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I completely forgot about the 2 Amigos at Educause! It was originally a “3 Amigos Production”, but that’s a long story. Alan and Brian made the trek to Denver, and it sounded like fun of course!

The presentation wiki is available as well. Links to other stuff are available via Alan’s description of the presentation.

This Rip, mix & feed style of dealing with resources (content, learning objects, whatever) is very cool. Using small pieces loosely joined…

Man, I wish I was able to make the trip to Denver!

I just nuked the Google Adsense stuff from this weblog. I had added it to see how it did with analyzing the content of various pages (along the lines of the bags-of-keywords and content-indexing memes with respect to learning objects and metadata).

The experiment was actually quite interesting and informative. Conclusions:

• It is definitely possible to effectively match content (ads) with other content (weblog posts) based on the bits within that content (and not on keywords or taxonomies applied to the outside of said content).
• The matches between content and ads are often extremely accurate, but lag by a couple of days as Google updates indexes and caches. New posts tend to have a quasi-generic ad for a day or so, and then a “real” ad kicks in
• Readers of this weblog (perhaps/not weblogs in general?) are rather task-oriented folks. They don’t get distracted by ads – they are apparently here to read stuff, and don’t tend to click on ads
• As a result of the previous point, Adsense isn’t a viable revenue source. It wasn’t intended to be – I would have donated any revenue to the Breast Cancer Foundation – but over the past several months, Adsense tracked a grand total of less than $10US. They don’t pay until you hit $100US, so I would have to keep ads running for almost 2 years to see a dime from Adsense. The Adsense EULA prevents me from publishing specific details on success rates (CPM, etc..) but they were substantially less than stellar.

By the way, the conclusion of this experiment was triggered by the IT Conversations: The Future of Online Advertising (at Gnomedex 4.0) session. They got talking about “monetizing content from weblogs” and adding ads to rss feeds. It left such a bad taste in my mouth that I couldn’t continue with Adsense. The talk was quite interesting (with folks from Google, Amazon, etc… talking about what they do and where they are going), but a wee bit scary.

Scott Leslie just pointed me to a Erik Duval’s weblog which points to a couple of presentations from the Dublin Core 2004 Conference in Shanghai.

I'd missed these links when Erik first posted them (the "DC2004" title didn’t grab me – doh!) but man, are they great presentations (well, the .ppt files are great anyway – I can only assume the presentations were better!)

They are basically talking about the changing role of metadata – how the html entry form is dead/useless for this. How multiple simultaneous metadata descriptions of resources are encouraged. Using multiple metadata schemas (LOM, MPEG, DC, whatever), as part of an active workflow rather than an ordained-from-above authoritative approach. About learning from cool new tools like Flickr, del.icio.us, gmail, etc…

It is excellent to see some high profile presentations on this – it’s exactly where the learning object world needs to head (I’ve posted some thoughts on that myself).

When repositories (and metadata) fade into the background as infrastructure, and workflows and communities form to facilitate the creation, description, and sharing of the resources via said infrastructure, we will start to see some really fundamental shifts…

The basic theory is that the conventional “librarian” approach is flawed for a few reasons:

• it won’t scale – limited number of librarians
• too expensive – authoritative metadata is expensive to generate
• too restrictive – shouldn’t have to hire a team of librarians in order to share a free resource
• too inflexible – what if something doesn’t fit in the LOM? Can I use EXIF instead? why isn’t the content itself used/indexed? Can I describe something several times/ways for different purposes? In the Librarian world, someone “owns” the metadata – I can’t change or add to it. I need to be able to do that.

Some of the stuff King has been working on for APOLLO over the last year will actually make this stuff possible for us, which is also amazing…

After a meeting we had on Tuesday, where I demoed Alan’s Ocotillo “control panel”, I decided I needed to reinstall feed2js on our server so we could do something similar for a project.

Last time I installed it, I made it freely available for anyone, and it wound up running news feeds for a German dating service, and a gun club, and several other questionable (and definitely non-academic, and certainly non-UofC) uses. These users were hammering our server, using resources that are needed for “official” purposes.

This time, I’ve restricted access to the script itself to machines on the U of C domain. Pages generated using the feed will be visible anywhere, but only UofCians can use the script directly.

If you’re on the U of C network, head on over to Feed2JS JavaScript RSS Feed Generator and help yourself. If you’re not on the U of C network, please download a copy for yourself.

Great. The National Post has an article suggesting the iTMS will open in Canada on November 28th (I’d link to them for posterity, but someone needs to hit the National Post with a cluestick – their website is useless to me if I have to be a paid subscriber of their dead-tree version to read stuff on it).

