Ariadne Conference (1)

We just started the ARIADNE Conference. Papers are on-line – slides will follow in the coming days.

Katherine Maillet talked about EducaNext: they have added support for communities to their infrastructure. (This seems to be a popular theme these days: didn’t Gerry mention something similar when I last heard him talk about Merlot?) Educanext assumes that providers may want to control usage of their resources. They also developed a “code of behaviour” that members must observe. Quality management is an issue, and a quite thorny one at that: (I wonder about how necessary and useful that is. Can this not be taken care of a posteriori: what if you needed to ask “permission” before you could post on the web?) Users can give quick feedback or more in depth reports on actual use of learning objects.

Eric Leclercq covered experiences moving from LearningSpace to a more open platform: Ganesha. He presented a UML use cases and a data model for their pedagogical approach. (I wonder about how specific that context really is: should we all build UML models for our context?) That was the basis for the modifications they made to Ganesha. In the process, they evolved from 2 to 10MB of PHP source code and so they are moving to a J2EE environment as they are running into code management problems. Currently, they have 4 users.

Kris presented his work on
composite learning objects and automatic generation of metadata. There is a prototype for Microsoft powerpoint slidesets: it tears the documents apart (“Documents must die”) and stores them separately in the Ariadne Knowledge Pool System, with associated, automatically generated metadata. Searches result in a new ppt slideset, that includes all the individual slides that satisfy the search criteria. Among the main issues: avoiding a parts explosion problem, where slides get re-introduced as their new reuse context is submitted to the repository… Maybe some heuristics can be developed to prune the collection of individual pages? Kris mentioned he would make the prototype available to anyone who is interested…