First assignment: gather together 15-20 digital objects. These will serve as the working collection for the repository systems we create in the coming weeks.
I immediately thought of a collection of learning objects. Learning objects are broadly defined as “any digital resource that can be reused to mediate learning.” (Wiley and Edwards, 2002) LOs are the big project my Provost is focusing on this semester, and I’ve been appointed to a committee to investigate what it would take to create a repository and to encourage faculty to begin creating VLOs for their distance learning courses. So collecting 15-20 learning objects to experiment with sounded great. In STEM topics—even more perfect!
Except…..
I spent a good portion of Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday trying to capture some objects. There are great repositories—Merlot, Wisc-Online, NSDL, Orange Grove, EcoLearnIt, etc. But Merlot and NSDL are decentralized (they point to objects rather than host them), Wisc asks that you link to their website instead of downloading items, and most of the other repositories did not have objects that I could easily download and use. (I have an entire folder full of zipped files—how do you put them in a repository?) I think I need a lot more technical skill (which I hope to get during this class.) I may be undertaking more than I can handle, but I would like to give this a try.
Tonight I came across some educational sites that were a little more promising. I have downloaded several .swf files, which I hope will work within the repositories we create. Although my initial attempt has been to try to find interactive flash files, as I hone the collection, I plan to include images, documents and other audio/visual formats.
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
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