One of the major benefits that I can see in using Live Links in course materials is the degree of separation that is provided between the link (or link hook?) as it appears in online course materials, and the actual URI of the target page.
So for example, at the current time, in Chapter 1 of the course materials for T184, I use the following direct link: Babbage's Computers. As you might imagine, this points directly to http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/on-line/babbage/
However, in order to start exploring the potential of managed bookmarks, I have started to collect links from T184 on del.icio.us/T184.
One of the tags I use there is courselink, which denotes that the link is provided within the course materials by the course team.
Another set of tags I use within the del.icio.us/T184 linkspace refer to the particular chapter of the course a clink is related to. So for example, chapter1 or chapter2.
Using this convention, along with a topic specific tag (for example, Babbage), I can now link to something like http://del.icio.us/rss/T184/chapter1+courselink+babbage to retrieve a list of relevant URLs (or perhaps, a single URL) and process these for inclusion in the course materials, either on the course webserver, or with Javascript in the browser, like this:
NB the previous link is not explicitly encoded in this page, it is pulled in by an RSS2HTML service from http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu.
So, Live Links are easy enough to incorporate in the page, but how are we to find which links to pull in where? It may be useful to think of the tags as metadata that describe not only the content, but also the potential ways in which the links may be used, and perhaps even unique identifiers that can be used to retrieve particular links.
In order to establish what sortof metadata we need to capture about links, we need to clarify the various contexts in which links are used in course materials. For example, the author may want to either:
a) ensure that a particular page is referenced - for example, if the page is the focus of a particular reading activity; or,
b) just provide links that are generallly useful - for example, in an informal Further Reading list.
In the latter case, it may be possible to go so far as pulling in content that is searched for at the time the material is viewed. For example, the following is a list of news stories from the BBC, acquired via the Google webservice, that mention Babbage:
There are pitfalls associated with this approach of cousre, such that search results may not be consistent over time if the database that is being searched is dynamically maintained during the presentation of the course.
Posted by ajh59 at August 2, 2005 03:23 PM