Paralelismo entre PLE y OpenOffice 3

Algunas características de OpenOffice 3:

• podremos editar wikis desde el propio programa y blogs en WordPress y Movable Type; todas las aplicaciones podrán grabar ficheros “duales”, que pueden verse como un PDF o editarse como un documento; y dispondremos de un módulo de informes, que se podrán generar a partir de los datos almacenados en Base.

• una aplicación integrará el correo electrónico, calendario, gestión de tareas y conectividad con servidores externos como aquellos que soporten iCal, Google Calendar o servidores CalDAV.

• al estilo de Firefox, OpenOffice.org 3 también recibirá extensiones, con las que se podrán aumentar las funcionalidades del programa. Entre algunas de las que ya existen encontramos integración con Google Docs, control de presentaciones a través del móvil o control de versiones de documentos con Subversion.

¿No recuerda un poco a openoffice como pieza central de un entorno hiperconectado, de la misma forma que nuestro editor xhtml es el núcleo en el que editar y crear los contenidos que se difunden desde el PLE?

 

Social interaction for authoring tools

Many of the course authoring environments that are on the market today have their roots in traditional models of instructional design for computer-based training. They are designed to allow production of content primarily for a single-learner, self-paced delivery model where some form of intelligent tutoring is embedded in the design of the courseware.

Elsewhere the predominant mode of course design for online / blended delivery has been the basic content plus test model which translates into presentation of web-based content and then testing with an online quiz to test understanding. Examples of this basic approach abound.

More recently this traditional model of instructional design and delivery has been challenged for social interaction in online environments. More attention has begun to be paid to the sequencing of ‘learning activities’ many of which may involve a collaborative approach and interaction between teacher and learners. These new developments in designing materials for online / blended delivery have been termed ‘learning design’.

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Britain, S. (2005): A review and analysis of content authoring software in relation to eXe

 

Background to content authoring for education

One of the most important and widespread uses of computer technology in education is for the creation and presentation of structured educational content. Before the internet revolution, so called ‘courseware’ would be developed for computer assisted learning (CAL) or computer-based training (CBT) purposes. The courseware would be distributed on CD or over a university network and played on standalone desktop machines. The primary interaction would be between a single learner and the software, in other words student-content interaction. Generally the design of courseware would involve an instructional designer as well as a content specialist, a graphic designer and a programmer. This approach is both expensive and requires a range of skilled personnel.

With the advent of the WWW and the use of the internet in education, HTML became an obvious choice for educational content designers, since HTML content would run anywhere and good-looking pages that combined both text and graphics could be put together with relative ease. Although hand-crafting HTML code was always likely to put many educationalists off creating content this way, the early HTML editors were very simple and the set of tags were small enough for teachers and lecturers to put their own pages of content together and present them on a website or in one of the emerging LMS environments.

By 2000 the variety of possibilities for presentation of material had become both richer and more varied with the advent of frames, toolbars, more sophisticated form elements, scripting possibilities using javascript or asp, and animation capability using macromedia Flash. Amongst other things these advances in technology allowed for the possibility of interactive elements most notably in question and test capability. However, the greater range of technology skills required to create web content that made use of these features once again became prohibitive for the majority of teachers in secondary and tertiary education.

Recognising this problem, the major LMS vendors stepped in to the breach by supplying WYSIWIG HTML editors and templates with clean graphical layouts and text editing areas to simplify the task of course creation. Whilst such tools provide a solution to the immediate problem of allowing non-technical academics to create their own online content, it suffers from a number of drawbacks:

• Firstly, the standard web-based model of most LMS systems means that the user is operating on a client/server system with bandwidth restrictions; this is a cumbersome and slow way to edit content where each update requires an HTTP request/response cycle.

• …

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Britain, S. (2005): A review and analysis of content authoring software in relation to eXe