Latest developments on the Maricopa Learning eXchange
More on the MLX front. An item that came in recently got me thinking more so about the value of reusable ideas- sure it is great to have some complex, engaging Flash animated do-hickey, but what great teachers have in great volume, and worth sharing, are smaller gems of great re-usable teaching ideas. So take […]
For the last two years we have tried a myriad of methods for soliciting people in our system to contribute their teaching ideas, class activities, course materials, heck even “learning objects” to our Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX) (see more about our incentive methods)
Even getting closer to the 1000 item mark, I know for sure we are just scraping the surface of what is “out there”. I get anecdotes, faculty letting me know that their adjuncts are making re-use of a lot of items, others thankful for specific resources, etc.
At our most recent Online Learning Group meeting, one participant thanked us for the “prize patrol picker” we use to give away door prizes (a Flash thing that picks random numbers from a pool 1-N). “Are you okay that 16 of our faculty use this?” he asked? Of course! I want more re-use!
Anyhow, now with the semester in gear, it was time for another system-wide email to invite our folks to “play” in the MLX Great Package Race. This is where we are tracking all MLX items submitted between April 1, 2004 and March 15, 2004 and will give the top contributers some software prizes, most of them donated from some nice vendors. In the last few races we had given multi-license software prizes to the colleges that contribute the most, but now we are “phasing” out of the competition/bribery approach, so this might be the Last Great Race.
Why stop this if it has been successful? I do not think we always need to create personal incentives for sharing resources. The act itself ought to be its own reward, and being public with your teaching methods is a cornerstone to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning movement which many in our system ascribe to.
And to be honest, I want to put some more effort on the next months on finding out how our packages are used/re-used…
Anyhow, for whomever cares, I am including the text of the email that was blitzed last week across Maricopa (so far it surfaced about 3 new items, sigh).
Todd has done something cool. He published a search plugin for Mozilla/Firefox web browsers that provides a direct keyword search into the Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX). I don’t do a lot of browser hopping beyond testing on the major brands. I’ve taken the cues from the Zeldmans out there to develop and test for on […]
It’s been our belief that it would take time for our Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX) to reach that magical tipping point, critical mass- when it contained enough content, resources, objects, ideas that our users could easily find something useful for themselves that they would be self-compelled to add their own stuff. I had MERLOT-ian aspirations. […]
History has been made! Pat Delaney has created the first package in the new open source MLX demonstration site, with his MLX Package on Twinned Manila sites for k-12 student publishing. We still have a lot of work to do on the site, yes there are missing links, the RSS feeds are only 1/3 there, […]
The dog has not died, but the author has been offline following the NMC 2004 Summer conference in Vancouver, taking advantage of the launch point for some relaxing travel to Vancouver Island and the tremendous Rocky Mountains south of Jasper, Alberta. It is just a short stopover in Phoenix to change clothes, repack for a […]
Got the call today from our Legal Department and they approve our plan for GPL licensing of an open source version of the Maricopa Learning eXchange (good thing cause we have been doing it anyhow). In fact, our legal counsel was impressed with “how clearly and humanly understandable the license was written” (that is the […]
A few weeks ago, the faculty developer at one of our colleges asked if we could create an MLX Special Collection for an upcoming summer institute on “Wwriting Across the Curriculum”, so that participants could create a “starter” package for a project they would complete over the summer (I call it “assembling the box’ like folding from a cardboard flat.).
The answer was of course, “yes”, and the effort took about 20 seconds to create a place for the collection.
She got the idea from how we had done a similar collection for “Civic Engagement” for an April 2004 Dialogue Day on Civic Engagement (ultimately 33 packages are in that one).
Sharon just sent some great feedback:
The MLX worked a treat in our Writing Across the Curriculum institute. There are only a few up at the moment, but our participants have gone away to refine their projects and will not only be uploading their ideas, but have been charged with using the MLX as a visual in their final presentations on August 13th.
I cannot tell you how excited I am about the role of MLX in some faculty development events like ours …. I am sold! Not only does it add to MLX, but it actually helps faculty think through an idea by having to concretely define and describe it. Way cool!
This experience did factor into some interface changes we made to the MLX loading Dock, the place where packages are created….
Colen is hard at work on re-coding the Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX) for the proposed open-source version we hope to make available as an alpha soon. There is a good deal of restructuring of the code libraries, yanking some code logic from individual PHP files and putting them in the libraries, outlining some functionality needed for some basic admin tools.
But we have the database and a crude version sort of running on a test box (don’t ask for a URL… yet). One of the interesting things to be changed is how we organize the packages in the Maricopa MLX- the main organizing unit is by colleges, so searches and RSS feeds can be filtered within a specific college’s contributions. In a sense, every person who creates an account in the MLX has an affiliation with one of our colleges, so that any packages that create are automatically associated with that college too…
Our legal department was supportive, even enthusiastic, about our plans to provide an openMLX, the propose open source version of the Maricopa Learning eXchange. They were not overly familiar with the details of open source licenses (they first proposed drafting up a new license), but seemed to understand our rationale for going GPL. Anyhow our […]
