Simple Semantics Resolution - RSS 2.0 Module.

"This specification defines the Simple Semantic Resolution (SSR) Module for the RSS 2.0 syndication format. The purpose of SSR is to provide a mechanism by which the semantics of an RSS 2.0 document can be unambiguously resolved to an RDF model. This is done by declaring the RSS 2.0 file as being an RDF representation and provide a mapping between the RSS 2.0 syntax and the RDF model. The mapping is declared using XSLT to give an RSS 1.0-based representation, this RDF/XML serialization providing anchorage to the RDF model.

Put simply: an element is added to the source RSS 2.0 document which declares "this is RDF, and here is the mapping". This has absolutely no effect on the interpretation of the document as RSS 2.0 within the bounds of that specification, but enables the contents of RSS 2.0 files to be considered first class material for the Semantic Web.

This specification is intended to act as a bridge between RSS 2.0 and RSS 1.0 on a technical level, it is hoped readers of this document will consider the technical aspects above any political concerns. No general criticism of either format is intended here."

This may help in overcoming the challenges of using RSS to syndicate learning objects.

12:50:21 PM    

Hey, look! It's a learning object repository!

An interesting initiative here at UBC is a homegrown repository project that is nearing completion. While the functionality isn’t about to knock CAREO or DSpace off the Internet, it does have its points. It can sit on almost any box (it uses MySQL on the backend), and I find its metadata entry to be as simple and fast as anything else I’ve used. It could be a useful application for smaller projects — and the few people who have tried it out and reviewed the code have had mostly positive things to say about it. [Object Learning]

This is another approach, along with SCORM and the various RSS schemes that people are trying out in Canada and Europe (and at Maricopa), to getting education/learning objects freely available.

11:33:24 AM    

The eLearning Developers' Journal is looking for writers.

The Journal is a publication of The eLearning Guild, and is now in its second year. We publish an article every week online by an e-Learning practitioner (no free-lance journalists) for an international audience of eLearning Guild members. These are not "pie-in-the-sky", "gee-whiz" articles, nor are they promotional pieces written by vendor marketing staff. We focus on the practical how-to-get-the-job-done information that other publications don't address.

Authors retain full rights to their work, and we allow reprints.

Current needs:

- Case studies that illustrate how your management team designed, delivered and evaluated interactive e-Learning. As the editor, I am fussy about the kind of e-Learning featured. In my opinion, PowerPoint and straight text screen after straight text screen do not qualify as interactive e-Learning. Neither does excessive and gratuitous use of Flash!, but that's another story.

- Articles that illustrate appropriate pedagogical (or andragogical, if you prefer) approaches to online learning. There are apparently many practitioners who take issue with the "straight-line," solo learner, behaviorist orientation inherent in (for example) much SCORM-compliant e-Learning. It would be great to see an article that details an alternative that works.

- Practical, hands-on articles that explain how to achieve specific learning outcomes through the use of specific authoring tools. There are thousands of developers who use Authorware, for example, yet most had to learn what they know through the School of Hard Knocks. This is your opportunity to make another developer's day by sharing some of your expertise.

- Other topics that many readers are interested to learn about include techniques for producing elegant simulations, tools for storyboarding, and unusual design approaches.

If you would like to write on any of these topics, or on some other subject of interest where you can offer depth of experience, please send a brief query to me at bill@elearningguild.com. Our usual article length is 3000 to 5000 words, but your query should be four or five short paragraphs that will let me know what your lead paragraph would look like, outlines your intended content, tells me why you are the person to write this, and gives me some idea of the date by which you could send a completed ms.

Bill Brandon
Editor, The eLearning Developers' Journal

10:27:32 AM    

My RSS aggregation service, Edu_RSS, has two new features. First, an RSS feed of the aggregated listings is now available for harvesting by other services. Second, a Javascript feed has been added which allows you to place Edu_RSS listings on any web page whatsoever (yes, even inside WebCT) with no coding or programming. I have also just release all Edu_RSS code under GPL.

