Monthly Archive for April, 2004

http://www.diglib.org/forums/Spring2004/
springforum04abs.htm

Thanks to Dr. Tom Carey for passing on the reference to the presentation archive for the DLF’s 2004 Spring Forum. There’s lots of interest here; in particular, one of the 9.00am-10.30am sessions from April 21, titled “Digital Repository Interoperability with Learning Systems” gives some insight into how the library/archives world is approaching the issue of interoperating with various learning systems, notable not only CMS are mentioned but also weblogs! (Ironically, for all of the focus on metadata, this page itself is unstructured HTML, hence my lack of ability to point you directly to the section containing this presentation’s references). - SWL

This is not an edtech related post but I felt the need to rant and well, it’s my blog so I’ll rant if I want to…

It is beyond me how there still exist any institutional websites that offer ‘Contact Pages’ with their address but that don’t also use one the myriad online maps services that exist to point to an online map of their location. You know, handy sites like Yahoo Maps or Mapquest. Maybe these are the same people who think the Internet is simply a ‘fad,’ just like ‘horse-less carriages.’

Unless my relationship with the person is restricted solely to face to face or the phone (which is increasingly rare for me) I basically refuse to write out in long directions to anywhere anymore - instead, I simply point folks to a URL and let them build their own map. For instance, if you ever want to come visit my office, you can find me here. Lucky for me, there is a campus next door to the one I have to visit tomorrow (that visit having prompted the above rant) that gets it. - SWL

http://sourceforge.net/projects/harmoni

Also from the NITLE site, a reference to this OKI-related open source project, which consists of three major components:
1) A PHP application framework and architecture, offering, e.g. authentication, DBC, file storage
2) PHP OKI OSID (service definitions) conversion system
3) PHP implementations of those OSIDs

This is the result of a collaboration of two projects we’ve heard a little bit about in the past, Segue (which has been referred to at times as the ‘blogging-based CMS’) and a LMS from the Associated Colleges of the South Tech Centre. It’s hard to overstate the importance of this project to OKI - originally all of the OKI castings were in Java which, for all of the sense it may have made, to me was also a serious impediment to many non-institutional developers (read ‘individual instructors’) being able to build in it/on it. Having the OKI OSIDs implemented in PHP suddenly opens the door to the potentially much vaster legion of people who are developing systems and individual learning apps in that language. - SWL

http://javelina.cet.middlebury.edu/lsa/out/cover_page.htm

This paper, titled “Patterns in Unstructured Data: Discovery, Aggregation, and Visualization” is offered by the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education as a “layman’s introduction to latent semantic indexing.” It does start to go into the specifics of how LSI works, but fortunately at an introductory enough level that most of us can grasp. This paper has it all: metadata…ontologies…visualization … what more could you ask for! A helpful introduction to an overlooked technology. See also the NITLE’s LSI project page for pointers to PERL-based LSI software. (Thanks to Bruce Landon for the tip.)- SWL

http://www.fedora.info/wiki/bin/
view/Fedora/FedoraImplementations

According to this list on the Fedora Wiki site, last updated October 26, 2003, there were only 2 known FEDORA installations. FEDORA’s own website lists around a dozen ‘registered deployment partners’ which would seem to indicate more actual deployments, but I was hard pressed to find URLs for working ones when going through that list. If anyone knows of a more complete list of working FEDORA implementations I’d be interested to hear about it. - SWL

http://www.lsal.cmu.edu/lsal/expertise/
papers/notes/lotec05052003/lotec05052003.html

This paper, from Dan Rehak and others at the renowned Learning Systems Architecture Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University (which now has a new RSS feed), asks how authors actually create learning objects, and whether the current tools are supporting these actual processes or instead getting in the way. To investigate this they take the sensible step back from the technology and look at a number of low or no tech paper-based techniques for developing learning objects, with the “objective [is] to help create learning, and hide technology and standards” and thus “understand how learning technology standards can be applied in the creation of learning objects and content.”

You can draw your own conclusions - I think the process they outline is a useful one for tool builders to go through if they want to build tools that support the way people actually work. But my cursory reading didn’t reveal any huge lessons learnt from the paper-based modelling and many of the criticisms levelled at the one example tool (ReLoad) they cite could seemingly be levelled at the paper-based model as well (e.g. use of jargon for one). - SWL

It seems like the idea of using RSS as a means to syndicate new items in learning object repositories is steadily catching on. The page I’ve set up to aggregate a number of these feeds now has three more, two of them thanks to Ian Winship from Northumbria University.

The new feeds are:
- latest additions to the EEVL repository, a UK-based guide to Engineering, Mathematics and Computing
- latest additions to the Learning and Teaching Support Network Centre for Economics’ collection of resources
- a ‘by subject’ feed from Chalkface, a UK-based publisher of K-12 online courses and photocopy-master lesson plans

http://www.atutor.ca/atutor/files/VLE_comparison.pdf

Stumbled across this through a tangential google search. Another comparison of 3 open source CMS, Moodle, Claroline and Atutor, this time by a European training firm. As in the case of the other main comaprison of late, Atutor seems to come out on top. - SWL

https://portfolio.du.edu/pc/about

While I expect it is not news to folks thoroughly immersed in ‘eportfolio’ projects, I found this site from the University of Denver to be very helpful in illustrating some of what one can accomplish through these systems. As a member of the public one can get a free account which opens up some searches not otherwise available (like the Rubric and Element libraries) but, as one would expect, the portfolios of students and staff are browse-able by anyone. - SWL

http://lionshare.its.psu.edu//cgi-bin/twiki/view

Announced with no little fanfare at the end of last year, the Lionshare project has since been quietly chugging along. In addition to the above Wiki pages, which give some insight into what they are actually working on, you can follow the project’s latest news through their RSS feed (another one to add to the list of LOR projects with RSS feeds). - SWL