elearning2.0

Looking over our referrer logs for the KNowNet site, I noticed the other day that we still get hits from people searching for the Skills Review program. My apologies to those who may have sought without finding: you can try out an online version of Skills Review on our old website (you cannot save your answers in this version, so should print the reports before closing the browser window). We have also converted the Skills review application into a Plone content type so that it can be shared as a saved-answer application, but have never released this as a finished product. Contact me (at my i-name =Mike.Malloch) if you want to know more about the Plone version.

I've spoken with Alan Brown, who created the wonderful questions-set for Skills Review, and he's agreed to participate in writing a 'review of the review', which will be appearing in various blogs over the next few weeks ( any new content will be linked-to from this weblog entry as it is posted, so watch this space ). I hope that we can develop a plan for taking Skills Review on to the next stage.

In the years since Skills Review was created there has been a growing 'buzz' about personal-development-planning (pdp) tools and - especially in the past year or so - e-Portfolios for developing and sharing personal development plans and skills profiles. Skills Review was a small but very good example of a pdp tool, and deserves to be remembered, learned from and built upon. KnowNet has many plans for extending knotes to help people to create, maintain and share e-Portfolios and social-software 'presences'; I hope that personal skills reflection and planning applications like Skills Review will fit nicely into that upcoming work.

The Skills Review Program was originally developed as a skills self-assessment tool for employees in small businesses, based on questionnaire content development by Alan Brown of the University of Warwick. KnowNet collaborated with Alan and the University of East London in 2001 to produce an online version which proved popular and usable. Alan's questions were so compelling that we could not get people away fromn the application once they had started it! Below are a few screenshots:

See the extended text for this entry (ie view the full entry) for more screenshots and content about Skills Review.

A little over a year ago, I proposed some work towards a middleware and services architecture which we provisionally called moomie and knase. This was meant to be part of a collaboration within the e-compete european project, which recently ended, but for various reasons the practical collaboration never really took off.

This was very disappointing, since the proposed work was - I still think - very good, and potentially quite important. It's about time we at least documented the outlines of that proposed work, and that is what this weblog entry is for. I've made a Flickr slideshow from my presentation to the ecompete partners, and also attach a printable pdf version:

In a nutshell, moomie is a proposed layer to broker object-to-object messaging in a lightweight, easy to implement way, and knase is a proposed set of APIs for requesting and delivering services and tools to complement moomie-aware applications. We intended to do initial experiments towards moomie object messaging in FlashCOM technologies, applying lessons learned there to other web-application clientside platforms such as JAVA and browser-based javascript/DOM. A major initial application of moomie was to have been multiple-instance and multiple-view support for simulations. We planned to experiment with two Knase services: an event-aware graphical chat tool and a 'knowledge-snippet' repository.

Neither moomie nor knase was a completely new idea; for instance in the early days of the IMS Project, middleware for multi-user JAVA applets was seriously proposed. What we considered new were the advances in other new technologies, such as the flashCOM server and standards-savvy web browsers, which might provide a way to creating limited middleware support for more interactive elearning activities in an extremely lightweight and incremental manner. Since we made our proposal, service-oriented architectures for elearning have become quite a buzz, and lightweight standards have also started to gain awareness and credibility. Similarly, there has been a growing understanding of the need for more engaging and interactive web-based learning activities. I have a hunch that the moomie / knase proposal would be very timely if we had the time to make it. :o)

The presentation (see links above) explains our motivation, rationale and planned approach in more detail than I can provide in this weblog entry; please refer to it for more information.

I will try to get back to this issue soon, and write a more substantial explanation of the proposal here sometime in July. We've been very busy over the past year working on knotes and other enhancements to Plone; now that we've made some real progress on those fronts I would dearly love to kick off some practical work on the middleware and services we proposed last year.

Technorati Tags: moomie, knase