I’m giving a presentation on Learning Object Repositories tomorrow as part of Faculty Technology Days. I’ve been madly whipping up a whiz bang Keynote presentation for it, and it’s pretty much done. It’s written in a newbie “what is a learning object” perspective, and builds from there.
I’ve posted it online here (pdf) and here (mov). The PDF version needs some tweaking (lines are white on a white background. It looks awesome on screen, but I switched the background to white for PDF and print, and lines don’t show up. Use your imagination for now…)
Wow. I’ve been saying that a LOT lately. King just posted a teaser of his latest piece of CAREO wizardry. One of the major problems with setting up a repository is in the difficult process of configuring it after the install. (The install is pretty painless, and could largely be automated, but the config and management can be a pain).
He’s come up with a way to integrate repository management into an interface based on the MacOSX System Preferences application, so it can be managed like any other part of the system software. Except that it’s web based, so it can run from any machine!
The server that was providing DNS for www.sciq.ca is apparently sitting in a moving van somewhere. The company that was providing the service decided to move offices, without providing a backup DNS server offsite first (like, say, the U of C, or any affiliated company).
As a result, SciQ is currently offline. It IS hosted on the same box as CAREO, so it is technically still running, but the www.sciq.ca address goes into the void at the moment. I’m working on tweaking the SciQ theme so that it doesn’t look for stuff on that domain (server-relative links are better, instead of the current absolute links).
Just surfed to the XStreamDB website to check the docs, and noticed that it’s been revved to 3.0. There are installers for Windows, Linux, and MacOSX. I’m downloading now.
Looks like they’ve got some neat new features, but I’m not really sure what’s different from 2.2 (the version I tried before).
The current version of CAREO is 3.something, and does a bunch of neat stuff (I’m planning on writing a brief “History of CAREO” to show the progression of the software).
The upcoming “CAREO/Extreme” version will be 4.0 (due hopefully this summer), so I’m going to be switching my focus to helping King out with his work on CAREO/Extreme (by documenting the rest of CAREO 3.x, doing a gap analysis between 3.x and 4.0, and helping him finish/refine the new frameworks and plugins).
I just published the latest version of CAREO to the Faculty of Medicine’s server. It’s got some custom stuff in it to help them integrate into their SunOne environment, and a new theme that looks just like the rest of their portal. Seems to work great!
King Huang, another Learning Commons employee, who has been gracious enough to volunteer to contribute to the CAREO project in his spare time (i.e., when he’s not actively doing OTHER projects around here - he’s our resident Jack of All Trades). He has been working like a crazed madman, pumping out his interpretation of CAREO. He’s basically doing a rebuild, refactoring stuff to be more modular (with plugins etc…) so that it is more reusable as an application development framework. Very cool stuff.
The Longer Term Future for eLearning About fifty of us participated in the April meeting of eLearning Forum this morning. Forty people met F2F in a classroom at the HP Nonstop Learning Center; eight to ten people joined us remotely via HP Virtual Classroom, a private-labeled Placeware derivative.
They talked about upcoming (and current) trends in eLearning. Good things to keep an eye on. Hopefully they’ll post more detailed proceedings later.
It seems like a minor thing, but the functionality it provides is quite important. Until now, the “Add Object” form in CAREO assumed the media was already web-accessible somewhere. If it wasn’t, you were expected to get it onto the web somehow (FTP to your own server, iDisk, whatever…).
I just added a feature (at the request of our MedCIS folks) that allows users to upload media to our server, and return the URL of the published resource into the correct field in the metadata entry form. Seems like a little thing, but this takes out the FTP, verification of URL, etc… Easy Peasy.
I just added an RSS 2.0 feed to this weblog. If you’re a purist, or just want the extra Dublin Core-y goodness that it provides, it’s located here (and in the sidebar).
Instructions, and RSS 2.0 template, were found here.
This was brought to my attention by Scott Leslie (thanks, Scott!).
Ryan Eby has an interesting post about the differences between Trackback and Pingback, and how they might be used in the context of learning object repositories. Ryan is commenting on a post by Phil Ringnalda.
From Ryan’s post:
For example, if I find a learning object such as MLX #467 on Atomic Structure and decide I want to write a review of it or something similar, then I would want to send it a trackback so that others can find my post on it, if they are browsing the objects. However, if I actually use the flash animation in some sort of online setting (as part of a lesson, etc.) then it would probably be wiser for me to send a pingback as just a way of showing I’m using it. Pingback is structured so you can ping any file and so it probably a more sensible thing for when I’m just using an image or something for a site I made.