Thomas' Work Space

We discussed file renaming utilities in an earlier post. Here are some more practical tips:

Limitations: While both utilities can accept Windows Search Result sets, drag-drop seems limited to fewer than 256 files at a time (on my Vista 64-bit – but that is not an OS limitation, since MS Expression Encoder can accept a drag-and-drop of all over 3.5k files that need reencoding).

Workaround: both utilities have a folder-select, and Renamer in addition accepts file masks, which can mimic some basic searches:

Bulk Rename Issue: While it allows for “Select from Clipboard” which you can use with the Windows “Copy as Path”/”Send  to Clipboard as Name” feature which works with search result sets. However, I could not get this feature to work (neither with the default “” around the path nor, after removing them manually,  without).

Renamer, Issue: rule, clean up, strip-out-content-of-brackets-does-not-what-it-should:

Renamer-translit-anglicize-foreign-language-diacritics: unfortunately still recommended for technical reasons; Renamer has presets, e.g. German here: TBA

Only one preset can be inserted add a time (overwrites previous) – but you can build your list with copy/paste from/to this text box and persist it to disk to load it later, just like the search rules – an extremely handy feature.

Below you can find a scrollable and searchable list of LRC learning materials in Moodle metacourses. You can filter this LRC Excel Web App using the column header dropdowns.

Languages that do not have their dedicated metacourse are LCTL/independent study and can be found in the LRC metacourse.

Note that the material you are looking for are not necessarily in this list, as there are other containers for language learning materials used on campus, including individual Moodle courses, textbook publisher applications, often based on Quia, like for Hybrid 1st-year Spanish, the and library ereserves.

Larger view here. UNCC-LRC Editors click here. 

First consider using the Library ereserves! However, to help teachers with the management of digital learning materials (text, audio, small video files) in your Moodle courses, to help students with a familiar learning interface (unlike Webdrive), and to relieve IT from having to store files in sparse environments like network shares or to manage duplicate files from many similar Moodle sections/courses across terms, the LRC is introducing Moodle metacourses.

In many Moodle installations, such metacourses – while lacking the advanced features of an LMS-integrated eRepository (software options are still under exploration) -, are commonly used like a shared library, holding teaching materials which a number of courses need access to and which the teacher of these course can link materials from in their respective courses.

You can view both a short list of our LRC Moodle metacourses and a longer list of language learning materials in these resource Moodle courses.

The CTL has arranged for all [your language here, e.g. French] Moodle courses to automatically become “child courses” (don’t get hung up on that terminology!) of the “LRC-[your language here]-Resource” Moodle course (AKA “parent course”) course at the beginning of each term. That means: all teachers and students in [your language here] courses will have access to the learning materials in “LRC-[your language here]-Resource” course. (At the end of the term, all teachers and students will be automatically un-enrolled also).

Please note: Due to technical limitations within Moodle, with you gaining access, the LRC staff loses access to the “LRC-[your language here]-Resource” course. However, if you want to make changes, you can yourself go to the parent course and manage either your child course (dropping) or individual resources in the parent course (hiding – please coordinate with colleagues, especially teachers of other sections).

Please note also: Like any library (or specifically the LRC) is a room, the metacourse is a (virtual) room, meaning: students must (virtually) “walk over there” to see the library resources. You can facilitate this if you link to library resources in the parent course from your regular course, preferably opening them in a new window for easy return to the regular course.

How is included in these helpful hints from a metacourses user: “The only minor problem is that the student navigation might leave them in the metacourse instead of the normal section course. To lessen this effect, I always launch links to the metacourse in a new window. Normally students understand that they need to close the popup window when they are finished with it. There are several advantages to using metacourses in this way. First, it saves having to upload the same materials more than once. I can change a file in the metacourse and know that it is changed in all section courses. Second, it saves storage space. Third, it provides the possibility of developing learning objects or mini courses that can be quickly linked to create a new course. Finally, it would allows several teachers to pick and choose what materials to include in their section courses. One hint, I put all activities (assignments, forums, journals, etc.) in the child course, not in the metacourse. This keeps grading segregated” .

Alternatively, if you do not want to distribute files through the parent course and rather drop your child course from the parent course, self-enrolling in the LRC-CLS-UNCC-Projects (URL sent on request) which as a child course of all metacourses will give you access to download the teaching materials (How? view how to use Moodle File management to zip and download files) and republish them into your Moodle course ((How? view how to upload files into Moodle).

The following LRC Moodle metacourses for teaching materials are available to LCS and ELTI  (including LRC-Resource  with training materials for using language learning technology in and outside of the LRC, as well as for independent study languages).

The naming scheme follows the course abbreviations taught in the departments the LRC supports:

These courses appear in the Training branch of the Moodle-courses tree-menu on the left (for all study programs you teach in):

The metacourse for a language (or field of study)  is accessible to all students studying this language during the term of their study.

This web site collects state-wide learning resources. Contained are also the NC-net (“Network for excellence in teaching”)  submissions: “The purpose of the North Carolina Network for Excellence in Teaching is to share professional development resources statewide. This helps avoid duplication and encourages replication of best practices. The Resource Exchange offers your college the opportunity to showcase and share its best professional development resources and teaching tools.”

NC-LOR is based on TheLearningEdge’s equella, one of the erepository software systems that I have managed learning materials in.

