Monthly Archive for January, 2005

http://www-serl.cs.colorado.edu/metis/index.html

One of a number of interesting services and tools funded by the NSDL, Metis is “a workflow system designed to support the workflow needs of digital libraries.” This Java-based application seems ot only work against its own internal store of users, but different events and roles can be configured to perform actions such as file compression, mvoing files, creating timers and new users and email notification. There is an API published, and you seem to get the source code in the download though no indication I could find of the license status. – SWL

http://ants.etse.urv.es/planetdr/

On the surface just another repository project, but of interest to me because it is a current project from outside of Canada that seems to have picked up the Edusource Communications Layer (ECL) developed by Marek Hatala and others as part of the Edusource project.

This is the second piece of information I’ve had in as many weeks that Edusource isn’t maybe as moribund as it’s original website would lead one to believe. I guess some of the action has moved on to this eRIB site and to this eduSource Registry of Services, but still, it seems pretty unclear to me what in fact is still going on. Would love to know, though. – SWL

https://www.dlearn.arizona.edu/index.jsp

I have wondered out loud a few times whether anyone was attempting an LOR on top of DSpace. I got some lukewarm responses but nothing very concrete to back up DSpace’s own claims that it could be used as one. Today I stumbled across this – I don’t know for an absolute fact, but this sure looks like a DSpace-powered site, ostensibly serving ‘learning objects’ hedged as ‘digital learning materials.’

Given my current predicament (some of you will know of which I speak) I’m not really feeling like one to throw stones, glass houses and all that, eh. But this performs kind of how one would expect it to – straightforward support of single object binary blob uploads, searching and browsing, collection support, workflow for submission and fine and dandy archiving using MD5 checksums. And maybe in the end this is all there needs to be, though it seems like we’ve seen enough of that style of repository to convince that it has some shortcomings. Certainly, nothing by way of authorization, DRM, handling of XML content or content aggregation which seem to be where things are heading. So clearly not an endorsement, simply an example. – SWL

http://blog.loaz.com/timwang/index.php

A warm welcome to the blogosphere for a new Ed Tech blogger from B.C. Tim Wang is a Flash developer with the Arts Computing group at U.B.C. For those of you not familar with their work, these are the folks behind a set of Flash-based learning tools they call ‘Learning Object Template Tools,’ including the flash-based Timeline Tool that made the rounds a few months back.

I am really looking forward to reading Tim’s blog, both for the ideas he brings to the field but also the connections he brings. In addition to being a great Flash developer, Tim also speaks Chinese and has of late been making more and more connections with educational technologists in China. I often find backlinks to EdTechPost from Chinese blogs only to find I can’t make heads or tails, so it will be great to have a guide to new happenings over there. – SWL

http://www.standards-schmandards.com/index.php?show/fangs

A few years back now my colleague Dr. Bruce Landon brought a blind student with him to one of our BC Ed Tech gatherings to have him demonstrate accessing a course within a CMS via the screen reader JAWS. JAWS is, as far as I know, a market leader and often held up as a de jure standard for accessibility.

What the demonstration showed me and others was that, even though on a technical level the CMS (in this case WebCT) was accessible through JAWS (e.g. JAWS could read it and the student could access different parts of the course) it was absolutely UN-USABLE – a streamingly long scream of text and navigation links one after another that even for the student, who was used to both JAWS and WebCT, presented difficulties. (To be fair, this isn’t an anti-WebCT screed, and from what I know they have made improvements in this regard).

The point is, meeting accessbility standards is a bare minimum, but it doesn’t make the content usable for those using assistive technolgoies.

And here’s where this plug-in comes in. The free, open source ‘Fangs’ plug-in for Mozilla/Firefox avoids one of the challneges designers have with creating accessibly usable pages, which is that JAWS has a license cost associated with it and so many people simply assume that if it conforms to W3C WCAG or Section 508 guidelines, that’s enough. It’s not, and it’s a case where ’seeing’ (actually ‘hearing’) is believing. ‘Fangs’ allows you to read web pages more like how the users of an assistive reader will hear them. And trust me, usually it ain’t pretty. – SWL

http://netlab.gmu.edu/NEW/

O.k., maybe I’m missing something here. This Java-based software, developed by Dr. Mark Pullen and others at George Mason University, provides synchronous audio and video conferencing capabilities, along with an annotatable whiteboard and slide upload. It also permits you record your sessions for future playback.

It’s open source.

It’s been around since 2002.

I tried out the demo and it seemed to work flawlessly. I remember when the ‘open education’ group initially met all of us getting together virtually via Elluminate, and many wondering if there wasn’t some open source alternative. Apparently there was and is. You might question this kind of technology as simply replicating existing F2F classroom models, but if you or your institution already uses something like Ellumiunate, WebEx, Centra, etc, then this would seem like worth checking out.

Found via a hit from my bloglines saved search feed on a posting from the Moodle discussion boards, which in my mind continues to be *the* most vibrant open source app/community in education I’ve yet to see. – SWL

http://www.eun.org/eun.org2/eun/en/
Celebrate_Relatedprojects/sub_area.cfm?sa=4688

In case you somehow overlooked it, CELEBRATE (Context eLearning with Broadband Technologies) has been a rather massive 30-month demonstration project (June 2002-November 2004) co-ordinated by European Schoolnet and supported by the European Commission’s Information Society Technologies Programme. It’s task was seemingly to examine all things ‘learning object’ to determine the extent to which it is a good strategy to pursue and how it should be pursued within the EC.

Their evaluation report is now available. Be forewarned – at 202 pages it is book-length and while I haven’t read it all, the bits I have read indicate it’s worth more than just a skim. It includes detailed case studies on the lifecycle of a couple of learning objects, detailed recommendations on how to move forward, and survey results from educators on their experiences with learning objects. With all the snow we just got (yes, 4 inches and counting in Victoria!) I guess I know how I’m spending my weekend. – SWL

http://www.dwelle.org/avar.cgi

From a somewhat hysterical slashdot thread examining the user generated tagging systems in Flickr, del.icio.us and the like came a reference to this little experiment to introduce auto-completion and suggestion of del.icio.us tags based on a user’s previous tags. This is a step in the right direction – if it can start to pick up tags from the overall site, then maybe one of the issues with this overall approach, lack of synonym support and inconsistency applying tags, maybe isn’t as bad as it first appears. – SWL

http://www.ossite.org/Members/GrahamAttwell/
sustainibility/attach/sustainibility4.doc

I am kind of surprised this hadn’t been posted on yet as it makes such extensive reference to ideas being promoted in ed tech blogs, but I couldn’t see any references so far. This report by Graham Attwell “commissioned by the University of Bremen as part of its contribution to The European Commission Socrates supported Lefo Learning folders project” could well be considered a survey of most of the discussions I have seen unfolding both in ed tech blogs and other forums for the past 2 years, but wrapped in the context of ’sustainability.’ Some of it won’t seem that new to those already immersed in the discussion, but taken as a whole it seems a valueable report and a bit of a summation of a seemingly widespread call to shift directions in the elearning world. – SWL