Subject: Learning objects: sequencing, wrappers and interactivity
From: Crispin Weston (crispinw@dircon.co.uk)
Date: Tue 22 Feb 2000 - 15:31:27 MET
From: "Crispin Weston" <crispinw@dircon.co.uk> Subject: Learning objects: sequencing, wrappers and interactivity Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 14:31:27 -0000
List address to send message to everyone: ifets-discuss@LISTSERV.READADP.COM
Details of current discussion: http://ifets.ieee.org/discussions/discuss.html
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Interesting discussion on learning objects and sequencing.
On educational wrappers. My view is that the educational wrapper will very
often add interactivity to an essentially expositive resource. By
interactivity, I refer to the ability to interact with the software in what
Ariadne calls a 'semantically meaningful' way, rather than software which
facilitates interactivity between humans (i.e. communications or
collaborative learning software). While interactivity is not essential to
educational content, it sure as hell helps, especially when you are dealing
with less experienced learners, say at secondary level. An experienced
learner generates their own interactivity by interrogating an otherwise
passive resource, while with less experienced learners, learner and
expositive resource sit and look at each other in stupefied silence (in my
experience, anyway). Furthermore, interactive objects have the potential to
produce results data which can form the basis for intelligent progression.
On 'who will assemble it?', I agree with Peter Brusilovsky that there are
essentially two routes: a hierarchical approach in which an authored
sequence object sits above the individual learning objects; and the
object-oriented or AI approach in which the objects sort things out amongst
themselves, most obviously by using pre-requisite tags which refer to some
kind of external assessment framework. I think the latter approach is
potentially well suited to the self-organised and self-financed learner
(with a big IF around the quality of the AI); while the former is better
suited for learners in a tutored, institutional context. The route the
learner will follow in the object-oriented approach is less predictable:
this means that the human tutor is marginalised: tutor control is strictly
limited; tutor intervention is made more difficult; and if the tutor (or
parent institution) is the one who is going to pay for the use of the
learning objects, the unpredictability of the student's route becomes
problematic.
Embedding interactive resources into a sequence will normally require the
objects to comply to a protocol such as IMS or AICC. This is certainly true
if a tutor wants to retrieve results data. If learning objects are to
maximise their re-useability, they will need to be parameterised; but the
structure of the parameters is unpredicatable and cannot be written into the
protocol. In this (and other) respects, the protocol must be extensible.
I am currently working on a set of authoring tools and management system,
primarily focused on the production and deployment of interactive materials.
Content and management system communicate through an open standard which I
have developed, loosely based on the British OILS protocol. My new standard
has a COM binding, though as IMS matures I intend to give it an IMS/XML
binding as well. The management system supports the pre-authored approach to
sequencing. If anyone is interested in having a look at the standard, drop
me an e-mail and I will send you a copy. A demo of the software will be
available in the summer or early autumn.
Crispin Weston.
---------------------------------------------------------
Forum website: http://ifets.ieee.org/
Forum's contact person: kinshuk@massey.ac.nz
Info on Join/Leave List: http://ifets.ieee.org/maillist.html
---------------------------------------------------------
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a24 : Tue 22 Feb 2000 - 21:57:25 MET