Reusability: Some of my LOs are older materials. However, a majority of them are newly created objects with reusability in mind. Reusable materials are becoming quite popular in the educational community, especially higher ed.

Today, I am re-tweaking some of my multimedia materials with the plan to share them on this website I found, MERLOT.org

MERLOT = Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching

Curricular Categories: There are several diverse curricular categories to upload/share objects within. The majority of my objects deal with general education and science/technology. But, my goal for this year is to create LOs for additional categories, including Arts, Math, and Humanities.

Working with Merlot is a great start for anyone interested in creating reusable LOs for the learning communities. They are truly more than just portfolio fillers.

For one, it facilitates a very learner-focussed approach, allowing the learner to "pick and choose the resources they need and the level of support they require to be successful. In other words, they can access the informational resources at any time, taking advantage of all, some, or none of them according their needs."

So for example, if the learner doesn't understand a concept after reading a text document they might be able to view a video or play a game that reiterates that same concept in a different form. There's also potential to have different forms of evaluation, both in terms of level of difficulty and methodology (i.e. paper-based quiz, oral exam, workplace assessment, etc.).

What I'd like to see is a system like this that is driven even more so by the learner. I imagine a PLE where the learner builds a learning path (for a whole qualification or a just-in-time need, from one or more different training providers) based on their desired learning outcomes. They then pick and plug into their PLE the relevant "learning molecules" and works through them at their own pace, with support from relevant teachers, associations, working professionals, and other learners covering the same material at that time.

The learner chooses the breadth and depth of subject matter according to their interests. (Optional) assessment for each "learning molecule" allows the learner to work towards a recognised qualification and all of this is stored in their PLE, so that they can keep it forever, use if for RPL or display it as an e-portfolio.

Hopefully I'll get the chance to work on such a system one day.

has sparked a running debate. The comments represent 'where are we at' X section of opinion on the worth of LOs (and associated implementation) and what constitutes good connected learning.

Originally designed as a Learning Object repository, intraLibrary is the platform behind JORUM and will need some repurposing to also serve as an Open Access research archive. During our rigorous selection process and after careful liaison with Intrallect, however, we have been satisfied that such repurposing is achievable and that the software will ultimately provide the best all round solution for our requirements. We now join Oxford Brookes University's CIRCLE project in using this software to implement a single repository for research outputs and Learning Objects.

intraLibrary will be implemented and configured over the next few months and I intend to start uploading research material almost immediately. An official launch, however, is still some way off while the necessary customisation is carried out. For demonstration purposes, priorities will be:

• Development of appropriate workflows for ingest of research materials.
• Integration of an SRU interface to facilitate open search and retrieval of research content.
• Work with Intrallect to incorporate embargo functionality in line with publisher restrictions.
• Work with Intrallect to incorporate report functionality (number of hits/downloads etc) that can be used in advocacy to the university community.

As initially prioritised in the project plan and due to the considerable amount of customisation to be undertaken, our early emphasis will be on research outputs; appropriate liaison will also continue within the university regarding LeedsMet repository and Learning Objects.

En él podremos encontrar recursos multimedia para la enseñanza y el aprendizaje. Estarán clasificados por temáticas y alumnado al que van dirigidos. Además se acompañarán de una breve descripción de su contenido. Es de esperar que tales recursos sean reutilizables y modificables. De momento existe un mini-site explicativo del proyecto www.proyectoagrega.es donde irán dando información sobre sus avances.

El objetivo principal del proyecto es crear una federación de repositorios con contenidos digitales educativos ya existentes, a la vez que procurar imponer ciertos estándares en su elaboración.

A corto plazo podremos tener más noticias en el Congreso Internet en el Aula http://www.congresointernetenelaula.es

 

I have worked in a secondary school where I was partly responsible for the VLE and as such noticed that only a few teachers were actually using the system as it was intended to be used. I also noticed that many of them made new courses each time they needed them, rather than re-using the content from previous years. It seems to me like they had valid reasons for this, if they re-used the content there was a strong chance of plagiarism.

The answer can be found in Learning Objects, splitting your content into separate objects that can be shared and re-used where necessary. This is based on the reason for creating SCORM, the ADL (the folks that are responsible for SCORM) coined  the concept of the 'ilities': interoperability, durability, re-usability, affordability and accessibility. Which intrinsically defines the desire to share Learning Objects between various institutes. Important aspects of Learning Objects are granularity (ie. the size of the Object) and meta-tagging.

