Yesterday the inventory at the Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX) climbed higher. As blogged earlier, the Civic Responsibility: From Awareness to Commitment Dialogue Day held yesterday (Apr 30, 2004) included activities where faculty from across our system submitted to the MLX their lesson ideas the involved some aspect of Civic Engagement- from a range of disciplines (English, Sociology, Economics, Writing, etc).
These are now collected in a MLX special collection, making it easier to see these 32 packages with a common theme in a group, piled one palette in the warehouse. You may notice that the boxes are, ahem, a bit “light”– this is because there is a different strategy at work here. Rather than just collecting nicely wrapped finished packages (or learning objects), there are just the starts of some new ones. The activities involved working in groups to generate these new ideas, and they used the MLX to post them.
Think of it rather than just boxing up things on an assembly line, stuffing them with packing peanuts and shipping them off– this group was merely taking the flat boxes, folding them, taping them up, adding the shipping details…. but they will (hopefully) return to the packages to fill in the detail.
Bad idea? I don’t know for sure- even seeing a range of teaching activities has a value. And if you are eager to see the boxes filled up, well use those comment fields to send your request!
As an interesting aside, we had set up an RSS Feed from this MLX special collection to post to the side bar of the event web site– it was just the morning of when I uttered a load DOH! as it never really seemed to update… Well heck, the feed generator was using the same scripts that generate the HTML listings of the packages, where the default listing is alphabetical order by title! A quick change to the feed script to order by date modified, descending fixed that. Also, originally, I had used our “>RSS2JS script but that has a problems that the feeds are cached and can be updated only after 3 hours… so I ripped out the scripts, wrote a new sub routine for this site (cache time 3 minutes), and since it was all PHP, I could write directly to the site, no JavaScript needed.
Always learning as we go….
