Merlot session notes from the 2:30 session on Learning Communities.
- Communities in Merlot
- go to "communities" tab --> Teaching_and_technology
- still a little rough, so it's ok that stuff is hard to find.
- adding resources to support faculty
- Patricia McGee
- LOs require standards, collaboration and cooperation
- www.educause.edu/nlii
- NLII - National Learning Infrastructure Initiative
- LOVCOP - Learning Objects Virtual Community of Practice
- Learning Objects Survey - developers, repositories, users
- what are people actually doing, needing?
- "What we want to know"
- Fall focus session on Learning Objects (at Columbus Ohio)
- http://www.educause.edu/nlii/meetings/nlii034/
- Discussion
- Should we really be focussing on Learning Objects?
- If everything is working right, nobody will even know they're dealing with LOs
- students will just get the right bits of stuff in place
- teachers will just find the right resources
- content producers will just integrate it into their workflow
- If everything is working right, nobody will even know they're dealing with LOs
- Need to have concrete, real-world examples of LOs being actually USED in practice
- by students, instructors, etc...
- how to transfer comfort level with software like gaming into LO-related tech?
- Should we really be focussing on Learning Objects?
- Building Learning Communities through Learning Object Development
- CLOE @ Queen's University
- def: a learning community consists of individuals who are working towards the primary goal of building knowledge.
- presentation will be available on the Merlot website
- community is created when
- participate in common practices
- depend on one another
- make decisions together
- identify themselves as part of something larger than the sum of their individual relationships
- ...
- CLOE = 17 universities across Ontario
- members develop and reuse learning objects
- all los are developed in a collaborative approach
- similar to an inter-library loan system
- Teams include Instructional Developer, Tech support, and 3 senior undergrad students
- Queens has a Learning Objects course in Computer Science! What a great idea!
- Examined existing LOs - pillaged the Merlot database
- co-developed 2 learning objects (doing 4 more this summer)
- have found the learning community to be a sustainable model for LO development
- Documentation is part of the community
- http://www.queensu.ca/cloe
- has learning communities databsae (text and graphic search)