Friday, February 27, 2004

The Gateway to Educational Materials: An Evaluation Study (Year 4). http://www.geminfo.org/Evaluation/Fitzgerald_03.06.pdf Before there were 'learning object repositories,' educators were already trying to catalogue instructionally useful Internet resources in 'subject-based catalogues' or gateways. In the K-12 world, one of the more significant of these has been the Gateway to Educational Materials, or GEM. This report, from last June, evaluates the successfulness of the GEM project and provides some insight into what repository users might be looking for and problems they might face based on qualititative research done with 50 or so users. There's nothing necessarily that revolutionary here, but it's a good reminder to not re-invent the wheel and make mistakes that may already have been made before in similarly-motivated projects. Thanks to Solvig for pointing this out. - SWL [EdTechPost] 9:31:20 PM      Google It!.

Stress can turn safe chemicals deadly [Science Blog] 2:31:23 PM      Google It!.

Depression can lead to back pain [Science Blog] 2:29:31 PM      Google It!.

.LRN - fairly robust open source course management system. http://dotlrn.mit.edu/ There's been a fair bit of buzz, and rightly so, for a few of the open source CMS systems out there; both Moodle and ATutor have come a long way and are increasingly looking like viable options for those wanting to go the open source route. There's another open source CMS that has been around for a little while now that hasn't received as much press, but seems to me to also be an increasingly viable choice. The .LRN system is based on a fairly 'old' (by Internet standards) platform, the OpenACS portal server. It has been developed by folks at MIT (Sloan School of Management) and the University of Heidelberg and has been taken up by a number of major adopters. They recently reached a major milestone with the release of version 2.0. One feature of particular note to this audience is support for student blogging tools - that's right, unlike attempts to re-purpose sole-purpose blogging tools as 'course management systems' (which I think gives seriously short shrift to the breadth of functionality offered in 'real' CMS) this is instead a fairly full featured CMS that offers individual student blogging support. The current system is a little light on assessment functionality, but there are plans to rectify that in the near future. These folks are clearly aware of existing instructional standards and already support IMS Enterprise 1.1 for exchanging student data, with Content Packaging and SCORM support on the horizon. And given the relatively long history of development around OpenACS, there is already a fairly broad development community built up around this platform. We just finished our draft review at Edutools - the review should be visible here in the next day or so. - SWL [EdTechPost] 2:28:13 PM      Google It!.

A Short Course on Structured Course Development, Learning Objects, and E-Learning Standards. http://careo.prn.bc.ca/losc/losccourse.html From Gerry Paille and his team (a partnership of BC School District #60, Open School BC and the Open Learning Agency/BC Open Univeristy to develop a 'CANCORE-compliant' resource network that will house materials from some of their older resource collections) comes this useful 3 module course on "using a structured language such as Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) or eXtensible Markup Language (XML) as a basis for producing a learning design and describing course content, activities, and assignments." Gerry has also gone to the effort of packaging the course as an IMS 1.1.3 Content Package. Gerry notes on the project blog that the course has yet to receive a 'technical review' but is still quite worthwhile. One neat feature of how they implemented this is the 'Module Resources' links in each of the modules, which seem to be keyword searches to the backend CAREO database to provide related supplementary resources for each module. - SWL [EdTechPost] 2:26:24 PM      Google It!.

Magic Words - Interactive Fiction in the 21st Century [Slashdot] 2:24:23 PM      .

Ray on Groove 3.0. Ray Ozzie : It's been a few months since I've posted - a very busy and exciting time here at Groove. Both in terms of what's been happening in the business and market, but also because we're closing in on... [Jeroen Bekkers' Groove Weblog] 2:21:38 PM      Google It!.

Return on Investment in Traditional Versus Distributed Learning - Robert Owen, Bosede Aworuwa; DEC 2003. Both instructors and administrators have embraced the use of online technologies in recent years; we no longer must appeal for greater use of technology. The time has come, however, to assess the tradeoffs in the costs and benefits of online technol [Online Learning Update] 2:20:09 PM      Google It!.

CSS Your Way to Learner Control - Thomas Welsh and Fred Condo, Learning Circuits. How do you create a single Webpage that’s completely standards-based and allows complete learner control over what they view and how they view it? Cascading Style sheets, of course. Learn how cascading style sheets can empower both training developers [Online Learning Update] 2:19:03 PM      Google It!.

VMware's virtual software gets ever more real. 'Intuitive' and 'virtualisation' in same article. Amazing [The Register] 2:18:01 PM      .

Nvidia's phone chips as the camcorder, console killer. 3GSM Gameboy killer? No, no, bigger than that... [The Register] 2:12:13 PM      Google It!.

Transcript of Eben Moglen's Harvard Speech [Slashdot] 2:05:22 PM      Google It!.

Mind Over Machine [Slashdot] 1:58:00 PM      Google It!.