Tag: LOR

OpalTree’s CADRiA

http://www.opaltree.com/

Early this week, BCcampus hosted an event to take a closer look at some of the open source course/learning management systems that are currently available and commence (or really continue) a province-wide dialog on the viability of implementing one and the issues surrounding such a project.

In the afternoon we were given a demo of OpalTree’s CADRiA system, out of Australia (what are they putting in the water down there!?! These folks seem to be simply bursting with innovation in the learning objects/elearning field!). In my mind the demo was actually a bit out of place in that particular day’s focus – when I think Course/LearningMS, I think more of delivery and tracking capabilities (of which CADRiA appears to lack many basic ones) instead of authoring, aggregation and searching capabilities (more à la LOR/LCMS, of which CADRiA had some simply mind bending qualities).

So if what you’re currently seeking is an LMS, I wouldn’t necessarily send you in this direction. But if you are involved with more of a learning content management/object repository-type issue, you’d do well to wade through their site, maybe look at their ‘demonstration’ flash movies, and see what they are doing. Read on for more…
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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

Joint IMS/CNI Whitepaper on interoperation between different types of ‘repositories’

http://www.imsglobal.org/
DLims_white_paper_publicdraft_1.pdf

I can only assume that the only reason someone didn’t point this paper out to me during my recent thrashing about concerning the difference between ‘institutional’ repositories and ‘learning object’ repositories is that, like me, they had never seen it before (or maybe you’re all just sadists and like to watch me flail about in public!)

Well in any case, hallelujah! This draft paper by Neil McLean and Clifford Lynch from June 28, 2003 is in my mind a model of clarity on the reasons for why these beasts are different (for one, the ‘transient’ versus ‘archival’ nature of their contents) but also why and how they need to interoperate.

Which is where I’ve landed on this topic – we need distinct types of repository software because they fill distinct end-user needs. But by implementing both common open protocols and using structured markup languages that can be mapped, we keep open the possibility of interoperating if and when this make sense. And I stress that last ‘if’ – the next piece in the puzzle I am waiting to see are convincing use cases, or even better yet convincing demonstrations, of search interfaces across catalogues of heterogeneous materials (e.g. records for books, ‘eprints’ and learning objects all at once) that don’t just confuse the matter entirely. – SWL

Learning Object Repository *Software*

http://www.edtechpost.ca/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/EdTechPost/
LearningObjectRepositorySoftware

There’s a lot of lists of learning object repositories around – to name but a few good ones, there’s

The problem, for me, with many of these lists is that these typically don’t make any distinction between instances of existing repositories that are hosted by specific institutions or consortia (‘collections’ if you will) and repository software projects – software that one can download and install in one’s own environment, and integrate with one’s own systems if that’s important to you.

Well it’s important to me for a variety of reasons – within the context of the BCcampus lor project we are definitely looking for software that we will run and host in BC, and in the context of the Edutools team we are looking at doing some work that will allow people to do a comparative analysis of this kind of software.

So to that end, the above URL points to an evolving list of packages one might consider if you had to implement a learning object repository. A few final notes on this list and my approach:

  • for the purposes of initially identifying as much as possible, I have included not only software that is specifically identified as LOR software, but also more commercial LCMS software, institutional repository software coming out of the library/archives world, and CMS software that implements either a repository or LCMS component
  • I have not made a huge distinction between learning object metadata repositories and learning object content repositories though I recognize there are crucial differences.

It’s a wiki page so feel free to add to it. It isn’t exhaustive when it comes to LCMS or institutional repositories, but I think there are strong cases to be made that these are different beasts, and that while either can be made to fill the LOR role, there may be good reasons not to do this. – SWL

The Bad News and The Good News

Two weeks without a post deserves some explanation, and the reasons for my recent absence are both not so good and really great. First the not so good news – I just got out of hospital after another bout with Crohn’s Disease. I luckily managed to escape the surgeon’s knife for now (having had the good fortune of meeting a surgeon reluctant to operate!) and we’re hoping that a new course of medication and a new diet will help things in the long term. I am almost back up to speed now, so here’s keeping my fingers crossed!

But the other reason for the lack of posts is that I’ve been extremely busy with what I’ll call the “great news” – at the start of February I embarked on a brand new project with the folks at BCcampus, Open School BC and a group dedicated to Telelearning-in-Health across the 5 BC Universities. I am project managing the implementation (and I stress that word) of a learning object repository infrastructure that will serve the needs of these varied communities in B.C. It’s been in the works for a little while now, but I wanted to wait until it was firmly under way before announcing it. We’ve got a fairly aggressive timeline (project is scheduled to end September 2004) and so we are ramping up right now to identify key requirements and assess the existing open source options. It is a hugely exciting opportunity both in the work I’ll get to do and in the people I’ll get to work with – the various partners involved end up touching most of the educational institutions in BC in one way or other, and there is just a ton of great experience across this province to tap into.

