Blog Posts

LO-blog community meeting

From David Wiley’s Autounfocus weblog:

Browse Learning Objects Interfaces

I’ve been implementing the browse objects interface for the SciQ project, and it struck me just how different it looks from the current browse utility in CAREO. They do basically the same thing - allow the user to use predefined vocabularies for searches based on standardized metadata elements - but the presentation difference is quite striking.

Compare the two, CAREO on the left, SciQ on the right:

Trying WebObjects on Solaris

Today, we’re going to install WO on a Solaris8 box, in preparation for deploying CAREO for the MedCIS project.

The fun part of this will be integration with SunONE Single Sign On to override authentication within CAREO. We’ll also be imposing several “classes” of users (Instructor, Student, Guest), and allow users to share documents with their own “class” as well as optionally with those in “lower” classes.

I’ll report back on how the install goes. Could be interesting, but we should be able to do the whole thing remotely.

Learning Object Repository Interest Level Rising

Over the last week, I’ve been completely blown away by the level of interest people are showing in LORs, and CAREO specifically. Wow. Really.

It’s been odd, because for the past couple of years, it’s seemed like nobody knew or cared about learning objects, never mind learning object repositories, and now people all over the place are looking at CAREO to help them play around with LOs and LORs.

That’s just plain cool, for a few reasons:

IEEE LTSC quarterly meetings

Norm Friesen just returned from the IEEE LTSC quarterly meetings, and he posted a brief report here.

Some progress on intellectual property issues, but what sounds most interesting is the proposal (apparently adopted already) to reserve physical namespaces for the elements of a metadata XML binding, such that the URI actually points to an info page defining what the purpose/meaning/etc… of that element is. We won’t have to collectively scratch our heads and say “WTF is semantic density, anyways?”

Trying to install WebObjects on Linux

We’re going to give it a shot. We need to test out CAREO running under SunONE single sign-on authentication. We don’t have a Solaris box, but we do have a RedHat box sitting here.

Should be fun. Found what appear to be useful instructions here. I’ll report back if they were useful or not.

UPDATE: Yup. Worked like a charm. I’ll post some notes in the comments for this entry.

Add Objects works again!

Wow. I just cleaned up the old IMS-only metadata entry component in CAREO, and lo and behold, IT’S ALIVE! It actually does a pretty decent job.

Next, I’ll need to clean up the logic that determines who is allowed to edit an existing object, then I can re-activate the “Edit” link on the object listing component.

The “default” and “commons” themes will have the “Add Object” button now, and as soon as I can scare up the graphics for the other themes, they’ll be activated too. Cool.

Learning Object Creation/Editing

Now that the SciQ theme is mostly roughed in, I’m shifting focus yet again. We’ve had a Very Important Client request a form-based method to create and edit learning objects within the repository. We have ALOHA, but they need it integrated into the web interface.

We actually had that function about a year ago, in the CAREO prototype, but eventually had to scrap it because it was hard-coded to a single metadata schema, and that schema got updated. That broke the editor.

SciQ ramping up

The SciQ Project is ramping up right now. Just received final content and UI, so I’m busy working away on transforming it into a theme for CAREO. That’s going to put pretty much everything else on hold until it’s ready to go.

This will be an excellent test of the theming engine in CAREO, though, and a cool use of the technology to get actual students (and teachers) using Learning Objects in the classroom.

XSLT Presentation of Learning Object Metadata

I’m (re)working on the learning object presentation code in CAREO. It currently uses a java class to figure out what sort of stuff it need to do to present a resource associated with a learning object. Some quasi-hackish code, like “if it claims to be a QuickTime movie, double-check the technical.location file extension. If that checks out, assume we’re really talking about a QuickTime movie, and try to build a page to display it. Unless it’s been uploaded to the ALOHA-managed streaming server, since that will already wrap a page around the file. In that case, just display the file as-is. Otherwise, go ahead and generate a web page, and add the object/embed tags to set up the QuickTime plugin. Feed it appropriate parameters, and return the page.”

CVS/ProjectBuilder woes

It looks like the CVS client built into ProjectBuilder insists on puking all over the deeply-nested file structure of a WebObjects project. Folders that are actually packages, etc…

In 3 separate cases, although PB insisted that all files were in fact committed to CVS, and up to date, only the .java files were uploaded to the server. Using the manual command-line CVS client, I was able to commit the whole shebang. Very unnerving. I’m going to revert to the command line client for the time being, and play around with Concurrent Versions Librarian (CVL), which is a gui-based CVS client for a bunch of platforms, including MacOSX. It looks like it needs a bit of tweaking to get it configured right, but I figure I’ll be more likely to commit regularly (and properly) if I don’t have to keep looking up commands and codes for cvs and vi.

Bug fixed

There was a pesky bug in CAREO for the past couple of months, where a non-themed component with a hyperlink would nuke the theme setting for that session, possibly also improperly rendering whatever page was linked to the hyperlink.

I’ve finally tracked it down and squashed it (it was low priority, mostly cosmetic), and it seems to work better. Theme setting is now properly stored in (and retrieved from) the session, so hyperlinks should work more reliably (like, for instance, in the WOTabButtonPanel in Metadata view).