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Re: [school-discuss] Learning Objects
Thanks, you guys. Enlightening and ... slightly troubling ;-0) at once. Thanks
for the good links from both of you, though.
Bruno, that zope site and your intentions re demystifying WebCT are
astounding. More power to you! Sometimes I wonder why Steve Narmontas of
Manhattan doesn't open up that project to you.
Martin, what do you mean by "structured" communication and why does it take
more time than switching resources?
David
Quoting Bruno Vernier <vernier@vc.bc.ca>:
> 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
>
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