In Defence of Glo Maker

Last semester some of you saw a presentation and workshop by Tom Boyle on Glo Maker. I think we were all initially enthusiastic about Glo Maker until we tried using it. We then began making comments like "it isn't all that easy to use", "it doesn't seem to do a lot", "it isn't very flexible".

I went to a seminar last Wednesday which consisted of a series of presentations about e-Learning work at LondonMet (of course Second Life was quite prominent). Tom Boyle was showing some of the work he had done with others in the room developing Glo Maker based systems. He explained that Glo Maker didn't start out as a project to make a tool for making e-Learning resources. It began as a project to make a library of reusable learning objects. People kept asking for slight variations in the way the objects worked, so then they set about making Glo Maker as a tool where the user can make their own object.

This made me feel much more sympathetic to Glo Maker and I think shows a general issues with any tool. The more flexible the tool is, the more difficult it is to use it. Is this true? What do you think?

An enjoyable and thought provoking video

Have a look at this.



I think its a great way of illustrating the voice and also contains a lot of very interesting ideas and viewpoints of current education.