Friday 24 June 05
Attended the recent Unfold meeting (Communities of Practice for Learning Design) which was very worthwhile. Had some interesting discussions and got to share thoughts and ideas with developers from both LAMS and Moodle. The main things we were discussing was how to make both of these VLEs Learning Design compliant, so they could both import and export LD XML. We found that especially for Moodle, the export to learning design would/should be relatively straightforward, though an import would be harder – due to the fact that Moodle wouldn’t currently cope with the complex activity structures that can be created in LD – so some ‘flattening’ of a deeply nested activity structure might be necessary.
The other problem we discussed for both LAMS and Moodle was how to describe and export the tools and services which are in both of these products, but the LD spec doesn’t allow for. The way we are thinking of working is to create a common description of each of these tools/services (eg forum, noticeboard, voting tool etc) which could then be exported into the LD package as resource file – so this resource file would be an xml file which describes the characteristics of the tool. Theres much to be done here, but I think we’ve got a plan of what needs to be looked at and a way of achieving this now, it will also tie in well with some of the work being done in the OKI/SAKAI projects.
Finally (!), I’ve been asked to present the progress of our 2 learning design projects at the next Unfold meeting which will be in Glasgow in October (more details)
