http://zircon.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/ocotillo/bb/viewforum.php?f=20

Our internal participation is so far.... well.... light... so we are hoping some other voices in the mix might make things move along. Our discussion boards ar eopen for anyone to read, and to post you simply need to request an account.

Jump in! Scott's feeling lonely inside the boards.

First of all, you can find Brian's presentation materials on our Ocotillo Learning Objects wiki, which is a Wiki-RO (Ready Only)-- meaning that the wiki requires an pass key for editing (thanks to spammers). On the day of Brian's visit, we temporarily opened it up wide.

What worked well was starting off right away with a discussion and hands on wiki activity, where Brian posed a few questions related to "You may already be a learning objects user...". He asked participants to compose their responses in their own on the spot created wiki page using the barest of simple instructions.

It actually took very little effort, sweat, or pain for our audience of 20+ wiki newbies to jump right on and add their responses. Our audience was a mixed bag of faculty, technologists, even a Vice Chancellor, all with no wiki experience. It worked like magic, amazing me as I had being trying to cajole some people all year long to use wikis for collaboration, note sharing, etc. So what I needed was a suave, humorous Canadian to get them started.

While Brian continued with his presentation on Learning Object Dreams and more, I quickly went in to the Recent Changes to extract out the wiki responses to a summary page that fed the before lunch focus.

After the mid morning break, Brian continued to lob topics like Liquid Media, RSS, the beauty of flickr, and more.

And they asked for more of the same.

Following lunch, Brian bravely demonstrated his skill for taking presentation turns where needed, asked participants to contribute what was the "Muddiest" point of the morning discussions and let the audience pick what to focus the afternoon on.

By the end, we had more than a handful of folks asking about where they could use wikis, probably at least 20 new flickr accounts created, and more people asking about using RSS than I had heard in my system over the last year. There was a great deal of excitement when Brian demo-ed creating hotspots in flickr images, and I think there was a lot of agreement that for digital images as learning objects, flickr provides many of the "hooks" they might need.

Over the weekend, our Blackboard technical director was asking about creating a wiki for some new portal design discussions.

I've seen a number of these full day workshops where the participation drops 25% after lunch, but this crowd stuck around, and could not soak up enough of the information Brian blasted out. And there was little of the glazed eye look that long workshops can bring. A workshop like this feels magical.

So no foolin, we got some good things going here. I rewarded Brian by taking him and his visiting family up to our cabin in Strawberry for the weekend, enjoying the tranquility, the scenery of the Verde Canyon Railroad and Jerome ("the town too tough to die") as well as a fun 4 wheel jaunt through the forests. Today we let the Lambs loose to see what sorts of havoc they could cause south of the border.

So I was rather agreeable when Lisa Young, co-chair of our Ocotillo Learning Objects Action Group, e-mailed me a few months back and said:

I've been reading a lot of great articles and blog posts by this guy at University of British Columbia and I think we would make an excellent speaker. Do you think we can bring him to Maricopa?

Sure, no problem!

So while Brian writes Far more disjointed than usual. It's yet another cry for help..., we're lining up an audience of faculty, staff, and a few administrators to get his spin on learning objects, and as we hope, to go a bit farther into the new waters of folksonomies, wikis, RSS, etc. Some who read CogDogBlog may have the notion that things I write about are growing like desert wildflowers across our system, but like everywhere else, these things take a while to sprout, A long while. There is likely no one in our system that will register if you ask them about "Rip. Mix. Feed."... a aoncept I have player with more externally than internally.

But it will be good- our Dialogue Days are built to be short on long lectures, and long ion discussion, ands on activities, etc. And we are in good hands for something interesting.

The pilot grant open content initiative, Sofia (Sharing of Free Intellectual Assets), was initiated in March of 2004 under the leadership of Vivian 'Vivie' Sinou, Dean of Distance & Mediated Learning at Foothill College. "Open" content refers to material that is freely available for use by faculty, students, and self-learners.

