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CanadianElearningWorkshop2004

  1. Opening Plenary
    1. Software architecture
    2. Demo!
    3. CanCore
    4. Tom Carey
    5. Savoirnet
    6. Stephen Downes
    7. Mike Mattson
    8. Griff Richards
    9. Q and A section
  2. TILE project
  3. logic
  4. Pan-Canadian E-learning Portal Project
  5. Lunch
  6. Meeting with Marek Hatala and Griff Richards
  7. Afternoon session (2)
    1. C3L
  8. A Pan-Canadian E-learning strategy?
    1. Lois Hawkins
    2. Susan Margles
    3. Michael Kaziel and Harvey Stark
    4. Jillian Dellit
  9. Demos of broadband apps

http://www.canarie.ca/elearning2004/ held in Vancouver, Canada from January 12-13, 2004.

[WWW]Program

I'm currently in attendance and am looking forward to meeting a lot of the attendees. I will be taking notes here.

Opening Plenary

A panel discussion about EduSource.

Software architecture

Gilbert Paquette "(Gilbert Paquette holds a Ph.D. from the Université du Maine (FRANCE) in Artificial Intelligence and Education. Researcher at the Center for Interuniversity Research on Telelearning Applications, (CIRTA-LICEF) he has founded in 1992, Gilbert Paquette holds a Canada research chair in knowledge-based instructional engineering, acts as the Scientific Director of the LORNET Canadian research network and is a professor at Télé-université du Québec in Montreal.)" is talking about use cases.

Actors: Builder, Infoseeker, Designer, Publisher

"Repository-in-the-box" -- there is a Web Portal

As I listen to Paquette talk about the software architecture of EduSource, I think "great, I'd like to try it out and maybe use it -- how can I get my hands on it?"

OpenSource business model is being used.

March 31, 2004 is the day we can come to download the software.

Demo!

[WWW]demo

A commitment to English/French bilingualism.

Repositories being searched:

ECL in action. There is a demo of Explora with Savoirnet

Mention of [WWW]Paul West of the [WWW]Commonwealth of Learning -- what is that?

strange all this rhetoric of about Canadian plans for world conquest.

CanCore

Speaker: Rory McGreal is presently the Associate Vice President, Research at Athabasca University, Canada’s Open University and the 2002 winner of the prestigious Wedemeyer Award for Distance Education practitioner. Previously he was the executive director of TeleEducation New Brunswick, a province-wide distributed distance learning network. His Ph.D. degree (1999) in Computer Technology in Education at Nova Southeastern University’s School for Computer and Information Science was taken at a distance using the Internet. Before that, he was responsible for the expansion of Contact North (a distance education network in Northern Ontario Rory was the founder of the world’s first elearning website now http://teleeducation.nb.ca and one of the world’s first metadata learning object repositories, the TeleCampus (http://telecampus.edu). He is the leader in the development of the CanCore metadata application profile for implementing the IEEE LOM standard.

1-2pm demo on the 23rd floor (Canada Room) of the repository work from Athabasca University.

Tom Carey

talking about need for social infrastructure in addition to the technical infrastructure.

Savoirnet

[WWW]Gilbert Paquette is speaking about [WWW]Savoirnet.

Will look more at SemanticWeb connections.

Stephen Downes

StephenDownes: "My job is to make it more difficult for everyone else at eduSource." -- he claims success.

Hope is that OpenSource will provide important infrastructure for Canadians. Not to be used in isolation. Mentions how Microsoft Office can pull stuff from network (much like what we've been doing in the ScholarsBox).

Need for OpenContent / OpenAccessMovement

Education is not about pushing content -- but thinking and engagement. Hear! Hear!

Mike Mattson

"Only two outstanding issues left with learning objects": 1) Learning and 2) Objects

Griff Richards

Q and A section

There was a question about metadata interoperability. [WWW]Global vs. Community Metadata Standards: Empowering Users for Knowledge Exchange by Hatala and Richards was referenced.

PachydermProject was mentioned in response to use of templates in learning objects -- apparently, there are at least 14 templates being for that project.

TILE project

[WWW]TILE

Presenters: [WWW]Jutta Treviranus and Anastasia Cheetham

Their primary message: "Learning is not an object but a process."

Granularity of object is not key -- but the flexibility! -- would like to get a reference from Jutta T.

the learner makes the connections.

the actual medium is not crucial -- multimedia used properly is good -- but we have rich learning in traditional media (e.g., text)

[WWW]demo

TILE is about tools that responds to learner profile -- emphasis on accessibility.

We're seeing how TILE adjusts the interface depending on the profile that gets uploaded. I wonder whether there are profiles to download from the TILE site.

logic

[WWW]Roger Mundell spent 30 years as an entrepreneur and CEO of technology companies before joining [WWW]Royal Roads University in 1997 to create [WWW]CEDAR, (Centre for Economic development & Applied Research). Driven by the University's unique mandate to be entirely self-funded and even profitable, Cedar quickly established itself as a thriving business and an innovator in the field of online learning technologies. Platforms developed by Cedar have won international and local recognition for innovation and for leading edge adaptation of emerging web technologies.

Talking about [WWW]LOGIC. LOGIC produces Flash.

Product launch: May 2004.

It'll be interesting to see what business model it uses.

