Patterns help introduce patterns (or any new idea) .

"Through the 1990s, a new movement in software development called patterns gained momentum. Inspired by the thinking of the building architect Christopher Alexander, a group of smart guys authored 23 patterns for software design as "a way to analyze solutions to recurring problems, make them reusable and communicate them." Patterns collected together form a working language that help systems architects and programmers cope with the complexity of software systems." [xBlog: The visual thinking weblog | XPLANE]

Following up on an earlier relayed post here on introducing new ideas into organizations. This is potentially useful to e-Learning entrepreneurs who are working with clients bringing e-Learning into their organizations. It also connects, in a way, to thinking about templates and (perhaps) reusable objects for designing e-Learning.

10:53:21 AM    

IE, Flash, and patents: here comes trouble.

"Microsoft has again been told to cripple its market-leading browser in compliance with the Eolas patent lawsuit. IE/Windows will no longer be able to seamlessly play Flash, Quicktime, PDF, and other rich media formats. Other browser makers like Netscape and Opera may also be forced to cripple their browsers, making the web look like 1993 all over again. Clumsy, disruptive workarounds that diminish user experience might allow browsers to present rich media files, but site owners would have to pay for development -- and Eolas might sue anyway. The patent ruling will hurt everyone. Patents on the web are always bad, but this one stinks to Heaven. We find ourselves rooting for Microsoft." [Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Daily Report]

There will be a round or two of appeals, and it also looks like Microsoft is working on ways to get around the crippling mandated by this ruling, but ... it would be a good thing to start thinking about how we are going to deliver rich media over the Web if this works out the wrong way. Watch for response also from Macromedia, Adobe, and other vendors whose product success depends on plug-ins working in Internet Explorer.

10:29:32 AM    

What I learnt was that despite the many exciting advances we've made in working with these instructional quanta, the concept of RLOs is still light years (no pun on Einstein) from most teacher's every day lives (and I expect those of learners though it was primarily a conference for teachers). Exactly what an RLO is, why they're important, more importantly exactly how you might use them, and even more fundamentally, what tools you might use to do these things were issues about as far away from everyday teaching as you could imagine, at least for most people. There was a tangible feeling of 'so what' about much of the RLO discussion, at least amongst the non-techies. As an aside the techie discussions about RLOs was very constructive but more about that in a later post.

The biggest issue is I think the lack of inexpensive, easily available, easy to use desktop tools, for without such tools people can't experiment, try out for themselves, and get their hands dirty with RLOs. Sure, there are some great tools out there but many are either development projects or are sophisticated systems yet to make a big impact on campuses. Also true, many of the popular VLE vendors sell products that claim to use learning objects, but often these are not low-level or low aggregation RLOs, the systems are not proper content management systems nor do they offer the kinds of authoring tools that authors need.

What we are going to need before working with RLOs becomes as familiar as word processing or at a stretch web page creation are studies on the ergonomics of RLOs, human computer interaction studies, and a deeper analysis of how educators can use RLOs to built teaching packages and more importantly how RLOs are going to benefit the learning process. We need a tool for RLOs just as familiar a word processor is for words. Though please not like Microsoft Word ;-)

[David Davies' Weblog]

Comments later. Is it possible that RLOs are "unattainable objects?"

8:03:23 AM