Present is Prologue

Tag: MERLOT

ITOE: History of Open Education
Update: If I had watched the class lecture video before writing this, I would have known exactly what role open source played in early thinking about open educational resources. My bad.

This is the first assignment post for the Introduction to Open Education (ITOE) class that I’m sitting in on. I’m tagging all assignment posts with “ITOE”. The assignment is as follows:
Carefully review at least 50 pages of historical information on the open education movement. Write a brief summary post on the history of the movement.
- Giving Knowledge for Free: The Emergence of Open Educational Resources (OECD, 147 pages)
- Open Educational Resources- Opportunities and Challenges for Higher Education (JISC CETIS, 34 pages)
- Open Educational Practices and Resources: OLCOS Roadmap 2012 (OLCOS, 149 pages)
- A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges, and New Opportunities (Atkins, Brown, and Hammond, 80 pages)
- JISC Good Intentions Final Report (JISC, 48 pages)
- OER Handbook for Educators (a printed version is also available; 284 pages)
(more…)
January 10, 2009
Learning Objects and Stutter Points

A while back I had the opportunity to hear Kevin Harrigan speak about CLOE, an Ontario-based feeder repository system for MERLOT. The group in attendance had just finished a quick rehash of the old and not terribly illuminating “what is a learning object” debate. Kevin (and CLOE) have a refreshing take on the whole mess.

CLOE focuses not so much on defining learning objects as on defining learning objectives. As Kevin put it, every discipline has certain “stutter points”–certain topical areas where students tend to get stuck. In evolutionary biology, for example, students often hold onto Lamarckian ideas (e.g., the giraffe has a long neck because its ancestor stretched to reach leaves in the high trees) long after they have learned the abstract concept of natural selection. Learning objects are simply educational tools that are created to address those particular stutter points. A learning object is a thingie designed to meet a learning objective.

To my mind, this is a crisp and clean way of describing learning objects so that they are obviously useful to faculty members.

Sweet.

May 30, 2005
Ethnoclassification, Pattern Languages, and MERLOT

Something clicked for me when I saw the reference on elearningpost to Peter Merholtz’s piece on the bag of keywords approach. The word Maish highlighted was “ethnoclassification.” This made me think of how you could unearth pattern languages in a learning object repository like MERLOT, MLX, or Pachyderm. (more…)

October 21, 2004