General educational technology things no longer worthy of their own cateory
On the ‘net anything can be anything. Or not. You might think http://www.learningobjects.com/ might be something related to learning objects, but in reality what they do is: enhance the overall learning experience by addressing the needs of key stakeholders at each step in the learning lifecycle, from planning through to delivery, assessment and reporting. Huh? […]
Last Friday’s Ocotillo Online Learning Group meeting was the first announcement and access provided to a new experimental electronic portfolio service we are hosting. This is a new installation of the software developed at Chandler-Gilbert Community College— we have set up this new server so that faculty form our other colleges could explore the potential […]
My position have been made too many times regarding the apparent over-obsession with learning object meta-data, 4 words guaranteed used together will put most ordinary humans into a mild coma. I’ve given thought to meta-data and our Maricopa Learning eXchange, where the “M-D” words will never appear, but certainly lurk under the cover of our […]
Just getting bounced around RSS-space is Phil Long’s Syllabus Feb 2004 column on TrackBack: Where Blogs Learn Their Places . Some are saying tat it explains Trackback well, but to be honest, you cannot really understand it until you use it. We are glad that Phil is giving TrackBack some limelight (waiting for those to […]
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….
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, […]
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 […]
We have compiled more of the products / ideas from the 61 faculty and staff who participated in the January 30 Pachyderm: Building Meaningful Content with Learning Objects Dialogue Day . This was hands-down one of the most high energy and active ones of the sessions we have run in a long time. Unlike many other workshops and sessions, we managed to limit the “lecture” part (Peter Samis’ presentation) to 1 hour, and the bulk of the time was in group activities.
So what we have posted this week includes….
Previously on CDB, on the doubts of “Learning object repositories”… “The folly is that educators will give up some time to share information about resources they have created or used”. Now a different slant. I had lunch recently with a colleague working on a new grant funded project– creating discipline-specific “learning objects” and yes, their […]
Trying another “new aiming to be regular” CDB feature, highlighting an interesting “”package” from the Maricopa Learning eXchange. This is is special because it is not a “reusable learning object” (RLO) but a ‘reusable idea object” (RIO?) Maybe we can breed a whole raft of meaningless acronyms, like RCA (re-usable classroom activity), RCS (reusable communication strategy), RCP (reusable class project), etc. But again I digress.
This one is also special because it comes from a long time veteran teacher, both a passionate teacher in class and online, someone with an uncanny knack to truly reach and touch her students, and someone who excels and doing effective things with rather simple but effective strategies. I recall these computer workshops Donna and I did back in the mid 1990s, typically in those computer classrooms where the participants were more or less huddled behind monitors- she brought out a classroom technique she called “mouse up” to get their attention. Simple, effective, (and fun). . But again I digress.
Anyhow, Donna has shared an introductory activity she uses as the first bulletin board assignment in her online classes. Rather than a dry, “introduce yourself, what you do, what are your interests” sort of thing, she has applied this activity called The View from Where I Sit (an in this vein of RIOs, she learned this one from another faculty member at a summer workshop).
