By Stephen Downes
November 5, 2003
AACE Phoenix
November weather has
settled in over New Brunswick, and this morning's round of
snow and sleet has been followed by a generally gloomy day.
6 a.m. tomorrow I'm on an airplane, headed for AACE in
Phoenix, which you would think would fill me with some joy,
but my registration already appears to have been messed up,
there's no way to fix it online, and there's no speaker or
schedule information on the website, expect for the usual
keynotes and invitees. So I'm headed right into the land of
'not getting it.'
I'm on a DRM panel opposite Robby Robson, Magda Mourad and
Harry Piccariello, an elite group in which I am no doubt
out of place. Except... except... someone has to fight the
good fight, even if it means airline food, the exhaustion
of U.S. customs, and immersion into a largely
self-congratulatory medley of e-learning professionals
locked in pre-digital age modes of commerce,
commodification, and hierarchical group-think. Some of the
links just below reflect my dissatisfaction, and perhaps
I'm more critical than I should be, but there are days when
I think that the entire industry has gone blind, that what
they're up to has less to do with the provision of
education than self promotion, institutional promotion,
and, of course, a good run of profit.
Last weekend I spend a long time on a draft of a technical paper, redefining
and redesigning the content and metadata relationship
(right-click and download; it's in text format). But who
will believe it if they don't even get what it's all about,
what it's all for. If you want an open and accessible
content distribution network, it's pretty clear how to go
about it - but what if that is not what you want? Maybe
people will read this paper - who knows? But what will they
see?
Last weekend (in between sections) I also reread
Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols. Days like this, I
need Nietzsche, need him like a warm rum and the taste of a
last stale cigarette before the end of a cold and
sleet-laden November day. Need him like a dirty old coat
that's been with me around the world and is up, maybe, for
one more time into the breach under the eclipse of the
autumn moon.
Maintaining cheerfulness in the midst of a gloomy
affair, fraught with immeasurable responsibility, is no
small feat; and yet what is needed more than cheerfulness?
Nothing succeeds if prankishness has no part in it. Excess
of strength alone is the proof of strength. A revaluation
of all values, this question mark, so black, so tremendous
that it casts shadows upon the man who puts it down--such a
destiny of a task compels one to run into the sun every
moment to shake off a heavy, all-too-heavy
seriousness.
I don't know whether I can show people the Resource profiles paper yet - I really
should finish writing it. I don't know whether I can show
people this one either, but I'm tired of
waiting. And I think about it. Am I allowed to
release these? Am I becoming what I fear?
In the latter item I write,
"So few people - Gibson among them - have grasped what it
means to live and learn in the information age. Along with
predicting the decline of America as a world power,
precisely because the locus of innovation shifted
elsewhere, he depicts life in a state of constant flux.
Douglas Rushkoff describes people who have adapted to this
new reality as people who 'ride the wave' - it is no
coincidence, he asserts, the modes, means and manners of
those who surf the waves, surf with skateboards, and surf
the internet are so similar. It is not possible to grasp
and hold a reality - those people who, for example, are
only just now coming to grips with blogs will read with
dismay the ebbing of this phenomenon, but this is life as
usual in Cyberia (the inhabitants of which grin at the idea
of some newspaper columnist who believes he has finally
'got it'). The *only* way to survive in such an environment
is to be free - not free in the sense of being able to vote
for one's dictators every few years, but really
free, in the sense of living (and working, and learning)
autonomously, that is, in a self-directed (not isolated)
manner. The very technology that makes self-directed (and
self-motivated) learning possible, also makes it necessary.
You don't get the benefits of becoming an agricultural
society without also having to live on farms; you don't get
the benefits of becoming an information society without
also having to live in information."
