Freakout Party Zone in Effect, and the word is out on a CMS Paper

Well, as usual, Scott has beat me to the punch on a new resource. Normally, there’s no great shame in that, but in this case it’s a bit embarrassing.

First off, my colleague (OK, she’s my boss), UBC’s Director of the Office of Learning Technology Michelle Lamberson has been weblogging for a while now, and she’s really starting to kick some ass. (Unlike me, who’s now really starting to kiss some ass.) I set her up with Michelle’s Online Learning Freakout Party Zone via our Movable Type instance on the CAREO server… expecting she would get a little chuckle out of the name and quickly change it. I guess the handle has begun to grow on her…

It’s groovy to know that I have a boss who not only “gets” weblogs, but who has quickly become a nifty blogger herownself… her output humbles me. Our office is discussing various collaborative and integrated personal weblogs as a means to facilliate our communication, which obviously has me squirming with delighted anticipation. I hope we can make it work.

She links to a PDF (1.1 MB) preview of a book entitled Learning Objects: Contexts and Connections. It’s the culmination of a great working event, “Building and Assessing Shareable Content” held last winter by the OLN Institute at Ohio State. The paper Michelle and I wrote (truth in attribution, she is generous to give me equal billing… she did most of the heavy lifting) “Course Management Systems: Trapped Content Silos or Sharing Platforms?” (p.57), was a learning experience for me… It really brought home that, for better or worse, our existing educational technology communities have evolved in concert with the features and requirements of CMS’s, and it’s vital to keep that in mind when planning new projects. It was also gratifying to learn how the new generation of systems are far more supportive of sharable content strategies than I had previously understood.

Many thanks to Catie Gynn and everybody else at OSU for a tremendous event, and the dogged follow-through with the book. The published result looks excellent, and I’m honoured to have taken a modest part in its creation. The contents:

* “The Challenges of Collaborative Knowledge”, James A. Anderson