Latest developments on the Maricopa Learning eXchange
I’ve made some noise here and there about the value of meta-data, not that I do not believe it in it nor do I think it does not exist, but mainly, I have yet to see the applied use beyond searching. Out of last week’s NMC Spring 2004 Online Conference, someone asked me, “Well doesn’t […]
The New Media Consortium Spring 2004 Online Conference was come and gone this week. I am still favorable of the format, and its mix of streaming presentations, asynchronous discussions, and live chat sessions- most online conferences throw so many sessions and event son the pile that you get overloaded. The NMC ones have had a nice balance, though the participation in this recent one was much less active than the first one in October 2003.
Anyhow, my keynote on “Mysteries Revealed! Inside the Maricopa Learning eXchange” was there, it turned out to be a 52 minute guided tour of the MLX by that energetic tour guide, Biff Cantrell. I am thinking now it was way long, but I wanted to represent all of the facets and features inside and around the MLX, from our promotion efforts, to IP issues, from hardware to software, from TrackBack to RSS. That is the thing about an online conference is you do not see the audience, so you cannot tell if they are bored, reading their email, blogging, or in a trance. You just let a presentation fly, like an arrow lofted in the air, and sometimes you hit the mark and sometimes you miss.
Maybe the jury is till out, but I have installed a copy of this presentation on our site, so if you have an hour to kill (actually with Breeze you can easily pick your way through the show), go take Captain Biff’s Tour of the MLX. Again, Macromedia Breeze does an amazing job of taking a 70 MB PowerPoint and making it something viewable as a streaming media presentation even on a 56k dial-up.
This morning was the release of my keynote on “Mysteries Revealed! Inside the Maricopa Learning eXchange” at the New Media Consortium Spring 2004 Online Conference. This turned out to be a 52 minute Breeze presentation, weighing in at a 70.5 Mb in authored PowerPoint, but a streaming 15 Mb via Breeze delivered Flash.
At 9:30 Am PST was the scheduled audio teleconference, which is a little of an odd format because the call in participants hear me via the audio telephone bridge, but post questions via the conference chat, and host Larry Johnson relayed them to me. Actually it kind of works well, and was a fast 30 minutes. The audio has been posted to the conference site.
It was good to see some new names and institutions listed in the chat area. I am guessing, but maybe there was disappointment that my vague reference to “franchising” was not the unveiling of a “Download MLX Source Code Here” link. I am hoping there is some more conversation about this.
At least on the fun side, there was an inquiry as to the whereabouts of the MLX tour guide “Biff Cantrell”….
Tuesday is my keynote presentation at the NMC Sipring 2004 Online Conference – register now to tune into “Mysteries Revealed! Inside the Maricopa Learning eXchange”. For this presentation I, ahem, went well over the suggested length of 20 minutes, to more than 50 (!) but it covers a lot of ground, and is all pictures, […]
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 […]
I am coming up for air…. gasp…. gasp… This is crunch week for prepping my keynote session at the NMC Online Conference, scheduled for Tuesday March 9. My Breeze-d up show is called “Mysteries Revealed! Inside the Maricopa Learning eXchange” and should be action packed, irreverent, and over the top. This will be a guided […]
Rumors are that elusive character, Biff Cantrell, will be appearing at the New Media Consortium Spring Online Conference (March 8-11, 2004). The NMC Series of Online Conferences is a new form of meetings based on social computing concepts and delivered entirely online through a collaboration with NMC partners iCohere and Macromedia. The unique environment allows […]
I am behind in citing a package of the week, but some of the freshest include: Let Excel Track Your Attendance for You!!, SCC Online Weather Station, Online Learning: What Students Should Know, and Nutrition Learning Exercise.
A few interesting things shaking out over at the Maricopa Learning eXchange. A faculty member who coordinates service learning projects at his college got the idea about using an MLX special collection to have a convenient way of organizing the reports and descriptions of the projects.
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….
I’ve been holding back the itch to gripe about how hard it still is to get the people in our system to squeeze a few minutes out of their day to share ideas and materials that already exist in the Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX) (past gripes 1, 2, 3 … There have been a few […]
