Something Stephen said in a recent post has had me thinking quite a bit lately (and I’m too lazy to go find the post again now, doubtless someone will point it out in the comments). Stephen commented that he was “glad to see David [me] reaching out to the learning objects community.” It was such an interesting comment because I considered myself deeply entrenched in the learning objects community. ...
I’ve gotten “.LRN”:http://www.dotlrn.org/ (MIT’s open source LMS) up and running, and I must say that I’m impressed. Out of the box, it supports “a lot” of what a normal thinking person would want to do. Being open source (based on postgres and openacs), we can make it do whatever else we want it to. Ahhh, I love open source…
We’ve had a functional prototype of the first Educommons “educational content viewer” (strategy object) for a few months; now I’ve “improved the prototype interface”:http://educommons.org/content/electricity/ecv001.swf based on a logo and other design ideas by “Corrine Ellsworth”:http://www.mindfog.com/. The current prototype (designed to teach facts) functions like an automated flashcard system, presenting and quizzing on information in external content bundles. _This is the key_; the ECV contains no content at all, and could teach facts or lists in many different domains (reusability!). The next version of the prototype will integrate research-based rehearsal schedules to improve learning. And of course, if we ever get our NSF funding, we’ll build ECVs for other kinds of content - concepts, procedures, etc…
“An Introduction to Open Source Communities”:http://www.blueoxen.org/research/00007/ describes: * What are the demographics of those who participate in these communities? Why do they join, and how long do they stay? How do they interact with each other? * How do open source communities work? What are the patterns of collaboration within successful open source communities? Spotted at “elearnspace”:http://www.elearnspace.org/cgi-bin/elearnspaceblog/archives/000899.html
Could it happen? “Could the Media Lab really be in trouble?":http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.05/mitlab.html Lots of interesting information here, especially for a certain Instructional Technology department who just finished getting administrative permissions to run a Board of Regents approved learning technologies research lab… [Pointed out by “Seb”:http://radio.weblogs.com/0110772/2003/04/10.html#a885]
For some reason it seemed like a good idea to syndicate the publications section of my vita using RSS. It only updates every two weeks or so, but still I like the idea of being able to subscribe to a rather fluid book (continually accruing collection of writings) and receive notification when stuff is added. So for the three people on the planet who might even remotely care, here’s the “RSS feed of the publications section of my vita”:http://opencontent.org/rss.pl. I’ll follow up with a similar feed for presentations, now that I’ve found a “decent tool for synch’ed-audio-PPT-to-streaming-Flash-conversion”:http://wanadu.com/new/site/icreate_desk.html. Of course, this means I have to convert my Keynote files to PPT… And convince people that streaming PPT does not equal instruction.
Only a few weeks left to get applications put together for the NSF’s National STEM [Science Technology Engineering & Mathematics] Digital Library or “NSDL Program”:http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2003/nsf03530/nsf03530.htm. This is a great program which funds a variety of learning objects-related programs, like our “Instructional Architect”:http://ia.usu.edu/
So today I can finally be more specific. “The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation”:http://www.hewlett.org/ and the “Center for the Public Domain”:http://www.centerforthepublicdomain.org/ have given me the green light to hold an initial meeting to discuss the establishment of some infrastructure that will support the distributed, collaborative development of open educational content. ...
“Learning objects: difficulties and opportunities”:http://opencontent.org/docs/lo_do.pdf is an eight page piece cataloging what I believe to be some of the largest obstacles to the successful use of learning object and some of the biggest opportunities for educational innovation using learning objects.
“H2O”:http://h2o.law.harvard.edu/index.jsp is a new discussion system out of Harvard that provides scaffolding that overcomes many of the traditional complaints about threaded discussion activities in formal courses. Now if only they supported scaffolds for arbitrary discourse grammars like “FLE3”:http://fle3.uiah.fi/ we could get somewhere…