Monthly Archive for October, 2003

http://tecfa.unige.ch/proj/seed/catalog/
docs/sevilla03-schneider.pdf

This 39 page paper (draft 1.5) by Daniel Schneider is well worth the effort. On top of the ton of good thinking on why traditional CMS don’t suffice and what roles the instructor might play within different pedagogical designs, the paper was worthwhile simply for introducing (at least to me) the term “Community, Content and Collaboration Management Systems” (C3MS) to describe packages such as Plone, PostNuke and Drupal. As the author notes, these are often discussed as ‘content management systems’ but this term belies much of their true nature as collaborative and community-building content management systems. – SWL

- via [Kairosnews]

http://denver.bizjournals.com/denver/
stories/2003/10/20/daily21.html

“The company posted earnings of 4 cents per diluted share for the third quarter of 2003, compared to a net loss of 5 cents per diluted share for the third quarter last year.”

http://www.imsglobal.org/af/index.cfm

“The IMS Abstract Framework (IAF) is a device to enable the IMS to describe the context within which it will continue to develop its eLearning technology specifications. This framework is not an attempt to define the IMS architecture, rather it is a mechanism to define the set of services for which IMS may or may not produce a set of interoperability specifications.” It’s hard to describe how huge this is. A lot of work has gone into this. It is not for the faint of heart. Start with the white paper, that alone is worth a few days or reading and digesting, and is invaluable for the appendices alone. – SWL

http://www.imsglobal.org/specificationdownload.cfm

You can now download the various IMS specification documents packaged as an IMS Content Packages themselves. The advantages, as their feed says, are that “by downloading the specification as IMS packaged content, you can see what a content package looks like and how it is organized. You can also import it as a learning resource into your Content Packaging enabled learning management system or repository.” – SWL

http://www.listserv.uga.edu/cgi-bin/wa?
A2=ind9803&L=itforum&P=R587&m=2140

Digging back through the ITFORUM mailing list archives for that last post brought me across this gem by Lloyd Rieber of The University of Georgia. It was originally delivered as the 1998 Peter Dean Lecture, but I’m linking to this version because of all of the interesting discussion on the mailing list it generated. – SWL

http://thejuniverse.blogs.com/afterhours/
2003/10/surviving_cours.html

June Lester is a mathematician and an educator, and one of the people brave enough to help facilitate the ‘blogtalk’ we tried over the last few weeks. She’s posted a great piece on the frustration a ‘SME’ can feel in the so-called ‘course-development wars.’ She’s right of course – subject matter experts in education have also often taught the material before and understand quite well how to communicate it’s intricacies, and treating them solely as providers of content will almost certainly produce a lesser learning experience (as well as antagonize them.) …
Continue reading ‘June Lester on the ‘SME’s Viewpoint’’

http://www.xplana.com/articles/archives/course_dev_wars

This piece by Susan Smith Nash on Xplana made me laugh. I wonder if anyone working in online instructional development in post-secondary *hasn’t* experienced this kind of situation…
Continue reading ‘More thoughts on ‘Surviving Course Development Wars’’

http://www.soros.org/openaccess/software/

Really helpful report from George Soros’ Open Society Institute that looks at the currently available open source institutional repository systems that comply with the Open Archives Initiative metadata harvesting protocols. (Note these aren’t ‘learning object’ repositories per se – these are typically more focused on archiving scholarly publishing and other institutional materials, though through things like z39.50 and the IMS digital repositories interoperability spec it may end up that your searches go against these repositories and more.)

You’ll have seen this already over at OLDaily (you do read Stephen already, don’t you?) – this post was more a personal note as this was one of those ‘just in time’ nuggets that float through the blogosphere and land on your desktop seconds before you knew you needed them. Hurray!. – SWL

http://twiki.wesleyan.edu/cgi-bin/view/Projects/WebChanges

The actual front page for the entire Wesleyan Wiki is at http://twiki.wesleyan.edu/cgi-bin/view/Main/WebHome but the page above points to recent changes on various project-focused wiki pages and shows a vibrant little site. Just pointing it out as another living breathing example of wikis being used to collaborate and coordinate within an organization – in this case they’re using Twiki. – SWL

http://etugblog.typepad.com/blogtalk/

Today is officially the last day so I can finally let the cat out of the bag for those who haven’t seen this yet.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, for the past two weeks I’ve been helping to facilitate, along with 4 other educators from B.C., an ‘online discussion’ on possible uses of blogs in education for the B.C. Educational Technology Users Group (ETUG). Many of you will recognize at least one of the other facilitators, Brian Lamb from UBC…
Continue reading ‘B.C. Educational Technology Users Group ‘Blogtalk’’