I’m so totally hooked on ITConversations, and I’m a little nervous about what will happen to my credit rating if it becomes easy for me to get quality audiobooks for the iPod…

Josh, King and I are continuing work on the Pachyderm Authoring Application. We just got a distance collaboration setup going that works really well. We use VNC to share a computer (my TiBook), iChatAV for an open audio channel, and Breeze Live for a shared whiteboard. This is working almost as well as when Josh flew up to Calgary for a week. I think we’ll be able to get much more done this way. And it’s more fun, too…

Pictured here are my trusty TiBook (with shared VNC session for XCode and WOBuilder), the monitor connected to my Power Mac (with iChatAV and Breeze Live Whiteboard), an iMac used for supporting surfingresearch, the iSight camera used for my audio/video feed, my 15-year-old Sony speakers for blasting Josh’s voice down the halls, and my iPod (just sitting there, begging to play some background music). Also, lots of really cute photos of Evan…

Alan Levine just created a real, bonafide learning object using Flickr.

Alan’s description of the resource, and the process, and the learning object itself.

I’ll preface this by saying this is an off-the-top-of-my-head post. I’ve been thinking about this off and on for some time now, but thought I should dump a snapshot into the online brain for safe keeping.

I conceive of learning objects as being analogous to molecular compounds. They are composed of atomic units (assets, or elements), and can be used to perform a highly specific role in the compound state (learning object), or broken down into the atomic/elemental state to be used as raw materials for a new compound (learning object).

Describing learning objects as words in a sentence oversimplifies the atomic bits (images, text, audio) as being interchangeable. It de-emphasizes context, and the value of strategically combining assets/elements to produce more elaborate constructs. It makes for nice examples, because lots of people use words and sentences, but I don’t know that it captures the real value of the concept of learning objects (if there is any).

Words and sentences also imply linear order. You read from left to right (or up and down, or right to left, depending on language), but there isn’t really branching or interactivity. The conclusion of a sentence does not depend on the interaction of the previous words, as much as on a predetermined sequence of concepts.

Yes, a word can be used in a different sentence, but the different context colours the interpretation of that word such that it may have a slightly different meaning. That’s great for a word that is just a collection of letters, but if a word is a video (or animation, or website, or whatnot), the different context may not have any meaning. We need to be able to deconstruct the learning object and build it back up to take advantage of the new context, in order for it to have the proper meaning (if we keep following this sentence analogy).

This is where I see the next generation of “learning object repository” applications being applied – in managing both the atomic/elemental assets, as well as providing tools to facilitate the construction and deconstruction of more complex compound constructions. This is where both APOLLO and Pachyderm are heading (although neither fully addresses deconstruction yet).

The strategic and intelligent construction of these compound learning objects could also be done along the lines of Michael Feldstein’s learning experience objects.

The molecular analogy can be extended ad infinitum – loosely bound tools acting as enzymes to catalyze reactions that build or break down molecules, etc…

Bunch-o-links:

• David Wiley’s “Learning Atoms and Learning Crystals” paper (written in 1999 – he’s been waay ahead of the curve on this one…)
• Michael Feldstein: Re-usable Learning Content Objects or Re-Usable Learning Experience Objects
• Stephen Downes’ response to that article
• Michael Feldstein’s Learning Objects Aren’t Legos (part 1, part 2)
• Michael Feldstein: Pattern Languages as Human Languages
• Ulises Ali Mejias’ Learning Molecules white paper (which mentions a patent… wtf? going to have to check this out… (Thanks to Brian for the link – hadn’t seen this before)

I’m re-posting this here to force me to deal with it more productively. Jon Udell totally nailed what’s wrong with deeply structured taxonomies, and the different bags-of-keywords approach successfully employed by Flickr and del.icio.us.

What needs to be done is to show how the bags-of-keywords approach could be employed in such a way as to allow the librarians of the world to relax (i.e., can it provide an efficient way of navigating a large-scale repository or repositories, or is it effectively limited to small scale – personal or workgroup level repositories? Gut says it could scale, but there isn’t enough data to get the library geeks to chill.)

InfoWorld: Collaborative knowledge gardening: August 20, 2004: By Jon Udell

Finally taking the time to read James Farmer’s article on incsub: Communication Dynamics: Discussion boards, weblogs and the development of communities of inquiry in online learning environments.

Did a quick skim, and he’s referencing the book “E-Learning in the 21st Century: A framework for research and practice” that was put together by Randy Garrison and Terry Anderson. Randy is the Director of The Learning Commons, while Terry is up at Athabasca University, and was involved with the development of CAREO.

Small world

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