By Stephen Downes
July 17, 2003
IMS and OKI, the Wire and the
Socket
Description of progress in MIT's Open
Knowledge Initiative (OKI). It is important to recognize,
reports the author, that OKI is not an open source learning
environment. Nor is it even an architecture, though as the
author note, OKI's layer-cake archietcture has become
famous. Rather, the heart of OKI is a set of "OSIDs:
definitions of particular slots in a computer program. In
an application that allows you to do searches for learning
objects in repositories, for example, the programmer can
just say 'put the code that talks to the repository here'
without actually having to program very much beyond calls
to the list of commands that the OSID specifies." Cool
stuff. Too bad so much of this work is happening behind
closed doors; as the author notes, "the success of OKI
depends almost entirely on the support it gets," and the
more open the process, the more likely the support. By
Wilbert Kraan, CETIS, July 17, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Government of Canada Newsroom (Phase
II)
Funny how things work. Yesterday I asked a
questions, to which a reader responded and, in passing,
suggested I visit the Canada website. I haven't been there
for a while, so I did, and as I passed the news page, I
sent a suggestion about formatting. I received a prompt
reply which, in passing, mentioned that the Government of
Canada is planning to implement, among other things, RSS
feeds in Phase II of the Newsroom web site. This is
something I have encouraged (and here) for some time, so I asked for
more information. With permission, I have placed a copy of
the fact sheet on my website. "Phase II of the Newsroom
will be launched with a primary focus on a new distribution
strategy for government news and related resources. Phase
II of the Newsroom will give people choices regarding the
types of news that they receive and the technology that
they use to access it." I will of course provide more
information when it becomes publicly available. A French version of the Fact Sheet is also
available. By fact Sheet, Government of Canada, July, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Adaptive Hypermedia
Yesterday I
linked to a short article about adaptive hypermedia.
Today's link is to a much more thorough examination of the
same subject by the same author, in the form of a Power
Point presentation. Make sure you have a look at this -
even if you are sceptical about adaptive hypermedia you
will want to see the role played by, for example, the public and
private information (PAPI) standard, learning objects,
classification and more. As for me, I'm a lot less
sceptical after reading this presentation. Great stuff. By
Alexandra Cristea, June 4, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
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