General educational technology things no longer worthy of their own cateory
Perched up at MIT, Phil Long is a key instructional visioneer, and in a recent Syllabus column he writes TrackBack: Where Blogs Learn Their Places. It’s a nice general overview of TB, yes, but Phil seems to not see as wide as we do by focusing only on what Trackback means in the blog world– […]
There is almost nothing more cliche than a Field of Dreams metaphor “If you build it, they will come”, but it is all so fitting for those that get glaze-eyed at the potential of building a Learning Object Repository (ugh, I despise the connotations of the “R-word”).
But I can guarantee you, that if you build it, they likely will not come, and if they do the pace will be one that gives you heartburn into the night.
However, do not despair. What follows is a tale of our efforts of growing our own collection, the Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX) story. And what we have tried, including saying “please”, bringing out the dogs and ponies, bribery, competition, and good old fashioned nagging.
Last weekend I built a fence around a vegetable garden in our yard. I am not really much of a craftsman, but this project came out pretty nice. Working with the hands got me thinking about (reaching for the metaphor) building things out of learning objects.
I have harped before that there has been way too much emphasis on the creation of the “repositories” and the piles of meta-data, and the search tools- and almost nothing on the craft, the art, the magic, of building something out of the things inside the collections.
Last week at one of our faculty instructional technology meetings, we were trying to get some commitment to taking on the learning object issue. There was the usual tired, over-trodden attempts at definitions, a lot of shrugging, and then the often worded desire for some sort of magic, point and click tools that would assemble LOs into meaningful learning activities.
As the line goes in the hilarious Australian comedy The Castle:
But as I worked on that fence I thought about what an un-realistic, un-attainable, expectation this dream places on technology…
Wow. In a very un-MERLOT-ian scheduling coup, we have the opening session (right after Wayne Hodgins! October 14) for a presentation at the NMC Online Conference on Learning Objects.
For those that missed the MERLOT 2003 presentation, this is your chance to see it during this conference, except now we get to add the razzle-dazzle (sound) as the conference format is via Macromedia Breeze. This is the return of Lora and Boris, and their blogging adventures on learning objects in their discipline.
The presentations are made available to conference attendees to view any time– Brian, D’Arcy, and myself get to then be available at a scheduled time for a live chat.
Finally! A test site now proves that Radio/UserLand weblogs are TrackBack enabled. And it works! Got Trackback? Yup!
My blog entry here was created by using the MovableType bookmarklet tool that automatically dissected the test source, found the embedded RDF TrackBack data, and provided the ping address directly to my blog editing environment. The proof of my ping should be registered right here
It work, and it works across different blog systems. This opens the door for maybe a lot more TrackBack activity…
One might ask why someone would use or create something like BlogChatter – Realtime Weblog Aggregation and the answer is the topic of this post (same answer to the philosophical question, “why do dogs lick themselves?”).
Blogchatter allows you to peek into the fast paced universe of weblogs (or blogosphere) by providing a rolling log of who is posting a new weblog entry right now. And these listings live only for 30 seconds before being knocked off for the next ones.
Wow, it is not even 15 minutes following our teleconference on “What’s The Fuss about RSS?” and already George has posted some great summary points, elearnspace blog: The Fuss about RSS – Summary.
How did I know? I glanced at my NetNewsWire RSS aggregatos and saw not only George’s new blog entry, but one from David, a modified PS from D’Arcy, and maybe more to come.
But I have to mention this great line from George’s post.
Okay folks. We have polished off most of the rough edges of the wiki part of our presentation on What’s the Fuss abour RSS? and are here tossing it out for your viewing.
Update (Sept 3, 2003) The wiki has been spiffed up and moved to http://careo.elearning.ubc.ca/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?TheFuss
This is just a pre-notice teaser for our upcoming LOVCOP teleconference on July 11, 2003: What’s the Fuss about RSS?. Tune in at 9 am Pacific, 10 am Mountain, 11 am Central, noon Eastern.
For access details (it is a toll free call), rush and click over to the LOVCOP site and sign up or email a request to LearningObjects@educause.edu.
On Friday you may even get a chance to sip some faux Merlot, and meet the (?) famous blogging duo of Boris and Lora.
We spotted a new Learning Objects White Paper posted in Macromedia’s Learning Object Development Center.
Written by New Media Consortium CEO Larry Johnson:
Elusive Vision: Challenges Impeding the Learning Object Economy,’ÄÝexplores the drivers, enablers and mediators in the’ÄÝlearning object economy.’ÄÝ Larry Johnson, CEO of the New Media Consortium,’ÄÝdescribes and analyzes a’ÄÝsummit of international learning objects experts.’ÄÝ
I still need some time to digest the paper, [800k PDF ], includes the output of a group of LO heavyweights (Hodgins, Carey, Masie… where are Wiley and Downes? likely duking it out 😉 who gathered in San Francisco in September 2002.
