Useful checklists for the development of online content: "The checklists below have been created to help web managers, business unit owners, and others quickly enhance their understanding of a range of issues associated with the provision of services online. The checklists are short documents which provide information in a simple, non-technical manner." [thanks ColumnTwo]

11:25:21 PM    

Using video games to study history: "History is filled with such what-ifs, and a company called Muzzy Lane Software thinks they could help high school and college students learn about history and develop thinking skills. To that end, Muzzy Lane is getting ready to introduce schools to a technology that is already familiar to most of today's students: a video game, but one that is custom-designed for the classroom."

11:22:58 PM    

My friends Venkat and Ravi have written an in-depth and thought provoking article on what they refer to as experience-enabling design in elearning. They contend that elearning design has to move beyond just providing functional learning and start providing a more holistic and memorable experience. They build their case by synthesizing research from diverse fields such as architecture, product design and media design.

11:21:40 PM    

Welcome to my first entry into the world of blogging. I'm not sure I can get into the habit of posting to a web log on a regular basis, but I want to give it a try, since this looks like a technology that is being used in reflective portfolios.

11:16:17 PM    

Making Sense of Online Learning has a great resource page of links and sites. Seems like elearnspace is missing...:).

11:13:17 PM    

D'Arcy Norman links to (and comments on) Guidelines for Learning Objects: "It's the first document I've seen that focusses more on the educational side of things, rather than the technical. This approach is much needed, since the real implications of this stuff are not technical at all..."

11:12:32 PM    

Exploring e-learning Myths: "e-Learning came to forefront for taking the traditional classroom training model and applying technology advancements to create new ways to learn. However, each advancement in e-Learning has also resulted in new obstacles. This continual struggle has helped spawn some popular e-Learning myths that deserve exploration."
Comment: This article explores myths about elearning standards, analystics, and implementation. Fairly standard stuff. The real challenge of elearning (and an area that is usually overlooked) still centers around getting it used. Right now, there is a small segment of society that sees the value of elearning (typically professionals who are looking at advancing/changing their career). Most people don't see elearning as an option. Often, organizations that implement elearning assume that the creation of a relevant, well-designed, integrated program will convince people to use it. Not so. Getting people to learn online (or use any new technology) requires a shift in thinking that needs to be fostered much like a well-organized advertising campaign. "Build it and they will use it" is probably the biggest myth surrounding elearning.

11:11:26 PM    

I really like this idea: Small Pieces Loosely Joined "What we are trying to demonstrate is the power of using a discrete series of "small" often free/open source technologies in a loosely coupled fashioned, for use in education."
Comment: This view of educational technology is much more palatable (to me at least!) than locked down "do-it-our-way" LMS'. If innovation is a function of variety and diversity, loosely connected tools will afford the greatest benefit to educators and learners.

11:10:19 PM    

"The law requires schools to provide special ed students with individual education programs because of their differences. Why shouldn’t every student have an IEP that addresses differences in strengths and weaknesses? When I suggested this to a middle school principal, he replied that schools are not structured to handle students as individuals with unique learning programs. And that’s exactly the problem. Since we can’t restructure kids, we need to restructure the system."

11:08:26 PM    

"The notion of coverage, of going through a bunch of disciplines, and learning facts and concepts, is assessed by schools all over the world. It's never been a very good idea, but now it's really irrelevant. I would throw away 95 percent of the coverage that we do; figure out really important questions and issues, and give people lots and lots of time to learn about how disciplined minds think about those issues, and then to practice those disciplines themselves."

11:06:18 PM    

Are you tired of your current weblog software? Does MovableType's new pricing make your blood boil? Sick of stomping spam? Hate your side bar? How much would you pay for a new weblog system? If you call before midnight tonight....

Well, there are not really midnight ads hawking blog software, but just in case you are looking at some alternatives, take a look at the Blog Software Breakdown:

This chart displays attributes of different user-installed blog software packages side-by-side for comparison. Only server-installed scripts will be included in this list. (Sorry, no Radio, Blogger, etc.) I created this chart to help figure out what blog tool best suited my needs. Hopefully, it will be useful to the self-hosted blogging community as well.

It looks pretty thorough, well linked. I will be shopping around later this summer.

11:05:16 PM    

Mena at SixApart is fishing for trackbacks to share how MovableType is being used. Here's another one for the education realm.

