Quote: “ContentPackage provides ZOPE with the ability to import IMS Content Packages and turn them into Zope objects (see http://www.imsglobal.org).”
Well this bodes well for the future. Has anyone heard from the eduzope folks lately - for a while it seemed like it was going to be vapourware, and then I checked back in a month or so ago and saw so release stuff, but in general it seems to have been quiet. Must check back in - SWL
- via [Serious Instructional Technology]
George Lorenzo at Educational Pathways has a nice write up on OKI and OCW - in fact that’s how I found the piece, via a reference at the end of Rob Reynold’s piece on open source CMSes to ‘OKI and OCW Defined.’
But what I want to know is why OKI have never posted an equally as straightforward explanation on the actual OKI site which is to my mind a model of unclarity. I recognize that there are some subtle concepts at work, but the number of times I’ve had to explain the difference between OKI as an architecture and the various systems (CHEF, Stellar, LON-CAPA, etc) that will be reference implementations, to people who should know better…sheesh! - SWL
Rob Reynolds over at Xplana has posted this useful piece that helps frame some of the issues an institution should factor in when considering looking at an open source solution to course management systems, proposes a rating scheme based on these factors and rates many of the currently available options. While I might differ on a few small points (OCW is not a CMS!!) I think I would also end up suggesting the same four products that show up in his 2 top 3 lists (CHEF, LON-CAPA, Moodle, FLE3) are the most likely contenders.
There are a few things I think we at edutools can learn for the factors he highlights as important (we allow reviews by features, but don’t tie features to these kinds of factors in any strong manner). That said, one lesson I think we’ve learned is that you end up getting way to much clumping in the middle on a 5 point scale (mean on this was 21 with highest score 24 and lowest 17). But I’m probably getting nitpicky as it is getting to the end of the day - SWL
This is one of those “I’m-not-totally-sure-what-this-is-but-it-seems-like-it-might-be-interesting/important” posts.
Creating a link to this site, say like this one, actually creates a new page on that site, much like how using a WikiWord works within a wiki (eg unlike regular web pages, where you need to create the thing to be linked to before you can link to it, the very act of creating the link and following it spawns the new page). Apparently uses trackback and ping back as well. Curiouser and curiouser. - SWL
“A CAPTCHA is a program that can generate and grade tests that:
You’ve seen this before - think of systems you’ve used that ask you to access a web page and read text off that page that was somehow obscured, then feed it back to the system to prove that you (and not some automated agent) are in fact there. But did you know they had a name? - SWL
“The MetaMap is a pedagogical graphic which takes the form of a subway map. Its aim is to help the information science community to understand metadata standards, sets, and initiatives of interest in this area.“
Now this is extremely cool and helpful - this map shows both what issues particular standards and initiatives try to address (the ‘lines’ they reside on), the media types they apply to (the colours of the subway ‘lines’) and also the interrelation of various standards and initiatives (where the lines have shared ’stops’). Cooler still is that it seems to run off of (or at least have a connection to) a structured directory that catalogues these standards and initiatives. Does require the SVG plugin, and they explain why they have chosen this format. - SWL
- via David Mattison’s [TenThousandYearBlog] which I subscribe to, yet only found this by chance as his main RSS feed seems to be broken. Still, dig further into his categories as he is still blogging and finding great stuff.
The latest issue of the U.K. publication The Journal of Interactive Media in Education is structured around expert commentary on the recent book, edited by JIME editor Alison Littlejohn, Reusing Online Resources: A Sustainable Approach to eLearning, (Ed.) Allison Littlejohn. Kogan Page, London. ISBN 0749439491.
Such elearning and learning object luminaries as Tom Carey, Ed Walker and Terry Anderson offer commentaries on the 19 chapters of this work that covers the gamut of issues surrounding learning objects, and there is an associated discussion forum that the authors appear to be responding to. Worthwile just for the references one can mine in the citation areas! The commentary by Terry Anderson on chapter 19 “Reuse of Resources within Communities of Practice” seemed particularly timely. - SWL
- via [CARETblogging]
If you are a Windows user and at all involved with working with XML or XSLT, then you probably already know about this tool, but if not, I highly recommend checking it out. Before I came across this editor I played around with both XMLSpy and eXcelon’s Stylus Studio, two of the seemingly more prominent commercial XML/XSL tools (actually, I don’t know for certain they are the most widely used, but their names kept coming up when I was first looking for an XSL editor).
Cooktop strikes me as a strong entry in the field, and well worth playing around with if you are just trying to get your head around XML, XSLT what extending RSS with learning object metadata might look like and what the XSL files needed to render it might be. The basic model is to provide it an XML file and some XSL and it will allow you to see on the fly what the results would look like. The tool has built in support for XML Tidy and can generate DTDs from existing XML documents, if you so choose. And I love the fact that all of it’s configuration is in XML files, so by tweaking the tool you actually learn more about the technology the tool is intended to build - SWL.
This post to kuro5hin.org by the original author of a story that was distributed for free via kuro5hin but had a ‘tip jar’ attached that let readers donate if they felt so inclined has some interesting anecdotal observations on distributing free content online versus going through traditional publishing mechanisms. He eneded up making $760 in tips (US!) which seems pretty good to me - it’s hard not to think that his ‘reputation’ on kuro5hin didn’t have something to do with it. - SWL
Long before there were blogs, Phil Agre was publishing a great read-only mailing list called Red Rock NewsEater which regularly commented on a mix of technological and social issues and was an outlet for new drafts of Agre’s papers. Agre is a fascinating character - he has a PhD in artificial intelligence studies from MIT, but seems to have spent most of his professional life in library studies, and information and organizational dynamics. The mailing list changed focus with the new american administration and subsequent events, and eventually traffic seems to have dropped right off. But as I always valued the insight Agre brought, I dropped by his website today to see what he had been up to, and found this very relevant paper.
The paper sets out to “explore the tension between the engineering story of rationally distributed computation and the political story of institutional change through decentralized architecture…In the case of peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies, the official engineering story is that computational effort should be distributed to reflect the structure of the problem. But the engineering story does not explain the strong feelings that P2P often evokes. The strong feelings derive from a political story, often heatedly disavowed by technologists but widespread in the culture: that P2P delivers on the Internet’s promise of decentralization.”
It was with profound relief that I read these opening sentences in the paper. I have been witnessing a number of projects adopting p2p or ‘decentralized’ or ‘distributed’ architectures for problems that computationally didn’t seem to call for them - if anything, in some of these cases this architecture seemed to add a layer of unneeded complexity. And since the people implementing these systems are typically very smart people, there must be some other motivation for adopting these models. And there are - what Agre here calls the “political story of institutional change through decentralized architecture.” Yet what troubled me was the seeming claims in this ‘political story’ that change is bound to these technologies, as it has never seemed obvious to me that the two are inextricably bound - you can have systems with centralized architectures that promotes change, and decentralized ones that don’t.
I think this paper reaches a similar conclusion. As Agre puts it: “The peer-to-peer movement understands that architecture is politics, but it should not assume that architecture is a substitute for politics. Radically improved information and communication technologies do open new possibilities for institutional change. To explore those possibilities, though, technologists will need better ideas about institutions. “
So maybe it’s just the case of many of these projects using the technology as a lever to shift the institutions and realizing that more than just the technologies will need to change. Or maybe we have reached father than we grasp. We shall see. - SWL
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