Pan-Canadian E-learning Portal Project

Interesting question of the strategy of taking a pan-Canadian strategy in a global economy. Why pan-Canadian? Why not just face the facts of being a player on the world scene?

Lunch

I was pretty brain-dead by after one morning-- so was glad for lunch. Excellent food (many of us were impressed that we actually had sit-down service and not the typical buffet line ups.)

During dessert, we were treated to an entertaining talk by Charles (Chuck) Hamilton, who "is the Manager Learning Technology and Strategy at IBM Canada's Innovation Center ::Vancouver and also supports the IBM world wide Learning Solutions Strategy Team (Xteam). The Centre's Education Solutions Team was established in 1998, with one mission, - to create a world-class education technology competency Centre to serve IBM clients around the world." He spoke about the world of smart homes and asked us what the learning opportunities are in such a world. I think that a lot of us were struggling with the basic implications of living in environments in which everything is a computer on a network -- a bit overwhelming of a thought. All I can say is that the beautiful scene of mountains outside the window reminded me of the very necessary counterpoint of the natural world far away from the networked world. (Can't believe I just wrote that!)

I will mention that it was a lot of fun hanging out with [WWW]Cyprien Lomas and Mike Mattson at lunch.

It was nice to take a short break in my room after lunch. I used to take a "model student" approach to conferences in which I would try to attend every single event but learned quickly that doing so usually burned me out.

Meeting with Marek Hatala and Griff Richards

I've become increasingly intrigued by the work done by the EduSource project, especially the eduSource Communications Language (ECL). I'll definitely be writing more about this topic as I go on. When I get back to Berkeley, it'll be interesting to see how hard it will be to hook up our ScholarsBox (written in PythonLanguage) to the rest of the system via ECL.

The eduSource project strikes me as a great project, something that has made Canada a world leader in e-learning. I hope that the federal funding that has been so instrumental in getting these projects moving will continue. (Excuse the editorial tangent.....)

To do: When I get back to Berkeley, I'll study [WWW]ECL API installation notes.

Afternoon session (2)

It was fun to listen to a set of talks about veterinary colleges. I know that I was resistent to paying much attention to the talks because the subject is pretty far from what I think about on a daily basis -- but it's important for me to realize how much interesting work happens outside of what I think about!!!

C3L

[WWW]Collaborative Content Creation Lab (C3L)

[WWW]OPAS -- focusing on partnerships between universities and industry

A Pan-Canadian E-learning strategy?

[WWW]Question under discussion:

Lois Hawkins

[WWW]Hawkins bio

Pieces of a pan-Canadian e-learning strategy (from Candian ministers of education? perspective)

Some points:

learning supports

Ability to connect to other efforts

Susan Margles

(from Industry Canada)

"Towards an eLearning Strategy: A Federal Perspective"

Must maximize use of "human capital, the single most important asset in a knowledge-driven" economy

Significant challenges

Moving forward

Working cooperatively

Some ares -- joint action is the only way: technical standards, copyright reform, learning object repositories, online credit recognition/transfer

better coordination would be good: R&D/demonstrations, content development, research, access to markets.

Govt initatives

Discussions underway between CMEC and Industry Canda.

Next steps

Michael Kaziel and Harvey Stark

two corporate (big and large) perspectives

mention of [WWW]CeLEA: Canadian eLearning Enterprise Alliance

Harvey: "impossible to amortize the costs solely in Canada"

News: [WWW]Zaq bought [WWW]Cogniscience.

point is that companies need coherent policy from governments.

Another point is that big and small companies need to work together.

Jillian Dellit

Towards an e-learning strategy for Australia

presentation of the Australian educational system....

[WWW]MCEETYA

[WWW]Backing Australia's Ability

Basis for national sharing

Possibly interesting references: Learning in an Online World -- a bunch of links on [WWW]MCEETYA publication list

Demos of broadband apps

[WWW]ABEL presentation description, [WWW]ABEL site

demo: 4 locations: J. Percy Page, Edmonton; Ursula Franklin Academy, Toronto; Senecca, Toronto; Galileo, Calgary

I guess this is to show off the fat pipes of [WWW]CA*net 4. This makes me think that it's time to sort out how these efforts compare to those of [WWW]Internet2

The video seemed jerkier than I expected for a super fat pipe -- was that because the hotel itself is not on the fat pipe and the jerkiness is introduced in getting to us? Also, was this stuff possible only because of the fat pipes? What could have been done with just off-the-shelf consumer grade stuff like the Apple products?

OK -- I wanted to know what [WWW]MusicGrid is....They're playing JsBach -- oh, how sweet. My take: long distance music education/collaboration via the fat pipes.

(They just made the screens smaller -- and the image quality looks better....The audio seems quite good.)

I need to check out and will not be in the afternoon session. Anyone who wants to add notes to the end, go ahead. I'd appreciate your signing the page, however.

Reference on Alberta Supernet in IEEE Spectrum (Jan 2004) (http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/jan04/0104comm1.html) [Cyprien]

Great presentation by Bryan Fair of BCIT on their OLT project on learner profiling for content customization as applied to a health and safety course. Use POOL as a repository. Bryan has promised to put the report back online by the end of the week at [WWW]OLT Project Report [Don Presant who Raymond met at lunch today]