David Davies: Edtech

MedBiquitous Annual Conference in Baltimore

Mon, 04 Apr 2005 22:03:12 GMT

If you're heading out to Baltimore for the MedBiquitous Annual Conference let me know. I'm heading off there first thing. I'm giving two presentations, one in the Virtual Patients session and a second in the Content Collaboratives session.

The problem with metadata

Thu, 10 Feb 2005 10:35:18 GMT

The problem with metadata is that it needs a technical FAQ to understand. The new CETIS metadata FAQ wiki is a great resource, extremely comprehensive and undoubtedly much needed, but by whom? Who are the people that need to know about metadata? I think there are three groups - systems vendors and tool developers, people adding metadata, and people consuming metadata.

One would hope that systems vendors and tool developers are already on top of the latest specifications. People adding metadata certainly need to know what to add in which fields but there the big issues are with controlled vocabularies i.e ensuring that what they add as individuals is consistent with what someone else is adding. What I call the 'you say to-may-to I say to-mah-to' effect. Lastly there's the consumers. Generally I guess most of these people don't care about metadata, they just want to find things they're looking for.

So what does this latest FAQ tell us about the present state of metadata in educational technology? One thing it says to me is that there is maybe more effort being expended on the technicalities of metadata and systems to create/use metadata than there is to understand how metadata enables learning and the creation of e-learning materials. The second thing it says to me is that metadata is still difficult.

Could it be that we're thinking about metadata in the wrong way, or maybe at least in way too much abstract detail? There's a school of thought that suggests that metadata should be largely invisible, not only to the consumer but also to the creator of materials. The present crop of e-learning systems can gather quite a bit of metadata automatically without the user having to do anything. I suspect there's lots more work still to be done to develop systems able to extract every ounce of metadata automatically before the user ever has to see a metadata entry form.

So I welcome the CETIS metadata FAQ but I won't be inviting any of my teaching colleagues to look at it, not unless I want them to be further convinced that e-learning is something only for technical experts.

Content rather than container

Tue, 04 Jan 2005 12:43:42 GMT

Rob Reynolds has a good new year's resolution "My suggestion for all educators in 2005 is that we concentrate on content first. I propose that we actually pretend there is no technology available to us other than simple sticks with which we can draw in the dirt."

Edu-nap-torrent

Sun, 02 Jan 2005 22:57:09 GMT

When does an activity become educational? Is there something you have to do to turn an activity into one with educational value? I'm not sure. If education is the same as learning then I feel as though I'm learning all the time, although I never usually think of it like that. But it wasn't always like that. As a kid I was more interested in learning about things outside of school than within. Learning about things in school was boring but the things that interested me outside, well, that wasn't learing, that was fun. The educational context of school wasn't that attractive for me. With kids, often the best way to kill their interest in something is to say it's educational. I have a standing joke with my son (now 13) that whenever anything comes on TV for instance that's vaguely educational one of us quips, 'I'm learning!'. Something from the Simpsons I think. So much for the Simpsons generation. Thankfully my son is a lot cleverer, more learned (another Simpsons joke) that I was at his age.

There's a bit of a trend to look for the educational value, the educational angle almost, in new Internet technologies. A while back there was Napster, then Gnutella, and soon after folk started wondering if P2P technology could be used to share educational materials. Take LOMster or Edutella for example. More recently Podcasting, nothing more than sharing audio (mix tape anyone?) with the extra step of loading it onto your iPod, has gone all educational. Now BitTorrent gets the educational treatment. Of course there's nothing wrong with looking for the educational angle in these things and I dare say some innovative applications will come from such speculation. I just have a suspicion that by trying to find an angle in something that in itself has already successfully formed around a shared common goal, e.g the exchange of music and other files, then you'll lose the essence of success.

An example. I was at an educational technology meeting in the summer and attended a presentation on the outcome of a trial to connect distance learners via instant messaging. How could that not be successful? Everyone uses instant messaging, right? It's the ideal way of keeping in touch, especially in these days of spam-ridden email. Well you'd think so but the trial wasn't a success and do you know why? They could get enough active participation amongst the learners. A survey discovered that the subjects of the trial didn't find using instant messaging outside of their usual cause to do so (chatting with friends and family) was something they could sustain. The novelty wore off quickly. Outside of its usual context instant messaging wasn't as valuable. There will be exceptions to this naturally but as a generalization, context is everything. Change the context and you change the meaning.

