Weblog Trackbacks to provide context for learning objects.

"Imagine this: "Person A" is searching a LOR and comes across a really cool LO that they want to use. They have some comments that they might be wanting to share with a community outside of the LOR. They publish these comments to their weblog (say a departmental or institutional or even personal LO-related weblog), and include a trackback to a URL provided by the LOR for that specific LO.

Sometime later, "Person B" is searching the LOR for some content, and finds the same object that "Person A" found. They click the "Details" button to learn more about the LO, including the metadata context stored in the LOR, and all trackbacked weblog entries related to this LO. They are able to see "Person A"s comments directly in the LOR, providing some addition outside-of-mandated-metadata-schema context that wouldn't have been available otherwise.

"Person C" is surfing the LO-related weblogs, and come across the post from "Person A" about a LO. They click the link, and are brought to the LOR's "Details" page for that LO, where they can see the "official," centralized metadata, as well as all informal, distributed metadata and comments aggregated by the Trackback feature of the LOR.

This could be quite cool.

Imagine this going one step further... There is no reason for Trackbacks to be restricted to weblogs... They could just as easily be generated by other LORs, or even other completely unrelated software. Imagine a user on CAREO being able to trackback a LOR in MERLOT. Or vice versa. Or a CAREO user being able to trackback and comment on something in the Corbus collection. Or an instructor working on a BlackBoard course being able to search for and add to comments on LOs in LORs all around the world, in the context of their course..." [D'Arcy Norman, with Alan Levine and Brian Lamb]

9:37:47 PM    
  
Notes on the Background of Back-Links.

Nice synchronicity - D'Arcy and Brian are talking with Alan Levine from Maricopa about using Trackback (which I've never totally got as a Radio user that doesn't have it built in) with learning objects, and then along comes this piece from Seth Gordon which is exactly what I've been missing to help me understand the uses and usefullness of trackback-like functions. (Do you think Ted Nelson will finally embrace the web now that it's got trackback ;-) - SWL

[EdTechPost]
9:28:58 PM    
  
The Semantic Blog [John Udell]
12:36:41 PM    
  
RSS Parsing Programs - Utah State Library Division's RSS Workshop. (SOURCE:"42")-Very cool collection of example code that displays RSS files. Tons of languages such as Perl, Rebol, JavaScript, ASP, etc. are represented. If you want an RSS feed displayed on your website, there's probably some sample code here you can use. [Roland Tanglao: WebCMS]
8:54:48 AM