I am fortunate that these folks agreed to a 4-day-a-week-deal which will allow me to keep working with my friends and colleagues at Edutools – we continue to add new reviews of Course Management Systems there, and are also looking to some exciting new projects in the near future, so I’m really pleased to be able to work on both projects.

So hopefully you’ll start to see more posts again, though at the current pace of things will likely still be a bit sporadic. I expect I’ll end up publishing a project-based blog for the LOR implementation, if only for my own tracking purposes, and when I do I’ll share that URL as well. – SWL

Intellectual Property Rights Issues Facing Self-archiving: Key Findings of the RoMEO Project

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september03/
gadd/09gadd.html#Gadd-2003f

This interesting paper details the efforts of the RoMEO project to land on, amongst other things, a digital rights schema to enable self-archiving of academic research papers in the U.K. What’s interesting is that while they found that either the Creative Commons or ODRL could possibly fit their needs, the problem with the CC solution was that their metadata was expressed in RDF/XML and did not have an associated XML schema—a prerequisite for any metadata disclosed under the OAI-PMH. Their solution was to develop ODRL versions (XML instances) of the CC licences that would conform to the ODRL XML schema, examples of which can be found in the paper. A more detailed accounting of this process can also be found in the related paper, “Rights metadata for open archiving.” – SWL

Academic ADL Co-Lab’s Database of Repositories

http://projects.aadlcolab.org/repository-directory/

New from the Academic ADL Co-Lab is this searchable database of existing learning object repositories. Most of these are not software you could download to run your ‘own’ repository but instead existing institutional or subject-based repositories in which you *might* be able to participate (which raises the entirely sticky issue of ‘how many repositories do we actually need?’ but that’s for another post!)

In particular pay attention to the ‘Advanced Search’ feature – it seems to confirm the same set of repositories that support RSS as I have previously discovered, but also lets you do some neat things like find out which repository projects support the OAI Harvesting Protocol, or which ones support Global Unique Identifiers (GUIDs). – SWL

New page for ‘RSS feeds from learning object repositories’

I just noticed today that people still refer to the old page I built illustrating RSS feeds from known Repositories. That page was built on my old Radio site using a simple Radio macro that rendered RSS as HTML. Since then I’ve moved the site into MoveableType and onto another host, but I have only recently got around to recreating this page. This time, though, I did it using a public Bloglines page (one of the beauties of a web-based aggregator that lets you share!)

The new page illustrating the results of these feeds is at http://www.bloglines.com/public_display?username=EdTechPost&folder=322938. It’s actually pretty interesting to have them in one’s aggregator as you get a better sense of how regularly materials are being added (not that regularly). As before, the page includes feeds from:

  • Campus Alberta Repository of Educational Objects (CAREO, http://www.careo.org/)
  • Maricopa Learning Exchange (http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mlx/index.php)
  • The MedWeb Testbank Search (http://medweb5.bham.ac.uk/databases/interop/mcqs)
  • Humbul database (http://www.humbul.ac.uk/help/rss.html)
  • UK Centre for Materials Education (http://www.materials.ac.uk/index.asp)
  • Edna Online (http://www.edna.edu.au)
  • Merlot (http://www.merlot.org/)

Originally when I built this it was mostly to try and illustrate for myself the results and the utility of such feeds. The page is still fairly referenced, though, and so I have tried to add new ones as I find them. If you know of other Repositories that offer RSS feeds please let me know and I will add it to the list. Eventually I will decomission the old site, and will probably do something to re-direct this particular page.

‘Institutional Digital Repositories’ and ‘Learning Object Repositories’ – What’s the Difference?

The title of this post is a question, and I’m actually interested to hear a few different things from people out there:

  • not only what you think the difference between ‘digital repository’ software (e.g. DSpace) and ‘learning object repository’ software (e.g. CAREO) actually is, but also
  • are any differences you think exist there because these types of systems really are trying to accomplish different functions, or are dealing with heterogeneous resource types, or are they different simply because they originated in different camps within educational institutions (libraries and archivists versus educators or educational technologists)? Other reasons?
  • should institutions adopt a single institutional repository system for both archiving research publications and their learning objects? Do you work at, or do you know of, an institution that is adopting a single repository software solution for all of there needs?

more…
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MERLOT’s Development Process Documents and other background tech information

http://conference.merlot.org/projects/technology/

I don’t know if I could tell you exactly *why* MERLOT published all of this – possibly for the greater public good or possibly to maintain a fairly high degree of transparency and formality given so many stakeholders in their development process. In any case, they have shared the policies shaping their development framework as well as a number of other technical background documents, all of which should prove of some use to people developing their own repositories or even just deciding on what strategy to take in implementing one. – SWL