And it is this meta-tagging which causes problems. SCORM and LOM (Learning Objects Metadata) are now being accepted as standards, but both fall short when it comes to defining the educational value of a learning object and both are very laborious. Imagine that you have a picture of an oak and you then want to meta-tag it in LOM. You will need to know about 9 categories with a multitude of criteria. Not only will you need to fill in all that data, the lady across the pond that wants to use it will have to look for exactly those criteria to get your image up.

It is obvious that this is a serious issue that will need adressing sooner rather than later if we are to use Learning Objects on the scale that we would like to use them. What is most puzzling is that if I want to find that picture of an oak, I go to Google Images and search for oak; it will pop up in seconds. This leads me (and others) to believe that the trick is to apply more fuzzy searching algorithms and therefore indexing algorithms to Learning Objects to improve the accessibility tremendously. We should stop defining all the branches (as on the picture above) and concentrate on other criteria.

Con Flash Cards Friendly è possible creare in poco tempo Flashcards per uso didattico.

È possibile:

• creare delle categorie di flashcard, associarle, condividerle

• definire in modo automatico e tradurre del testo in modo che sia di estrema facilità creare flash card per la didattica delle lingue seconde

• aggiungere immagini e suoni alle flashcard, registrandoli direttamente (interessante per gli insegnanti di lingua straniera)

• per lo spelling inserire la parola e il sistema passa direttamente dal testo scritto al testo orale. Ciò rappresenta il suono dal quale passare alla parola scritta

• si possono creare dei test basati sullle flashcard

Tutto ciò ci porta a vedere che è finita l'epoca in cui, per creare delle attività, gli insegnanti avevano bisogno di installare authoring tools sul proprio personal computer. Siamo passati all'era del web-based authoring tools.

Social Learning Objects

Questa definizione ci viene dal blog di Tony Karrer che giustamente vede come semplice l'operazione di modificare del testo già esistente a scopo didattico per creare flashcard. In questo modo condividere contenuti diviene più semplice e, inoltre, non è più una prerogativa del docente. Anche gli studenti-utenti potranno condividere i propri contenuti nel trovare, creare e condividere flashcard.

Link utili:

• Flash Card Friends: http://www.flashcardfriends.com
• Flashcard Exchange: http://www.flashcardexchange.com
• Scholastic.com Flashcards: http://www.scholastic.com/kids/homework/flashcards.htm
• Aplus Math Flashcards: http://www.aplusmath.com/Flashcards
• Flashcard Machine: http://www.flashcardmachine.com
• Study Perfect (Luminaresoft): http://www.luminaresoft.com

]]> http://carolsill.wordpress.com/?p=267 Mon, 03 Mar 2008 19:29:52 +0000 Carol http://carolsill.wordpress.com/?p=267 Francesco makes a great case for recipes as the ultimate learning objects in this post from the Rouxbe Blog. He's right. Stick around long enough and you see that much of the academic and artistic experimentation eventually ends up in a real-world application that people can taste, touch, eat, use. What was once rare and esoteric (and mega-funded in many cases) soon becomes common knowledge, and isn't even seen anymore - it just gets absorbed into the fabric of our environment.

Here's a brief quote - by the way, the site is gorgeous and really useful - educators take note!

And the great thing is that all this convergence that is happening now is based on the early work that artists and academics were doing a number of years ago. I guess the conclusion that I’m getting at is that if our society has artists and academics that push the boundaries, even if we don’t see it applied to our daily lives, chances are that their work will have an impact on us eventually.

http://www.nzmaths.co.nz/brightsparks/
Sito caratterizzato da giochi di natura matematica

http://www.coolschool.ca/content/
Sito in cui sono presenti learning objects legati alla matematica e alla scienza

http://www.didattica.org/
Sito italiano dedicato a learning objects di varia natura

Different authors have used synonyms or similar definitions to refer to learning objects, they are also known as "chunk of educational content" (Quinn, 2000), "units of learning" (Koper, 2003), or "modular units" (McGreal, 2004).

