miscellaneous tasks

There have been a number of tasks that have been piling up that are unrelated to the actual design and creation of the Learning Objects. I have a little bit of time, so I’m finding a few of the answers now:

1. Is it okay to use Microsoft clipart?
   1. According to the Microsoft copyright site, it looks like it’s fine for me to use clipart for my class and practicum, but it’s unclear if it’s okay for us to use the clipart for LIB100 use. It distinctly says you can’t use clipart for your business or to make a profit, but it doesn’t say academic institutions are able to use it. I think that if we really want to use the games for classes, we might want to take a few hours to design original artwork.
2. What quality assurance standards are there for shared Learning Objects?
   1. The Merlot website has a short list of things that their peer reviewers are supposed to look for. However, they’re pretty general and appear to lack objective standards by which to measure a given Learning Object.
   2. All other sites I found were even less general, though, so I’m not sure there are any community-defined objective standards.

Flash, Learned (at least a little)

Tonight I finished a draft of the narrowing game!  With a little help learning some JavaScript principles from John, I was finally able to get Flash to cooperate enough to make the game work.

It’s not finished by any means, but the elements are in place, and I made my first (baby) program in Flash!

Tomorrow I’ll need to try to see what I can do for the Family Feud game.  I think it will be really hard to get it to interact with text the user inputs, but we’ll have to see once I get started.

On a related note, but not part of the practicum, Kaeley and I are attempting to use an extra credit quiz with our class this semester.  If it goes well, we might substitute well-designed standardized & open-ended quiz questions for some (most?!) of the homework assignments.  Anything to save time on grading (as long as we can still assess learning).  At a minimum, something like this can save the two of us ten hours of work time.  If five sections of LIB100 decided to implement quizzing instead of one assignment, it would save a minimum of 50 hours of time—giving the library back a week and a half of work time.   Anyway, I know it’s not a Learning Object in a traditional sense, but it certainly would have some LO-elements, and may make the class easier and more desirable to teach.  Another thing I’m thinking about in the context of this practicum.