Friday, January 09, 2004

Repository Folly Educational technologists need to reflect on what it means that, for many instructors, the prevailing attitude toward referatories and repositories is "start the revolution without me." My own experiences match those reported below from cogdogblog by Alan Levine. I've focused on helping instructors locate and use online instructional resources, not on the much harder task that Alan has undertaken to assist instructors to create and share learning resources. Both tasks can be discouraging. I do believe that the widespread availability of high quality online learning resources can potentially have a very positive impact on higher education, but the realization of that potential is still open to doubt and considerable uncertainty. JH _______ Repository Folly. By rule, I usually avoid use of the "R-word" (repository, too close to the "S-word"), but wanted to launch, here just a few notches into a new calendar, my pessimism on the aspirations of those creating these magical collections of "learning objects." The folly is that educators will give up some time to share information about resources they have created or used. They pay lip service to the concept but the action is not there. A bigger folly is that they would have the gumption to complete a "meta-data" form on top of that. I am more convinced is that the loop is far from closed as we lack anything that can easily build meaningful things from these R-places. We have piles of meta-data on top of objects... and that is about all. But following the pessimism is maybe a small ray of sunshine (next post). This is fueled largely by the lack of response (or glacial speed thereof) of contributions to our Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX). Back in October I outlined a rather long list of the various efforts and strategies we have put in place to convince our folks to help build the MLX. [cogdogblog] 11:36:28 AM    COMMENT []