Subject: Re: Which objects are of interest?
From: John Maxwell (jmax@cr366361-a.crdva1.bc.wave.home.com)
Date: Fri 03 Mar 2000 - 01:07:58 MET
From: John Maxwell <jmax@cr366361-a.crdva1.bc.wave.home.com> Subject: Re: Which objects are of interest? Date: Thu, 2 Mar 2000 16:07:58 -0800 (PST)
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Clark Quinn writes:
> >To each such object you would want to attach:
> >
> >* resources (= say, explanatory content which could be simple - a web
> >page, or complex - a simulation, or a piece of multimedia);
> >
> >* support (= say, feedback, facilitation, formative assessment, peer
> >dialogue);
>
> This is an interesting perspective, and I can see some reasons to
> want to do it this way; you package content with educational activity
> wrapping. However does that make it hard to unpack it? Could you be
> better off packaging them separately and letting a learning object
> system concatenate or 'bookend' them?
>
> It would take careful tagging to make it happen, but then each object
> could be reused.
Hope this is on-topic, as I've just joined this discussion, but what
you're describing here is very much the way we built things at the Open
Learning Agency for a group of high-school distance ed. courses. They're
SGML/XML from top to bottom, so the metadata associated with any
particular object is both explicit (cataloguing-type things) and implicit
(taken from the context of the object within it's original course
context).
What this means is that a group fo objects are authored orginally within
a holistic context (a particular course with a particular program), but
once created, the whole thing can be disassembled into granualr objects --
be they assessment pieces, topic explorations, or external resource
wrappers. Each piece is, as I say described explicitly, but also knows
where it came from in original context -- vis a vis learning outcomes,
relationship to other materials, etc.
The point is that it is very difficult to author materials out of context,
and then expect them to be assemblable in meaningful ways. What is easier
is to disassemble objects from a previous context and re-use them. This is
just simler to do, conceptually. Of course, it means the material has to
be tagged and described within an inch of it's life, using something like
XML.
- John Maxwell jmax@portal.ca
Open Learning Agency, Burnaby, BC, Canada
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