[carvingCode]

[James Farmer's Radio Weblog]

Interesting, but there is a LOT of information on Edu_RSS that has nothing to do with education. I was hoping the service would cut down on the amount of time I spend culling all the various feeds, but I was still wading through many irrelevant posts.

9:18:55 AM    

Another interesting xplana article... quoting Laura Gibbs

"Last week I did a quick survey of how the Internet and web publishing can completely change the way students write - the Internet gives students a real audience for their writing, it expands the content of their writing (images!), allowing them to link and be-linked-to, while promoting continual revision throughout the semester. Does Blackboard, a web-based course management system, take advantage of any of these features? It does not."

And therein lies one of the key issues! Great to hear others suffering.... kinda.

[James Farmer's Radio Weblog]

Another quote from the article: "Blackboard uses all the jargon of the Internet, without fundamentally changing anything." You could say that about a LOT of elearning software, systems, and content, unfortunately. And as Laura points out elsewhere, in many cases it seems that software publishers in the elearning realm have never spoken to an actual learner. <sigh>

1:35:48 PM    

Interesting website about collaboration and community. Hmmmm... this links in quite nicely!

Finaly got "Design for community"... looking forward to digging in, I love the way Powazek writes!

[James Farmer's Radio Weblog]

Also for followup (see previous notes).

1:25:37 PM    

Six factors to consider in planning online distance learning programs..... Excellent paper pointed to on Carving Code [James Farmer's Radio Weblog]

Posting this for possible followup in The Journal.

1:23:06 PM    

RSS in WebCT. Now, this is really cool! [James Farmer's Radio Weblog]

Excellent! You could also use that RSS feed to place learning objects into WebCT courses. The article explains completely how to do all the steps needed -- and these steps apply to ANY system, not just WebCT! Needed this last week for the *&@! article I am struggling with for The Journal.

1:15:24 PM    

Real Value Real Tme Communication. Via elearningpost a very interesting article looking at the extensive use of IM... but not in education. It's an interesting question - and one that 'aint goig to go away - as to the value of IM in various educational settings. [James Farmer's Radio Weblog]

IM may turn out to be useful in at least two contexts for e-Learning: to enhance collaboration between students, and to facilitate courseware development. We just published an article in the eLearning Developers' Journal that showed how the development teams on a very large project for a US national retailer used text pagers to accomplish the latter. If they had all had WiFi-enabled PDAs, they might have better used IM. (Full disclosure to anyone who may read this: I am the editor of the Journal.)

1:10:06 PM    

Interview.

Interview with James Farmer, posted on Xplana.

"I'd like to see technology enhance education in terms of communication and community. I think that we are now becoming more able to embrace the opportunities the net offers us in terms of communication and community. Perhaps a move away from systems design to design which reflects how people really learn. Earl W. Stevick said it in 1970 but I sometimes feel that we're just catching on... the most important aspect of education is 'what goes on inside and between the people in the room' (or online classroom, chatroom, discussion board, Inter/Intranet etc.). The more we reflect on and learn from this, the better."

[James Farmer's Radio Weblog]

More evidence of a growing movement in the world of education. Is this another rift, or is it where we are all headed? Why do so many people feel that it is a case of EITHER systems design OR whatever-you-call-this (facilitation? collaborative learning?). I am very uncomfortable with either/or dichotomies. Embracing them leads to dogmatic approaches to teaching and learning, and haven't we had enough of those? (Not to be dogmatic about it or anything.) Not to mention my deeeeep suspicion that many who object to a systems approach are actually objecting being held accountable, or to having to do something besides lecture, lecture, lecture.

1:01:39 PM    

Check out Open-Education.org, which seems to be promoting the exciting old concept of public domain digital content resources for educational resources.

Thanks to Scott Leslie's EdTechPost, 04/15/02003

11:15:11 AM    

Step-by-step primer on RSS.

