Hey, look! It's a learning object repository!

An interesting initiative here at UBC is a homegrown repository project that is nearing completion. While the functionality isn’t about to knock CAREO or DSpace off the Internet, it does have its points. It can sit on almost any box (it uses MySQL on the backend), and I find its metadata entry to be as simple and fast as anything else I’ve used. It could be a useful application for smaller projects — and the few people who have tried it out and reviewed the code have had mostly positive things to say about it. [Object Learning]

This is another approach, along with SCORM and the various RSS schemes that people are trying out in Canada and Europe (and at Maricopa), to getting education/learning objects freely available.

11:33:24 AM    

The eLearning Developers' Journal is looking for writers.

The Journal is a publication of The eLearning Guild, and is now in its second year. We publish an article every week online by an e-Learning practitioner (no free-lance journalists) for an international audience of eLearning Guild members. These are not "pie-in-the-sky", "gee-whiz" articles, nor are they promotional pieces written by vendor marketing staff. We focus on the practical how-to-get-the-job-done information that other publications don't address.

Authors retain full rights to their work, and we allow reprints.

Current needs:

- Case studies that illustrate how your management team designed, delivered and evaluated interactive e-Learning. As the editor, I am fussy about the kind of e-Learning featured. In my opinion, PowerPoint and straight text screen after straight text screen do not qualify as interactive e-Learning. Neither does excessive and gratuitous use of Flash!, but that's another story.

- Articles that illustrate appropriate pedagogical (or andragogical, if you prefer) approaches to online learning. There are apparently many practitioners who take issue with the "straight-line," solo learner, behaviorist orientation inherent in (for example) much SCORM-compliant e-Learning. It would be great to see an article that details an alternative that works.

- Practical, hands-on articles that explain how to achieve specific learning outcomes through the use of specific authoring tools. There are thousands of developers who use Authorware, for example, yet most had to learn what they know through the School of Hard Knocks. This is your opportunity to make another developer's day by sharing some of your expertise.

- Other topics that many readers are interested to learn about include techniques for producing elegant simulations, tools for storyboarding, and unusual design approaches.

If you would like to write on any of these topics, or on some other subject of interest where you can offer depth of experience, please send a brief query to me at bill@elearningguild.com. Our usual article length is 3000 to 5000 words, but your query should be four or five short paragraphs that will let me know what your lead paragraph would look like, outlines your intended content, tells me why you are the person to write this, and gives me some idea of the date by which you could send a completed ms.

Bill Brandon
Editor, The eLearning Developers' Journal

10:27:32 AM    

My RSS aggregation service, Edu_RSS, has two new features. First, an RSS feed of the aggregated listings is now available for harvesting by other services. Second, a Javascript feed has been added which allows you to place Edu_RSS listings on any web page whatsoever (yes, even inside WebCT) with no coding or programming. I have also just release all Edu_RSS code under GPL.

[carvingCode]

[James Farmer's Radio Weblog]

Interesting, but there is a LOT of information on Edu_RSS that has nothing to do with education. I was hoping the service would cut down on the amount of time I spend culling all the various feeds, but I was still wading through many irrelevant posts.

9:18:55 AM