Monthly Archive for July, 2005

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july05/weibel/07weibel.html

Rarely do you get a chance to read reflections by someone with as much experience as Stuart L. Weibel, the Senior Research Scientist with OCLC, on 10 years of work around Dublin Core and digital metadata standards. And frank too - he concedes that we’ve all perhaps been too optimistic about the ‘author contributed’ model of metadata submission, and also that metadata in general has to find its place (if it has one at all) in the full-text searchable digitized world of the web. Check out also the great pictures of the bogeys (wheel carriages) that move entire trains between railway lines of different gauges between China and Mongolia. - SWL

http://www.hieraki.org/

Just one of those things that I stumbled across through a dedicated Google search feed; Hieraki is an open source, Ruby-based (hence the reason you’ve probably never heard of it; many who try Ruby seem to rave about it but it never seems to gain traction versus its competitors) wiki-like system that structures pages by ‘Chapters’ and sub-sections to assist with collaborative book authoring. Someone has even tried building a ‘learning object repository’ named Noc on top of it. Not an endorsement, just a pointer to an interesting experiment. - SWL

http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/events/
2005-07-04/I050704F_OSS_Watch.pdf

Slides from the recent “Building Open Source Communities” conference held in Edinburgh have now been posted. My favourite so far was the above by Jim Farmer of uPortal and now Sakai fame. It’s quite a sprawling piece that covers many aspects of the “business” of open source and higher education. I appreciated the lack of dogmatism and the willingness to acknowledge some of the risks in software development, and also the notion that open source can help customers take care of the ‘core’ by helping to address the ‘context.’ - SWL

http://engage.doit.wisc.edu/tools/ConceptTutor/

From a reference in the Tools Interoperability demonstrator I mentioned yesterday came a link to this tool, ConceptTutor, built by the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Released under what looks to be an open source license (the source code is available here) it seems to be a glossary tool on steriods, with a structured approach to illustrating concepts and minimally assess the learner’s understanding of those that can be used to annotate and supplement core course content. The application apparently produces Accessible content and can draw content from repositories like Fedora (this I could not confirm), which makes it an interesting tool for re-using ‘learning objects’ in a way that perhaps retains some of the original connotation of the term and focuses it on the right level of granularity. It’s not clear the extent to which this tool can now be shown to practically interoperate and annotate content within existing CMS like WebCT, or Sakai, but presumably if that is not already present as part of the demonstrator it will be something being targeted soon. - SWL

http://www.imsglobal.org/altilab/

June has been a busy month in the post-secondary elearning world; along with the release of Sakai 2.0, another major milestone happened this month at the Alt-i-lab sessions in Sheffield, England. The page above links to many of the presentations and demonstrations that took place there, possibly most notable of which was the first practical demonstration of the Tool Interoperability across multiple CMS. A summary of the demonstration by Chris Vento is available, which seems to be cause for cautious optimism; unfortunately, the only ‘independant’ report I’ve been able to find (not having attended myself) is this one from the Learning Technology Standards Observatory. One can only hope that Wilbert Kraan and the folks at CETIS will come to the rescue with another of their lucid and helpful write-ups to explain what this really all means.

But I would be remiss in not pointing to some other sessions of note; for me the one that jumped off the page as I read further was the working session on “A Common Cartridge for Robust Content Delivery.” This group basically proposed to tackle the problem of content interoperability once more in light of the current situation:

“It’s five years later. The major elearning providers have implemented IMS specifications; many customers mandate compliance with some form of them. However, software vendors and suppliers, consumers, and maintainers of content have not worked together to create a detailed de facto understanding of what implementation means. So while elearning firms market ‘compliance’ with IMS specifications, and some have been certified as compliant with a specific version of the specifications; the lack of practical interoperability has left us in a place not sufficiently different than where we were prior to the IMS specification effort began.”

It’s nice to see the problem being owned up to (no real news to folks in the trenchs who have become increasingly dismayed as the variety of implementations of IMS Content Packaging failed to bring them the content portability and freedom from vendor lock-in they had hoped for). Too early yet to say if the proposed idea of “Content Cartridges” can have any better effect, but the idea of compliance testing and publisher involvement in the standards both seem improvements. - SWL

http://www.edutools.info/course/productinfo/detail.jsp?id=262

I don’t normally post notifications of every new review we do on the Edutools site, but in the case of Sakai there has been a lot of interest from this community and so I thought it might be warranted. As always, we endeavor to provide descriptive, non-evaluative reviews of the software within a framework that allows you to compare it with other known quantities and for you to make the judgements yourself. For instance you can view a side-by-side comparison of Sakai 2.0 with Blackboard 6 and WebCT CE 4 and Vista here, or look at it in comparison to some other open source CMS (Moodle, Atutor and .LRN) here. - SWL