So, getting the formal CFP together has taken some time, but here is the official CFP for the TICL issue on Learning Objects and Pedagogy that Marie Duncan and I will be editing. Please submit something!
Tag Archive for 'learning objects'
There’s something about the notion of reuse that seems to confuse people. They think “reusable resources” like those in an OpenCourseWare collection should “just work out of the box.” We frequently hear about “design tips” for making learning objects more reusable; what we almost never hear about is “design tips” for how to reuse existing materials.
It seems to me that the all-time best example of reuse, the one that all instructional designers should study as a case, and consequently the one about which I am writing a longer piece now, is The Magnificent Seven. This film was, of course, a remake of Kurosawa’s Shichinin no Samurai. Perhaps we (instructional designers) should all be talking about “remaking” learning objects, and not “reusing” them, in order to better communicate the complicated process involved in taking a cultural artifact developed by another person for another audience and trying to make it speak meaningfully to our audience.
As a mental exercise, complete the following statement. Shichinin no Samurai is to The Magnificent Seven as MIT OCW Linear Algebra, Fall 2002 is to _______________.
If you answered either Universia’s Spanish translation or CORE’s Chinese translation, I think that misses the point. Adding English subtitles to Shichinin no Samurai made it slightly more accesible to non-Japanese speakers, but it didn’t make it speak to Americans like The Magnificent Seven did.
It’s surprising how little we instructional designers know about this kind of reuse, what we might call “shichinin reuse” or the art of the remake. It will be very surprising if we don’t figure it out and are still employed in a few years.
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!
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?
Without knowing it was going to happen, I met Maish from “Elearningpost”:http://www.elearningpost.com/ at the Learning Objects conference in Singapore yesterday. A very welcome surprise… Who would we hang out with when we travel around the globe if it weren’t for people from the blogosphere?
Maish wrote a “complimentary summary of my sessions”:http://www.elearningpost.com/archives/2003_11.asp#002220 yesterday for those who missed last week’s thread on the topic.
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