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?
Well, I don't think this is true, the difficulty in this case would be in knowing how the tool could be possibly used or of benefit. i.e. the simpler the tool or the more general it is the harder for a user to decide or configure where to start or how to initially use it....[if this makes any sense]
ReplyDeleteit is important to specify important usability attributes for e-learning tools, and i think the complexity and interface should vary depending on the type of user (developer, general..etc)
I think that they tried to develop this to be as 'usable' to new users of learning objects as possible.
ReplyDeleteThere is an underlying pedagogical model that they've followed but I haven't see users' feedback on how successful they have been.