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Friday, April 08, 2005 |
ID and SCORM. Some good points in this presentation, but
author David Wiley takes a stance that is more to the
middle of the road for my liking (Scott Leslie calls him a
"a lone voice in the wilderness," and he probably
is in the ADL crowd, but from my perspective he is more
establishment - it's all point of view, I guess). Anyhow,
Wiley sets up a nice distinction between the
"Centralized / Top-down Camp" (which favours
intelligent tutoring systems, automated LO assembly
systems, advanced visualization techniques and the like)
and the "Decentralized / Bottom-up Camp" (which
favours large scale self-organizing social systems, content
creation, and more). But his main point is that design
consists of "making instructional choices under a set
of constraints" and that the right design is a little
of each camp, depending on the constraint. Viewed from this
perspective, SCORM, as a set of constraints, is "not
about people learning more, better, or faster," but
instead, enabling interoperability and distance learning -
and design, therefore, is "getting the job done"
within the constraints of SCORM. By
David Wiley, ADL Plugfest, February 23, 2005
[Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily]
10:31:39 PM  Google It!.
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Shock of the Old 2005. Good presentation by Derek Morrison (and read
the slides
(2.62 Mb PDF); the notes by themselves don't really do the
job). Morrison writes, "there are now so many
opportunities and services arising 'out there' that it's
perfectly feasible that if institutions are found wanting
in their future IT/e-learning infrastructure and services
provision that the teachers and students will migrate to
systems and services about which institutions have no
knowledge and over which they certainly will not be able to
establish any control." By Derek Morrison, Auricle,
April 8, 2005
[Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily]
10:28:38 PM Google It!.
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Wikibooks.
Following up on the two previous postings about free online libraries,
here's a link to Wikibooks, a collection of open-content textbooks.
"Wikibooks is a Wikimedia project set up July 10, 2003. Since then, volunteers have written around 7654 book modules in a multitude of books." Wikibooks is yet another resource for students, teachers, and online learners.
More information about Wikibooks is provided in the section Why open textbooks?:
"The textbooks on this site are all released under an open content
license that means that they are free forever. No one can keep you from
using these materials, modifying them or distributing them. Also, the
license guarantees that any works that are derived from these materials
will be similarly free to modify and distribute, forever."
"Are you really going to spend $100 or more for a textbook when you
can get the same information for free? These texts are owned by the
community and the world."
"Our textbooks are started by people who are familiar with the
subject. Content is continually augmented by Wikibookians. This is no
lone professor seeking additional income, it is a community of people
who are there to learn the material in the least painful way to get the
grade and be prepared for the next step. That means textbooks that make
sense."
"You will never have to wait months or years for another edition to
come out that incorporates the latest changes in the field. The very
minute a discovery or advancement is made the text can be updated to
reflect that change."
"Every module in the textbooks has its own associated talk page
where students can ask each other questions and help each other with
the material."
"Learners from around the globe who have access to the Web can find
quality educational information, regardless of financial status,
local/regional educational restrictions, or proximity to an educational
institution."
The books can be browsed by Category, by Dewey Classifications, by
an Alphabetical Index, and by Bookshelves. The top page also lists the
most actively viewed 10 books, New Books, and shows a featured Book of
the Month. ____JH [EduResources Weblog--Higher Education Resources Online]
1:01:38 PM Google It!.
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When does it become a standard?. Turn to page 3
of this interview with Tim Bray, one of the eleven designers of XML.
Asked why there is no version 27.5 of XML, he gives a common sense
answer, that XML is frozen, and isn't going to change. Of course, it
couldn't be any other way.
He says: "XML was frozen and
published in February 1998. As it came toward the end and it became
obvious -- well, not obvious, but likely anyhow -- that this was going
to get a lot of momentum, we were besieged by requests for extra
features of one kind or another. We basically lied and told the world,
we would do all that stuff in version 2. You have to shoot the
engineers and ship at some point, right? I think there will never be an
XML version 2. There is an XML version 1.1, but it's controversial and
not widely supported."
Sounds like what I've been saying about RSS (without the lying part).
If XML weren't frozen, it wouldn't have been possible to build XML-RPC, RSS, SOAP or OPML on top of it.
You
could still add features to XML if there was a strong enough will in
the community to do so. But there doesn't seem to be any movement in
that direction, and that's okay, because while XML is not perfect, it
certainly is good enough.
Emphatically, that XML is frozen is a good thing. If it were a moving target nothing would get done. And the same is true of RSS.
Today,
there's no question that RSS is frozen, done, settled. Yes there are
still a small number of people who would like to argue about it, but
the deployment speaks so much more strongly. Every time you see
so-and-so "supports RSS" on this page, that's an affirmation of the
power of a frozen format, and if that goes on long enough, one can
justifiably start calling it a standard. With RSS that day is coming
soon. [Scripting News]
9:52:13 AM Google It!.
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© Copyright 2005 Bruce Landon.
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