NC-LOR training materials are hosted on WordPress. Of special interest to us should be the Moodle integration: “How to Use the NCLOR with Moodle 1.9.x (4.1): This tutorial should be reviewed by faculty of institutions who use Moodle as their course management system. This tutorial includes topics like: defining LMS integration, deciding what type of learning activities to put in a course, understanding how to use Moodle with the NCLOR, understanding how to update item links and information on learning object creation”. However, UNCC has not implemented NC-LOR integration as of yet:

Even without the Moodle integration, while students can access NC-LOR materials only from within Moodle, as member of the UNC system, you can either browse NC-LOR as a Guest, or ask for a Contributor account, my request had a turnaround of only a few minutes. Once you have a contributor profile, you can subscribe to receiving workflow updates from within your profile:

However, what I would like to see, but cannot find is the capability to subscribe to an RSS-feed which notifies me of updates of new submissions in a certain subject-“folder”.

The most important subject folders for LCS and ELTI are here:

There are only about 120 resources (snapshot at bottom) in the root folder, mostly links (reminds me that around 2000, I managed about a 1000 language learning links in a self-adapted PERL-CGI repository…) to freely available internet resources most of which should be in subfolders which, however, are empty.

This may be indicative of a number of typical problems I have encountered with learning materials repositories.

Based on GossamerThreads’ Links Management systems (one of the best open source PERL-CGI resource web database systems of its era), this language learning links system that I first implemented in Canada in the late 90s and took with me to the US.

Benefits: The system went beyond the usual “visit a website” foreign language elearning exercise of this pre-LMS day by allowing students to publish online, thus introducing a Web 2.0 collaboration element that shared meaningful exercises in the German learning  community. We had contributions from Kingston, Toronto, Detroit and Des Moines.

The system was both reasonably easy to use for teachers (How_to_add_a_links_assignment_in_90secs) and productive for students who could improve their language skills by interacting with, reviewing and presenting authentic target language websites, while having quick access to other computerized language learning resources, like fledgling online dictionaries (also stored in and searchable from the same interface).

Example output:

Highlights included reviews of websites dedicated to online shopping, travel booking, mapping, live webcams, and much more…

Limitations: All links needed to fit into a pre-tagging strictly hierarchical categorization tree. A GUI, but no batches – I preferred to write myself PERL scripts to batch update the underlying database files.

Cost- and time-saving benefits of learning material eRepositories include:

1. sharing and reuse of content for the teacher ad learner
2. de-duplication for the IT support

Typical issues I have encountered with learning materials repositories:

1. questionable applicability of the software-object-oriented-design   (OOD)-derived concept of encapsulated and reusable learning “objects” to highly progressive subjects like language arts;
2. also, a not uncommon problem of OOD gone wrong: having a “God-object” vs. SOLID-principled object-design, is even more of a risk with “learning objects”: Don’t they not always tend to be too complex to truly reap the benefits of having a design based on many small encapsulated and reusable objects in software programming?
3. licensing & copyright or privacy FERPA restrictions preventing uploads and specialization of interest prevents the network effects which have made the open internet so pervasive (and disruptive to some businesses);
4. curation using metadata implementing controlled vocabularies and ontologies , even if crowd-sourced, remains a daunting task for domain specialists for non-librarians, while it has been said to be the secret of librarians:

“als ob er jetzt das Geheimnis dieser Wände aussprechen müßte: ‘Herr General,’ sagt er ‘Sie wollen wissen, wieso ich jedes Buch kenne? Das kann ich Ihnen nun allerdings sagen: Weil ich keines lese!” Weißt du, das war mir nun beinahe wirklich zuviel! Aber er hat es mir, wie er meine Bestürzung gesehen hat, auseinandergesetzt. Es ist das Geheimnis aller guten Bibliothekare, daß sie von der ihnen anvertrauten Literatur niemals mehr als die Büchertitel und das Inhaltsverzeichnis lesen. ‘Wer sich auf den Inhalt einläßt, ist als Bibliothekar verloren!’ hat er mich belehrt. ‘Er wird niemals einen Überblick gewinnen!’” (Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften)

eRepository implementations I have used:

1. Our Moodle instance is still looking for an erepository system to integrate. We are getting some eRepository benefits (easy reuse across courses without need for term-wise recycling/re-upload; de-duplication) by implementing [your language here] metacourses in which we enroll all [your language here]  “child courses”
2. The equella eRepository is used by NC-LOR, and TBA:I have managed learning materials in it earlier, in conjunction with Blackboard – most recommended (at least then) among educational technologists, but not for the faint of heart, which seems to have limited the faculty adoption (and for which NC-LOR may have been a reference implementation, if I remember correctly). One of the things I did not like about equella when I used it (2006-2008) was the seemingly endless point-and-click-and-WWWait.
3. The Blackboard content-system was WebDAV based and therefore, once you had established the connection of your client to the WebDAV share (which MS-VISTA WebDAV updates unfortunately temporarily broke ),  featured an extremely user-friendly integration with the MS-Windows shell that  allowed for batch-handling of files in a familiar, fast “fat client” interface.
4. I was, when it was first released, and its metadata-tagging features advertised by Jon Udell, highly impressed by – and consequently have become an avid proponent of, and much more active photographer itself -  MS-Windows Vista (now also in: Live) PhotoGallery which combines intuitive use with great speed . However, requirements for managing and sharing a personal photo and video collection are not nearly as complex as for shared learning materials (although I have also used it managing my personal work ePortfolio).