A Day in the Life of a DLO

  Trevor & Vicki (VLN ePrincipals) attended “A Day in the Life of – Digital Learning Resources” Conference hosted by MOE last week.

Thanks Trevor for sharing your notes with us:

“Due to fog at Timaru I didn't get to Wellington until lunchtime. A mini speech/introduction by Penny Carnaby, Chief Executive and National Librarian made me realise that much of the work on repository systems has already been done by the national library and Tertiary Organisations eg

http://www.natlib.govt.nz/services/get-advice/digital-libraries/introduction-to-digitisation

http://www.oarinz.ac.nz/index.php

We need to ensure that we gain maximum benefit from the $$$ and time that has already been spent by others.

Next was a speech by Yong Kim outlining a Korean Cyber Home Learning System that was a bit like the VLN but several orders of magnitude larger. Unfortunately the funding model was not obvious.

Repository talk by Brent Thomas http://repository.ac.nz/

Intersting talk about DLO metadata. They developed an NZ version of LOM, whereas the National Library use Dublin Core. If schooling uses the dublin core then alignment/merging of DLO's with national initiatives will be trivial (lol).

Wayne Mackintosh. Some people are inspirational, fewer of international importance and even less visionary. Wayne Mackintosh is certainly visionary with his aim of providing free educational resources for the whole world by 2015. The wikieducator project

http://www.wikieducator.org/Main_Page

is still under development but is one that I whole heartedly support.

If we can get teachers and schools to collaborate using wikieducator then this will be a significant gain.

Drinks and nibbles. As ever, the real conversations happened here. I had a long chat with Wayne Mackintosh and Jim Tittsler, sys admin for wikieducator about the work that jim has outlined here:

http://wikieducator.org/User:JimTittsler/Sandbox/OO-WE

One of they key ideas about sharing resources is that of contextualistion for repurposing. I have never found a resource that I didn't want to change in some way. We need to make resources easy to change and develop for local use (contextualisation), so when we develop resources for sharing it is important that we remove reference to /local/ stuff - we decontextualise them. I also think we need more formal policies on copyright and resource creation by teachers and that perhaps the MOE needs to take a lead here.

Summary: great one dayer. I wish you all could have heard Wayne Mackintosh.”