IMS

In this 12 minute recording, we'll hear from Ed Meachen about work on educational gaming, patents, and more. 

See also:

• An Interview with Kurt Squire
• An Interview with Matthew Stafford

In this 19 minute recording, we'll hear from Michael Sessa, the Executive Director of PESC, the Postsecondary Electronic Standards Council. Listen in as he introduces PESC, progress on the standards front and much more. 

In this 26 minute recording, we'll hear from Rob Abel, CEO of the IMS Global Learning Consortium. Listen in as Marliu Goodyear hosts a discussion about standards, course packs and more.

The latest version of Moodle has gone live. There are a whole swathe of updates and improvements, but the big ones for me are:

Integration of LAMS

It's great to see people and projects working together to answer the needs of a community of practice.

Full native support for the IMS Learning Design specification

Interoperability, interoperability, interoperability.

Blogs

...but then, maybe I'm just a blogging-type person.

Check out the full announcement.

The e-portfolio community would agree that reflection is a key part of learning, and by association, a key activity for owners of e-portfolios. The IMS e-portfolio specification includes a special <reflexion> element, designed to highlight this and separate it from other e-portfolio elements. But the distinction between reflexion and other e-portfolio elements in the IMS spec (notably, <assertion>) remains unclear, and this has the potential to affect the way that we understand and interpret identity, ownership, and activity in relation to e-portfolios. Pondering this, Scott Wilson asks:


Good question. The relevant bit of the IMS ePortfolio Best Practice Guide seems to be 3.1.7: Using Core Data Structures: Assertion / Reflexion. To the authors' credit, they've had a stab at defining reflection, but I find their definition insufficient because it raises questions similar to Scott's. The wording in 3.1.7 seems to me to mirror some slightly fuzzy thinking about the nature and role of reflection in e-portfolios. And the actual example of reflexion (XML format) given is alarmingly simplistic: