The JIME special issue on the Semantic Web in Education is out. Congrats to Terry and Denise on what appears to be one of the more useful contributions to the instructional technology conversation in recent memory!
Monthly Archive for May, 2004
So I finally got out to meet David Carter-Tod. Absolutely smashing time. Exceedingly excellent guy. Very excited to hook up with him again sometime soon. Here are some pictures from the VCCS outing to Maymont to substantiate my claim that we actually met:
Me and DCT
Bridge in Maymont’s Japanese Garden
Well, for all of their existence the reusability.org blogs have been powered by Movable Type. But not for much longer, I guess. This morning 6A announced their new licensing plans. The free version of MT is now severely crippled: “No more than one author and three weblogs.” This certainly puts reusability.org over the limit, with 12 authors hosting 15 blogs here.
Continue reading ‘MT Affronts, Offends, Loses’
The OSLO Engineering Team today released a new version of the OLS software. The update includes a number of new features based on user feedback and requests:
- Link to MIT/OCW Materials: Forums now contain a convienent link to the MIT/OCW materials, making it easier for you to reference the materials while participating in the forums.
- RSS Feeds: RSS feeds are now available for OLS News and Forums to help keep people up to date on the latest postings. See the FAQ for more details about this new option.
- OLS User Highlight: Particular OLS user profiles can now be highlighted on the front page (Thanks Jamie)
- Source Code in the Body of Posts: It is now possible to include programming / source code in the body of a post and preserve the layout by using an HTML <pre> tag.
- Total Number of Posts: Total number of posts are now reported on the right of every page to give a better indication of how the community is growing.
- Vote For Course List Update: The course list in the Vote for new courses section has been updated to include the latest releases by MIT’s OCW team.
- MIT Course Numbers: Course numbers have been added to the title of forums, making it easier to identify particular courses.
A few years ago I gave a conference presentation about adding collaboration functionality to SCORM. Not many people seemed particularly interested in human-to-human interaction in SCORM (or IMS, etc.), and so I presented a model where such functionality might be “hacked in” via a common roll-up area where arbitrary data (“comments”, “questions”, “answers”, “documents”, etc.) could be stored on a per SCO basis (almost exactly the way our OLS software works with MIT/OCW or Connexions content). Several of “the right people” heard that talk, and I’ve had high hopes since that someone with more time would ammend SCORM to allow social interaction.
So I was extremely happy to hear about the new IMS Shareable State Persistence work. But imagine my disaapointment when I read from the SCORM Application Profile:
Data bucket access is defined to be per learner, with no defined interoperable facility for multi-learner buckets. The LMS must ensure that SCOs requesting access to data buckets only gain access to the appropriate learner’s data bucket.
And then from the Best Practice Document:
This is runtime storage of data not data for reporting or long-term storage.
If this were long-term storage, at least we could hack it to support learner annotations or something that starts to feel social (dialogue with one’s self?). When will we get social interaction in IMS/SCORM? It’s not that hard; or at least it seems obvious to me. Anyone interested in collaborating to create a draft specification?