The Sofia finalists include the following content contributed by faculty from five California Community Colleges: Creative Typography, by Carolyn Brown, Foothill College; Introduction to Java Programming, Steven Gilbert, Orange Coast College; Elementary Statistics, by Susan Dean and Barbara Illowsky, De Anza College; Physical Geography, by Allison Lenkeit, Foothill College; Musicianship, by Don Megill and Dave Megill, Mira Costa College; Enterprise Network Security, by Sukhjit Singh, De Anza College and Mike Murphy, Foothill College; Web Page Authoring, Jo Anne Howell, Gavilan College; and Macromedia Flash, by Marcia Ganeles, Foothill College.

I just skimmed Web Page Authoring and found it clean, comprehensive, with not just content, but assignments, exams, and discussion areas.

Are these "learning objects"? "course objects?" Who cares what you call it, it's good stuff... and it is free.

Keep an eye on SoFIA, she's a looking gooooooood...

Strangely, having built one sort of similar system myself, I am asking the same question.

Stephen Downes today shared the announcement of the Commonwealth of Learning's Learning Object Repository being released, "An online database of learning content that provides software to Commonweath countries free of charge" and the software was being made available as well.. sounds interesting enough to click around.

Hitting the technical documentation, you get alphabet soup explanations:

The COL Learning Object Repository (or in short COL LOR) integrates eRIB and pakXchange such that the local repository of eRIB is disabled and replaced with pakXchange, and pakXchange is modified to act as an EduSource node for the purpose of searching.

Easy for you to say... what the heck is all that?

So then I thought, give the thing a whirl and see what I can figure this does. Now I am looking at the eRIB "eduSource Repository-In-A-Box" (Yikes, hope that fares better then the long gone "Web Course In a Box!").

But apparently it lets you do "federated" searches, or searches for learning objects across multiple sites. I tried some real simple queries to generates lots of results. Unfortunately, not taking the cue from Google in that search results produce retrievable URLs, I cannot easily link you to what I saw. But I ran three searches on:

* volcano
* economics
* heart

Hoping to see some learning objects, what I found is that 95% of the results are simply links to web pages, many of them course syllabi [1] [2], in some cases images [1], pages not found [1] [2] [3], this page has moved [1] [2], a thesaurus [1]

Yes, an unscientific sampling, and perhaps I misunderstand the purpose of this site is more to demonstrate the search technology than the content.

But if these are the learning objects that are meant be "reusable" chunks of content, I am totally mystified as to what this giant piece of technology has created- a keyword search engine that finds web sites, and pretty meta data for web sites (many of which do not exist any more).

If that is the case, we ought to just use Google, eh?

This image was made by compositing 2600 photographs and arranging them in a fibonacci spiral, a form commonly seen in plants, such as sunflowers and pinecones. The image was produced by Jim Bumgardner using images from the Squared Circle photo pool at Flickr, the photo-blogging website.

Jim is aiming to turn this into an actual poster, and to do so, he is seeking to get permission from the people who shared the 2600 photos on flickr-- and he is appealing to them to make sure they have applied a Creative Commons license (tools built into the flickr site) that alloes derivative works. He even created a second graphic that shows in color the images that need permission changes (it looks like 25%- but check out the image):

Legally, we can only use your photos with your permission. This means you must license them. Fortunately, Flickr makes this easy.

The red band indicates unlicensed photos. The purple band indicates photos which are licensed, but have a "No Derivatives" clause. The photos in the center are useable.

Remember: We can not, and will not use your photos if you don't license them!

This reminded me of an ichat yesterday with Gerry Paille, and he was asking why places like flickr and del.icio.us are exploding with activity, but educators cannot seem to get anywhere above the no pulse line with learning objects. Imagine a chink of learning material seamlessly created from 2600 other pieces, each licensed. Flickr is proving huge amounts of reusablity of their "objects".

Of course photos are much similar than learning objects (after all, we all know what a photo is :-).