My initial foray with this CogDogBlog has been to document our instructional technology projects that support the 10 colleges of the Maricopa Community College systems, as well as commentary on technology. This server supports 10 blogs with about 14 authors, many whom are colleagues at our colleges tghat I am trying to get exposed to the educational potential for blogs.

Three are from our college centers for teaching and learning, including Mesa Community College's CTL, Chandler-Gilbert Community College's TLC, and South Mountain Community College's TLC. Another is an art faculty member who is describing how he has been using Photoblogs with his students.

In June 2003, I created an online workshop, or "BlogShop for teachers at one of our colleges to introduce MovableType as a potential electronic portfolio tool, and to provide a step by step tutorial on using MT. I have provided this workshops 2 other times, and it has been taken to Canada as well.

We have incorporated the MovableType Trackback standalone server and the autodiscovery code into our repository of instructional innovations, the Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX)- and recently have re-engineered this as what we have termed "sharebacks".

One of our innovative faculty members at Mesa Community College experimented with having some 40 students use MovableType to blog their reflections of learning in an Anthropology Course and to work in "co-horts".

Most recently, we are creating 4 new MT blogs for our 4 Ocotillo Action Groups (8 authors), faculty led teams that will explore and promote 4 key instructional technology initiatives. The server will not be publically viewable until June 1, but will be located at http://graphite.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/ocotillo/-- each blog will be linked to its own phpBB bulletin board and its own wiki space. We are using MT plugins such as "otherblog" to combine the post summaries from 4 blogs into one central vbog.

11:02:30 PM    

One of our faculty members taking on leadership of our learning objects action group is getting up to speed on learning about learning objects.... Donna sent this "Cliff Notes" version of SCORM:

This is an overview of the Sharable Courseware Object Reference Model. It's hard to make technical standards understandable (much less interesting). Nonetheless, here's the cliff notes version of what you need to know about SCORM.

SCORM is a suite of technical standards that enable web-based learning systems to find, import, share, reuse, and export learning content in a standardized way. (See ADL Background for how SCORM came to be.) Note that SCORM is written primarily for vendors and toolmakers who build Learning Management Systems and learning content authoring tools so they know what they need to do to their products to conform with SCORM technically. A "Designer's Guide" for implementing SCORM is in the works. Stay tuned.

It is still mud to me. I am therefore below a Dummie as I still do not see the importance of all the effort for standards when there is no system that provides the services to connect all the "compliant" data:

Never mind the terminology for now, but assume in the SCORM world there is a set of services that launches learning content, keeps track of learner progress, figures out in what order (sequence) learning objects are to be delivered, and reports student mastery through a learning experience.

11:01:21 PM    

Thanks to a friend inside Blackboard, I got a peek a few weeks ago at a Building Block (plug-ins for Blackboard) that provides a wiki functionality inside the Blackboard environment. I'd put up some screen shots, but the Bb Showcase site seems to be offline right now.

What was interesting was the shying away from even the use of "wiki" and they software had created a WYSIWYG interface for doing the wiki editing- no need for remembering the various arcane wiki editing protocols (which make sense only to the people who use one particular wiki on a regular basis) or the funky variations on linking method. rather than dealing with CamelCase, you just click a button to create a new wiki page.

Also, from what I understand, you can have a separate wiki-space for student groups you create as a Bb instructor, and the view history functionality essentially is a log of which students were active in the wiki-space.

I liked some of the thoughts behind this- as they stand right now most wikis are geared to the propeller head crowd (ducking the lobbed tomatoes). Of course there are some considerations- Blackboard building Blocks require the enterpri$e version of Bb, and there is a cost for the Building Block- oh, it is called "Teams LX" from what I think is a grossly misnamed company/URL, "Learning Objects, Inc."

Again, from a simple look and play around, not so icky for a wiki.

10:58:11 PM    

Summary of BlogWalk discussion on weblogs and communities by Martin Dugage is reposted at Knowledge Board: Blogs and CoPs: Can blogging replace communities of practice?

If you haven't read it yet, make sure you do now and contribute to the discussion: the question about similarities vs. differences between weblog networks and forum-supported communities is one of the first you will get while talking about weblogs to KM practitioners.

And if you have written weblog posts that you believe deserve attention of a wider audience, please, let me know, they may be reposted at KnowledgeBoard as well.

This post also appears on channels BlogWalk and weblog research

10:53:37 PM    

For those thinking about communities and weblogs: Lee LeFever on Trackback across discussions and weblogs in a single online community space.

10:52:11 PM    

Sebastian Paquet points to a wiki discussion on why communities are usually tied to one technology. Many familiar faces. Great pictures. Interesting ideas... Must read.

