A little bit of echo to Brian’s analysis of our conference ending session on RSS and Learning Objects. You can find the paper there as well as a hefty 6 Mb PowerPoint (if I have time, I will at least post a MS mangled HTML version), plus there is a streaming quicktime version too.

There seemed (from the front of the room) a buzz of interest and people were at least sitting forward in their chairs instead of snoozing. Stephen took in good humour our reference to “the oracle.” And hats off for Michelle for playing the part of “Lora” and showing up to the presentation.

I really hope people can go back and start on the same discovery of the power of RSS for staying in tune first with information in their interest area, and then thinking about how it can be integrated into their online materials and/or use of learning objects (no matter what defintion you can slap on them)

I regret having to rush right out at the close of the session to try and dash to the airport for a 2:00 flight. A small tip for Vancouver Travelers- forget the pokey Airporter Bus (it was 20 minues late when I gave up) that makes a billion stops. I was able to grab a cab and get to the airport in 25 minutes (thanks to a silent but agressive driver) with a risky 2 hour window to stroll through US Customs.

But then…

Friday, last homestretch of the conference.

Collaborative Usability Evaluations with IDEA Online
Rachel Smith

(Comment- this is a very cool, Carl Berger “cooooool”, resource. Sign up, submit designs, and join their evaluation group. The system itself is well designed)

Asked for hand raises of faculty, staff, who designs online content or learning objects. Then… asked for who had professional training in interface design (one hand raise).

Hence reason for the IDEA Online project – a web site resource for getting feedback on interface design from any submitted site. Currently has 60 members.

Started as paper based checklist… ended up being 60 pages! Seemed more efficient to move online.

There was a significant drop in weblogging activity this evening, starving Stephen’s MERLOT conference feed, as D’Arcy, Scott, Brian, Greg, Stephen, Bruce, Alan (plus Michelle but she may not want her blog linked… but we know where it is 😉 downed some ales and swapped stories over at… um… what was the name of that […]

“MERLOT Focus on: Federated Search Technologies”
Martin Konig Bastiaan

Waiting for the overview, background slides about federated searches. In a nutshell, use web services to spread search and retrieval across multiple sources.

But the three dollar (Canadian) question- will they put a URL on the screen of a MERLOT RSS feed?

“Herding CATS: A Model for Professional Development for Academic Technology”
Abbe Altman, CSU Sonoma

CATS= Community of Academic Technology Staff (CATS) also part of MERLOT, see MERLOT repository of CATS materials

(Comment- the dogs here are riled at the feline metaphors 😉

Getting ready to start the Thursday 8:00am general session, another presenation by Garry Putland from EdNA (Education Network Australia). There will be other bloggers in the room madly typing the notes, so I plan to lean back and observe…

Too bad the room is looking pretty sparse- Garry is brilliant and EdNA Online is worth seeing. Maybe too many late nights whooping it up at the Celebration of Lights fireworks last night… I could hear from outside the throngs lined up for the SkyTrain after the show were chanting “Oh Canada” endlessly.

Now it the room is filling, and on with the show.

(This blog is from memory- a browser freeze up managed to eat a half composed immediate blog entry).

First half was on the connection of MERLOT and EDUCAUSE’s NLII (National Learning Infrastructure Initiative). NLII research fellows Colleen Carmean and Patricia McGee provided the overview of NLII as the arm of the EDUCAUSE organization that looks at issues of teaching and learning, and in particular one of its themes this year on…. Learning Objects.

Part of the “building community” is the Learning Object Virtual Community of Practice (LOVCOP, love the acronym), which to be honest from this writer’s opinion, has seen little activity of community and even less practice, and is only hampered by the cumbersome and community-stifling Worktools technology. At least the “virtual” part holds up.

But that is an aside.

Waiting now for the start of Garry Putland’s talk on the Australian LO portal- I had a chance to chat with him early, and heard about what sounds like an incredible integration of information connected with RSS- he mentioned availablity of more than 2000 feeds, not only for objects, but information piped to different web portals.

Well, maybe I am getting ahead of the presentation… It is ready to roll. In a snippet, the Ozzies are way ahead of the pack in terms of “getting it” with open source, standards, syndicated content, and communities of practice. Makes us look like roadside wombats..

MERLOT and EdNA now have a relationship to be revealed here. (EdNA= Education Network Australia) Rightfully so, Garry is based in Adelaide, home of many great vinyards.

He mentioned (and others have alluded to) published RSS feeds from MERLOT, but have yet to see anything for real. Is it to be revealed at Thursday’s 4:00 PM session on “MERLOT Federated Searches”?? The abstract mentions implementations of “web services”.

Gerry Hanely, head MERLOT “wine steward”- said a theme was “connecting learning repositories”. Interesting, eh? Can you think of an acronym that fits there? It begins with an R….

Keynote: “Leading from Both Ends”- Doug MacLeod from Netcetera to talk about eduSourceCanada. Introduced “Donut Object Repositories” Tim Horton’s- a chain of thousands of franchises across Canada.