Learning Objects

Genome Island (http://slurl.com/secondlife/Genome/118/145/53) was created to explore the potential for creating an interactive laboratory environment in the 3D virtual world of Second Life. College and university science courses that include a laboratory typically, because of the constraints of class scheduling, separate the lecture and laboratory components into different time blocks, and one of the challenges of college/university science becomes the meaningful integration of the two experiences. Virtual worlds offer the opportunity to eliminate the lecture/lab boundary by immersing students in an environment to be investigated.

Beyond the capabilities that virtual worlds offer us at the moment, it is the possibilities that we can imagine for the future that may be the most compelling. Virtual worlds technology, like the Internet in general, is changing the way we access and experience information and the way we can access and connect with each other.

This ACRL publication serves to instruct and educate readers about topics relevant to library instruction, which are either timely or underdiscussed. The publication's emphasis is on current information packaged in a recognizable, consistent, readable way. It is intended to be a user-friendly entry into reading and keeping up with library instruction research and practice.

Learning via computer games: the very idea can seem surreal or outrageous. Yet for the past five years, a movement has been afoot to examine how digital games work as pedagogical devices. Starting with the publication in 2003 of James Paul Gee’s landmark What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy, faculty, technologists, and librarians have been exploring how we can learn from and also teach within computer games. This column will survey what this movement has discovered.

The Information Literacy Program at Otis College is a collaboration between faculty and librarians that includes multimedia tutorials, learning objects, podcasts, and YouTube videos. This presentation will describe how the program was developed and embedded in courses, demonstrate some of the instructional technologies used, and discuss the assessment processes and results.

Many academic digital collection projects are focused on special collections and college archives. Such projects seek to bring collections "out of the basement" and enable greater access to valuable and specialized research materials. However, undergraduate students and faculty often have very different needs and expectations of these digital materials than experienced researchers or the general public.

What does it take to implement a digital asset management system that not only improves access to collections but also allows faculty to integrate digital materials into their teaching? Teaching with digital collections means collection development that is driven by faculty needs, flexible presentation tools, and web interfaces that help students understand visual resources in context. Reed College’s IT and library will share their experiences in implementing a CONTENTdm-based digital image collection for the classics and humanities.

Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) defines standards for the description and exchange of aggregations of Web resources.  This document provides an introduction and lists the specifications and user guide documents that make up the OAI-ORE standards.

These documents are the result of over a year of effort by a large group of people. OAI now seeks feedback on their contents, as part of our effort to transition these documents to beta and then final production release.

This article presents the structure and theoretical foundations of the Learning Object Review Instrument
(LORI), an evaluation aid available through the E-Learning Research and Assessment Network at
http://www.elera.net. A primary goal of LORI is to balance assessment validity with efficiency of the
evaluation process. The instrument enables learning object users to create reviews consisting of ratings and comments on nine dimensions of quality: content quality, learning goal alignment, feedback and adaptation, motivation, presentation design, interaction usability, accessibility, reusability, and standards compliance. The article presents research and practices relevant to these dimensions and describes how each dimension can be interpreted to evaluate multimedia learning resources.

In a short 10 years, the Internet may not have "changed everything" as was predicted, but it certainly has impacted approaches to learning and learning facilitation. In this talk, Rob Abel, educational researcher and CEO of the IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS GLC), provides some insights on what we may have learned from the past 10 years and what it may mean for the next 10 years of learning technology and learning technology standards. Discussion topics will include IMS GLC's new focus on innovation, adoption, and, most important, learning impact. This talk will draw from the latest IMS GLC research in the satisfaction and use of learning technology in the U.S. higher education segment, indicating trends in digital content and learning platforms, and the most recent Learning Impact Awards.