CogBlogged from ‘July, 2003’

Okay folks. We have polished off most of the rough edges of the wiki part of our presentation on What’s the Fuss abour RSS? and are here tossing it out for your viewing. Update (Sept 3, 2003) The wiki has been spiffed up and moved to http://careo.elearning.ubc.ca/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?TheFuss

This is just a pre-notice teaser for our upcoming LOVCOP teleconference on July 11, 2003: What’s the Fuss about RSS?. Tune in at 9 am Pacific, 10 am Mountain, 11 am Central, noon Eastern. For access details (it is a toll free call), rush and click over to the LOVCOP site and sign up or email a request to LearningObjects@educause.edu. On Friday you may even get a chance to sip some faux Merlot, and meet the (?) famous blogging duo of Boris and Lora.

We spotted a new Learning Objects White Paper posted in Macromedia’s Learning Object Development Center. Written by New Media Consortium CEO Larry Johnson: Elusive Vision: Challenges Impeding the Learning Object Economy,’ÄÝexplores the drivers, enablers and mediators in the’ÄÝlearning object economy.’ÄÝ Larry Johnson, CEO of the New Media Consortium,’ÄÝdescribes and analyzes a’ÄÝsummit of international learning objects experts.’ÄÝ I still need some time to digest the paper, [800k PDF ], includes the output of a group of LO heavyweights (Hodgins, Carey, Masie… where are Wiley and Downes? likely duking it out ;-) who gathered in San Francisco in September 2002.

And not to be outdone by a mere earth science teacher, our Humanities Blogger, Boris, has also latched onto the new RSS Feeds from About.com (see boris blog…) and quickly drills down to some useful Art History ideas for “approaching art” This is pushing beyond the bounds of mere learning objects, but again gets out the nortion of using RSS to network together useful (to Prof Boris) sorts of content he can peruse and pontificate upon.

After a bit of summer vacation (actually field work in Montana), Lora the Geologist (who is blogging about learning obejcts in geology) has found the news that About.com is now syndicating their content via RSS, and very quickly she has added a feed for their Geology collection to her site.

Each May we organize a year-end “Ocotillo” retreat for faculty and staff in our system to spend some focused time on instructional technology issues. This year, the theme was “Guess Who’s Coming To Learn?”: What do we know about our students and their motivations for learning? Are our planning activities based on our own assumptions and experiences? There is plenty of literature about the various Gen-X, Gen-Y characteristics, but are we paying attention? To better understand the attributes, desires, expectations of our current and future students, we have invited an expert in organizational and social demographics to help us figure out Who is Coming to Learn at Maricopa. To help set the stage, we created the word Association activity. This was a quick and simple survey a number of faculty collected from their students, where we collected their first responses to some common educational and technical terms. The results were [...]

Actually, we have some ventures going on Electronic Portfolios at Maricopa. A new mcli site (for now) chronicles three project/efforts.

Now, I wish our work with electornic portfolios was buzzing enough for someone in the organization to force me to attend ePorfolio 2003, the “first international conference on the digital portfolio, 9-10 Octobre 2003, Poitiers France” Can you say “buzzword”? This year’s “portal”?? ePortfolios might be the biggest thing in technology innovation on campus

For our new CDB readers, we have been experimenting a few months with adding Trackback records to all items in our Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX). This allows a way for each item to potentially record an entry everyitm someone describes an MLX item in a weblog. And we also have included a TrackBack summary tool for our entire collection. But still we new, and were reminded by David Carter-Tod (and also noted by Randy at CarvingCode) that there is still not much of a pool of people who can easily send those TrackBack messages or pings (Limited now to MovableType users although Dave says it is coming soon to Manila and Radio) . So, as one first crude cut, we have a new feature of every MLX item that provides a web form for registering a new ping. It is still not nearly as elegant as a tool that can [...]