I recently got an email notification that a peer review has been done of a former project that is available in MERLOT. While it is listed as being loaded there in 2002, actually Negative Reinforcement University (NRU) was developed as a CD-ROM in 1996 and converted to the web in 1997.
Although I’ve not even thought about NRU in a long time, I think the old Shockwave version might actually still run (Yup it does! and I even remembered some of the hidden cheats in the game- but wow, is it crude and pixelly). It’s approach was an unabashed rip-off of Myst. Actually, it was one of my favorite projects- the outgrowth of an idea to have teams of students and a faculty member work as a team to create some educational content using a movie-making metaphor (see the Studio 1151 Press Release).
This is not meant to poke fun at MERLOT for reviewing 8 year-old software (especially since they gave it some high marks). I am rather stoked they looked at it and did not laugh.
It does make me wonder about the scalability of the oft-desired structured review process of learning content.
The News Flash! MERLOT Peer Reviews 8 Year Old Project by CogDogBlog, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
[...] Alan Levine posts this remark about scalability on the event of a favourable review (at last) of a project from the 90’s submitted to Merlot over three years ago. [...]