What is RSS?

RSS is a protocol, an application of XML, that provides an open method of syndicating and aggregating Web content. Using RSS files, you can create a data feed that supplies headlines, links, and article summaries from your Web site. Users can have constantly updated content from web sites delivered to them via a news aggregator, a piece of software specifically tailored to receive these types of feeds. RSS is the hottest thing in Web communication. It powers many popular applications such as weblogs, knowledge management networks, and news syndication.

Weblogging, a term coined by Jorn Barger in December 1997, is one of the most popular and fast growing applications of RSS. A blog is someone's personal dated 'log' frequently updated with new information about a particular subject or range of subjects.
[State of Utah Government Information Locator Service]

This is oriented toward weblogging, but it does a good job of explaining how to build an RSS feed.

11:04:42 AM    

XHTML Syndication Module.

Abstract

This document is meant to document the Syndication module for XHTML. This module defines a namespace and arttibutes that live in that namespace that allow an XHTML web page to be syndicated.

Motivation

The motivation for this document is to do away with RSS as a seperate file format. If web publishers and CMSs want to participate in content syndication then they have to produce two versions of their front page, the HTML version and the RSS version. A careful inspection of XHTML and common web practice shows that most of the information need to do syndication already exists in web pages published today. What is needed is a little extra information to make syndication possible.

[Joe Gregorio]

This is from July 2002. More to study. Not everyone likes RSS.

10:58:52 AM    

Userland knows how.

John Robb says Tiernan Ray is all wet. OK, John -- show me how to structure knowledge in weblogs so that I can find something when I need it without having to look through back logs and archives for a half hour.

10:21:14 AM    

Tiernan Ray: Why Blogs Haven't Stormed the Business World. [Scripting News]

This is a great summary of the problems I have been pointing out for the past two years. Weblogs as they are now are just not good knowledge repositories. Without indexing or metadata and no convenient way to find what you're looking for, they remain like my Moleskine notebook - repositories of the moment, collections of ideas and memoranda. I read about one man who actually created a little index on the last few pages of each of his Moleskines, but that is a time-consuming effort that only hits the high points of what is on each page, or indexes pages to dates. In Radio, I have tried to do some organization with Categories and it is a similarly messy way to do the job. After months (over a year, actually) of this, I could no more quickly find a specific citation in my weblogs than I could do handsprings across the office. Plus I have deleted all entries and started over again in frustration at least twice. If there are back archives of what I dropped, I have no idea how to get to them.

So, I love my weblog(s), but as journals and notes and a way to capture what is going on day to day, but not as repositories.

9:43:27 AM    

Connecting people.

Presentation by Doug Ransom on April 16, 2003. [via syndic8.com]

11:29:29 PM    

Rob Reynolds over at Xplana has posted this useful piece that helps frame some of the issues an institution should factor in when considering looking at an open source solution to course management systems, proposes a rating scheme based on these factors and rates many of the currently available options. While I might differ on a few small points (OCW is not a CMS!!) I think I would also end up suggesting the same four products that show up in his 2 top 3 lists (CHEF, LON-CAPA, Moodle, FLE3) are the most likely contenders.

There are a few things I think we at edutools can learn for the factors he highlights as important (we allow reviews by features, but don't tie features to these kinds of factors in any strong manner). That said, one lesson I think we've learned is that you end up getting way to much clumping in the middle on a 5 point scale (mean on this was 21 with highest score 24 and lowest 17). But I'm probably getting nitpicky as it is getting to the end of the day - SWL

9:25:44 AM    

George Lorenzo at Educational Pathways has a nice write up on OKI and OCW - in fact that's how I found the piece, via a reference at the end of Rob Reynold's piece on open source CMSes to 'OKI and OCW Defined.'

