Shaggy Rules!

I just got off the phone with Peter Shanks, creator of the Training Packages Unpacked tool. It is a system that reaches into the MSAccess data base of the Australian National Training Information Service NTIS (a place that manages expressions of Australian competency standards or training units for qualification), and pulls it out of the PDFs and RTFS and redisplays the information that teachers and learners need on a web page for us web people to more easily reuse. Then he goes the full 9 yards and makes the newly formatted data available for those of us using wikis, Moodle, html, XML and an assessment spreadsheet. Now its just a simple process of finding the competency unit you are using for learning, teaching or assessment and copy pasting your prefered format into your prefered system.

Here's me extracting out an overly verbose unit statement from the Training and Assessment package - Design and Develop Learning Resources. Now, it is still a big wad of text, but now it is in Wikiversity where I and many others can chop down and make it more realistic. Peter and I agree that this statement alone should be enough for people to structure their learning around. Students could work together building up this wikiversity entry with resources and the like.

Here's the audio of Peter and I talking about all this today (3.5meg - 30 minutes - ogg file). I couldn't get an MP3 through to Podomatic or Odeo, security settings here prevented my uploading it. But a through way to Wikimedia commons who rightly only accept open standard media formats like Ogg was A OK.




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