So, with all the talk about the death of learning objects and what not, I got to thinking about how hard it really has to be to collect and contextualize resources. There are two approaches two contextualizing a resource - those being internal and external approaches. You can open the resource and tinker with it, or you can try to wrap something around the resource that provides some context with regard to how the learner should use it, how they should think about it, how it connects to other resources (in *this* instance of use), etc. This is the crux of the O2 approach to using learning objects I outlined while back:
O2 is a project-based model of using learning objects which focuses the learning experience on a sequence of increasingly complex projects, following Wileys Learning Object Design and Sequencing (LODAS) approach (Wiley, 2000).... Learning objects are selected and made available to students by course designers in order to support the accomplishment of project tasks and goals. This use of learning objects follows the Octopus Methodoutlined in our previous work, in which a project or problem is placed at the center of the learning experience and learning objects "hang off of the project" like legs off an octopus. O2 is also strongly influenced by van Merrienboer's Four Component Instructional Design (van Merrienboer, 2000) model and Hannafin and Hill's work in Resource-based Learning Environments or RBLEs (Hannafin and Hill, 2002).In other words, setting up a problem for students to solve and using the work setting as the context in which students experience the educational resources is one possible way to allow wholesale reuse of resources with context being wrapped around the outside and no internal tinkering.
So... I love delicious and find the little bookmarklet about as easy to use as anything. Now. Imagine you're a teacher searching the web for some resources to use in a unit on volcanoes, or dinosaurs, or the Civil War or something. When you find a page, what do you do with it? Bookmark it in your browser? Here's an idea. First, tag it on delicious with a special tag representing the unit or project you're designing. Second, go around and find the resources you need for your learners to accomplish whatever project you're outlining for them. Third, well, you're done if you have something like the interface below.
Stephen has talked for a long time about using RSS to distribute learning objects from repositories... This is something like that. Except that the whole web is the repository, the metadata lives in delicious, and the teacher uses an arranging / contextualizing interface like the one below to finalize things.
So here's the kind of interface we might expect a non-technical user (such as a teacher) to use, or perhaps one even simpler. The user simply clicks on the assignment/project/problem name or description and edits these in place. Then they put enter their delicious username and the special tag they were using on delicious, and all the resources then appear inline below the description. These can then be dragged around and reordered, etc. Save it and you're done. And there's your resource reuse and contextualization interface.
Note that the demo can be pretty slow depending on how quickly delicious is responding at the moment.
For today's project I'd like you to grab a copy of wordpress 2.0 and get it installed on the server of your choice. If the resources below don't prove sufficient let me know and I'll try to provide you with some extra support.
This page doesn't save anything at all, but of course it could.
When we have rendering mechanisms like this, tagging becomes authoring. And it's done by you, but of course you could use others' tags to collect resources. And of course you could use a service other than delicious, etc., etc. My point is that tagging can be authoring, and can make reusing and recontextualizing resources quite a bit simpler than they are today. And with the edit in place functionality, you can imagine how cool it would be if people would share the things they build with each other...
If people think this is something I'll build a nicer version that actually stores things and let people start playing with it.
The code for this demo was taken from this ajax tutorial, this one, and script.aculo.us. The cgi is written in python. It took a few hours to hack together. I love web 2.0.