Google Scholar: Information for all

Fri, 19 Nov 2004 16:38:35 GMT

"Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web."

This is a really important and exciting development from Google. And it works! Here's something of mine from the archives. There are links from articles in Google Scholar search results to electronic copies in online journals. In terms of access to the published literature, this is potentially a great service to the public, which is important because so much of basic research is publicly funded. I say potentially a great service becuase not everyone will have access to all of the electronic journals and sources that Google searches. For accessible content use the Public Library of Science, a more established service committed to making the scientific and medical literature freely available to the public.

In related news, the UK National Health Service announced the lauch of the National Library for Health.

"The National Library for Health is the next natural step in the development of NHS library services. By developing an integrated and federated service, the National Library for Health will enable us to meet the various challenges of delivering knowledge and information services in the 21st Century."

The Programme Director is Ben Toth who maintains a weblog on digital library topics.

It's official - social interaction enhances learning

Mon, 11 Oct 2004 22:23:29 GMT

Sometimes basic research is needed to confirm what you thought you knew all along. The BBC is running an interesting report from the Institute of Education in London confirming a few suspicions about the importance of social interaction in learning, particulalry interaction with a teacher. Although the report focuses on school kids I think it's likely there's something in there for education at all levels and to be honest the overall message will be a familiar one to many.

"A focus on content delivery, tests and targets in secondary schools interferes with learning, young people say. Research involving children in the second year of secondary school suggests they regard the social aspect of school as highly valuable. Researcher Eileen Carnell, from the Institute of Education in London, said this could be used better to develop collaborative learning."

The BBC's write-up of the report is largely a good read but I'm not entirely convinced by the closing statement.

"The new focus on 'assessment for learning' could help - but only if the emphasis is on learning and not 'performing', test results or levels of ability."

The assessment for learning referred to is likely this strategy for 3-14 year olds from the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA). Assessment and in particular formative assessment is important but I've never been in a meeting where someone's complained that learners today are underassessed.

A weblog for every student

Thu, 16 Sep 2004 20:53:55 GMT

The University of Warwick is giving every new student the opportunity to start a weblog hosted on their home-grown BlogBuilder system. It'll be interesting to see what the take-up is once the new university term gets underway. I spoke to Steven Carpenter at the ALT-C conference and he told me that Warwick will probably let the system run for 12 months then they'll tie it in more closely with their PDP e-portfolios. Perhaps Warwick might even decide that the student weblogs will actually be the e-portfolios, a bit like they're doing over at the Maricopa Community Colleges.

Revisiting a dialogue on reusable content

Thu, 16 Sep 2004 20:17:35 GMT

The content conundrum is a short piece I wrote back in Feb '03 on reusing content. After re-reading it the issues seem as familiar today as they were back then with not a lot of progress being made over the last 18 months. We do however have a couple of learning design tools now. RELOAD, the popular content packaging tool is about to get a learning design editor and player based upon the CopperCore engine, and while LAMS is a learning design tool, it doesn't actually support the IMS learning design spec.

The problem with definitions - or how I learned to get over learning objects and start making good e-learning instead

