Hi
A few places are still available
at the CETIS Learning Design event next
Tuesday, 20th May 2008 at the Midland Hotel, Manchester.
A draft agenda plus
further information and a background to the event are now online at http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/LearningdesignMay08
and copied below for reference
Places are filling up quickly so if you would like to attend,
please register soon - You can register for the event online at http://jisc.cetis.ac.uk/events/register.php?id=134
We hope to see you there for what should be an interesting
event!
Thanks
Lisa
Agenda
The meeting will start at 10.30
(registration from 10.00am) and will finish at 4.15pm.
Draft Agenda
Time |
Activity |
10.00 |
Registration (tea/coffee) |
10.30 |
Welcome and overview of the day |
10.35 |
Oleg Liber - Origins of IMS
Learning Design & the conceptual framework, |
11.00 |
Helen Beetham – Overview of
the JISC Design for Learning programme, developments & future directions |
11.30 |
Martin Weller - Role of LD in
‘bridging the gap’; overview of Compendium work at OU plus thoughts on a
‘flickr for learning designs’ |
12.00 |
Mark Barret Baxendale -
Liverpool Hope experience– using LD with tools |
12.30 |
Lunch |
13.30 |
Dai Griffiths, Phil Beauvoir,
Paul Sharples - TenCompetence– background & overview. Demonstration of
latest developments: Recourse work & widget server
|
15.30 |
Panel discussion, reflections
and next steps |
16.15 |
Close |
The development of Virtual Learning
Environments made life very much easier for the teacher, back in the days when
providing a Wiki, a forum and a chat for learners was a challenging task. In
the early years of the present decade, however, many of those working with
technology in education were dissatisfied with the functionality which they
offered. This gave rise to a number of initiatives which are broadly described
as learning design, with a focus on defining activities for learners which went
beyond “read and test”. These included the development of innovative
applications and the inclusion of new features in VLEs, and also the definition
of educational modelling languages, which could be used to describe learning
activities.
One of the criticisms of VLEs,
however, was that while Learning Objects could be exchanged between systems,
the courses themselves could not be exported or imported. The move to a
learning design approach made this problem more severe, and in order to resolve
this in 2003 the IMS Learning Design (IMS LD) specification was published,
building on the Educational Modelling Language developed by the Open University
of the Netherlands. This provided both a model for defining learning
activities, and also a file format in which they could be expressed. Since then
a great deal of work has been done with the specification, and in the wider
area of learning design, much of it funded by JISC or by the European
Commission. Some developments have used IMS LD as a modelling language (such as
Reload and SLeD) while others have produced applications which are informed by
the learning design approach, and in many cases have provided full or partial
interoperability by means of IMS LD (for example LAMS).
On the one hand, in the five years
which have passed since IMS LD was published much has changed in the
technological environment. The role of the VLE is no longer entirely secure.
Teachers and learners may not be impressed by VLEs in a world where many
learners are intensive users of social software, and where much of the
functionality of a VLEs is available for free from Google. At the same time
many now see VLE’s as being monolithic, when compared with the potential for
combining services such as Wikipedia and YouTube using widgets and gadgets. This
has led to the development of many valuable applications, and innovative
learning activities, but many of these have no common underlying conceptual
model. This makes it very hard to compare like with like, and to build on
experience. It has also led to an impression has that IMS LD may no longer be
relevant, making exchange and comparison of learning activities hard or
impossible. On the other hand, work has been continuing on the implementation
of IMS LD systems, much of it being carried out in European Projects. The
increased usability of emerging editors and the ability of runtime environments
to provide flexible services suggest that the specification is better able to
deal with the challenges of emerging environments than has been assumed by
many.
In organising this meeting we believe
that this is a good time to reflect on the past five years of work, and indeed
that it may be watershed for the future of learning design. The presentations
and discussions will provide an update on current developments in learning
design applications, and provide an opportunity to reflect on the shared
conceptual models which underly them, and on the future relevance of IMS LD.
--------------------------------------------------------
Lisa Corley
JISC CETIS (Centre for Educational Technology & Interoperability
Standards)
University of Bolton
Deane Road, Bolton, BL3 5AB
Tel: +44(0)1204 903851
Fax: +44(0)1204 399074
email: [log in to unmask]
Design
for Learning: http://dfl.cetis.ac.uk/
JISC CETIS: http://jisc.cetis.ac.uk
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