This site has some decent resources categorized into:

• Applied eLearning Standards
• Theories of Online Education
• Web Technologies
• eLearning Standards

but NO RSS FEED! Which is o.k. I guess if it doesn't see itself as a 'blog' or want to update people regularly about its contents, but looking at the source code (to see how easy it would be to scrape) it even calls itself a 'blog' in the comments!

Note to self - Maybe it would be helpful to gather a collection of pointers to creating RSS feeds from various different sources and from different formats, or what you should do if hand-creating content to make sure you don't cut certain avenues off - there seems to be hundreds of ways and suggestions out there (can someone point me to an existing list?). In many cases instead of people having to change tools they use to create the more effective approach in some cases is to lead them to ways to bootstrap their current content. - SWL

8:03:33 AM    

Weblog Trackbacks to provide context for learning objects.

"Imagine this: "Person A" is searching a LOR and comes across a really cool LO that they want to use. They have some comments that they might be wanting to share with a community outside of the LOR. They publish these comments to their weblog (say a departmental or institutional or even personal LO-related weblog), and include a trackback to a URL provided by the LOR for that specific LO.

Sometime later, "Person B" is searching the LOR for some content, and finds the same object that "Person A" found. They click the "Details" button to learn more about the LO, including the metadata context stored in the LOR, and all trackbacked weblog entries related to this LO. They are able to see "Person A"s comments directly in the LOR, providing some addition outside-of-mandated-metadata-schema context that wouldn't have been available otherwise.

"Person C" is surfing the LO-related weblogs, and come across the post from "Person A" about a LO. They click the link, and are brought to the LOR's "Details" page for that LO, where they can see the "official," centralized metadata, as well as all informal, distributed metadata and comments aggregated by the Trackback feature of the LOR.

This could be quite cool.

Imagine this going one step further... There is no reason for Trackbacks to be restricted to weblogs... They could just as easily be generated by other LORs, or even other completely unrelated software. Imagine a user on CAREO being able to trackback a LOR in MERLOT. Or vice versa. Or a CAREO user being able to trackback and comment on something in the Corbus collection. Or an instructor working on a BlackBoard course being able to search for and add to comments on LOs in LORs all around the world, in the context of their course..." [D'Arcy Norman, with Alan Levine and Brian Lamb]

9:37:47 PM    

Comments from David Davies re Norm Friesen's article.

I had somewhat the same reaction, with a few additions. First, I don't know that learning objects are necessarily about single learners. There's no reason there couldn't be collaborative learning objects (or learning objects designed for use in a collaborative setting). Second, I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting that e-Learning can totally replace human tutoring/coaching/mentoring, certainly not in the lifetime of anyone reading Friesen's article. I would like to suggest that, based on my experience suffering through many a lecture by Old Doctor Fossil and his colleagues, many educators have been using Learning Objects for centuries. The content never changes, the delivery never changes, and the amount of individualized tutoring is nil. I'm sure there are exceptions -- but they are exceptions. Finally, I think there's definitely an agenda behind Friesen's rant on "the military-industrial complex" (and I thought that phrase went out with Eisenhower!).

David's take follows:

Putting the learning back into learning objects. I read Norm Friesen's 'Three objections to learning objects' but something in the arguments raised didn't match with how I view reusable learning objects. So in the spirit of Norm's article, here's another perspective on the debate about the positive and negative aspects of the vision of sharing educational resources. 1. The old 'what is a learning object' debate. In the context of e-learning, "any digital, reproducible and addressable resource used to perform learning activities or learning support activities, made available for others to use" works for me (thanks to Rob Koper, 'Combining reusable learning resources and services with pedagogical purposeful units of learning' in this book). 2. When I read the IMS learning Design specification is see "The IMS Learning Design specification supports the use of a wide range of pedagogies in online learning.". I don't see pedagogic neutrality, in fact I see a tool that builds upon the excellent groundwork laid down by those fine fellows at the Open University of the Netherlands on the Educational Modelling Language (EML) and delivers a specification that can put the learning back into learning objects. Here's a key paragraph from the IMS Learning Design Best Practice and Implementation Guide: "While the Learning Design approach allows different kinds of learning strategies to be supported, there is currently no vocabulary provided for describing different kinds of learning approaches, in part because the runtime system does not need to have such a vocabulary in order to correctly interpret learning designs - it just has to be able to interpret the meta-language. This provides a means of expressing many different pedagogical approaches in a relatively succinct language as set out in this document. This language in itself must be pedagogically neutral. In consequence, a system that has to interpret this language does not need to know the pedagogical approach underlying the design: it only needs to be able to instantiate the design, allocate activities and their associated resources to participants playing the various roles, and coordinate the runtime flow." 3. If you have a strong pedagogic model and are serious about learning design then forget SCORM. How can anyone be serious about SCORM when it only models the single learner, single interaction, and is fundamentally unable to model the kinds of interactions between groups of learners and learning objects that makes e-learning (and learning objects) work. IMS Learning Design is new, and as such will be refined, but right now it could be the most significant e-learning specification yet developed. [David Davies' Weblog]

9:04:18 AM    

from Denham Grey's KMWiki, a large collection of links to various knowledge tools, including

11:11:42 AM    

So I finally got a chance to actually look a little more closely at the feeds from the existing repositories that I posted last week and am slowly starting to get my thoughts together. Here are some reflections.