Hence Feasibility of Course Development Based on Learning Objects: Research Analysis of Three Case Studies:

Learning objects offer potential for cost and time savings (Downes, 2000; Hodgins, 2003;Wiley, 2002c). However are these benefits being realized in current practices? This investigation examines the course development implications of a learning object approach to the design and production of online courses. This paper presents three case studies that seek to maximize the use of freely available and reusable learning objects in their course design. The three case studies originated in different university-level disciplines – Nursing, Business and English writing. Using the Internet, each group searched for and selected learning objects to integrate into a specific course. Throughout the course development process, the individuals documented and shared their experiences. They reflected on the availability, benefits and barriers encountered when working with publicly available learning objects. This paper discusses the feasibility, pedagogy, and cost-effectiveness of searching, retrieving and integrating online learning objects into a post-secondary distance education course.

I see it popping up a references in feeds from blogs I read, and nearly every time, the blogged entry has just a lifted quote (like I just did). How about scraping the surface?

The paper does come equipped with quite a thorough background and list of references on Learning Objects- ideal if you are intending to append to the long list.

I admit doing a quick skim and am not aiming to diss the research or the work covered in the article but in a Dummies Guide to Long Research Papers, this is what I gleaned:

* Three discipline groups looked for learning objects to redesign a course.
* They struggled with finding objects, being able to re-deploy them, but maintain "they are timely"
* Learning Objects are theoretically useful but still not easy to find and use.

Here is what is tragically missing from the paper, to me, immense holes large enough to drive a large mining truck through:

* What are some examples of the objects found -reviewed? Where did they find them (besides "Google")?
* What were they doing with the objects? How where they re-used?
* Where is the content these groups spent 6 months developing?
* Is anyone surprised that not one object was mention as re-used (between groups or found elsewhere in another context?)

All I am asking for, authors, are some old fashioned hyperlinks. Share the love. If the reference papers can be linked, why not the meat of the research? Where is the beef? Where is the demo? Where are the objects?

Oh well, another reason I stay outside the PhD Club. Or as in other words, Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah! Blah blah blah blah...

I love reading things like:

LOs are sometimes defined as being educational resources that can be employed in technology-supported learning. With appropriate metadata descriptions, they can be modular units that can be assembled together to form lessons and courses.

I sure wish someone out there could point me to some real examples of such lessons that have been snapped together lego like fashion. I see these things in the same vein as Sasquatch, Nessie, and the Yeti-- all you get are big headlines and fuzzy photos.

And we must hail the mighty meta-data:

In order to search for and find LOs, which might be ideal for a particular course, descriptions of their many characteristics are needed. This is what metadata does...Metadata includes a listing of commonly defined fields for each LO. These fields conform to an accepted set of rules. These rules provide a means of creating, handling and storing data and electronically transferring information using common standards that enable international interoperability.

I love meta data, even mildly believe in its value, but severely doubt the piles of structured, rigid meta data armories constructed by the acronym soup organizations will go very far. Kind of like driving a Hummer crossing a rope bridge... "Who will do all this tagging?" It has all the appeal of doing the long tax form in quadruplicate. It won't be me, and it sure will not be your average technology user.

Rory then goes on to in great detail outline a variety of schema and dimensions to look at learning objects. This is some valid, thought out work... this statement seems left out there hanging:

Whether something counts as a LO, depends on whether it can be used to teach or learn, and this can only be determined by its use, not by its nature.

So where in the pile of meta data, repositories, SCORMIEEERADRIADNEIMS doe we ever look at tracking use/reuse? Nada.

So drum roll please.....

LOs can be defined as any reusable digital resource that is encapsulated in a lesson or assemblage of lessons grouped in units, modules, courses, and even programmes. A lesson can be defined as a piece of instruction, normally including a learning purpose or purposes.

Like the hundreds of "you've reached the end of the Internet" pages, maybe here one can say "You have reached the end of the learning object definitions. Turn off your computer and go home."