Tue, 14 Sep 2004 00:02:37 GMT

At the risk of labouring yesterday's piece about learning objects, I did just want to write another paragraph or two to address something that has been raised in some feedback I've had. Is there any specific reason that you can think of why there needs to be definition of learning objects (LOs) that's as agreeable to an educational technologist as to an educationalist (assuming we agree what distinguishes those different kinds of people)? I suggested yesterday that perhaps this is why there's so much discord when talking about LOs. Firstly because you can't have more than one definition or interpretation for the same thing as that's just asking for problems in an area that requires some degree of precision. How can you write a piece of software to handle data that few people can even agree upon? And second, who says there even needs to be an educationalist's definition of LOs? Perhaps LOs are only meaningful to educational technologists or the people who write the software to manipulate these data. The end user, the teacher let's say, doesn't really care what you call the parts, they just want to achieve a specific end point, creating a PowerPoint file or creating some e-learning for example. Learning the names of all the parts often just gets in the way. That's why users don't read software manuals, because good software should be unambiguous and as intuitive as possible. Who cares if you guys can't agree what a learning object is, I just want to create something I can use to teach my students. I've heard words to that effect many times when talking to colleagues. It's a bit like, well at a stretch any way, whether or not to use HTML tables or CSS to structure your web pages. How many people care about that? Sure, they care about the output, how well a web page works in different web browsers, but probably for most people they just trust that the folk who make the web page editing software will sort that out and just give the user the best solution. Same with LOs in my opinion. So now when I'm in a meeting with my fellow academics and learning objects crop up in the discussion, I just say they're bits of reusable e-learning material and everyone gets it and we quickly move on to talking about the really interesting stuff. Like how to create really effective e-learning materials. Enough about learning objects for the time being. So now, who's going to add metadata to my learning objects... ;)

If learning objects didn't exist you'd have to invent them

Sun, 12 Sep 2004 17:58:00 GMT

I still find it puzzling why some people are still hung up about learning objects. Maybe it's the name, maybe it's the technology, regardless of what the difficulties are the term itself often gets in the way of discussing the applications that use these pieces of reusable e-learning content. I was at a meeting this last week where some smart people were talking about innovative applications in e-learning that reuse content. I thought we were getting into a good discussion when someone pipes up 'so what is a learning object anyway?'. The whole session effectively broke down as people twisted and turned while trying to come up with a consensus term of what these elusive quantum particles of e-learning really are. What a waste of energy, particularly given that up until that people everyone seemed to know what we were talking about. Here's how I tend to think about learning objects. Learning objects are the data contained within content packages. Pretty specific but it works for me and here's why. When I talk about e-learning materials I think of three classes of data (see figure). Raw assets often though not always exist outside of a specific learning context, that is to say whatever context they do have is usually inherent in the asset. For example in an x-ray of the chest the context is the data contained within the x-ray itself, the pixels of the x-ray. It is the act of adding context by creating metadata (context for how the asset relates other data including a learning outcome for instance), and assembling raw assets into larger aggregations (e.g. adding a text narrative to an x-ray) that creates a meaningful piece of learning material. Ironically in this scheme it's raw assets that are the building blocks of learning materials rather than in previous analogies where learning objects have been likened to, for example, Lego bricks. Raw assets are given a learning context and assembled, or aggregated to use the common parlance into learning objects, the stuff learners use to learn from. Learning objects get moved around between learning environments as content packages. At one extreme, most people are fairly comfortable with what constitutes a raw asset (itself an assembly of data, pixels in an image for example but that's taking too reductionist an approach) and at the other extreme content packages are well understood, not least because there are specifications that describe what they are and how they're structured. Between these two lie the learning objects. Sometimes it's difficult to conceptualize learning objects if you've never worked with tools that make it completely unambiguous what they are. There are tools available that understand this simple metaphor and function well to create one class of data from the other (for recommendations of what I think are the best tools get in touch). Perhaps my particular way of looking at this problem will be more familiar to people who are used to learning content management systems and are therefore comfortable with the progression of complexity from raw asset to content package. Others may find this approach too simplistic and instead prefer to think of the increase in contextualization from raw asset to context package. Either way it amounts to just about the same thing. But perhaps there's one of the underlying problems with the way people think about learning objects. There is sometimes an uneasy overlap in ways in which educationalists looks at e-learning materials and the way education technologists do. What works as an analogy for some doesn't always work for others. But of this there can be no doubt, the materials or 'objects' that sit midway within the opposing continua of organisation and reusability are the learning objects. If we don't like the name then let's find another, but the space remains.

alt-i-lab 2004:Advancing Learning Technology Interoperability

Tue, 20 Jul 2004 15:53:28 GMT

Look out California, here I come! The 2nd annual IMS learning technology meeting hits the San Francisco Bay today and for the rest of the week. The venue is Redwood City, the Sofitel Hotel, so if you're in the area, stop by and say hi! I see from the program that David Wiley and Raymond Yee are here, two learning technologists I greatly admire. If you guys are reading this, I'm looking out for you! After the conference I'm heading off to San Diego for the weekend to say hi to friend and fellow weblogger, Jack Mancilla. Jack, I've got my shades and hat so I'm ready for the desert. If anyone else is around the area this week drop me a line (link at right) and we'll see if we can meet up. PS As an extra bonus I met up with Scott Leslie too. This is real treat to meet such great webloggers, and it's not even a weblogging conference. Pity Alan's just a bit too far away given the time I have. Next time!