But what I want to know is why OKI have never posted an equally as straightforward explanation on the actual OKI site which is to my mind a model of unclarity. I recognize that there are some subtle concepts at work, but the number of times I've had to explain the difference between OKI as an architecture and the various systems (CHEF, Stellar, LON-CAPA, etc) that will be reference implementations, to people who should know better...sheesh! - SWL

9:24:55 AM    

Quote: "ContentPackage provides ZOPE with the ability to import IMS Content Packages and turn them into Zope objects (see http://www.imsglobal.org)."

Well this bodes well for the future. Has anyone heard from the eduzope folks lately - for a while it seemed like it was going to be vapourware, and then I checked back in a month or so ago and saw so release stuff, but in general it seems to have been quiet. Must check back in - SWL

- via [Serious Instructional Technology]

9:24:03 AM    

"A CAPTCHA is a program that can generate and grade tests that:

• Most humans can pass.
• Current computer programs can't pass. "

You've seen this before - think of systems you've used that ask you to access a web page and read text off that page that was somehow obscured, then feed it back to the system to prove that you (and not some automated agent) are in fact there. But did you know they had a name? - SWL

4:49:06 PM    

The latest issue of the U.K. publication The Journal of Interactive Media in Education is structured around expert commentary on the recent book, edited by JIME editor Alison Littlejohn, Reusing Online Resources: A Sustainable Approach to eLearning, (Ed.) Allison Littlejohn. Kogan Page, London. ISBN 0749439491.

- via [CARETblogging]

[EdTechPost]

I have been waiting for this article for months. This is another "study" item, the ideas thrown off by it will take a while to understand.

4:26:50 PM    

"The MetaMap is a pedagogical graphic which takes the form of a subway map. Its aim is to help the information science community to understand metadata standards, sets, and initiatives of interest in this area."

- via David Mattison's [TenThousandYearBlog] which I subscribe to, yet only found this by chance as his main RSS feed seems to be broken. Still, dig further into his categories as he is still blogging and finding great stuff.

[EdTechPost]

This map is amazing!

4:14:07 PM    

1. Introduction to the SCORM Content Model
2. What is Meta-data?
3. The SCORM Meta-data Information Model
4. Introduction to SCORM Content Packaging and
5. Introduction to SCORM Content Structure.

9:57:52 PM    

Ikarus: Teaching and Learning in Virtual Learning Environments

I stumbled across this free course very recently via a mailing list post, managed to sign up just in time and it is so far turning out to be a very interesting if a little bit too academic an experience (I'm studying the pedagogy stream so that probably explains it :-)

There are several hundred students participating from around the world. It appears to have started originally as an online law course! Unfortunately the pedagogy stream is presently concentrating on the science of instructional design (or is it?!) which is a bit of a dry argument, but later discussions look promising.

The course runs for 13 weeks. They use a special system called Moodle that is not a clone of any usual online courseware package.

2:38:03 PM    

[Learning Design, Virtual Learning Environments and Learning Activities]

The license to use the software is free. Support is not. Hosting (if you need it) is not free. Read the license carefully - do you think you could tailor this application to your needs? There are true open source LMS applications that are much better deals, imo.

Look at OpenACS for example. See the article published January 27, 2003 in the eLearning Developers' Journal about how Berklee School of Music used this to provide their own tailored LMS.

In my opinion, the first two questions that should be asked regarding LMS are: "How do we know we need an LMS?" and "How do we know we need to buy an LMS?" More often than you might expect, the answers to these questions are "No" and "We do NOT need to buy an LMS when we can build our own for free."

2:26:07 PM    

XPLANA http://www.xplana.com

Xplana is definately one of THE hot learning and teaching sites of the moment. Although it does a fair amount of LMS bashing it offers a fair amount of good stuff in return.

Well worth a look. 4.5 chocolate fish out of a possible 5.

[Learning Design, Virtual Learning Environments and Learning Activities]

The White Papers are better than the articles, imo. Their RSS feeds are a bit complicated, and need some study.

12:29:18 PM