Tuesday, July 02, 2002

e-learning on the bleak frontier. eLearn Magazine: In-Depth Tutorials: Learning Objects. Quote: "It's hard not to fall in love with the notion of reusable learning objects. The idea of a world filled with little self-contained lessons that you can assemble into any course you can think of seems so…well…cool. How could you not want something like that? Unfortunately, after five years of struggling with the challenge of finding that world, I have come to the conclusion that I am simply not smart enough to lead the way to the Promised Land of e-learning, where milk and honey flow from the earth and learning objects can be plucked like ripe fruit from fig trees." [Serious Instructional Technology] » What people are learning is that designing re-usable learning objects (RLO's) is no simpler than designing re-usable anything else! So much extra thought and effort has to be expended to understand the context something was designed in and then re-engineer & re-package it for arbitrary other contexts.  It's very hard.   And the tools provided to educators are no more, and often far less, sophisticated than those provided to engineers or software developers doing the same kind of tasks. Other major problems I perceive: models of excellence - do you have a catalogue of really excellent RLO's to learn from yourself? time for excellence - are you being paid to take time to really think hard, design and package RLO's? The storyline metaphor presented in the article is interesting and possibly helpful.  But as the authors point out: Because there's nothing quite like a good concrete example to make a lesson stick, a repeating storyline across the entire arc of a course tends to tie all the lessons together very effectively. We thought about picking a story that would work across all courses, but since we didn't have a clear idea of what all courses (both planned by the client and created by the learner) would be, we couldn't be sure that our storyline would always work. To the contrary, we worried that if some of the stories were different then most or all of them might have to be different, even within a single course. It's a pretty bleak looking frontier alright.   [Curiouser and curiouser!] 2:06:33 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Gurteen knowledge-log. Gurteen Knowledge-Log. David Gurteen has just setup his own weblog on knowledge management. Beyond this, he is aiming to establish a KM [Column Two] » Although i'm probably on peripherally a k-logger at the moment I'm very interested in k-logging and how it develops.  It just seems so right. I love the idea that I and project mates can blog our own ideas and viewpoints and that these can be aggregated into some whole greater than each of us constituent parts. I also love the idea that we can aggregate from these ourselves and build upon them. I'll be watching the GKL with interest.   [Curiouser and curiouser!] 2:06:01 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Reading this article at Business 2.0 about basic techniques for rising through the ranks at Google got me to check my various rankings, and hey, for the first time ever, I'm the number one Dave at Google. Neat. Theory about why. When I took my leave a couple of weeks ago, lots of people pointed to me by name, driving me past Dave at Bungi.Com, who was previously untouchable in the top spot. [Scripting News] 1:59:56 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Bernard M. Baruch. "Approach each new problem not with a view of finding what you hope will be there, but to get the truth, the realities that must be grappled with. You may not like what you find. In that case you are entitled to try to change it. But do not deceive yourself as to what you do find to be the facts of the situation." [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog] 8:02:28 AM    trackback []     Articulate []