Firstly, learning object repositories are not really stand alone items. Well, they are, but often they don't easily fit into what the teacher wants to do with them - So they really need to be adaptable. Secondly there is a risk that they can become a solution looking for a problem. If they're not wanted, there's no point creating them. (If they are wanted, then creating them is a very good idea though. But make them adaptable, and also, as the first paper suggested, give some thought to the different devices on which they might be used.) It's also an idea to think about how they might be used in a web 2.0 context

In the afternoon, I heard a number of papers. The first was on online silence (What if anything do you learn from "lurking"? Why do people lurk. What do you learn from participating in online conversations". Was there any correlation between silence and learning styles?) Interestingly, the answer to the last question seemed to be that there was, but the presenter acknowledged that learning styles were situated, and that higher level learning occurred when the student reflected on the entire course.  Next up was a paper on Second Life - well, it was more about the SLOODLE project which mashes up Second Life and Moodle. The idea here seemed to be that Moodle (or a VLE in general) provided some of the structure that SL doesn't in the shape of threaded discussions, chat support and logging,  drop boxes and quiz tools. Well, that's all very well but what's SL then bringing to the party? I've always suspected that SL's technology is going to be more use in education when it's taken out of SL itself. I can see the scope for immersive environments in many subjects - but not when you're trying to run them across 4,000 servers in California or wherever it is - it's just not reliable enough at present.  But perhaps I'm being short sighted - Who would have thought when I first saw the Louvre online back in 1994 that I'd be sitting here blogging about a 3-D world I could move around in.  Finished the "academic" work of the day with the presentation on blogging I described in my first post, so I won't go into it here.  So who knows where it will all end.

Wednesday started with a paper on the e-learning benchmarking exercise. I was heavily involved in this, although if I'm absolutely honest, I never really saw the point of it. There's a lot of talk about "institutions" doing this and that. Actually, what is happening, is that "some people in institiutions are doing some of this stuff". Of course that raises the question of do we want everyone to be involved, and that was the question under discussion here although it was phrased rather differently  "Does this type of programme create a culture of dependency in HEIs, because the programmes are externally funded?"  Well, you can't get away from the fact that the money's coming from outside as you've probably guessed, I don't think they reach far enough in to do so, but the feeling from those behind the programme was that they had envisioned an "interdependency" culture. - A network of institutions feeding off each other. But that, along with the external funding makes development very difficult to sustain. Having said that, there were some good examples of practice around - I very much liked Leicester's Carpe Diem initiatives in which (As I understand) they take a whole department and redesign a course with them. That sounds exactly the sort of thing that EDUs should be doing, because the focus is on building institutional capacity rather than just staff development.  So perhaps that was the point of the benchmarking exercise!

 Next up was an excellent keynote speech from Dylan Williams, at the institute of Education. Again you can see it on the conference web site, so I'm not going to give a long account of it. The main points were that in terms of student achievement, it matters much less which school you go to, than which teacher you get when you get there, and that one of the most important things teachers could do to help students learn was to provide good quality formative assessment and respond to what it told them. This was an excellent talk, and I thoroughly recommend having a look at the live version. There were a couple of good throwaway lines that I liked too.

"Schools are places where kids go to watch teachers work!" (of course it is the kids who should be working.)

"Kids choosing not to ask a question are foregoing the opportunity to get smarter"

In the afternoon, I went to a couple of talks about wikis. It's funny how these get such a bad press. In our own Blackboard training sessions I've had colleagues who won't touch the concept because of what they've heard about the inaccuracies in Wikipedia. There's some justification in that I suppose, but isn't it the job of the teacher to correct misconceptions - in fact the whole concept gives the lie to the notion that ed. tech. is going to replace teachers. But one interesting point that came out of the session was that students tended to see Wikis as places for finished work rather than for drafts. The presenter had actually hoped to use it to look at drafts - but then, I suppose, who want's to mark every bit of paper a student has struggled to make a mark on, or noted.  And of course, what student wants to hand all that in? Perhaps attitudes to written work haven't really changed all that much. The conclusions were that a module leader needed to be clear about

• how to use wikis
• Targeted learning behaviour
• Participation drivers (why would students want to join in?)

Next, I went to a Blackboard sponsored session, where they revealed their latest plug-in. This was something called Safe Assign, which is essentially Turnitin - although it didn't search as many databases and doesn't have the on-line marking feature that we're using in Architecture. (Although I suppose Bb has it's own gradebook.) I suppose I'll have to download it and we'll use it too.

 The final session of a busy day was about whether the sector was ready for learners in control. I was a bit late arriving for this session so had to stand at the back in a very hot room, so I'm afraid my notes are not terribly coherent. Although there was another great one liner "We have to address hearts and minds, not sim cards"  The one thing I did take away from this session was the interesting revelation that "digital natives" (i.e. kids who are well used to and brought up with technology) seem to be least receptive to on-line learning. Could this be because a lot of the subject matter in HE is conceptually very difficult and not readily conveyable in small bits of information?

