David Davies' Radio Weblog

This piece on learning object contextualization was in part triggered by reading David Wiley's recent paper "Learning objects: difficulties and opportunities" but also because I wanted to get down some of the work we've been doing in this area in our curriculum. The piece is illustrated by examples from our medical undergraduate programme and in particular our VLE.

"One issue that keeps popping up in debates about learning objects is the metadata question; how are educators supposed to make an interoperable description of a learning object that will allow it to be found by others? The Reload elarning tool development project decided to attack that problem before any others, with the first results already appearing."

Check out the RELOAD web site:

http://www.reload.ac.uk/

There's even a Mac OS X installer. Yay!

OK, so anyone else seen this book yet? I picked up a copy at my local bookstore at the weekend. Nothing particulalry new in the book though it's a useful collection of articles so as such it makes a handy reference. The collected articles have a strong UK bias which makes a change. There are 19 chapters under the broad headings:

1. Vision and theoretical perspectives
2. Design perspectives
3. Resource perspectives
4. Strategic perspectives

The book is suported by a website.

http://www.reusing.info/

There's a link to an online debate section hosted by Journal of Interactive Media in Education though the JIME special covering topics in this book isn't available yet.