Monthly Archive for June, 2006

http://projectpad.northwestern.edu/ppad2/index.html

Staying with the Sakai-theme for a bit (but in fact the more interesting theme emerging for me is “affable web-based tools for rich media manipulation,” more to come), in the Sakai wiki I came across Project Pad from Northwestern University. It is a suite of audio and video annotation tools, including tools to annotate quicktime a/v files, flash movies and mp3 audio streams, still images, and do audio transcription. The suite includes two tools for searching and managing content stored in external digital media repositories such as Fedora systems, Z39.50 library catalogs, and Google and uses the Common Query Language. And it looks to be becoming integrated with Sakai. Not sure this is a flickr-killer (but who says it needed killing anyways) but maybe one alternative worth investigating for those attracted by some of that functionality (it is actually much broader) but uneasy with sending their faculty off to 3rd party commercially hosted services. – SWL

http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/
Conf2006Vancouver/Conference Sessions

My only regret about going to the BC ETUG sessions last week is that it coincided with the Sakai conference being held just across the Straight in Vancouver which would also have made for an informative few days.

Alas, all is not lost, as the good folks there are posting their slides and podcasts of the sessions to this wiki. See also their conference ‘facebook’, a great idea for any conference, but especially one like this trying to create community.

Lots to digest here; a good presentation on small institutions implementing Sakai, (though clearly the concept of ‘loosely coupled‘ is understood a little differently here.) But that’s just nit picking, lots of exciting things going on, but it left me wondering about two things. Why were there only 3 Canadians in the facebook for a conference hosted in Canada (presumably the rest are just shy?) and is there a whole segment of the edu-blogosphere I don’t know about that is simply buzzing about this conference, because I haven’t heard a peep in my aggregator. – SWL

One of my other destinations last week was the BC Educational Technology Users Group annual Spring Workshop, this year held at North Island College’s lovely Comox Valley campus.

If the workshop schedule was actually reflective of current practices in BC, then you’d be led to believe we have almost ubiquitous adopting of elearning 2.0 in the province – 2 different wiki workshops, a podcasting session and blamb’s always entertaining and educational social software tsunami (with guest D’Arcy Norman, who we keep letting into the province, but I told him he better just move out here or else we’ll start asking to see his papers!) BCcampus’ Executive Director, David Porter, has a good writeup on one of the wiki sessions as well as the invigorating opening session by journalist Mark Schneider over at his new blog.

And as D’Arcy has mentioned, I also made my small contribution, a Web 0.1-ish session on our new service, SOL*R. More to come on that soon, but so far I have avoided being pelted with rotten fruit, always a relief when rolling out new services. – SWL

www.edtechpost.ca/gems/coppul-lor3.ppt

Pheew! Back home now after a hectic (for me) week of travelling and talking, one of which was a talk I gave to the Council of Prairie and Pacific University Libraries (COPPUL) Distance Education Forum on the feasibility of using DSpace as a general learning object repository.

I have been pretty hard on this idea in the past, so I was glad to be given the opportunity to revisit the idea in more depth. And while it might not seem so from the slides, I actually found myself softening to the idea, in part because of some innovations from MIT and others to accomodate learning materials. But my main message, which was perhaps buried a bit at the end of the talk, was that it is one thing to evaluate DSpace against an abstract set of functionality that a LOR should have, (which is kind of what I did here) and quite another to say that it will solve the problems of finding, sharing, remixing and reusing learning content, a question some would say has already been asked and answered a few times. – SWL