Fishing for eLearning Standards in Sestri Levante

Wed, 07 Jul 2004 08:37:27 GMT

At the beginning of May around 500 delegates gathered in Sestri Levante, a quiet fishing town on the beautiful Portofino coast, Northern Italy for the 2004 eLearning Results meeting. Now in its second year, the conference organized by Giunti Interactive Labs brings together industry leaders, academics and government agencies to share case studies and discuss good practice in the field of e-learning standards. The meeting offered a refreshing change from the usual navel-gazing often associated with e-learning standards meetings and instead focussed on success stories of standards adoption. The standards bodies themselves were well represented with delegates from IMS, SCORM, AICC and the UK’s own CETIS in attendance.

Streaming video of all the presentations including the medical education strand are on the web. I wrote a review of the event for the 01.5 edition of the LTSN-01 newsletter, be sure to check it out along with all the other goodies in the newsletter. A 1.2Mb PDF version of the newsletter is here, a higher res version is on the LTSN-01 web site.

NMC 2004: Small Pieces Loosely Joined

Tue, 15 Jun 2004 23:36:47 GMT

Note to self, must get around to participating on the Wiki site that's sprung up around one of the presentations at the New Media Consortium Summer Conference 2004. Alan Levine, D'Arcy Norman and Brian Lamb are inviting people to align themselves with one of the camps in a centralist vs decentralist debate about the use of software tools in web-based collaboration but ultimately about (I guess) e-learning. As I don't subscribe to either extreme view I appear to be forced to join the FenceSitter camp, though that's an unfortunate title as I don't think I'm a fence sitter in the sense of being undecided. However in the spirit of Alan, D'Arcy and Brian's invitation these camps aren't meant to be too serious, they're just there to provoke debate. There's a lot to read on the related Wikis already so I'm just working through that before leaving my own comments. I expect the comments I'll likely make will draw some distinction between informal web-based collaboration for whatever purpose (e.g a community of patient self-help groups) that can be conducted in a completely decentralized manner and formalised education where some degree of centralization is essential to provide continuity and context in a student's experience, not least from the point of view of accreditation (e.g. formal medical education & training).

eLearning Results

Wed, 05 May 2004 10:35:22 GMT

The beautiful town of Sestri Levante is host to the 2004 eLearning Results meeting. If you're going let me know. The full program is available. I have a couple of slots and will be speaking about IVIMEDS and hopefully showing off some cool learning objects workflow. Lots of industry leaders will be there as well as a contingent from the e-learning standards groups. The town is lovely and the venue is on the shore of small bay, the Bay of Silence. We've arranged dinner in a hotel that overlooks the whole town, from where I took this accompanying photo last week. Hopefully see you there, ciao!

Learning object processors

Mon, 15 Mar 2004 22:17:26 GMT

Carrying on from comments the other day about what metadata is useful, I'd like to make a distinction between metadata that I as a human would find useful (title, description, URL etc.) and what metadata a computer would find useful, particularly a computer running an intelligent tutoring system. To make this distinction I'll introduce what I call learning object processors. A learning object processor is an intelligent tutoring system or ITS (for want of a better term) that knows how to assemble learning objects into something useful for an individual or group of individuals. The ITS uses assembly rules to select learning objects and put them together, or aggregate them in the parlance du jour, pretty much like a software compiler uses rules to assemble source code into an executable computer program.

An example of an ITS would be a software program that can assemble learning objects to present a simulated medical patient case. A student is presented with a scenario representing a real-life patient with, oh, let's say diabetes. The simulated patient case includes a video of the diabetic patient talking about his/her illness, background reading about the subject, various clinical investigations being undertaken along with a presentation of their result, you get the idea. The student uses this simulated patient case to learn about real-life patients with diabetes, or just about any other medical condition you could think of. Now imagine a situation where for whatever reason, say, cultural convention, we can't show a simulated patient case of a woman, so we must present a case with a male patient. We could manually rebuild the case using data from a male patient, or we could use an ITS that knows how to swap in and out the components of individual cases. This ITS could automatically select replacement data for our student and reassemble a new case to meet the cultural requirements. The use of different languages would be another example where alternate content would be required.

