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Learning Object Reuse Acknowledgment (an idea, an acronym, and not much more)

One of the theories (myth?) for learning objects is that their cataloging is there to support re-use. But just making piles of objects in repositories does not intrinsically motivate re-use. About a year ago (BB before blogging, so the first mention was after the fact) I tinkered one afternoon with adding the MovableType Trackback mechanism to every item in the Maricopa Learning eXchange.

We have presented this idea and a few scenarios to the LOVCOP, Merlot 2003 Conference, NMC Online conference. but not seen any traction out there. So I am pitching this again, as an idea, and an acronym, Learning Object Reuse Acknowledgment (LORA) (did you really think that I chose a name for a fictitious faculty member out of the big book of names! I had a plan! Now try and guess what BORIS stands for 😉

The concept is this. Billy grabs an a 3D molecule object from your collection. When Billy re-deploy it in another context (e.g. publish with some futuristic, Jetson-like learning object constructor, as opposed so so-called learning object “ingestors”, yuck), the system automatically sends a short electronic “acknowledgment” to the object’s home in the “repository.” In MovableType, this is a “ping” message that sends a weblog a title, URL, date, and brief blurb of this external mention of a blog post.

A bit more detail….

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Gone to the Dogster: Dog-jects, Doggie Meta-Data??

UIh-oh, I am going to be busy now. From Ben Hammersley by way of Stephan Downes (who is a cat-person) comes a reference to Dogster ( “catster.com” is registered but no site is there!). Welcome to Dogster …where every dog has a webpage. Dogster lets you view and save photos of dogs, search by breed, […]

Blog Pile

Old Fashioned Junk Mail

I hardly blink while deleting all of the unsolicited crap that hits the e-mail inbox. But just as a throwback, I got a flier in my postal mail at work for “everything you need to know in an intensive 2-day seminar!”: Centrifugal Pumps: Troubleshoot and Maintain Centrifugal Pumps- Learn How to Reduce the Amount of […]

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Beware of Blogs in Plaid Jackets

While opportunistic greed vultures are circling over RSS, the used blog sales men have set up their hawkster wares down on the corner. Witness BlogToRiche$.com: Imagine earning an additional income, or more, by doing what you are already doing…BLOGGING! That’s right, I’ve outlined the basic techniques of how to use your Blog to make money! […]

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XPLANA “Courseware Karma” On Graphics…. Karma Shmarma

Wow, XPLANA’s Interface Impact When Developing and Teaching Online Courses : When using graphics in a course, it is imperative that the graphics match the subject matter they are being presented with. When graphics are either inappropriate (meaning that they either do not correspond with the subject matter or they are culturally biased) they are […]

Blog Pile

A Sheep in Wolve’s Clothing: I am Teaching Online

Time to be honest. For being immersed in instructional technology for 12 years, I have yet to teach online. I’ve taught classroom computer courses (Director / Animation), created and delivered lots of workshops, developed a batch of online self-paced tutorials… but never a for-real online course. So I grabbed the opportunity when colleagues from one […]

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ePortfolio System Just Up and Running

We had a burst of interest after our October 2002 Electronic Portfolio Dialogue Day, but there has been a long lapse in our efforts, with some fall out from a not so great experience with an external project. But just in about the last 3 days, we have started a new experiment, running a test […]

Blog Pile

Thumbs Up for Our Maricopa Bloggers

It will take a few more days to compile notes, but the reaction and participation at our Ocotillo Online Learning Group this past Friday was very positive. This was obviously brand new territory for many of our faculty, and we had to clarify a bit on what are blogs, why are they different form discussion […]

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Waiting on the MLX…

I’ve been holding back the itch to gripe about how hard it still is to get the people in our system to squeeze a few minutes out of their day to share ideas and materials that already exist in the Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX) (past gripes 1, 2, 3 … There have been a few […]