At the ECEL09 conference in Bari, Italy, a keynote address by Julià Minguillón introduced the application of learning objects supported in an open source digital repository software called DSpace. On my return, I took a look at this software on their site and can more clearly see the possibilities it offers not only for supporting repositories of digital objects for knowledge management and research, but also for learning – and in the context of a more robust representation of what most educators and learners would like to see represented in what we call a learning object.
I welcome your thoughts about this type of software and its uses to support online digital repositories of all kinds, and especially toward the more challenging goal of supporting richly contextual collections of learning objects.
If you are interested in viewing Julià Minguillón’s ECEL conference presentation on learner-centered learning object repositories, you can view it on SlideShare via this link:
http://www.slideshare.net/jminguillona/ecel-2009-keynote-j-minguilln
And here is a link to their local implementation of Dspace at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (in Spain).
http://oer.uoc.edu/
I found clicking on the Interface link in the left navigation menu to reveal a fascinating “semantic network” representation of the contents of their repository (where you can click on the terms – as nodes in the network – to zoom into the knowledge structure).
Clicking on the Taxonomy link revealed a hierarchical outline listing of objects.
Exploring these two views of their repository are excellent examples of the component parts of what would be called a “knowledge management system.”