Still, it is no clearer than the day before I ever heard the words "learning object". Me, I take a twist on Justice Potter Stewart's definition for pornography, "I cannot define it, but I know a learning object when I see it"

Tomorrow Brian and I will be rounding up some objects in our pre-conference seminar, "Decentralization of Learning Resources: Syndicating Learning Objects Using RSS, TrackBack, and Related Technologies". More on that after the fact, jack.

But it will be wild and full of action, so bring your meta data down to the OK Corral...

After that, it is 3 days of the typical big conference show, lots of sessions, hawkers in the vendor pens, most people reading email via the wireless. This is one big show, last time I went I think it was 6000+ attendees.

If you are there, give me a yell or look me up iChat.

Giddyup!

flickr foto

Volcano Types Diagram
available on my flickr

I saw this recently in something Brian shared that shows a flickr image that through this method, demonstrates the process for making a pie.

At first I missed the significance, as I thought it was just the pictures... but when you follow Brian's link to the flickr image you get more than the image- it is annotated with hotspots of descriptive text when you roll the mouse over a region of the image.

I just rolled this quick example together, using an image I had created for our Writing HTML tutorial, dusting off the geology cobwebs, it is a graph used in introductory geology to help classify volcanos. When you roll overthe image in flickr, you get short explanation or detail related to the region of the diagram.

This is done easily in flickr when you edit a photo, and click the small icon for Add Note. A region is added to your image which you can drag to resize and reposition over a part of an image, and then compose the note associated with that image.

Hotspot type diagrams have many uses in learning- e.g. identifying parts of the nervous system for an anatomy and physiology class, diagraming a sentence structure for English, clarifying composition for music theory, illustrating the location of engine parts for an engiineering class... on and on.

How many of our course management tools offer a simple hotspot tool? Too busy 'managing'....

Flickr may not be the be-all tool for creating so called "learning objects", but anyone can quickly take an image and add annotation to it. Object or not, it is yet another cool layer of flickr.

As our hard drives fill up with thousands then tens and hundreds of thousands of digital snapshots, we're all going to face the same basic challenges as the Bettmann Archive. Of course, you won't haul 19 semitrailers full of your decaying family photos into cold storage, as the Bettmann did in 2001. But you can expect to go clicking through folder after folder of pixelated images, trying to find the one where Aunt Rose put on a silly inflatable life preserver in the summer of 1999.

He then goes in to describe how Corbis is tagging their digital archive- with the skills of a professional metadata tagger, something few of us have or even care to bother with. Adding keyword tags to images allow the cryptic named images to be dredged up by search tools...

In computer parlance, these tags are metadata - information about information. But metadata as it relates to imagery is a slippery thing, and tagging is a craft, not a science. If, for example, Fraser doesn't recognize one of the figures in a cocktail party scene as Serena Williams and instead tags it "Nightlife," customers searching for photos of tennis stars won't find it, and it might as well not exist....

Thus, the metadata most of us attach to our photos is pretty pathetic. We can name them when we transfer them to a computer, but most people don't bother and end up with a hard disk full of photos with names like DSC00012.jpg and DSC00234.jpg. As the years go on, DSC00234.jpg will become an archaeological artifact that might as well be labeled Don't_Know_Don't_Care.jpg. If we're to have any hope of preserving our memories, we'll need to be more clever than that. Much more clever.

The article goes on to describe 6 ways (illustrated in a side bar) to ease the metadata tag problem- everybody wants tags for what they can provide, but no one wants the tedious chore of applying tags.

To me 5 of them to me are either un-reasonable or untenable, and the most interesting approach "socual networking" or the free form tagging method taking off at flickr (for photos) and del.icio.us (for shared bookmarks) gets rather short shift in the article. It's one that is feasible for people to manage, and it is happening now (as opposed to facial or scene recognition).

A read of Jon Udell's Collaborative Knowledge Gardening opens up the possibilities even farther.

