Widgets and IMS Learning Design
CETIS Conference, 2008
Dai Griffiths
The Institute for Educational Cybernetics, The University of Bolton
Way back in 1992
• Hypercard sank
• WWW emerged
• There is balance between interoperability / usability / functionality which is still with us
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IMS-LD and widgets
• Proposes a language which seeks – an improved balance– a better total performance
• It is a model of the wider problem (to the extent that LD is a good model, and the underlying technology is satisfactory)
• Widgets also look at the balance of interoperability and functionality
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TENCompetence
• Wookie server (architecture by Scott Wilson, developed by Paul Sharples)
• Wookie manages the widgets available, and handles the multiple user functionality
• A widget world to be integrated into LD and others
• Can be used for LD, and for others
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Ask not what widgets can do for LD…
• What can LD do for widgets?
• LD provides a way of defining and running flows of tools, to be made available to different sets of learners, in their roles as they relate to particular activities
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Representation of services in LD
• The actual services for use in a learning context (e.g. wiki or forum) are not specified in IMS-LD.
• Only four generic service are available:– Conference– Monitor– Send Mail– Index Search
• What happens when you run the UOL?6
Problems with integrating specific services
• Each new service needs a new adaptor
• Creating the adaptors for a service is hard work
• When the service changes, the adaptors need to be re-written
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Previous approaches (2)
• Integrate the player into a specific Virtual Learning Environment
• The .LRN platform has implemented a player which has access to all the services available in .LRN
• This provides a rich set of services, but is not portable to other platforms.
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Previous approaches (3)
• Independent systems inspired by IMS-LD focused on providing services
• Ambition to export to IMS-LD at a later date
• e.g. – LAMS has a rich set of services, but the IMS-
LD export cannot represent them– “Learning Design Language” provides an
independent specification for services10
Previous approaches (4)
• None of these approaches provides both– a rich set of services – a reasonable degree of portability across
different LD-compliant platforms
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The solution proposed: The Wookie widget server
• In TENCompetence we have developed a widget server (Wookie)
• Supports multi-user widgets
• Uses W3 draft specification
http://www.w3.org/TR/widgets/
• Current widgets include forum, chat, vote
• Built in order to resolve the IMS-LD issue, but can be used independently
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IMS-LD and Widgets is a powerful combination
• A UOL can specify – which widgets to make available– when they should be made available– which users should see them in which
contexts
• You can define a complex reusable flow– Give learners the right tools in context– Provision them simply by assigning a role to a
learner
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A generic solution
• The SCORM integration was a single service
• Wookie integration provides a framework for the provision of services
• Widgets are simple to develop (javascript and HTML)
• The complexity of multiple users is handled on the server side
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Authoring• A Wookie server advertises the widgets
which it offers• The author of a UOL can choose which
widgets to include • a parameter is added to the service element
in an environment widget=<type of widget>• Authoring handled transparently by
TENCompetence authoring tool ReCourse
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Extensible, but also portable
• New widgets can be made, or adapted from existing widgets and imported
• Each server may have different widgets– Default set of widgets provided with Wookie– Administrator can set a particular widget as
default for any widget type– Users can expect to find, for example, a forum
on any runtime system, in the flavour determined by the administrator
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Please make use of Wookie and the IMS-LD toolkit
• Open Source
• Available at http://www.tencompetence.org/ldruntime/
• More widgets to come soon– RSS reader– Wiki– …
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