office this week, but wanted to post a few things from home to keep on top of them.
Met Brian Lamb last week at the Eduspecs sessions in Vancouver. He’s the Learning Objects Coordinator at UBC (how cool a job is that!). He also is into blogs, which is the main reason I went up and talked to him. Based on our 1/2 talk it seems like there might be a burgeoning community of bloggers within education in B.C. which would be very cool. Brian’s work blog, Object Learning, is at http://www.reusability.org/blogs/brian/. Already I’ve seen 2 or 3 really interesting posts there that didn’t make the mainstream edtech blogs, which is great – I’m getting a bit tired of seeing the same urls do the rounds in 6 different blogs, one after another.
http://www.imagingmagazine.com/db_area/
archs/2002/10/tfm0210f1.shtml?contentmanagement
“There are two schools of thought as to when metadata should be applied to content (in a process known as metatagging). The first school advocates applying tags at creation, a theory that, not surprisingly, many vendors in the content management and taxonomy software vendor community support. The second school calls for categorization of content at the search end using various algorithms that analyze content for meaning. These algorithms aren’t dependent upon metadata applied to the content along the creation path. This method, again not surprisingly, is championed by categorization and search vendors.”
Continue reading “Content at Your Fingertips: Better Ways to Classify & Tag”
http://www.irrodl.org/content/v3.2/tech11.html
A decent annotated list of resources and definitions for elearning standards from Norm Friesen and Rory Mcgreal in the latest International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning. I’m having a hard time comprehending, though, how one would consider JA-SIG or EML as “Learning Object Repositories.” EML is certainly relevant as an emerging specification or technology, and maybe just mis-filed. JA-SIG, well I guess in that it is being developed within higher ed it might, just might, fall in here someplace, but I’m not sure the extent to which it is a ‘specification’ or specifically related to e-learning. In any case, a decent starting point to a huge field. – SWL
http://www.irrodl.org/content/v3.2/soc-hes.html
I know this isn’t the first article to do this, but this is a really coherent, thorough and technically savvy explanation of why it is not a good idea to try to define ‘learning objects’ through references to object oriented programming (OOP). I think a lot of the people I respect working on learning objects have already left behind the effort to try and define them strictly (or at all) in terms of OOP concepts. And like these authors, most of them seem to be moving on to clarifying the questions of
“What is the point/purpose of learning objects? Are they here to solve problems in the education system? Are they here to enhance current instruction? Do they form part of a revolutionary front that will transform the provision of face-to-face or distance education? ”
– SWL
There’s a discussion going on currently at the ETUG list, British Columbia’s Ed Tech Users Group list hosted at C2T2 (http://www.c2t2.ca/, and just happens to be where I work 😉 that has me thinking again about learning objects. I’m planning to post something there if I can get my thoughts together. The thoughts are along the lines of the connection between learning object model and approach and pedagogical approach, not unlike some of the motivations I think are behind the Educational Modeling Language out of Europe or the recent sequencing work at IMS. In trying to gather my thoughts on this issue I did a few google searches on the connection between learning object models and pedagogical models and came across this article by three folks in Australia. I wanted to capture the URL here as I really liked the line of thought (although am not sure I 100% agree with the conclusion) and want to follow up with more in this area.
For me, this is actually the best aspect of the discussions on learning objects (and related ones on CMSes and some other educational technologies) – they constantly spur us on to think and talk more and more deeply about the nature of teaching and education. I think this ongoing investigation and dialog is far more important, and has improved the quality of our collective teaching and edtech practice, than the conclusions we may end up drawing. It is this collective shift towards increasingly reflexive practice that I think is often overlooked when trying to cost out the returns on investment of technology in education. – SWL
This is a great paper by Norm Friesen (of Cancore fame) that backs up the conclusion we came to this afternoon concerning the value of the Cycle project. The Cycle is providing expert context and evaluation of the learning objects that are best left out of the rigid meta-data definitions and instead best developed within the communities of practice. To quote the abstract:
“The vision of reusable digital learning resources or objects, made accessible through coordinated repository architectures and metadata technologies, has gained considerable attention within education and training communities. However, the pivotal role of metadata in this vision –and in more general conceptions of the semantic Web– raises important and longstanding issues about classification, description and meaning. These issues are of special importance in indexing educational resources, where questions of application and relevance to particular learning contexts often supersede more conventional forms of access such as author, title or date. This paper will survey the controlled vocabularies defined in a number of educational metadata specifications (in particular, the set of values such as “quiz”, “simulation”, and “exercise” used to identify a “learning resource type”). Understanding these vocabularies in terms of their potential harmonization or rationalization in the CanCore Profile, this paper will illustrate the problems inherent in specifying educational and subject contexts and types. It will propose that the specification of these and other elements can best be approached not through further formalization and abstraction, but via careful study of their use, currency and relevance among existing communities of practice. It will conclude by emphasizing that a similar acknowledgement of the importance of community and practice will also be significant for further developments in XML and the semantic Web.”
I am going to ask the POOL folks where they are at with this, but it holds great promise. – SWL