(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.

Unlike D’Arcy, my trip to Vancouver, British Columbia, was less than smooth. It rained in Florida, so my flight from Phoenix was late, customs was slow, and the bus stopped at every freaking hotel in downtown. Finally arrived at 2:00 am, cannot h-a-r-d-l-y t-y-p-e (no more than usual). It is blessedly cool here (They call […]

Both Stephen and George recently pointed to this bit from Wired News: Educators Turn to Games for Help.

What an idea! … wait a minute, we took a look at Shall We Teach with a Game? back in 1994 at that time, with having our faculty review a selection of CD-ROM games for potential in new learning environments.

It is good to see that MIT has caught up with our work 😉 But no, we are not crowing for “we did it first credit”, but more to look at the power of small innovations that use existing content rather than big ticket projects that create glitzy, commercial game level apps.

We have had some internal discussions in our our organization about a (real? perceived?) notion that our system’s reputation for innovation has lost its luster.

So a question is, when people think of innovation, it it only the big money projects from MIT, Microsoft, etc?

Blarney.

Just a few days until I leave (Monday), heading northwest to beautiful Vancouver for the MERLOT 2003 conference. In addition to putting on a poster (and a completely unposter-like poster at that!) on the Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX), I am teaming up with compadres Brian Lamb and D’Arcy Norman for a session covering our work […]