More than Personal
Stephen Downes, of Online Learning Daily writes an editorial for After 5 titled More than Personal: The Impact of Weblogs. For the most part it’s a really dead-on summary of weblogging development. However, this part doesn’t seem accurate:
“Blogs form an ideal medium for the distribution of professional development and other learning resources. Some initiatives have already started as places such as Maricopa College and the University of Calgary are experimenting with the use of RSS to distribute learning objects and learning object metadata.”
This seems like a leap. Weblogs don’t equal RSS, and neither of his examples, MLX nor CAREO, are weblogs. Nor are, for the most part, the MLX and CAREO objects being presented to students through weblogs. Curious. I suppose that technically one could syndicate their own learning objects from their weblog (or other kind of repository) and the RSS feed (e.g. the metadata) could be collected in a separate metadata repository. This is what DLORN does, as I understand it. Is that what he’s thinking?
As a bit of a sidenote, I have to admit that I’m getting really bored with the “everything is a weblog and weblogs are everything” mentality. Not accusing Downes of that here (although I think he’s teetering on the brink), but I think the hype surrounding weblogs as a panacea to … well, everything, is really beginning to miss the target. (Note to self: write more about that at some point.)
[Note: once again MT's draft feature bites me in the ass. The timestamp on this post has been updated to note when it was actually posted, not when it was drafted.]
You’re right. I should have said RSS, not blogs. But that said, I use my newsletter (now sometimes called a blog) as a learning tool. So I’m not completely over the brink. But I do have some explaining to do.
I’m seeing RSS not as a weblog-specific technology, but as a good way for separate bits of software to share data (meta or otherwise).
I’ve got a demo Blackboard course that uses the RSS feeds from CAREO to get “live” lists of relevant learning objects integrated into a course. That’s just one (very simple) way to use the RSS feeds… We’ve also got a separate portal system that is doing a good chunk of its integration with CAREO via RSS feeds into its native interface. Works like a charm.
I’m not sure weblogs are an appropriate place to _host_ learning objects, but they are a handy place to _discuss_ them – Both CAREO and MLX respond to trackback pings from weblogs (or, potentially, any other software that implements trackbacks).