Thursday, November 13, 2003

ADL Global Learning Repositories Summit Final Report I'm passing along this notice about the availability of the ADL Summit Final Report, with Scott Leslie's comments. This is a valuable report as are most of the resources available from the Academic ADL Co-Lab. It does seem to me that LO conferences should begin to include critics and counter positions in their meetings. There is too much speaking to the converted in many of these reports. From the viewpoint of a user of LOs and LORs who is trying to assist instructors to become aware of these new resources, I can say with confidence that most higher education faculty do NOT understand or sympathize or care about the LO movement. I'm concerned that the undoubted value of LOs and LORs not be lost because of the insularity of the proponents and developers. JH ____ Following up on earlier posts about their wiki and draft list of repositories, the final report by Colin Holden on the recent 'Global Repositories Summit' has been released. The report ultimately contains as many (more) questions than answers, but reflects what was evidently lots of quality interchange amongst the participants, and could be taken as an effective state of the learning object union. I found it hard not to come away from reading this with a sense a lot of learning object/repository projects sound like solutions in search of a problem, or at least a solution that's not sure which, out of many, problems they want to address. One of the best pieces of advice contained in the report was "Those at the Learning Repository Summit recommended that administrators of developing learning repository projects ... know the communities that they are serving" and, I would add, the specific problem(s) they want to solve. While this may seem obvious, if you reach a point where you start to have functional software but are still having to persuade users into using it, you have to wonder a bit. - SWL [EdTechPost] 12:45:11 PM    COMMENT []

EEVL Adds RSS Feeds EEVL, the UK Internet guide for engineering, mathematics, and computing, has added two rss feeds for its site: one feed provides Industry News, one provides Jobs News. We can expect that more association and repository sites will continue to add rss feeds to enhance easy user access to updates and news. "EEVL is a hand-crafted user-friendly service which provides easy access to networked resources, with the emphasis on the UK, but including the best world-wide resources. EEVL's services are free, and no registration is required. EEVL provides academics, researchers, students, and anyone else looking for quality-assured information in engineering, mathematics and computing, with a centralised access point on the Internet. EEVL, which is funded by JISC through the Resource Discovery Network (RDN), is available on the Web at: http://www.eevl.ac.uk/" JH (Thanks to Roddy MacLeod for this news piece.) 8:31:42 AM    COMMENT []