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Thursday, May 26, 2005 |
A Watch That Senses You're Ready to Get Up (and Tells You So).
Sleep specialists say it's more difficult to wake up from a period of
deep sleep than from a light one. To improve on the traditional alarm
clock - which, if it jolts you awake from a deep sleep, could leave you
feeling drowsy during the day - an Atlanta company called Innovative
Sleep Solutions has designed an alarm wristwatch called the
Sleeptracker. By ADAM BAER. [NYT > Technology]
5:47:18 PM  Google It!.
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ADL Plugfest 9 Proceedings Available, Some Notable Presentations. http://www.adlnet.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=PF9ProceedT
The proceedings for the 9th ADL Plugfest are now available,
including both online video, links to the powerpoints and to some demos.
As if the point needed more illustration, nothing quite exemplifies
the differences between the training/corporate elearning communities
and the higher ed community, or between the state of the advanced
research community and the state of actual practice in the field, (or
between the military and everyone else), as does
looking through proceedings such as these. I almost get whiplash from
the contrast between some of my current conversations in higher ed
(where the boutique model of production is so entrenched I sometimes
get push back at the notion of an instructor wanting to re-use any content, at all)
and this, where orderly lines of SMEs and instructional designers are
expected to crank out content based on specific processes, protocols
and procedures, yes sir!
Still, lot of potential interest here - from the Wednesday sessions, one can find a presentation on "XML Content Formats for SCORM"
from a number of luminaries, including Canada's own Roger St-Pierre
from the DND, and John Townsend, head of HarvestRoad. It is interesting
to see where folks such as these have got in practice with using XML
for content markup (not just metadata) and then subsequently displaying
it in multiple formats. As Stephen Forth points out in the question
period, the control that, say Boeing, can exert on its content
production model seems like a luxury to many of us. Townsend's 'devil
advocate' comments in his part of the presentation (especially the
comparison of higher ed to being 'near anarchy' in its production
models) was especially appreciated by me.
Another notable presentation was from Rob Ferrell of IBM who presented on IBM's efforts on the "Dynamic Assembly of Learning Objects."
Ostensibly, if you go back far enough, this was one of the early
motivations for the notion of learning objects, at least in the
training communities. Interesting to see working code and architecture
of how this can work in practice. Not sure that I'm convinced all of
the obstacles to this happening regularly can be overcome, but clearly
it's not just a theory any more.
Finally, also of note for being a lone voice in the wilderness of this mechanized view of learning is David Wiley's keynote
to the 'Working on Simple Sequencing and Navigation' thread within the
Plugfest. David makes the important point that things like SCORM don't
solve all the problems - they help with things like interoperability,
and are necessary constraints that instructional designers must work
within, but at the end of the day the fact that an object validates as
a SCORM package does not mean it is effective learning (or reusable!)
Anyways, lots of stuff to ponder here. Happy viewing! - SWL [EdTechPost]
5:38:22 PM Google It!.
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LAMS as a CMS. http://blogs.nitle.org/mane/2005/05/
lams_a_new_open_source_cms.html
I found this short post by Bryan Alexander at the MANE IT Network
personally really useful - I've known about LAMS for quite a while, but
had never heard it described as a "CMS." My first reaction was - oh
that's just wrong, it's an "e-learning design tool" (oh the sophistry
of labels!). But then I went back and re-read the LAMS material. Sure
enough, it does have facilities for delivery to students, accounts
mgmt, etc. So I think the characterization of it as a 'CMS' is not
incorrect. But calling it that potentially overshadows why LAMS is in
fact so interesting; it takes as its starting point the design of
learning activities and then assists with the delivery of those
activities, rather than the traditional CMS perspecitve of giving
instructors a series of unconnected generic tools with no scaffolding
for tying them together or combining them with the content itself. The
filter I had for it in my mind was 'learning design tool' but this post
made me re-consider what that meant; it's a new approach to delivering
the education that takes as its starting point the design of the
educational activity, not the organizational container of a 'course' or
the pre-set bunch of tools a traditional CMS offers. So thanks, Bryan,
for reframing the issue! - SWL [EdTechPost]
5:35:28 PM Google It!.
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FLOSSE Posse - Is the Learning Objects King Naked?. http://flosse.dicole.org/?item=
learning-objects-is-the-king-naked
Over on on the Flosse Posse weblog, Teemu Leinonen has posted
a bit of a rant on the term "learning object." I'm glad someone stepped
up and said it. I agree, let's kill off the word "learning object" and
while we are at it, let's throw "learning object repository" on the
funeral pyre too. Both of these terms have led us thoroughly astray.
"Learning Object" for their implication of some magical plug-and-play
learnability that we're discovering is mostly folly, and "learning
object repositories" for the mistaken emphasis of the word "repository"
on the container at the sake of the users and re-users and re-use,
ultimately what I thought the motivation behind the whole idea was.
But my small fear is that in throwing out these terms, we'll also
throw out many of the problems they were supposed to be trying to solve
- namely enabling learning content to be shared and found through means
that were otherwise unavailable (e.g. searching on pedagogically useful
terms that were either not directly part of the resources themselves,
or else for resources that weren't served well by conventional web
search engines), and having formats for learning content that allowed
it to be reused by as many systems as possible without major
alterations (there are many more problems they were supposed to
address, I know, but let's leave it at that for now). I absolutely
agree that the terms have gotten in the way, and have led us to propose
solutions which seem to have forgotten some of the initial problems
they were supposed to be solving. Actually, in the case of both
Learning Objects and "LORs," part of the issue for higher ed has been
IMO in higher ed's appropriation of the terms; we've assumed the
terminology, but we've tried to change the underlying problems they
were originally intended to address to suit the needs and culture of
higher ed, and we haven't done enough critical examination of the baggage underpinning the terms and original ideas to understand why this isn't working).
So, firing squad, guillotine, maybe lethal injection as we're now so
civilized; I don't care, but let's move on from these terms and the 5
years (at least) of false starts that are associated with them. We
likely couldn't be moving on without having made these mistakes, but
once made, repeating them over and over doesn't suddenly make them
right. - SWL [EdTechPost]
5:31:50 PM Google It!.
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Jeff Veen: The Usability of Subscribing to Feeds.
I'm glad that Jeff is writing about this. Now that Safari has helped
make subscribing easier to use, it would be great if the other browser
vendors followed suit, and then carefully upped the ante. There's an
evolution that could take place here over the next year that would make
subscribing really easy. I'll write more about this soon. [Scripting News]
5:30:18 PM Google It!.
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© Copyright 2005 Bruce Landon.
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