cogdogblog

Learning Object Readings

Learning Objects Readings assembled by Micheael Roy at Wesleyan for a new Learning Object site being developed there (worth a click and look). Their project sounds interesting and is using some (free) web portal tools from the Internet Scout project

Lots of good links and references here, a bit rough edged on the blog side (maybe it is new or maybe it is just blogspot)- some links are not linked and there is not much navigation.

Probably a work in progress, and the resources are good, so content can be prince if not king or queen.

Learing Objects Discovery Workshop

See Learning Objects Discovery Workshop by Tony Whittinham.

Sections include "Analysis", "Design", "Development", "Implementation", and "Evaluation" and are thoruogh, chock full of extra resources.

Ideal Gas Law Multi-User Game

This experimental site form 2000 (MLX Item #372), a multi-user application designed to teach students the interplay of variables in the Ideal Gas law, has been getting a fair bit of action lately. Check it out.

I've not paid it much attention, but the multi-user server (once available as part of Macromedia Director, now retired) hums along quietly on a Macintosh 8500 sitting in the corner of my office.

This box handles the user-to-user interaction, while the host shockwave site sits on our main web server.

Developing in MUS was pretty complex, but once you got your head aaround the messaging scheme, it allowed some interesting group interaction in real-time.

Although Macromedia dumped MUS technology, this project still functions- content can still thrive, even when the software wilts (all of those HyperCard and mTropolis fanatics out there are believers)

I had been having issues with some other software I was trying to run on this machine (it was my main development computer 4 years ago), so I decided a few weeks ago to reformat the drive (turns out I had abad internal drive) and re-install the system software.

Not long after In turned it off I started getting emails from students asking why they could not access this web site, and via them I got in touch with a high school science teacher using this for a student assignment. assure him it was coming back, and it has been a steady stream of users accessing it since (judging from the MUS server log).

Maybe it picked up some action as I posted it on MERLOT (Hey Merlot, where's the RSS? What's the big deal?)

PS- I am writing this mainly to play some more with the TrackBack code we inserted into the MLX

RSS & LOs BlogMentions

Just to keep up, here is some summary blog action referring to our work here on Learning Objects and RSS (Too bad Manila/Radio users do not have their entries coded internally to be recognized via autodiscover, and cannot be TrackBacked)...

And it has been only about a week or two since the dabbling really got started.

Weblogg-ed Vol.2: Using Weblogs in Education Will says "My Brain Hurts"-- sorry for brain pain, but I know what you mean.

David Carter-Tod gives it "most important post of the day"... Aww shucks....

D'Arcy Norman and I have been going in the same direction almost at the same time (Howdy D'Arcy!)....

Scott Leslie in EdTechPost aggregates feeds from a handful of LO repositories (including our MLX)

David Wiley gives us a plug too for "The Use is the Context"... much thanks as I was inspired by Wiley's mention of this concept in his paper Learning objects: difficulties and opportunities.

Consultant Seb Schmoller gives us a plug.

more...
from Feedster

MT Plugins

MT Plugins is very useful collection of addition tools for Movable Type for those that are setting up an MT site, all free. I've added two so far and plan to go back for more...

MTRSS Feed by Timothy Appnel is what we have used so MT authors can define one or more RSS feeds to have automatically inserted to their site, such as the two fictional bloggers I have set up:

Lora (Geology Objects) has RSS feeds from at least 4 sources"
http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/lora/

Boris (Humanities Objects) has RSS feeds from at least 3 sources:
http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/boris/

This is easiest to do if you also incorportate the MTList plugin which allows one to list their desired list of RSS Feeds in an external file, and thus not have to insert them into the template (getting rather tired of the endless MT Rebuild sequences...), e.g.

   <MTListFile file="lo_feeds.txt" name="feeds" />

	<MTListLoop name="feeds">

	<MTRSSFeed>

		<strong><$MTRSSFeedTitle$></strong><br/>


		<ul><MTRSSFeedItems lastn="5">

		<li><a href="<$MTRSSFeedItemLink$>" target="ext">

		<$MTRSSFeedItemTitle$></a></li>

		</MTRSSFeedItems>

		<li><a href="<$MTRSSFeedLink$>"><em>more...</em></a></li>

		</ul>

			

	</MTRSSFeed>

	</MTListLoop>

	<p>Syndicated using <a href="http://www.mplode.com/tima/files/mt-plugins/#mt-rssfeed";>mt-rssfeed</a></p>

So with the same code in the template, all one needs to do is to put their list of desired XML feeds into a text file named "lo_feeds.txt" on their MT directory, and edit that as desired.

And Boris then TBs the Same Object

Meet my second learning object blogger, Boris the humanities teacher.

He also finds the same correlation meter blogged by Lora, and ads an entry to his own blog- essentially he has a different use for the same LO.

And thus, one object in our collection can be networked to places where it is referenced:

http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/cgi-bin/tb.cgi?__mode=list&tb_id=278

Lora TrackBacks an Object

So first Lora, searches our MLX and then uses her MT Bookmarklet to ping a Correlation Meter that she can use in teaching about the correlation coefficient.

She writes a blog entry...

BackTrack to TrackBack

It was David Wiley's paper "Learning objects: difficulties and opportunities" that got me thinking about how weblogs might be able to provide the contextual "wrapper" around learning objects- .e.g. people implementing LOS would use tools like MT's TrackBack to discover properly marked objects, and then describe how they might be (or are) used in an educational context in a blog.

The TrackBack mechanism (see beginners guide too) could then provide a means for objects to keep a record of where they ahve been "blogged" about.

It took very little effort to install the MT StandAlone Trackback system on this same server that we run MT, and then to modify the scripts that output our MLX items (see one) so that each item in our collection would have a unique Trackback ID. This would allow bloggers to "discover" and set up blog entries automatically to our MLX items.

So at this point we have blogs that can subscribe to our MLX feeds (and others) and now we have a way for objects to record which blogs had "pinged"

This was about 2 days after I ever heard the term "TrackBack", and I am pretty much a hack programmer...

A LO/TB story
Lora, a Geology instructor blogs about Learning Objects in her field. She finds a Correlation Meter shockwave application on the Maricopa learning eXchange MLX, and uses the TB features of her MT bookmarklet to post in her weblog how she would use it .

Meanwhile, across campus (cue the hokey BatMane music;-), Boris, an instructor in the Humanities that is trying to integrate learning objects (see his weblog), is also poking around the MLX, and by sheer coincidence, sees the very sameCorrelation Meter as a useful way to have his students better understand research journals. He too uses the autodiscivery feature of the MT bookmarklet and documents his idea.

Since we have implemented TrackBack on the MLX, not only are we coding each item for autodiscovery as Lora and Boris have done, but we can now also add to each MLX item a link to see who has been writing about that item:

http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/cgi-bin/tb.cgi?__mode=list&tb_id=278

This is very simplistic as an example, but as a reminder:

(1) Autodiscovery makes it easier for bloggers to locate/find objects of interest, and trasnfer information to the blog editing tools
(2) Doing so generates a ping that can be recorded for each Learning Object.
(3) Now each learning object has a link to other places where people have built entirely different contexts around learning objects, hopefully even linking to where it is actually put into use.

Finally, this took more time to write about than it did to implement!

Meet Lora..

Lora's geology objects was the first psuedo blog I created in MT to demonstrate a site in which w person is harnessing the LO/RSS notion in one field.

Lora is a Geology insutrctor, and here she has set up MovableType to accept RSS Feeds form our Maricopa Learning eXchange. Later she adds additional feeds from CAREO, Humbul, ITPapers. And then she learns how to have a Google search on "geology learning objects" inserted to her blog