Supporting Student Autonomy Online

I’m linking to a paper (half-paper, really, since I’ll be leading a discussion using it as springboard) including notes I will use to lead a discussion at the “Supporting student autonomy: students’ creation and reuse of learning objects” event at the University of Strathclyde later today. The focus is on social interaction around open content, from self-organizing and game theoretic perspectives. Thoughts welcome and appreciated.

June 18, 2004 · David Wiley

JIME on the Semantic Web in Ed

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!

May 25, 2004 · David Wiley

Meeting David Carter-Tod

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

May 22, 2004 · David Wiley

MT Affronts, Offends, Loses

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. ...

May 14, 2004 · David Wiley

OLS Software Updated

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 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.

May 14, 2004 · David Wiley

IMS/SSP Comes So Close...

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. ...

May 7, 2004 · David Wiley

IMS/SSP Comes So Close…

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. ...

May 7, 2004 · David Wiley

OLS -- it works!

So today I was stumbling around the OLS site and found the following exchange. This is it… this is what Open Learning Support is about. autounfocus readers may find this boring or even lame, but I’m just so excited to see an instance of OLS facilitating the kind of interaction we intended that I just had to make a post…

April 29, 2004 · David Wiley

OLS — it works!

So today I was stumbling around the OLS site and found the following exchange. This is it… this is what Open Learning Support is about. autounfocus readers may find this boring or even lame, but I’m just so excited to see an instance of OLS facilitating the kind of interaction we intended that I just had to make a post…

April 29, 2004 · David Wiley

OLS Pilot Goes Live

Our Open Learning Support pilot project went live this morning. There are now seven MIT OpenCourseWare “courses” pointing to OLS communities: Linear Algebra Introduction to Computers and Engineering Problem Solving Introduction to Algorithms Introduction to Optimization Electricity and Magnetism Intermediate Applied Microeconomics Real Estate Finance and Investment You can also visit the OLS homepage at http://ols.usu.edu/. We’re really excited for today to finally come, and we’re hoping that OLS will have a huge impact on learning around the globe. ...

April 20, 2004 · David Wiley