On buiding a meta-portal for distributed Geography Learning Objects (Completed)
Chang Chew Hung (PI), Lim Ee Peng (PI), Kalyani Chatterjea, Dion Goh Hoe Lian and Theng Yin Leng
Email: chewhung.chang@nie.edu.sg
The World Wide Web today provides users access to extremely large number of web sites many of which contain learning objects of high education values (Sumner, Marlino, 2004). Web pages may be designed such that various tools of the web may be used to complete a learning task. These web pages may contain a set of instructions that will lead students in a step-by-step manner in completing the task or they can be completely open-ended in that only the learning task is given. As the web also serves as a global network of servers for user communities to create and share learning objects, these resources may be organized in a manner which allow the users to take control of their choice of resources, choosing ways of representing and using the resources, creating new resources and even developing their own learning strategies. Learning objects here refer to carefully edited and organized text, HTML and other multimedia objects that could be used directly or indirectly in the learning process. For example, web pages and image files at a website documenting environmental issues related to water conservation are some kind of learning objects. In this project, we propose to develop a meta-portal for harnessing distributed Geography learning objects and providing the essential tools to support problem-based learning. This research extends our current research in G-Portal (Liu, et al., 2003, Liu, et al., 2004) The research tasks include analyzing the content of those Geography related educational websites, constructing a community-driven review system for creating metadata and managing them, developing a object sharing mechanism to access remote learning object repositories making it possible to conduct advanced search and visualization over the distributed learning objects, and enabling the transduction of these educational content into students’ personalized project resources.
To conduct this research, we first need to tap on the metadata resources and domain knowledge of educational websites previously constructed by various Geography communities. Examples of such metadata repositories include DLESE (https://www.dlese.org) and ADEPT (https://piru.alexandria.ucsb.edu/) (Champeny, et al. 2004). Based on these metadata, we would like to analyze and organize the websites’ content further and make them more searchable and viewable. Finally, these advanced search and visualization functions can be integrated with the pedagogical practices of Geography education.
Source of funding: CRPP