Not all <links> are the same

A seemingly small thing that jumped out for me is the different interpretation of what the <link> element should point to in D'Arcy's CAREO feed - his is the only one that uses the object's URL instead of the metadata record's URL. I'm interested to hear from D'Arcy's whether this was intentional and if so, the reasoning behind it. There aren't any rules yet as far as I can see; at first I thought that pointing to the record made most sense because un-extended RSS doesn't do a great job of displaying any of the existing metadata schemas I know of, but then I realized that this might just be anticipating extending RSS 2.0 through namespaces and so in fact the <link> field pointing to the object's url might in fact be the right way to go.

Some metadata filters seem more exciting than others

I'm glad I placed multiple feeds from the same source that used different criteria together onto this page. While I can see some cases where presenting the latest entries to the LOR might be useful (and I understand that proofs of concepts need to start somewhere), streams like that are likely to be less interesting than ones that use more pedagogically relevant metadata fields - e.g. "latest history objects," or "biology objects containing the word 'blood'."

Which led me to my next thought - unlike the way RSS currently supports news distribution where for the most part a 'channel' is defined by the content author , RSS as a distribution mechanism for learning objects repositories seems to get really interesting when the channel can instead be the latest results of a user-defined search using specific meta-data fields. So if you have user accounts in your LOR, a user could perform a search, be they an instructor wanting to know when any new objects are posted that might help in teaching fluid dynamics to 2nd year engineering students, or a student wanting to see new objects that could help with their term paper on mass production and the Civil War, and then be able to create a persistent URL that was the RSS feed for additional results for this search that could then be aggregated in their 'news reader' or whatever their personal learning object aggregator might be called.

Like I said, still early days in puzzling this through, but wanted to put something down. Off to bed (unlike Brian, I need some sleep before I die ;-)  - SWL

11:10:21 AM    

Macromedia Central

Macromedia announced Macromedia Central and their future plans for Flash! on March 27. Read it here. [Macromedia PR]

10:05:22 PM    

"Learning objects and e-learning standardization bear the imprint of the ideology and culture of the American military-industrial complex--of ways of thinking that are related either marginally or antithetically to the interests and values of education generally and public education in particular."

Wow, I'm glad somebody said it! But then in reading this informative paper by Norm Friesen, it looks like somebody already had in a major way - he cites a reference to a work that sounds really interesting in this regard, the The Classroom Arsenal: Military Research, Information Technology, and Public Education  by Douglas D. Noble.

I'm not sure I actually hold out that much hope of the educational community's voice being heard in the larger arenas where commercial developers and industrial training agendas seem to dominate. But it is great that these kinds of objections are being aired openly, especially by someone as knowledgeable in the field as this paper's author. - SWL

[EdTechPost]

I guess I need to understand what it is that Norm and Douglas object to so strenuously. Maybe they don't need to re-use content (yeah, right), but why should they object so strongly to *my* re-using content.

6:01:38 PM    

Jon Zittrain on The Google Death Penalty

[Scripting News]

Ways to get into trouble that you never dreamed existed.

5:55:09 PM    

eLearn Magazine

Keep coming up with all these online newsletters for e-Learning ...

10:40:24 PM    

Lawrence Lessig (Stanford Law School) posts on digital rights and on public domain

Digital rights expression (DRE) vs. Digital rights management (DRM) [Lawrence Lessig]

Weblogs and the public domain [Lawrence Lessig]

The Creative Commons License ("expressing freedom beyond fair use") [Lawrence Lessig]

"What politicians need to remember is that Congress has always adjusted the rules by which creators get paid as a response to new technology. That’s just what they should be doing today. Never before has the law been used to force new technology into old way of doing business. Every time before this, it was the law that adjusted to assure artists got paid given the new technology." [Lawrence Lessig]

9:50:45 PM    

Creative Commons, RSS, and Manila

Further to earlier posts today about open source and Doc Searls.

"This document shows you how to use a Creative Commons license in the RSS feed generated from a Manila weblog.

Creative Commons is a non-profit organization run by several universities that makes it easy for creative people and organizations to share their work with more options than are provided by copyright.

Aggregators and feed readers should consider the presence of the element, but it should also be understood that, at this writing, this is a new feature in the RSS world. We must allow software designers time to think and discuss to see how the presence of a CC license will be utilized by their software.

We will of course also do an equivalent feature for Radio UserLand. According to Larry Lessig, Moveable Type already supports Creative Commons in RSS. " [Manila]

This, in my opinion, is a good (no, great) example fo figuring out a fair balance between technology and intellectual property rights, and thereby avoiding endless litigation, cease-and-desist orders, etc.

1:21:48 PM    

What is "trackback" about?

Trackback has been mentioned a lot lately in blogs, and I didn't know what it was. Here is the explanation.

12:55:29 PM    

The Whatever License

Good thoughts from Doc Searls.

11:01:41 AM    

More issues on DMCA and access [Blogs and Education]

This one bears some thinking about. On the one hand, there is no doubt that there are conflicts between intellectual property rights and the ability of people to communicate via technology on the Web and internet. On the other hand, there is also no doubt that a lot of "hiss-"trionics and polemics are being launched by both sides instead of trying to figure out the answer.

The fight seems to get nastiest when it involves companies in a fight for market share with only one or two major competitors, and academics who seem to feel there is no justification for private ownership of intellectual property, period. (My opinion, ok?)

I like open source more all the time.

10:55:09 AM