Tuesday, February 03, 2004

SCORM 2004 Released!. I'm sure most of you out there already know this, but it is still big news. SCORM 2004 (which was once referred to as SCORM 1.3) has been released.  Perhaps the most important addition to SCORM with this release is the inclusion of content sequencing rules by incorporating the IMS Simple Sequencing specification. But also important is the fact that ADL now consideres SCORM "stable". According to Phillip Dodds we are unlikely to see major revisions or changes to the SCORM as we have in the past. This is good news for content developers and systems creators alike. Check it: http://www.adlnet.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=newsstory&;newsid=161 [e-Learning Eclectic] 10:08:20 AM      Google It!.

Intellectual Property Rights Issues Facing Self-archiving: Key Findings of the RoMEO Project. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september03/ gadd/09gadd.html#Gadd-2003f This interesting paper details the efforts of the RoMEO project to land on, amongst other things, a digital rights schema to enable self-archiving of academic research papers in the U.K. What's interesting is that while they found that either the Creative Commons or ODRL could possibly fit their needs, the problem with the CC solution was that their metadata was expressed in RDF/XML and did not have an associated XML schema—a prerequisite for any metadata disclosed under the OAI-PMH. Their solution was to develop ODRL versions (XML instances) of the CC licences that would conform to the ODRL XML schema, examples of which can be found in the paper. A more detailed accounting of this process can also be found in the related paper, "Rights metadata for open archiving." - SWL [EdTechPost] 10:02:43 AM      Google It!.

RSS self-defense. Now that I'm accumulating my inbound feeds as XHTML, in order to database and search them, I find myself in the aggregator business, where I never planned to be. The tools I'm using to XHTML-ize my feeds are Mark Pilgrim's incredibly useful ultra-liberal feed parser and the equally useful HTML Tidy, invented by Dave Raggett, and maintained by folks like Charlie Reitzel, one of CMS Watch's Twenty Leaders to Watch in 2004 (along with yours truly). ... [Jon's Radio] 9:58:18 AM      Google It!.

Content-aware search. At InfoWorld's 2002 CTO Forum, Google co-founder Sergey Brin threw cold water on the idea of instrumenting content for intelligent search. "I'd rather make progress by having computers understand what humans write," he said, "than by forcing humans to write in ways that computers can understand." Brin's pragmatic stance sharply opposes the idealistic view of the Web's inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, who continues to evangelize his vision of a Semantic Web full of carefully encoded content that we can precisely search and fluidly recombine. My own humble contribution to this debate is a prototype search engine, now running on my Weblog, that tries to steer a middle course between the Scylla of simple fulltext search and the Charybdis of unwieldy tagging schemes and brittle ontologies. [Full story at InfoWorld.com] I keep trying out phrases to capture what I'm aiming for. One is 'dynamic categories,' another is 'interoperable content.' Probably neither will stick, because these only describe how to do something, not why. The why, of course, is productivity. ... [Jon's Radio] 9:56:53 AM      Google It!.

Blackboard to RSS. We use BB at Eastern Oregon University so I'll be checking out this tool. I'd like to hear from others who have done tests on BB to RSS compatibility. JH_____ Blackboard-to-RSS at Wytheville Community College. I've got some tuning and HCI work to do and I haven't turned caching on yet, but kick the tires and let me know what you think.Prying open the LCMS box [Serious Instructional Technology] [EduResources Weblog--Higher Education Resources Online] 9:52:46 AM      Google It!.

Internet gives rise to a bold new era in college-student cheating - Nahal Toosi, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Sometimes, pure dumb luck saved him. Take his freshman year at Marquette University, when he and a buddy turned in the same paper, which neither had written, to separate sections of an introductory English course taught by different teachers. His frien [Online Learning Update] 9:51:13 AM      Google It!.

Educational Bloggers Network. Sponsored by the Bay Area Writing Project and Weblogger.com, the Educational Blogger Network (eBN) is a community of teachers and education professionals and supporters who use weblogs for teaching and learning. The network assists members to advance [Online Learning Update] 9:49:41 AM      Google It!.

Taking Charge of Learning: Tips for Students - David G. Brown, Syllabus. My recurring pedagogical theme is that each student is at the center of his or her learning. As teachers-professors we catalyze. We coach. We connect. In the end, however, each student must take personal responsibility for learning. Properly used, each [Online Learning Update] 9:48:24 AM      Google It!.

FlashHyki : Flashbased Wiki for Groove. Although we don't do a lot of Groove development these days, Tim couldn't resist the temptation and found time to brew something cool : FlashHyki. It's a distributed Wiki based on Flash and Groove. It offers secure decentralised collaboration without... [Jeroen Bekkers' Groove Weblog] 9:45:12 AM      Google It!.