Big news on the Learning Objects front around here. Brian Lamb ,D'arcy Norman and Alan Levine are talking about extending the track-back feature of Weblogs to Learning Objects repositories. This seems like a great idea as it starts to capture the value added when a content expert adopts a Learning Object. In the same way that much of the linking in 'blogging' seems to rest on a referral system, adding trackback to Learning Objects should help build a similar 'social' aspect to Learning Objects.
It also seems to short circuit some of the necessity of complete tagging of a learning object. It seemed to me that a weak point in LO theory is the arduous task of metatagging. I keep thinking that nobody is motivated to tag their objects thoroughly enough to make them useful. Looking at existing repositories shows that most of them have more untagged objects than tagged.
As a Biology instructor, I know that my colleague uses'Learning Object A' in his course, it is likely that I will do the same. Much value is in the referral; I am more likely to use an object that a colleague r ecommends. If I am new to the field, a referral system is even more valuable as it allows me to quickly pick up on the culture and discipline surrounding the objects. Not only do I determine which objects are valuable, I also get a sense ofwhich colleagues I share curriculum, teaching philosophies and other aspects with. By browsing the combination of objects a colleague puts together in their course, I can assess how similar our courses are and also how similar our teaching techniques are. All of this can be done with me having to deal with metadata! (Metadata may work well for me in cases where I do not have the benefit of a referral, but it is not nearly as useful to me as a trusted referrer)!
The other big news today is that Michelle Lamberson has successfully streamed an RSS stream into her WebCT course and by doing so firmly brings RSS feeds into education (at least around here at UBC). Currently her stream consists of titles (and possibly some text) displayed (through a rendering process involving an executable) within a regular HTML page.
It is interesting to think what else could be transferred in an RSS stream. Adam Curry has experimented with Audioblogging, where he narrates part of his regular blog. Sound files are much bigger than the text of his blog. He has gone on to propose that any media could be wrapped up in an 'RSS enclosure'. Dave Winer liked this idea and incorporated it into Radio Userland. Large objects wrapped up in RSS enclosures can be set to download at night, when traffic is lighter. In the morning, the user has access to large media on their own computer.
When talking about adding trackback to Careo, D'Arcy Norman comments:
Imagine this going one step further....There is no reason for
Trackbacks to be restricted to weblogs. They could just as
easily be generated by other LO Rs, or even other completely
unrelated software. Imagine a user on CAREO being able to trackback
a LOR in MERLOT. Or vice versa.
Or a CAREO user being able to trackback and comment on something
in the Corbus collection. Or an instructor working on a BlackBoard
course being able to search for and add to comments on LOs in
LO Rs all around the world, in the context of their course?
What about moving the content of the repositories into our weblogs?
Could Learning Objects be taken out of central repositories and ultimately end up on the desktops of the people that use them? I could post video or images to my 'blog', wrap them up in an RSS enclosure, and publish them to anyone that subscribes to my 'Biology 112' RSS channel. In a recentLearning Objects proposal submitted last year, we proposed to use our weblog environment, Frontier, as the perfect vehicle to store our learning objects. Learning objects could be stored in the form of a weblog post and subscribers would receive copies streamed to their own computers. If subscribers elected to re-publish them to their own weblog, a copy would then be distributed to several more computers. Popular objects would benefit from the referral and copies would reside on many computers. This is how stories spread in blog space - and I wonder if it could work for richer media.
Multiple copies existing in a distributed fashion would insure that a popular object would not shut down a central repository. The instructor would also have a copy (properly vetted and with his seal of approval) of all the items important for his teaching. Popular (or valuable) objects would be duplicated many times over, less popular ones might remain in more obscure reaches of an instructors personal teaching kit.
One advantage would be for students. Ulrich Rauch (alas - no weblog) has been saying that students with easy access to learning material could reassemble (construct) them in ways that makes sense to them. He thinks that students could present this material to one another, possibly working in groups, and ultimately contribute (and 'own') their learning materials. This work could end up in their e-portfolio and serve as a personal and official record of their mastery. (We currently use the model of students preparing and presenting scientific information to fellow students in several courses with great success).
Another advantage of local copies is economical. At our institution, we pay for the bandwidth on and off campus. Learning objects that exist locally would reduce the need to make a call to the repository (especially if it is in the next province). If the object exists down the hall, then the cost to the institution is minimal. If one thousand students download the same image the outside, the costs begin to add up. The distributed nature of the weblog-repository begins to make sense.
Copyright 2003 Cyprien Lomas
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