Christine Horgan

Sylvia:

Most participants to SCoPE seem to be Canadian. We're never very good at tooting our own horn, so perhaps this exercise provides us with an opportunity to see the value in the skills, knowledge, experience we have within Canada.

Perhaps the emphasis could be directed to home-grown materials.

having said that, I see no reason to exclude artifacts from other cultures. How about a Canadian museum with "other" collections?

Chris

Sylvia:

One item to add to the virtual museum list:

- users have to be able to easily/quickly locate the resource.

Sylvia, your question about quality is particularly relevant to me right now because I'm helping pull together an informal learning objects repository (LOR). As this is a small, informal (and unofficial) repository, there's no fancy design or database. Right now, to encourage instructors to participate and contribute material, there's no quality control/selection criteria. However, I anticipate that before too long we'll be looking at having to impose some sort of quality control on the objects.

So, I'm hoping to be the beneficiary of this particular conversation.

As I have been giving some thought to quality control, and in case my musing are of any use to this conversation, ......

• Would some sort of self-assessment check list work? 

Items might include check boxes for

• copyright clearance,
• software used,
• identification of the resource,
• brief explanation of the items value

• My next suggestion would be incredibly time consuming, but validation of an object might come from some sort of peer/juried review.

Cheers, Chris

Sylvia:

Two recent emails seem to be leading us in a similar direction...and perhaps becasue I have my curriculum hat on so firmly today....I wonder if we should be starting from the end and working backwards on this project.

• What's the final outcome?
• Who is the target audience?
• how will we assess whether or not we have met the outcome?
• how will we assess whether or not we have met audience needs?

I think when the fundamentals are determined, we can then determine how best to knock down the box.

Cheers, Chris

hello:

Sylvia R's comment: "I've been a proponent of open content / open learning for a long time now. I'd like to hear what other educators think of collaborative development of learning materials, sharing of content, quality of product... I'd also like to have a dialogue with anyone who has been actively producing, sharing or teaching in this environment."

In Alberta, eCampusAlberta (eCA) is probably the best model of province-wide sharing.

Just a guess....outside of eCA, I'll bet there's not a lot of formal sharing between institutions (or even between deaprtments in the same institution).

Such a shame.

Chris

hello:

I was delighted to see Richard's post.

As I've been out of the country (Canada) for a couple of weeks, I'm just catching up on the tail end of one SCoPE conference and the start of another, and so the emails are often out of context. However, as I was reading through the various posting around those educators who have influenced the direction of education and technology, I found myself thinking about the "little" names....the ones that might not be known outside of their own institutions or their own communities (many of which will not be "main stream" communities).

As I'm still catching up on all my email, I have no names to offer right now, but as we are building up a list of influential experts, I do hope there's a place to capture the influence of the less-well-known.

Thanks, Chris Horgan (SAIT Polytechnic)