{"id":428,"date":"2004-04-01T13:58:00","date_gmt":"2004-04-01T21:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.edtechpost.ca\/wordpress\/2004\/04\/01\/opaltrees-cadria\/"},"modified":"2004-04-01T13:58:00","modified_gmt":"2004-04-01T21:58:00","slug":"opaltrees-cadria","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottleslie.ca\/edtechpost\/wordpress\/2004\/04\/01\/opaltrees-cadria\/","title":{"rendered":"OpalTree&#8217;s CADRiA"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.opaltree.com\/\">http:\/\/www.opaltree.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Early this week, BCcampus hosted an event to take a closer look at some of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.edtechpost.ca\/pmwiki\/pmwiki.php\/EdTechPost\/OpenSourceCourseManagementSystems\">open source course\/learning management systems<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n<p>In the afternoon we were given a demo of OpalTree&#8217;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&#8217;s focus &#8211; 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 <i>&agrave; la<\/i> LOR\/LCMS, of which CADRiA had some simply mind bending qualities).<\/p>\n<p>So if what you&#8217;re currently seeking is an LMS, I wouldn&#8217;t necessarily send you in this direction. But if you are involved with more of a learning content management\/object repository-type issue, you&#8217;d do well to wade through their site, maybe look at their <a href=\"http:\/\/www.opaltree.com\/content\/fs_downloads.html\">&#8216;demonstration&#8217; flash movies<\/a>, and see what they are doing. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.edtechpost.ca\/mt\/archive\/000519.html\">Read on for more&#8230;<\/a><br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nThe system itself is built on top of ZOPE, which is encouraging if not in-and-of-itself groundbreaking. But it&#8217;s the proprietary portion of the product, the portion that OpalTree themselves have built, that does seem groundbreaking &#8211; in contrast to most existing repository systems, that rely heavily on human cataloguers and seemingly inflexible taxonomies, this system seems to be built on more &#8217;emergent&#8217; principles, and presents information to users based on their specific contexts and the contexts in which the resource has previously been used. In their own words, CADRiA &#8220;learns from the context in which information is used, predicts the information that will be needed to fulfil a purpose, dynamically builds semantic models of information that humans can navigate, and automates the assembly of knowledge objects that fulfil the information requirements of end users.&#8221; While it sounds fanciful, the demo I saw led me to believe that these folks are actually achieving some of the promise of XML, web services, the semantic web, learning objects &#8230; not by brute force but by pairing them up with some slick natural language processing and data mining techniques, like I think we all thought was supposed to happen, eventually. I&#8217;m still trying to wrap my head around what I actually saw that day, and I will be doing more investigation of these folks in the context of our own LOR project, but I hadn&#8217;t seen them mentioned before and they struck me as worthy of a look. &#8211; <i>SWL<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/scottleslie.ca\/edtechpost\/wordpress\/2004\/04\/01\/opaltrees-cadria\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;OpalTree&#8217;s CADRiA&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[201,205,219],"class_list":["post-428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-learning-objects","tag-km","tag-lcms","tag-lor"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottleslie.ca\/edtechpost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottleslie.ca\/edtechpost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottleslie.ca\/edtechpost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottleslie.ca\/edtechpost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottleslie.ca\/edtechpost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=428"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/scottleslie.ca\/edtechpost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottleslie.ca\/edtechpost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottleslie.ca\/edtechpost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottleslie.ca\/edtechpost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}