Monthly Archive for November, 2003

http://www.edtechpost.ca/gems/
etug_roundtable/roundtable_discussion_topics.htm

Tomorrow the B.C. Ed Tech Users Group gets together for its bi-annual face to face sessions. I’m hosting a short half-hour discussion on blogs in education, in part as a follow up to the online ‘blogtalk’ we did back in October. The roundtables are just supposed to be loose discussions but I threw together two possible topics, as well as pointers to a few examples of higher ed class blogs that I like. If anyone has comments on pointers to where these discussions have already taken place online (specifically the ‘inside or outside the firewall’ one) I’d love to hear them.

The only problem with doing this roundtable is that I’m going to miss the other ones that are going on at the same time, most notably Brian’s on wikis in education. As always, feel free to re-use if there’s anything useful here.- SWL

http://careo.elearning.ubc.ca/weblogs/michelle/
archives/000545.html

Michelle Lamberson has a note about two really interesting tools recently released by the instructional technology support folks at UBC’s Faculty of Arts. The first is a forms-based Flash Timelines builder. The second a tool to extract and then re-import distinct pieces of threaded discussions from inside WebCT. - SWL

http://learnware.uwaterloo.ca/projects/cloe/bulletin/

CLOE is the Co-operative Learning Object Exchange, an Ontario-wide LOR. Camp CLOE was a 5 day workshop they ran last spring for representatives from the 17 partner institutions. They’ve set this ‘blog’ up in support of the cohort from that session. I say ‘blog’ in quotes as it seems a bit sporadic and not overly personal, but the terminology isn’t important - it seemed like a nice albeit small attempt to keep some of the momentum going for a group of learners after the flush of the f2f workshops had passed. - SWL

http://www.cetis.ac.uk/content2/20031124150257

Wilbert Kraan at CETIS has a lot more information on the proposed SAKAI project that I posted on last week. As reported, it’s a collaboration by a number of the former OKI participants in conjunction with folks from uPortal and introducing work around the JSR 168 Portlet specification. As Wilbert writes, “SAKAI is meant to come up with production level application almost within a year.” - SWL

It’s going to be a slow day here at EdTechPost, so….

“Say not, when I have leisure I will study; you may not have leisure.” - The Mishnah

“The ink of a scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr.” - Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him)

http://www.edtechpost.ca/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/
EdTechPost/MetadataTaxonomiesAndVocabularies

Similar to the last post, here’s a new wiki page with some pointers to resources that may be helpful in dealing with metadata issues, taxonomies and some controlled vocabularies in higher education. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/
EdTechPost/ELearningGlossaries

As part of the background research for the Edutools project I am constantly on the lookout for new elearning glossaries with which to compare definitions of terms. Here is a list of the ones I know about (in a wiki, so feel free to add if you want) - most of them are generic ‘elearning’ glossaries though there are a few specific to ‘metadata’ and ‘learning objects’ here too. - SWL

http://www.ulist.org/index.htm

This is one of those accidental finds that ended up seeming highly relevant but for which I have no background info and really don’t know if it’s real or not. As the site says “ULIST is a website where Web Services interfaces for learning, training and related applications can be exposed for comment and evaluation and where organizations that require Web Services integration of multiple functions can go to find relevant Web Services interfaces.” The contact email address is from the QuestionMark.com domain, which seems plausible - to me it makes sense for a 3rd party tool builder like Questionmark to champion something this. There are no entries in the directory yet and almost no links to it from the outside world - this seems to be a bit of a proof of concept at this point; still, interesting. - SWL

http://www.edutech.ch/edutech/tools/Platforms-report-03-03.pdf

Summary report of an evaluation of 5 CMS platforms (a strangish mix of well known CMS, European ones and very training-focused Learning Management Systems) performed for the Swiss Virtual Campus in spring 2003. They looked at Blackboard, Clix, IBT-Server,
Qualilearning/Luvit, Globalteach, and WebCT Vista. None of them seemed to match exactly what they were looking for, but the recommendation seems to have been to provisionally go with Vista until something better came along. The full evaluation site, along with detailed reports on each of the products is also available. - SWL

http://www.adlnet.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=rcdetails
&libid=633&filterid=13&page=1&keywords=
&applyto=libTitle,libAuthor,contentText

Quite a bit of these are specific to the context of training in the American military, but the Use Cases presented here are still helpful in detailing many of the ways in which people may want to work with a LOR. - SWL