In order for an ITS to perform its data swapping exercise in anything like an automated way, it'd need to know how to find, select, and incorporate new learning objects into the patient case. It would use metadata to perform this magic. These metadata would describe objects in a repository that have the required 'fit' and can act as alternative information blocks in our hypothetical simulated patient case. The metadata required to describe a component such as I have described are very different from the metadata that I as a human would find useful when searching for information about diabetes in our example. It may be stretching the computer program analogy too far but I'd say that the metadata used to define the hot-swappable learning object components would be more like the sub-routines in a program's source code listing. Each sub-routine has its input and output parameters, and when plugged into a larger program in the correct way performs an essential function. Well-written sub-routines from other people could just as easily substitute from my sub-routines, such that with an appropriately diverse bank of sub-routines I wouldn't need to write very much of my own code at all, I could just assemble code provided by others, topped off with a bit of linking code to make it work the way I liked.

There's only one problem with this metadata scenario, the kinds of metadata present in the LOM are not the kinds of metadata we'd need to make this ITS work, and this simple ITS described here is only one of thousands of potential ITS', each fulfilling specific high-level learning needs. So what we really need are working groups within subject domains scoping out how they want their intelligent tutoring systems to function, and to start agreeing on ways of describing learning objects to allow them to fit together in meaningful ways. Metadata can mean different things to man and machine, and one size will not fit all. We have lots of metadata we could be using, let's try to agree on the metadata we should be using and start using e-learning in interesting ways.

What everyone should know about e-learning

Fri, 12 Mar 2004 09:30:19 GMT

What would be on your list of things that every new teacher should know about e-learning? Ideas are for an upcomming published piece so a name check for useful suggestions.

Metadata I find useful

Thu, 04 Mar 2004 23:45:49 GMT

Alan wants to know why anyone would want to use metadata. Well, speaking as someone who thinks the LOM is a solution to a problem nobody really has, I'm not the best person to reply. However, I do find some metadata to be very useful. I think for many applications you can get away with knowing 5 things about a resource:

Title. Because everything has a name, right? That's what we do, we label things.
Description. Because I want to know a little bit about your resource, especially if your resource is one of many in a list of search results.
URL. I need to be able to find your resource. Perhaps this should be 'location' rather than just URL because some of us still use stuff that's not on the web (really, some still do).
Controlled vocabulary keyword(s). I need to know that when I say potato, you say potato, and when you say tomato, I say tomato.
Copyright statement. Because very often you don't own the thing you created, your institution does, and I'll need to know who I have to ask to use your resource. And when you do own your resource, I need to know that, too.

I think you can do a lot with these data. "Like what?" Alan might ask. Well, for me, there's really no point using any metadata unless you intend to share your resources. If you've got 3 resources to share, just give them to me and be done with it. If you've got more, these basic pieces of data that describe your resource will probably help me find them when I search a database. A controlled vocabulary keyword would help me find you resource more effectively (especially if you give your resources non-descriptive titles and don't use the same words that I'd use to describe the resource). The copyright statement is just good manners as it makes it easier for me to work out who I need to ask to use your resource.

The first 3 fields in my list or 5 fit nicely with RSS and are the kinds of metadata that are so common we'd hardly even think of them as metadata. The copyright statement is something that's also pretty straightforward, or at least it's something that we understand to be important. Although many people don't understand who owns the resource. The only difficult think is keyword(s). These can be optional of course though searches are much more accurate when they're used. And using a controlled vocabulary to assign your keywords saves so much confusion. Pity there are so few agreed controlled vocabularies.

As for Alan's other question about why use OAI, I can't think of a convincing answer. Although I do know that one of the goals of using OAI is the ability to exchange metadata records rather than the object itself, which makes sense from a bandwidth point of view. I think an RSS aggregator approach would be just as effective, not least because RSS aggregators are easy to use and readily available. If you used RSS 1.0 then you could even use Dublin Core module to include the copyright and keyword fields in your feed.

