Many thanks to the fabulous, most-groovy Alan Levine for posting a couple of multimedia extravaganzas of personal interest to me:

1) Connecting LOs with RSS, Trackback and Weblogs: this is a version of a presentation created by Alan, D’Arcy Norman and myself using Macromedia Breeze… so you can hear our narration, and the performances of our stellar cast of actors. The abstract:

Customized Collections of learning objects from multiple repositories can be achieved with simple, existing RSS protocols, creating access to a wider range of objects than a single source. This presentation will demonstrate the approach via a scenerio of two faculty members who create RSS views into the collections from different organizations. Their blogs are connected to the RSS feeds and provide a component of object contextuality that is beyond the meta-data.

Thanks to the New Media Consortium, not only for hosting a fine Online Conference on Learning Objects, but for graciously agreeing to allow Alan to serve it up for public consumption.

2) Alan further demonstrates his wizardry with a piece he developed for the recent NLII Fall Focus Session on LOs. I can’t decide what is cooler: his narrative hook, tipped off by the title Learning Objects: Believe it or Not!, or the nearly unbelievable accounts offered by instructors on their use and reuse of resources to be found in the Maricopa Learning eXchange.

When I first saw this, I could barely believe these interviews weren’t scripted. Here’s your proof of concept. It’s easy to get frustrated by the many challenges presented by introducing learning objects into educational practice. These testimonials show that it’s not a pipe-dream.