Just thinking: I'm gradually getting connected with many people from my "weblog community" via wikis, e-mail, IM, phone... I would only say that IM/e-mail work best and these are not really "community" tools, more one-to-one communication...

10:50:55 PM    

Taran Rampersad of KnowProSE is writing a book on the importance of copyleft for intellectual usability. The notion of intellectual usability is covered in his article on NewsForge, GNU/Linux, usability, and freedom. From the article:

Now let's take usability to a different layer of abstraction. Let's talk about usabilty as an extension of the freedoms associated with Free Software: (0)The freedom to run the program, for any purpose. (1)The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs. (2)The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor. (3)The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits. These freedoms make Free Software usable to everyone. Is a developer who wants to adapt software any less a user than someone who never peers at the source code? Not by these freedoms. There's a lot of talk these days about intellectual property, but the real issue -- the one that everyone seems to be ignoring or misunderstanding -- is intellectual usability. Something is intellectually usable if it has the four freedoms above. If someone's intellectual property is not intellectually usable, what's the point, other than making a quick buck and prosecuting users?

This is very significant because Taran is looking at copyleft in terms of how it affects knowledge creation/dissemination, a very social constructionist view point from my perspective, but coming from the direction of usability in order to complicate intellectual property. Seems very applicable to open content as well. I also will look forward to hearing more discussion about "Collective Intelligence" as mentioned in the book preface linked to above.

10:49:22 PM    

I "attended" Robin Good's online event about online collaboration technologies this evening. Not sure if I learnt that much from the discussion he had with Eugene Kim and Stuart Henshall, but it was nice to have a sense of being present with other people from all over the world at the same time. The system used (Communicast) was nice and simple and worked reasonably well, even over my 128K connection. However, I wish they'd make it possible for a participant like myself to at least see a list of the audience members and ideally to be able to text chat with others - even though text and video is reserved for official speakers. Perhaps next time one could set up a "backchannel" via some other text chat technology that people can be directed to from the Communicast event. It would require having to sign into two different environments, but that wouldn't be too much hassle...

10:47:50 PM    

Somebody commented on my previous post on attempts to make the SCORM standard for learning objects more collaboration-friendly and pointed me to Albert Canale's recent paper on that topic. It is an interesting, thorough consideration of how SCORM would have to be adapted to support collaboration. As Albert rightly says: "It is well known that the pedagogical model assumed by SCORM is primarily that of a single independent learner". The core technical difficulty he identifies is the need for exchanging data among learners and most of the paper focusses on showing how it would be technically feasible without violating core SCORM design principles. The paper does not focus much on less technical issues, but there are some interesting remarks, such as that collaboration objects may ironically be more re-usable than content objects as they expect users to create their own new content each time - so each new set of users gets a sense of ownership rather than feeling that an incongruous object has been inserted into their learning stream.

10:47:00 PM    

The irrepressible trio of Alan Levine, Brian Lamb and D'Arcy Norman are inviting people to participate in the June 2004 New Media Consortium Summer Conference in Vancouver. The technique they're using is something I've been thinking of as the shibboleth approach to radically distributed collaboration. Suzanne Kemmer defines a shibboleth rather nicely as "a kind of linguistic password: A way of speaking (a pronunciation, or the use of a particular expression) that identifies one as a member of an 'in' group." What it entails in this case is that one has to use the phrase "NMC 2004" somewhere in a blog post (as I have done here). Stephen Downes' wonderful EDU_RSS aggregator then collects together all such posts and displays them on an NMC continuing coverage page. This is meta data without the pain. The trick is to use a shibboleth phrase that is easy to remember and likely to be used by those in the know, and unlikely to be used by somebody writing about something else.

The technique works well for blogs, but can also be applied to ordinary web pages, as has been shown by the much-maligned SocialGrid - an online dating service that generates cryptic codes describing participants' gender, sexual preference and so on which they then paste into their blogs. This allows people who know the codes (or use SocialGrid to translate them) to find likely dates via a straight-forward google search.

Interestingly, shibboleth is also the name of an internet2 access control architecture (aka federated identity system) which seeks to authenticate group membership, but in a much more involved and restrictive manner. There are no doubt situations where such things are necessary, but I suspect that in many cases where people are tempted to over-regulate identity management, simple shibboleth collaboration ("if you can say the word, or even just be bothered to say it, you are one of us") is all that is needed.

10:45:55 PM