Unfortunately my dental appointment obliged me to miss the last keynote, but before heading back to Nottingham station I attended a session on using podcasts for pre-lecture preparation. This turned out to be a report into some research about whether those students who had been given pre-lecture material did better than those who had not. I was tempted to ask about the ethical implications of this, but in fact the results showed a slight improvement among those who had been given the material in advance, it was quite small and not statistically significant. Still, I did wonder what might have happened if there had been shown to be a significant difference.

So, a good conference, and I'm glad I went. I haven't blogged about the social events, although they were very good and enjoyable, and I did make some useful contacts. But the "holiday" is over now and I really need to get my Ed D head back on. I've been sitting at the PC since I got back today indulging in every kind of distraction activity to avoid doing any work, but one potential benefit of blogging is that it gets you writing.

Learning objects interest me as points of intersection between digital technologies and learning. It would be interesting to find more resources on the pedagogy of learning technologies. I shall have to find these. If anyone else finds these, please send them my way.

Reuse is using the learning object virtually as it is with a different group of learners and/or for a different qualification. In some cases additional materials will be presented alongside the original learning object.

For example using an object on customer service for Hospitality and using it with Business students

Repurposing

Repurposing can mean a variety of processes. From using a substantial part of the learning object with additional learning content to disaggregating the learning object and using components within a completely new learning object.

For example using a video clip from an object on health and safety for Hairdressing and using it within a new learning object for Business students.

This year's theme is Voices of Young Refugees. The Refugee Council of Australia has lots of ideas for celebrating this week, but one thing you can do is read about the real experiences of young refugees and  those imaginative stories which have been based on true stories.

Our Year 7s have just read Little Brother by Allan Baillie, a story set in Cambodia during the terrible years of terror in the 1970s. Baillie based the story on a young boy he met at a refugee camp and tells vividly what it must have been like to lose family and home and to have to survive as a young child in such a hostile environment. To read more about the background to this story see the links from Seven Magic.

For more reading suggestions about refugees see this junior reading list on Library Thing, or check the library catalogue.

David Goldie's interactive documentary Long Journey, Young Lives uses video interviews with children and young people who came to Australia as refugees, and with Australian born children, to try to recreate the experience of having to leave one's country and the long hard journey which leads to a new one.

For Refugee Week Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders)  has put together pictures and text which recreate the experience of living long term in a camp waiting to be allowed into a new home country - see Virtual Refugee Camp.

To catch up with a family who came to Australia from Vietnam in the seventies see Cuc Lam's Suitcase, a 4-5 minute video in a series called National Treasures. It tells the story of a couple who came to Australia with just one possession - now displayed in Melbourne's Immigration Museum.

Finally, teachers might like to investigate The Learning Federation learning object called The Journey of Hong Hai which recreates the journey of Vietnamese refugees escaping by boat in September and November 1978. (Available through CASTnet.)

The main findings (based on series 7) from my POV are:

• The use of stable and powewrful CMS provides strong support for designing online learning units [wonder if this is a reflection of Tassies experience with Learning Edge-maybe skewed the outcomes?]
• Many LOs hold strong contextual connections with their original use which can limit their re-use [central to a LO appraoch has to be developing them independant of context]
• The use of LOs appears to ahve a strong fit with teachres design and development strategies [not sure what this means]
• The use of LOs can discourage the use of task oriented designs [again this is more a reflection of poor learning design approach]
• The majoity of LOs are tutorial in design. There appear to be far fewer content and information objects from which teachers can choose [does this imply teachers want content objects? I would have thought tutorial objects wouldembarce the notion of 'information objects'/these are possibly teacher classifications and not learningdesign descriptions]
• Teachers would be advantaged by better descriptions of Los to aid their discovery and selection. [maybe a reflection of poor repository/CMS organisation-]

and most significantly I think: Teachers do not appear to be inclined to seek to customise LOs.  

If this last point is generalisable, then  we should question the extent to which we keep dissagregating resources,  perhaps teachers only want to use complete modules/courses off the shelf. Not all teachers want to repurpose material.
 

• Enable and facilitate the use of instructional content in different electronic media
• Can be applied and re-used in different applications and learning environments
• Have metadata descriptions
• Operate at different levels of granularity
• Are intended to support learning
• Have a formal instructional purpose