Tag: standards

Remote Question Protocol

http://mantis.york.ac.uk/moodle/course/view.php?id=14

You know there has to be something to this because a) it hasn’t been widely hyped, as far as I know b) they actually seem to be shipping code and working specifications. What a nice contrast. A high level description of this web services protocol to provide remote processing of assessment items on behalf of assessment systems, independant of specific CMS, can be found in this PDF file. Apparently Moodle is already supporting this, and it is on the radar for the people working on the Tools Interoperability Profile. – SWL

Report Comparing eXe with other elearning authoring packages

http://eduforge.org/docman/view.php/20/243/
eXe_report_sbritain.pdf

This report by Sandy Britain was commissioned by the University of Auckland and released back in April, but I only just stumbled upon it. I’ve been arguing for at least a year now that one of the next places we need to focus our attention on is better tools for authoring, especially for authoring XML-based, standards compliant elearning content. XML is not a fringe technology, and it’s far past the time when we should be requiring content in higher ed to be well structured and easily re-published in other formats, something I take it that these editors can help with and that continuing with outmoded HTML editors doesn’t. Britain acknowledges that there are potentially far more tools to examine than the 4 he compares eXe with (Burrokeet, Lectora, SoftChalk Lesson Builder, and Lersus); I would have liked to see at least ThinkingCap Studio and the ICE System in there as well, and to this end am hoping we at Edutools can get a comparative analysis project going to look at these and more. [If you have a pot of money lying around 😉 and would like to see such a comparison happen, please feel free to contact me.] Still, a good overview and introduction to the issue. – SWL

D-Lib Article – Reflections on a Decade of Metadata Consensus Building

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

Presentation: “Licences, Features, and Community: The Path to Sustainability”

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

Presentations available from 2005 Alt-i-Lab sessions

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

IMS Compliance Program

http://www.imsproject.org/conformance/index.html

I could be wrong, but this seems new, and welcome at that. IMS has announced this new Compliance Program which outlines methods for developers of content, services and applications to provide evidence to support conformance claims based on self testing, and in so doing rate the claim of “IMS Conformant.” While we have had the ability to verify SCORM conformance now for some time, this is the first, as far as I know, where claims concerning IMS specifications that aren’t included in SCORM (and there are many) will have some form of verification applied to them. Announcements to this effect should start to circulate later this year as the first products work their way through the process. – SWL

Open Knowledge Initiative Delivers XOSID Specification

http://www.imsglobal.org/news.html

The specifications geeks in the crowd will want to note (and probably have already seen) this joint announcement by IMS and OKI that they have released an XML binding or representation of OKI’s Open Service Interface Definitions (OSID), previously only officially available as Java APIs. Wilbert Kraan at CETIS has written an article which as usual does an excellent job detailing some of the implications of this work. – SWL

Integrating Library Reserves and Course Management Systems: Aleph, RSS, and Sakai

http://www.educause.edu/LibraryDetailPage/
666?ID=MWR0566

Hey, I’m as excited about the potential of service-oriented architectures and the ‘loosely coupled’ appproach as the next guy, but on a regular basis I find myself lamenting the seeming lack of real world working examples one can currently point to.

Yet every time I feel this way, along comes another presentation like this one, in this case describing the use of RSS to display library resource holdings within the Sakai CMTools application, that help me believe the grand vision of diversity and choice with stability and integration may actually come true. So don’t dispair; ‘network economy’ effects to the contrary, slowly cracks are forming in the vendor lockdown and silos we all lament … really … I think. – SWL

JISC’s non- technical guide to E-Learning Frameworks

http://www.elearning.ac.uk/features/nontechguide1

I expect this is actually as ‘non-technical’ as one should expect a document to be about something as nerdy as E-Learning Frameworks but it’s not necessarily for the faint of heart. (actually, it really is pretty well non-technical!) Still, I’d encourage you to have a go if you’ve come across the Framework before but aren’t really sure what it’s about.

For my part, I keep wondering how long its going to be before the ‘small pieces’ folks (you know who you are!) protest this – these needn’t be antagonistic, but if your goal is to abolish all enterprise computing (instead of the silo’d monolithic systems that are the target of this type of approach) then you’d better come out shooting! Seriously, I’m just taking the mickey, (it’s Friday afternoon and all,) but certain calls to arms would have you believe we’d do better to have a student information system on every desktop (or better yet, none at all!) – SWL

DC-Education Application Profile

http://dublincore.org/educationwiki/
DC_2dEducation_20Application_20Profile

Possibly of interest to some of you metadata mavens out there is this wiki where you can find ongoing work of the Dublin Core Education Working Group, including this early draft of an application profile of Dublin Core to apply to educational materials. It’s not exactly ‘knock your socks off’ kind of stuff but then let’s hope metadata never is considered such.

Clearly an improvement over straight ahead Dublin Core in adding things like ‘Education Level,’ but as some folks from the library community recently reminded us, it’s not like anyone’s actually using much more than the equivalent of Dublin Core anyways when they use the LOM. Oh yeah, I keep forgetting, automatic metadata generation/harvesting is going to save our souls and use all the LOM elements to then rapdily (magically, automatically…) re-assemble personalized learning. LOM mani padme LOM. Boy, am I having a rough Saturday! – SWL