Re: [school-discuss] Learning Objects

[vernier@vc.bc.ca (Bruno Vernier)]

On Mon, Aug 12, 2002 at 10:25:28PM +0800, Martin Dougiamas wrote:
> Some years ago I got all excited about IMS and learning objects.
> As a programmer I could really see the potential, and would have
> agreed fully with the statement above.  We could build courses
> like lego and "let em go" - what a time saver!

me too :-)

> Now, as I teach more and learn more online, I find I use fewer
> resources and use an increasing amount of structured collaboration
> between people in order to stimulate really meaningful learning
> (as opposed to page turning).  It's more work but ultimately
> much more effective.  SCORM and some of the other IMS standards
> are looking less and less relevant to this kind of teaching.

me too :-)  ...  from the point of view of a working teacher. 

However, I still hope that IMS/Scorm/some_kind_of_XML_for_education 
becomes as important as ASCII hex codes or raw HTML ... 
for the practising teachers it should be (by default) invisible 
and out of the way.  In that sense, it should fail to grab the 
interest of anyone but certain kinds of  programmers.  

> I'm not writing SCORM off - the idea of learning objects has
> plenty of uses in niche areas - I'm just saying be wary of this
> stuff as a universal panacea.  As the following article points
> out, remember CORBA?
> 
> http://www.onlinelearningmag.com/onlinelearning/magazine/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1526769

I agree; and I have been guilty of over-stating the need for  XML standards in
Education.  I still think that they have potential for improving efficiency and am
willing to work with them as a programmer if need be.  Meanwhile, I am more
rewarded by tuning communication/collaborative tools that engage my
students. My current work is to finish building a Learning Management System centered
around asynchronous discussions stored in postgres SQL database, and
presented via Zope using skins. I have kept the name "eduml" since this evolved 
out of our earlier attempts at an opensource XML for education initiative.
I am working hard at simplifying it and separating the logic processing from the
presentation (skin) aspects.  It is GPL and I hope it will completely
demystify  commercial LMS like webct by exposing such Learning Systems as
simply SQL databases, some small web scripts and some HTML/CSS/javascript
skins.  I also think there might be some value in a universal
standard written in  SQL tables and fields specifications for educational asynchronous
discussions... so that such discussions can continue across multiple LMS
platforms.  People should not have to get used to different discussion skins
everytime they change courses or online schools.

> >I'm deep in the middle of last minute writing for two courses and have 
> >come across this: http://www.atl.ualberta.ca/downes/naweb/column000523.htm
> >
> >I think it's _well_ worth a read. Some of you doing eduml and similar 
> >schemes will better judges of the value of this, but it seems quite far 
> >along to me. See what you all think. Seems like one more person/group we 
> >should recruit, no?

Alberta is a leader in Learning Objects in Canada.  Another excellent
resource is the open-content textbook on Learning Objects from
http://reusibality.org  which also challenges the purely robotic approach to
sequencing learning objects

Bruno