I am at the IMS global learning quarterly meeting today discussing, among other things, repositories for e-learning. Brian Nielsen, Project Manager for Faculty Initiatives in Academic & Research Technologies, Northwestern University is on the stage.
"A technology may be limited not by its characteristics but by a lack of vision on how it may be used in particular contexts" -Brian Nielsen
While not what Brian's intent, I think this explains my stumbling block to working up huge amounts of enthusiasm around learning repositories. I lack a vision of how it will be used.
These repositories are social spaces, but are they being designed with lessons learned from existing social repositories (e.g. flickr, youtube)? Is a participation around these educational resources so small, that various social network benefits don't exist? Is that the problem we are really trying to solve: No link economy, No meaningful (due to small amount of participation) social ratings? Are we trying to make up for this with mountains of metadata? From the institution POV it makes sense. Does it make sense from the POV of the individual instructor?
At Northwestern they use a system called Xythos that provides file sharing with fine grained access controls, versioning, and logging. On the surface, it looks similar to PSU's PASS, except it seems to be used more sharing rather than general purpose storage. Xythos works with blackboard - trust between Xythos and Blackboard with custom plugin they built call File Bridge allows students in class to see certain files instructor placed in Xythos. You can't search across Xythos.
One interesting tidbit is that Northwestern is looking at integrating their student's google services with blackboard with some custom code the way they did with Xythos.
"A technology may be limited not by its characteristics but by a lack of vision on how it may be used in particular contexts" -Brian Nielsen
While not what Brian's intent, I think this explains my stumbling block to working up huge amounts of enthusiasm around learning repositories. I lack a vision of how it will be used.
These repositories are social spaces, but are they being designed with lessons learned from existing social repositories (e.g. flickr, youtube)? Is a participation around these educational resources so small, that various social network benefits don't exist? Is that the problem we are really trying to solve: No link economy, No meaningful (due to small amount of participation) social ratings? Are we trying to make up for this with mountains of metadata? From the institution POV it makes sense. Does it make sense from the POV of the individual instructor?
At Northwestern they use a system called Xythos that provides file sharing with fine grained access controls, versioning, and logging. On the surface, it looks similar to PSU's PASS, except it seems to be used more sharing rather than general purpose storage. Xythos works with blackboard - trust between Xythos and Blackboard with custom plugin they built call File Bridge allows students in class to see certain files instructor placed in Xythos. You can't search across Xythos.
One interesting tidbit is that Northwestern is looking at integrating their student's google services with blackboard with some custom code the way they did with Xythos.
Sounds a bit like LionShare - http://lionshare.psu.edu/
Eric