Tuesday, October 08, 2002

Presentation notes from Learning Objects session I've been trying to figure out the best way to present my notes from Educause, but I'm not going to have time to do anything but slap them up as is. Here is the first one, some notes from a very interesting session by the folks at Berkeley's Interactive University: Creating Learning Objects from Research Content to Open the University Wednesday, October 02, 2002 3:50 p.m. - 4:40 p.m. Berkeley Interactive University Open Learning Environments Learning Objects The Teacher’s Box Every school teacher possesses a box full of hand-collected teaching materials, “stuff” gathered over the years from various and ephemeral sources. Stored in closets and garages, these primary source materials—pictures, maps, news articles, short stories, speeches, graphs, and charts—are carefully guarded… Collections of images, articles, maps, video (w/transcription and hyperlinked sections of interviews, etc.) chicken parts (using various pieces to make your own whole). -- after you have a collection, you might create… Album (order, annotate, etc.) Share album—peer reviewed—other teachers can use my object -- Create an environment that allows sharing of objects, knowledge, -- Creating Structured Content – Research and Learning Objects A culture and process of building and sharing digital objects for multiple uses Both individual faculty and large collections Authoring technologies for markup Support structures, funding, incentives Intellectual property Many big issues…what do we mean by Ros and LOs (theory of content) Markup? Intellectual Property? -- For B-OLE the ideal web content would be: Easily found with meaningful terms Contain information about university and K-12 use Modular, granular, “chunkable” Small and simple, large and complex Capable of modification, combination, annotation Some stuff just content; some stuff for learning … Digital content object – something you can find (URL)…need to talk aobut metadata (XML?) -- Autodesk Content Strategy (stack/flow) www.learnativity.com Research and Learning Objects Digital Content -> Research Objects -> Learning Objects -> Modules Materials from museums—how can it be structured for additional value? Chaos theory Content (image) -> add metadata (research objects) -> combine into meaningful structure (learning objects) -- Raymond Yee Technology Architecture Diagram What architecture would have to underlie the initiatives? Central scenario – allow teachers to gather diverse materials from diverse sources and easily incorporate them in to learning environment 1 Web Browsers 2 Desktop apps/Web apps 3 Inputs 4 Products 5 Services 6 Digital Libraries 7 Individual or teams of scholars Don’t want to have to build all of these parts—nobody knows how to build all of them. Want to work with content repositories, developers. MIT is looking for publishing process--- -- Library, Educational Technology, RSS Interoperability Librairies/Digital Repositories (METS) Educational Technologies (IMS, SCORM) Web Content Syndication (XHTML, RSS, OPML) Commercial and Open Source Productivity Tools (Microsoft Office) Need to have systems that will allow materials to flow from one community to another. -- Examples of MOA2 (Making Of America 2) and IMS packages METS = content packaging standard Crosswalks Translate XML from one standard to another MOA2 -> LRN Microsoft LRN viewer (learning management system) Library and Educational Technology worlds must come up with standards for translation. -- The Ideal World : A Technical Perspective Publish your materials in XML Look for standards There is not perfect markup Consider offering a web service to your collection Ask tool vendors to open up their data frameworks and programming interfaces. Favor tools that are highly interoperable. -- Ideals Collaborative design of structured content that works for faculty and K-12 teachers Collaboration with major related initiatives… Quote from Creative Commons 6:59:36 PM    comment []

Anyone using a portal on their campus? Does anyone have any experience using weblogs in an enterprise portal environment? Our campus is currently migrating to Campus Pipeline (who just announced they are being acquired by SCT) and their Luminis product. This includes, eventually, Documentum, their content management system. The chicken-and-egg challenges of adopting such an architecture will keep our IT folks busy for some time to come, but I'm interested in finding out how friendly a portal system is with technologies such as RSS and XML-RPC. I'd love to be able to indicate a category for a weblog post that routes the content to the portal system. I'd love to hear any experiences others have had in this area.  9:30:10 AM    comment []