Merlot session notes: Learning Communities

Merlot session notes from the 2:30 session on Learning Communities.

• Communities in Merlot
  • go to “communities” tab –> Teaching_and_technology
  • still a little rough, so it’s ok that stuff is hard to find.
  • adding resources to support faculty
  • Patricia McGee
    • LOs require standards, collaboration and cooperation
    • www.educause.edu/nlii
    • NLII - National Learning Infrastructure Initiative
      • LOVCOP - Learning Objects Virtual Community of Practice
      • Learning Objects Survey - developers, repositories, users
        • what are people actually doing, needing?
      • “What we want to know”
        • Fall focus session on Learning Objects (at Columbus Ohio)
        • http://www.educause.edu/nlii/meetings/nlii034/
  • Discussion
    • Should we really be focussing on Learning Objects?
      • If everything is working right, nobody will even know they’re dealing with LOs
        • students will just get the right bits of stuff in place
        • teachers will just find the right resources
        • content producers will just integrate it into their workflow
    • Need to have concrete, real-world examples of LOs being actually USED in practice
      • by students, instructors, etc…
    • how to transfer comfort level with software like gaming into LO-related tech?
• Building Learning Communities through Learning Object Development
  • CLOE @ Queen’s University
  • def: a learning community consists of individuals who are working towards the primary goal of building knowledge.
  • presentation will be available on the Merlot website
  • community is created when
    • participate in common practices
    • depend on one another
    • make decisions together
    • identify themselves as part of something larger than the sum of their individual relationships
    • …
  • CLOE = 17 universities across Ontario
    • members develop and reuse learning objects
    • all los are developed in a collaborative approach
    • similar to an inter-library loan system
  • Teams include Instructional Developer, Tech support, and 3 senior undergrad students
  • Queens has a Learning Objects course in Computer Science! What a great idea!
  • Examined existing LOs - pillaged the Merlot database
  • co-developed 2 learning objects (doing 4 more this summer)
  • have found the learning community to be a sustainable model for LO development
  • Documentation is part of the community
  • http://www.queensu.ca/cloe
  • has learning communities databsae (text and graphic search)