And the leap from tagging of photos to so called "learning objects" is the shortest of steps... of course it is very clear what a photo is and what it means to tag it, but objects? We could spend the next 40 years wrestling over definitions or controlled vocabularies... to what end?

This is good meta data- it is automatically created (no tag typing, or 2 page form completions) and it is transparently and appropriately used when the "object" (my image) moves from one environment (my computer) to another (to flickr).

And then you click the link for the camera name, and you get all the freakin meta data! This is provided as part of EXIF (Exchangeable Image File) data file format that is nicely handled by iPhoto.

Does that make sense? Metadata ought to be completely in the background. Transparent to the user. Is that the tack taken by "learning objects"? Nooooooo - the metadata is out in front, like a big ugly boulder dropped in your front yard.

Even more flickr eye openings- you cannot right-click save images; they are presented as Flash objects (yes i know screen shots are possible), butt that is n-e-a-t. And what about that link that says "Flag this photo as 'may offend'"?? What happens when you click it? Do the police come to your door? ;-)

I looooooovvvvvve flickr. I am in love, deep in love.

Go Flickr Go

My experiment has been to assemble the RSS feeds from known learning objects (ugh here comes that word...) repositories into one Learning Objects Bloggdigger group. You can subscribe to this feed via its own RSS URL:

http://groups.blogdigger.com/rss.jsp?id=252

But when you go to the Blogdigger page for this group they offer a search field, so you can key word search for results within this pile of objects, for example, all the items among the Learning Object feeds that contain the word "math".

Nice.

But wait, there is more. This customized display also has a customized RSS feed- so you could subscribe to a subset of this feed:

http://groups.blogdigger.com/rss.jsp?search=1&id=252&q=math&sortby=date

Sweeeeet.

This is understanted and overly powerful. This is ripping up content from a collection of discrete RSS feeds and re-combining it into something new. Maybe if we could assign our own "tags" to feeds, we could have a wacky place like flickr's tagged photos.

Well, that might be over-board.

But think about it-- getting into consuming content via RSS is a small step for humans, but now mixing feeds and creating new feeds from that, well, that is one great leap for human-kind.

And then it might be tossed into feedburner, mixed with photo feeds and furl-ed sites, and.... what a stew!

This year, we ripped the page right out of the Small Pieces Loosely Joined concept and built a system to support our four action groups that will lead activities and projects on:

• Learning Objects
• ePortfolios
• Hybrid Course Structures
• Emerging Learning Technologies

Each group publishes their activities, findings, ideas on a weblog. Each group also has a wiki of its own to build collaborative resources, and a discussion board to have "conversations" (previously alluded to in July 2004).

The map sort of looks like:

larger image

So four groups times a blog,, wiki, and board = 12 information sources.. plus a blog for the General faculty Ocotillo chair and we have it all tied together with RSS or RSS-like feeds to present a dashboard view of all the activity... we call Ocotillo Central:

http://graphite.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/ocotillo/

This week we've announced to our system the new setups via an online kickoff event. We have short video welcomes from the 8 faculty co-chairs, plus our Chancellor, 2 Vice Chancellors, a Dean, and the faculty general chair. These have been set up to be available in QuickTime, Real, or Windows Media streaming formats. The ideas is to give our people an idea who is leading this initiatives, and why they are important, and then ask them to join in on some discussions via our web boards.

Well, the action has been okay, but slow. People are reading the boards, and we can see a number of account created there, but there is not a whole lot of discussion... so to set some things into frothy motion, I am inviting any CogDogBlog readers to join in-- as our intent all along was to have this system by open to people inside and outside of Maricopa.

So here it is. Visit the Virtual Kickoff at:
http://graphite.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/ocotillo/kickoff.php

where there are instructions for how to use the discussion boards. The boards are open to the world to read, but to participate, you must register to create an account (and confirm via an auto generated email).

So come on in and stir things up. Who knows what will happen.

We have been working on getting people who have experience or expertise in these areas to join us as "guests" for topical discussions in the web boards. Contact me if you want to be a virtual guest.