PALO Language Home Page

PALO is a proposal of Educative Modelling Language to describe and design learning content and learning environments at a high level of abstraction. More...

Experts Question SCORM's Pedagogic Value
Scott Wilson's summary of the 'Clarity or Calamity' article. He points out that standards bodies have been working on pedagogical issues for some time. In addition to EML, the PALO language developed in Spain and TeachML (Targeteam) from Germany's University of the Armed Forces both use ontologies to build semantic networks of learning objects. More...

SCORM: Clarity or Calamity?
This article pulls no punches as it lines up some of SCORM's loudest critics and lets the cannons roar. But what is really surprising is that it took so long for this article to see the light of day: I heard Merrill saying much the same thing at NLII last January and Lahanas has been volumous in his Yahoo group. More...

Superarchives Could Hold All Scholarly Output
Useful article looking at alternatives to scholarly publication in journals. The bulk of the article is devoted to what are called superarchives. These are essentially collections of materials hosted by a single university and intended to contain that institution's professors' research output. More...

Top 10 Best Practices for Voice User Interface Design
I absolutely hate those telephone menu systems that take you through three menus, then hang up. And while voice recognition is not mature technology, it holds the best promise of allowing customers more immediate access to information or services. More...

Call for Input on Digital Rights Management
A high powered group attempting to "define the industry standard for a rights language" that would govern many application domains including digital libraries and archives. More...

Getting Administrators up to Speed

The last people to innovate, they say, are the administrators. To judge by the number of administrators I have met over the years who still struggle with email, there is truth to this adage. More...

How to Design Recyclable Learning Objects
Some good points in this cynical look at learning objects. Promoters of the concept need to worry when it is observed, with some justification, that "content is harder to recycle than design." More...

Canadian Students' Access to and Use of Information and Communication Technology
Research on the responses of nearly 30,000 15-year old Canadian students showing that the vast majority of them (88%) have access to a computer at home. Some international comparisons are included in the report and the overall results suggest that universal access is nearly a reality. More...

What's Important in a Learning Content Management System

The most fun part of this otherwise vague article on what to look for in a learning content management system (LCMS) is the list of bad ideas at the end of the article. More...