(via OL Daily) In my Manila workshops this week we spent quite a bit of time on gems, something that hadn’t really sparked too much interest past the normal nodding of heads in the past. But this week for some reason, gems were big. (For the unManila initiated, gems are what Manila calls files like documents or .pdfs or PowerPoint presentations that you can upload to the server and then link to.) One of the questions went something like “so if I post my presentation as a gem, my colleagues can get it and use it too?” It had LOR written all over it. That’s one of the reasons I found this article interesting, especially this quote:
Blogs, and RSS in particular, exhibit a feature which is critical to future development of distributed systems, i.e. the ability to provide a unique address for an information or learning object…the discrete addressability of information objects.
I’d never really thought of it that way, but when you consider how easy it is now to upload and point to basically any file type, the potential for group archiving of lessons and best practices really is very easy. And then if you Furl it and send out an RSS feed to a site that collects similar feeds from all over… Oy…another thing to add to my list.
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