General educational technology things no longer worthy of their own cateory
The energy was electric yesterday at our system’s first introduction to “Pachyderm” at our Pachyderm: Building Meaningful Content with Learning Objects Dialogue Day. The reaction to the potential of Pachyderm and the level of participation in the afternoon activities were beyond our wildest expectations. Much had to do with the enthusiasm guest speaker Peter Samis […]
No, this is not about the circus. Well, we hope not. Tomorrow (Jan 30) is our Pachyderm: Building Meaningful Content with Learning Objects Dialogue Day event for about 70 registered participants from our colleges, held at Paradise Valley Community College (our “Dialogue Days” are one day special events, workshops, etc that are organized by our office in response to requests of faculty or promising trends, etc).
Pachyderm is one of the most promising tools that would actually be able to build something useful from so-called “learning objects”. Developed by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as a vehicle to allow non-technical staff (museum curators) to create rich multimedia web/CD/kiosk experiences that add layers of context around the museum exhibits, and it is constructed via a web interface that accesses a database of digitized assets. It is not a small leap to say this is a similar need for faculty, so SFMOMA in conjunction with the New Media Consortium (NMC) have launched the Pachyderm 2.0 project with this goal in mind- to create an open-source authoring platform for educators.
When ever a discussion turns to “defining learing objects” my attention span goes out the door. With more than 500,000 Google-hits (link above), it is not any more clear what a LO is.
The “Learning Object Virtual Community Of Practice” bears the cheery acronym LOVCOP, but it has been a ghost town since summer 2003. The virtual tumbleweds are blowing down main street and the saloon is slient.
But I have read some things recently where it seems that almost any multimedia lesson created, any web page, every single flash goober, seems to bear the hot label of a”learning object.” Therefore, I proclaim that everything that exists is a learning object, including my left big toe, so we can drop the silly jargon and move on to what counts…
This rightfully belongs with the recent barking on Repository Follies— a few weeks back Scott Leslie made reference to “Best Faculty-level presentation on Learning Objects from the last 18 months”— a vintage 2002 keynote by William Horton titled “Don’t Bother Me With Learning Objects! I’ve Got a Course to Teach!, a worthwhile 4.3 Mb PDF: […]
By rule, I usually avoid use of the “R-word” (repository, too close to the “S-word”), but wanted to launch, here just a few notches into a new calendar, my pessimism on the aspirations of those creating these magical collections of “learning objects.” The folly is that educators will give up some time to share information about resources they have created or used. They pay lip service to the concept but the action is not there. A bigger folly is that they would have the gumption to complete a “meta-data” form on top of that.
I am more convinced is that the loop is far from closed as we lack anything that can easily build meaningful things from these R-places. We have piles of meta-data on top of objects… and that is about all.
But following the pessimism is maybe a small ray of sunshine (next post).
This is fueled largely by the lack of response (or glacial speed thereof) of contributions to our Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX). Back in October I outlined a rather long list of the various efforts and strategies we have put in place to convince our folks to help build the MLX.
Although I miss the literary references, I do like the spin that Jason Kotke puts on meta-data: Nothing takes the fun and personality out of writing like metadata. As software developers, photographers, writers, and users struggle to organize creative work so that people can locate what they’re after, the work itself has necessarily been de-emphasized. […]
It is time to crank up the promotion department for the Maricopa Learing eXchange (MLX), given that the semester is winding down. We have set up a new PR area that links all of the MLX presentation and news tidbits. With the exception of a nice burst of 15 entries from Estrella Mountain Community College […]
From Seneca College in Ontario, Canada comes a new Learning Objects Portal Page: ….a gateway to many resources about learning objects and repositories. We invite you to meander through the portal sections below based on your interest. f you like to discover through interaction, we suggest you visit our “Activities” section… This site is intended […]
An artlcle and links from University of British Columbia’s e-Strategy newsletter (no RSS!) features some interesating tools developed at the UBC Arts ISIT.
<tiphat>Tip of the blg hat to my colleague Michelle, who has one of the funkier blog names for an educator 😉 </tiphat>
You gotta like the fun photos of the tool creators on the news story.
Here is another new learning objects “hub” site (a PHP-Nuke supported site) called Learning About Learning Objects . I clicked and clicked and clicked trying to find the elusive “About” statement, failing, and found this on a site that seemed to be the prototype: The process of implementing SDCCD Online to date has highlighted several […]
