Category Archives: educational content

Shareability

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I’ve just been talking to colleagues about sharing learning resources and I suggested that we could try to describe what attributes make a resource more easily shared. I’ve been using the set listed below in discussions relating to several projects I’ve been involved with over the last two or three years, but I don’t think I’ve ever put them down clearly on their own rather than embedded in some presentation on a specific project. Mostly they were first suggested by Charles Duncan at the 2005 Eduserv Symposium, but the first two are my own addition (Charles probably thought them to obvious to mention).

So here for clarity and ease of reference (but certainly not novelty) are six attributes of a resource which I suggest will make it more likely to be shared:
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VUE

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I’ve been known to make a fair amount of use of computer based concept and mind mapping tools to help me organize information or get my head around a tricky problem (I find linear thinking difficult). So I was pleased to be reminded of VUE, the Visual Understanding Environment from Tufts University, by an email announcing the official release of VUE 2. I remember VUE from a few years back as a way of creating a sort of concept map user interface for repositories. VUE 2 has that, with interfaces to fedora, Flickr, JSTOR, Wikipedia, but the real emphasis is rightly on its potential as an Understanding Environment: “VUE provides a flexible visual environment for structuring, presenting, and sharing digital information.” New in version 2 is support for predefined ontologies, the website says “VUE also provide tools to apply semantic meaning to the maps, by way of ontologies and metadata schemas.” So I guess VUE is also very relevant to the discussions we have been having at CETIS since the semantic technologies for teaching and learning session at last November’s conference.

Update: one of the outcomes of some the discussions I mention above has just been released, a JISC ITT for a study on the potential of semantic technologies for learning and teaching.