LeMill blog

At 22.5.2009 it was three years since release of our first working prototype, version 0.3 “Louhi”. To see what fine features we had working or barely working by that, see this milestone report.

I am surprised how much of the essence of LeMill these functionalities captured. Though these features were implemented three years ago, we still have been returning to them, trying to make them more efficient and robust.

The last few days have been about looking back. We’ve been revising an article about LeMill, and that requires comparing LeMill to other learning resource repositories, learning resource editors, learning design editors and such. My initial reaction was that our approach of preferring design and ease of use to learning object and metadata standards has been a good one. When services are built to satisfy some pre-selected standards, the user interface will end up resembling that standard, and as long as abbrevations like IMS-LD, LRE LOM or SCORM are not meaningful to teachers, user experience ends up being quite confusing. It is easier to convert our content to those standards than to convert those standards to good user experience.

However, there are few interesting and positive findings that I’d like to point out: Our ’sister project’ in Calibrate was the Calibrate Portal, which was supposed to be a place where you can find European learning resources coming from ministries of education and publishers. Development of that portal has been continued in MELT-project and the outcome is Learning Resource Exchange for Schools-portal. There is much more Creative Commons content there than used to be, and the use experience is much better than last time I visited.

Another interesting find was Cloudworks, an UK project in alpha state that has took simplification of learning resources even a step further from LeMill. “A place to share, find and discuss learning and teaching ideas and experiences”, so not so far for our goals. All resources there are “Clouds” and groups or collections are “Cloudscapes” and it is up to the users and their tagging strategies to build further structures. Personally, I like how the discussions are linked to Clouds. There are no true collaborative editing of clouds yet, they work more as a conversation starters. Also, some more structure would probably be required for proper multilingual work.