I was actually pretty pleased about the fact that when a colleague mentioned this group to me, I had never heard of them before. It meant to me that I have created sufficient distance with any ‘administrative computing’ past. The PESC seems to be the domain of registrars and student service (eg. financial aid) folks, but I thought I’d post it because you never know when one of your projects might need to be aware of this alternate universe. Mostly they seem focused on issues like how to ship student transcripts around, though an upcoming conference on the “State of e-Authentication in Higher Education” seemed slightly relevant. – SWL
Tag: standards
Alt-i-Lab papers and highlights
http://members.imsglobal.org/forum/ims/
dispatch.cgi/f.altilabtech
Lucky for us all, the IMS have posted the supporting papers and slides in a publicly accessible area. Day Two of the sessions I was assigned to the Content working group. The promise of this group had been to tackle some of the questions laid out in the stimulating “Repository Management and Implementation” overview paper. But somewhat disappointedly to me, day one seemed given over mostly to talk of existing or emerging digital library standards, and while these are likely of interest and pertinent to others I found it hard to stay engaged.
Which led me on day two to migrate over to the somewhat oddly named “Tools” group, which ended up being a far more fascinating discussion on the world and problems of ‘learning design.’ Day Two in this group ended up being more of what I think of as a ‘working group’; real experts (James Dalziel, David Wiley, Bill Olivier and Gilbert Paquette, amongst others) hashing out real problems with the specification and what problems it is supposed to solve. It was both an honour and a learning experience to be able to sit in.
There really are a lot of worthwhile papers in this directory and they represent some of the state of the art thinking in the field, so take time going through them. Some of the powerpoint slides are also thorough enough to stand apart from their accompanying speeches; Brad Wheeler’s talk on how Open Source supports Open Specifications, Chris Etesse from Blackboard’s Ed Tech framework, and Fabrizio Cardinali from Giunti’s romp through the future of personalized learning all seem worthy of mention.
While there were lots of stimulating papers and talks, ultimately my first Alt-I-Lab will end up being remembered more because of the relationships begun and re-kindled. In addition to meeting fellow bloggers David Wiley and Raymond Yee for the first time, I spent a delightful evening with David Davies and Mark Stiles over a tasty Middle Eastern meal (go figure, easily the most popular restaurant in the small town of Redwood City.) All in all, well worth it, and hopefully I’ll find a way to next year’s event. – SWL
Reusable Learning site from NSDL/Eduworks
http://www.reusablelearning.org/index.asp?id=26
Based on a reference in a recent intro to learning objects I went back to a site I thought I new, but instead found this newly developed resource that the Eduworks folks produced for the NSDL. It is really worth spending some time on, for both newbies and old hands alike. The section on “Fostering Reusability in the NSDL” is very helpful, and the Reusability Framework is, I think, top notch and I would be surprised if I didn’t start to see it show up more as a canonical reference. – SWL
Practical Interoperability from the Reload folks
http://www.reload.ac.uk/interop.html
Recognizing that saying one complies with a standard and implementing a system that does so (especially when some of the standards seem to change nightly) are two different things, the good folks at Reload have built this page that reports on various real world users’ attempts to import content packages built with Reload into a number of “VLEs” or course management systems, including WebCT and a few of the open source options. One hopes that some of the ‘hiccups’ described here are simply a sign of the relative immaturity of the systems and standards that will dissipate with time (right?….) – SWL
Wiki for Retreat on Mellon Open Source Projects
http://rit.mellon.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome
Who knows if this was meant to be public, but as the link isn’t password protected and I stumbled across it on the web, I’m assuming it’s open for viewing. This wiki was built in support of meetings held this past February concerning higher ed open source projects funded by the Mellon Foundation. The notes are worth perusing to glean some insight into what some of the biggest minds in educational institutional computing in the States are thinking about, but maybe most interesting is simply to ponder the list of projects that Mellon funds in this area – Sakai, Chandler, OCW, DSpace, uPortal … the list goes on. Without a doubt, a number of these projects have already changed the landscape in post-secondary educational computing, and have the potential to change it even more dramatically in the years to come. – SWL
Learning resource discovery based on the LOM and the OAI-PMH’
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/powell/
From the latest issue of ARIADNE, comes this article by Andy Powell and Phil Barker detailing the development of a LOM-based application profile and the sharing of these resources using the OAI-PMH. Lots of good references, and I found the sections regarding their vocabularies and the issue of identifiers quite helpful. – SWL
SCORM 2004 Photoshop Examples Version 1.0
http://www.adlnet.org/index.cfm?
fuseaction=DownFile&libid=641&bc=false
There’s likely to be a few posts circulating today on this as the ADL sent out a news release via its RSS feed to the effect that they were releasing a number of new items.
The ones in particular that were of interest to me are these example content packages – interesting because the collection illustrates a number of the different sequencing scenarios that can be addressed under the current ‘Simple Sequencing’ specification. In particular, I found the powerpoint presentation bundled at the root of the zip file (warning, it is about 11MB in total) to be helpful in laying out visually how these different scenarios unfolded. – SWL
A Short Course on Structured Course Development, Learning Objects, and E-Learning Standards
http://careo.prn.bc.ca/losc/losccourse.html
From Gerry Paille and his team (a partnership of BC School District #60, Open School BC and the Open Learning Agency/BC Open Univeristy to develop a ‘CANCORE-compliant’ resource network that will house materials from some of their older resource collections) comes this useful 3 module course on “using a structured language such as Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) or eXtensible Markup Language (XML) as a basis for producing a learning design and describing course content, activities, and assignments.”
Gerry has also gone to the effort of packaging the course as an IMS 1.1.3 Content Package. Gerry notes on the project blog that the course has yet to receive a ‘technical review’ but is still quite worthwhile. One neat feature of how they implemented this is the ‘Module Resources’ links in each of the modules, which seem to be keyword searches to the backend CAREO database to provide related supplementary resources for each module. – SWL
COLIS ODRL METADATA PROFILE
http://www.iprsystems.com/COLIS/COLIS-ODRL-Profile-06.pdf
Out of the Australian-based COLIS project was produced this metadata profile for using ODRL to express the rights for learning objects in IMS Content Packages. This was originally published about 18 months ago, but still seems useful, and as far as I can tell hasn’t been supplanted.
The COLIS Project (renamed and extended as the “Interaction of IT Systems and Repositories” or IIS&R Project) seems to have finished much of its work this past December, and is now engaging in a series of tours around Australia to disseminate its findings. A number of reports and presentations are available on their site – of particular interest to me was a presentation on the “‘Use and Useability of Learning Objects within the COLIS Demonstrator Framework.” It is interesting to see the similarities in the difficulties it outlines (cataloguing time, standard vocabularies, versioning, DRM issues) to other existing projects. 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