Like a bird
on the wire
Like the drunk
in a midnight choir
I have tried
in my way
To be free
(Cohen)
By Various
Authors, November 7, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
LOM/CanCore Open-Source Software Components
Released
CITIS summary of recently released
software components from CanCore which designed to provide
the building blocks for a digital library. Though you would
never know it by reading this article, these components
were developed at Athabasca University as a part of the
eduSource project (and were the subject of a great deal of
discussion and wrangling by the wider eduSource development
team) and will be soon joined by a wider range of
applications and tools (why they were attributed to CanCore
is a bit of a mystery). I love Wilbert Kraan's summary:
"It's essentially a cheap and cheerful digital repository
that's very easy to implement." Brian Lamb comments, "Hmm, well… I kind of know what
all those things are… Then there’s the stated rationale for
these components, 'to greatly simplify the challenging task
of developing learning object repositories —all without
adding in any way to development costs.' Well, I can get
down with that. But what do I do with them? How do these
components fit in to what I or other LO projects at UBC are
trying to do?" That's more like my reaction. By Wilbert
Kraan, CETIS, October 30, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
A Recipe for Interoperability in
Practice
Demonstration of practical
interoperability between a learning object content
repository (the JORUM Intralibrary) and a virtual learning
environment (PIONEER), mediated by the RELOAD Editor, with
a walk-though of the steps involved. This is what I call
the 'library' or 'CD-ROM' model of learning object
distribution and reuse, and exemplifies what are to me are
many bad practices, beginning with the closed-access
repository, continuing through the use of content packages
for simple tasks, the manual classification requirement...
and the zillion-step process (with 8 separate screen shots)
for the simple joining of two discrete elements. I know
this is just a demonstration and all, but really, this
can't be how it works in its final form. The article itself
is downloadable as an IMS content package - and yes, there
it is with metadata, images, the works, all wrapped up in a
nice zipped archive, and if I put in the time and expense I
can get in the end exactly what I got by clicking on a link
in my email. What has all this bought us? Am I being
heretical? Try as I might, I simply cannot get excited by a
technology that has as its end objective the re-creation of
closed-content CD-style content distribution. There's so
much more to see by looking forward than by looking
backward. By Colin Milligan, CETIS, October 8, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Getting the Mix Right Again: An Updated and
Theoretical Rationale for Interaction
"This
paper," writes the author, "attempts to provide a
theoretical rationale and guide for instructional designers
and teachers interested in developing distance education
systems that are both effective and efficient in meeting
diverse student learning needs." The heart of the theory is
Anderson's equivalency theorem: "Deep and meaningful formal
learning is supported as long as one of the three forms of
interaction (student–teacher; student-student;
student-content) is at a high level. The other two may be
offered at minimal levels, or even eliminated, without
degrading the educational experience." This is a
controversial thesis, insofar as it avers that a high level
of interaction between student and content is just as good
as that between, say, student and teacher. But of course we
need to keep in mind that this isn't a simple principle of
substitutivity (as I'm sure many commentators will
misinterpret it). Not all students interact meaningfully
with content, and therefore require interaction with a
teacher. But some students will prefer to interact with the
content, or with other students. Each student is different,
and each student requires one or another mix, so long as
the overall level of interaction is maintained. By Terry
Anderson, IRRODL, October, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
On the Concepts of Usability and Reusability
of Learning Objects
I'm not so happy with the
definition of the usability of a learning object adopted by
this paper - "Usability in e-Learning is defined by the
ability of a learning object to support or enable […] a
very particular concrete cognitive goal.” So I'm
uncomfortable with some of the details of the definition of
reusability offered: "the aggregation of the adequacy of
the learning object to each of its possible contexts of
use, multiplied by the number of those contexts." Still, I
think that the overall approach has merit, and some
suggestions - "Perhaps more sophisticated encapsulation
techniques may provide more information regarding contexts
of use." - are very much in line with my own thinking. More
soon. By Miguel-Angel Sicilia and Elena García, IRRODL,
October, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Ontology Development 101: A Guide to Creating
Your First Ontology
Nice, detailed exolication
of the concept of ontologies. The article could be a bit
stronger on why they are created and how they are used, but
provides an in depth description that leaves readers clear
about what they are and how they're created. As a beer
drinker, the wine analogy is a bit opaque to me. By Natalya
F. Noy and Deborah L. McGuinness, Stanford University,
October, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
The Future Of Web Conferencing: Good
Interviews Roland Piquepaille
The latest in a
series of interviews by Robin Good (links to the rest are
at the bottom of the article). As usual, the key hurdle in
this technology, as with most, is not technological but
rather human factors. "I worked for US companies in
multinational environments. Even face-to-face meetings were
sometimes difficult. Conference calls were obviously even
more difficult. Web conferencing is better, because you can
see the body language of the people you are talking to." By
Luigi Canali De Rossi, Robin Good, November 5, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
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