UKeU gets restructured

Fri, 27 Feb 2004 17:34:16 GMT

The UKeU is being 'restructured'. After a fairly massive investment of cash (£62m) the UK's flagship higher education e-learning venture had enrolled a total of 900 students. Not surprisingly the UKeU has found stiff competition from conventional universities who are also offering their own e-learning courses. Well what did they expect? The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) is now intending to refocus on "the development of e-learning in universities and colleges". UKeU reportedly spent £10 million on developing their learning environment.

JORUM national repository report now available

Sat, 21 Feb 2004 21:35:42 GMT

The JISC is hoping to provide a learning materials repository service to all FE and HE institutions in the UK. As part of this the JORUM+ project has been funded to:

investigate the user requirements for the national repository service by December 2003
support a JISC research programme called Exchange for Learning (X4L) into re-use of learning materials until July 2005

The JORUM Scoping and Technical Appraisal Study has now been published and includes recommendations for how this national repository should work. The lengthy report makes interesting reading and while the recommendations are too numerous to mention here, there's good news for RSS fans: "Implementation of RSS to allow alerts to be sent to relevant applications such as the L&T Portal whenever metadata is changed, so that the record can be automatically harvested"

The report mentions Scott Leslie's RSS-enabled repositories web page and so mentions the RSS learning object syndication offered by yours truly. With a bit of luck and a little bit of vision RSS may figure in the JISC/JORUM repository.

The initial stages of the JORUM+ project used the IntraLibrary product from Intrallect and Xtensis from XOR eLearning Ltd. As far as I know it's not yet been announced which vendor(s) will be involved in the next phase of repository development.

Metadata, what metadata?

Tue, 17 Feb 2004 19:59:16 GMT

Should a well implemented metadata system be transparent to the user? An obvious question perhaps but a valid one nonetheless and depending upon the context the answer might not be as obvious as you may think.

Metadata is all around us yet how aware are we of its existence? An example. Most of us use Google at some point to search for pages on the web. Google uses metadata, quite a bit of it in fact yet most is not obviously apparent to us, at least not as metadata per se. There's a web page's title, metadata of a kind though you might rightly argue that's part of the page's data rather than metadata. More obvious metadata for any given page might include the date the page was last modified (available via the web server's page cache), the language, mime type (not all objects on the web are HTML web pages; think pictures, video, PDFs, etc.) and a few other bits of information. A web page's URL is also metadata, and that's quite an important part of searching Google, not least because Google creates its own metadata about a web page used to compile its PageRank. All these metadata are used to construct your search results when you search Google. Thankfully you can be blissfully unaware of their existence and still get pretty authoritative results. However, awareness of Google metadata can help you perform more focused searches but generally most of us are happy with the results we get when using the familiar single, simple search box.

Then there's learning object metadata. How aware are we of that, and indeed my main question, how aware should we be? The current learning object metadata specification from the IEEE weighs in around 69 metadata fields, that is 69 boxes in which something could be entered to describe a learning object. Let me say at the outset that you don't have to enter anything into any of these fields, they're not mandatory. But of course if a metadata system is to be of any use you'd have to use at least some of these fields otherwise what's the point. And it's a given that some metadata is essential for resource discovery and reuse, and therefore standardization in what those metadata are is essential. However, depending upon what your learning object is, some IEEE LOM fields will be more useful than others at describing your object. Some groups are working hard at helping to create a consensus as to what are the core fields that a learning object could use to aid resource discovery and reuse.

There's clearly an overhead associated with creating metadata as any data that can't be automatically gleaned from the object itself or created by the system a la Google has to be added by someone. Consequently there must also be a trade-off between the utility of metadata vs the cost of adding metadata. At one extreme no metadata is probably not going to be very helpful (and actually quite difficult to achieve given the inherent metadata surrounding any object placed on the web - see above). At the other extreme a comprehensively completed IEEE LOM record is likely to be too costly for many objects. As a result of this trade-off one of the hot topics in e-learning is trying to identify where the balance is, recognising that it's probably going to be different depending upon the context.

