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29 April 2003 |
JIME Special Issue - Commentary and Debate on: Reusing Online Resources: A Sustainable Approach to eLearning
The realities of reusability are surely still worth chewing over, and some little-discussed topics are revived here - eg Symeon Retalis on behaviour of learning objects:
"Despite the fact that there are many attributes in learning object metadata description, they do not fully capture the "behavior" of a learning object. A learning object is created with specific learning objectives in mind, holds specific behavior and interoperates with other surrounding learning objects. Isolating a learning object and reusing it, means that either this learning object can remain intact since it might fit well to the new learning context, or this learning object needs changes. In the latter and most usual case, not only do technological problems arise but also instructional. A learning object does not only have its own characteristics and learning value but its relationship with other learning objects offers additional learning experiences".
11:54:21 AM 
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28 April 2003 |
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22 April 2003 |
Electronic Journals in the Field of Education from the American Educational Research Association
"To the best of our ability to discern, we have included only links to electronic journals that are scholarly, peer-reviewed, full text and accessible without cost. We have excluded professional magazines that are largely not refereed, and commercial journals that may only allow access to a very limited number of articles as an enticement to buy. By restricting membership in this way on the list that follows, we hope to do what little we can to promote free access world wide to scholarship in education."
10:57:29 AM
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And thanks, Mariscopa, for revealing the waybackmachine. It found the fluttering scraps of my old life. What lost treasures and ghosts will it find for you? Seriously though, it makes providing non-permanent links for students as core teaching material a bit less risky.
10:39:09 AM
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Thanks to some of my favourite elearning enewsletters I've harvested loads of interesting links this morning. Haven't filtered them enough to comment yet but may I recommend:
Learning Circuits Express for links to LC articles and industry news
Maricopa web's eye view for a regular bag of links, mainly to innovative online teaching materials and tools
10:31:08 AM
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02 April 2003 |
In 'E-nhance Lectures' (Journal of digital Information - free access online) Larissa Naber and Monika Köhle look closely at the phases of a student's interaction with a lecture course (by 'take a lecture' I guess they mean lecture course). This highlights the unusability of much lectureware for students. The article looks realistically and sympathetically at lecturer needs too.
Phase 1 - reconnoitering: Before deciding to take a lecture or exam students want a detailed overview of the topics covered. Some students refer to is as the "90 minutes notes'' or "executive summary''. Many lectures fail to provide support for this stage.
Phase 2 - learning the basics: After deciding to take the exam most students read through the material available (and try to solve the exercises). In this stage they try to focus on the main points. Many lecture notes do not differentiate between essential, important, and additional information. Support is generally there, but it could be improved from the student's point of view.
Phase 3 - exam preparation: Most students make custom notes of the topics they need to study further. Most classic materials provide no support for this stage; all excerption is done by hand. Although these excerpts can be of great pedagogical value, they cannot be integrated with original materials efficiently.
Phase 4 - reference: Lecture notes should not be worthless after the exam. Human memory being as it is, it is often necessary to return to previous "haunts" to look up what has been forgotten. While some books come with a decent index, most lecture notes do without, so information retrieval can be tedious.
Phase 5 - selective retrieval: This phase is set apart from the other four phases: without detailed knowledge of the information provided the student wishes to retrieve selective parts that might be required for a different subject matter. Chances of extracting just the relevant information are slim. Prerequisites for later chapters tend to be scattered across various chapters, forcing the student to canvas the material completely.
10:27:06 AM
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26 March 2003 |
- British academics using Blackboard, whose hackles rose at US terminology such as Roster being applied to their online courses, are relieved that version 6 offers customisable labels.
- A CARET project, oki@cambridge allows shareable content objects to be played in a multi-lingual environment.
- CMI projects aim to share teaching resources across the pond.
What's involved in translating teaching tools and resources? US <-> UK English is a great example of how subtle the changes can be.
- vocabulary - professor/lecturer, math/maths
- grammar - I've got/I have
- colours and symbols - red orange green/red amber green
- formatting - 05.20.2003/20.05.2003
...and register (appropriate levels of formality), cultural assumptions (eg PC-ness), legal constraints (accessibility legislation, equal rights) and academic conventions (eg citation formats, style of argument)
Localisation (localization!) is actually a better word for this cultural translation process. However much we manage to automate translation it's always going to be expensive and demand skill. Should UK academics just get used to accepting material from elsewhere on its own terms?
12:25:22 PM
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17 March 2003 |
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13 March 2003 |
© Copyright 2003 Rhiannon Williams.
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