So, back to the question. Should a well implemented metadata system be transparent to the user? And a supplementary question, how can we as learners use this metadata to enhance our learning experience beyond that which was possible before the creation of the IEEE LOM?

Are there any really effective implementations of metadata e.g. the IEEE LOM in learning management systems that are transparent to the user yet sufficiently useful to justify the effort that went into creating them? And the $64,000 question, are these implementations used, and if so how, by whom and to what effect?

Updated RSS feeds from learning object repositories

Sun, 01 Feb 2004 10:58:56 GMT

Scott Leslie has updated his list of learning object repositories that offer RSS feeds of their items. Nice work Scott. I particularly liked the collapsible headlines (once I figured out they were there: click the minus sign in the box at the right of the headlines in blue).

RSSWinterfest

Tue, 20 Jan 2004 22:51:49 GMT

Although I expect RSSWinterfest won't mention learning object syndication using RSS or the importance of syndicating e-learning content in general, I will still be a virtual attendee in the hope of being pleasantly surprised.

Semantic Web Designer Post

Mon, 15 Dec 2003 09:22:06 GMT

Here's your chance to make a difference and help create the semantic web. This new post is based in the UK at QinetiQ, the largest science and technology research enterprise in Europe. Don't hang around though as the closing date is 10 January 2004. The job advert states "... the initial focus is on military applications ..." so you'll get to work on black ops too but at least you'll have access to a large budget!

Pitch in

Tue, 09 Dec 2003 23:29:19 GMT

I can't bear the thought of Alan not having anything to read via RSS so here's a quick post. It's nice to be missed, though I don't feel as though I've been away. As Seb has written, sometimes other things just take over your life. I've also been keeping my typing fingers busy with other projects.

While I was away doing other things David Wiley and team have set up their pitch with a new peer reviewed publishing project. Bravo! It's early days although a few papers have already been published. I'm not yet sure how Pitch will be different from other collaborative systems though with the pedigree of the first three authors I expect we'll see some great things. I anticipate that many of the hidden strengths of the project are in the work flow. Anyone who's had a paper peer reviewed and published in the 'established' literature will know that even rapid communications can take weeks to appear (though some are very rapid I accept) and a full paper can take months. Still, once your paper is accepted though it must be good, right? Well (stop the presses), no, peer review is no guarantee of truth, quality, and non-biased writing. That's reflected by the fact that we have tens of thousands of peer reviewed academic journals, often many tens or even hundreds of individual journals in the same small field. There are different degrees of 'truth', 'accuracy' and 'non-bias', at least there are in the published literature although in terms of absolutes there aren't of course (read this for a readable piece on understanding science and the science-based literature). Community interest and custom-and-practice can inadvertently perpetuate bias despite the most rigorous peer review.

But I digress (this is a topic that tried writing about before but have yet to get it right), back to the work flow advantages and community commentary offered by journals like Pitch. With regards the lengthy traditional peer review process, of course it doesn't have to be this way. It's as much about peer consent as it is about peer review. By that I mean the academic community accepts that in order to publish in the literature you have to (as a generalisation) submit your paper to a journal's editorial team, submit to their peer review process, assign your copyright to the journal's publisher, and then finally pay to buy back a copy of your (hopefully) published paper. Well times they are a changin. Increasingly authors are retaining their own copyright, are contributing to electronic journals (though not all offer the apparent cost and time saving that the electronic medium would seem to offer thanks to the strangle-hold of the existing publishing industry) and through entrepreneurial publishing ventures are getting their papers for free. Communities are springing up around some online journals where commentary extends debate.

So, let us welcome Pitch and let's all pitch in and make it a success because it'll likely only ever be as successful as you make it.

A rose by any other name

Mon, 15 Sep 2003 23:23:32 GMT

As a postscript to my post last week, it's not that I don't think reusable learning objects have a lot to teach us about how e-learning might work. I do. Much of my effort over the last few years has been in some way related to RLOs. It's just that I have a dawning realization that what educational technologists think of when they talk about learning objects is not the same as what lecturers and teachers think. And I don't just mean the old debate about whether a picture is an RLO or whether a course is. I mean something much deeper, about the way people interact with RLOs, what they're for and how they work for us. What works in the real world of teaching and learning, and what doesn't. At some point I think both communities needs to start interoperating.