Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

Started my day with a few phone calls and then rushed to meet the wonderful delegation lead by Dr. Yasutaka Shimizu from the National Institute of Multimedia Education in Japan. Along with Murray Goldberg, Michelle Lamberson and Jim Sibley. It was a great pleasure listen to Murray talking about the past, current and future of WebCT, the company he started over ten years ago and just currently merged with Blackboard. It was also an interesting experience to share the learning tools with our Japanese guests through a language translator. I have to say she did a wonderful job in translating all the technical and educational jargons between the two languages. After the meeting, caught a ride from Uli back to downtown to catch the last few hours of E-Learn conference. Met Dr. Reiner Fuest from Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany, who also is a great Flash developer! We exchange some great ideas on how to properly package flash contents into learning object standards and allow search engines to openly index the reference XML files etc; more ideas on learning object authoring templates and learning tools... Then rushed to John Nesbitt's presentation and learned some interesting update on gStudy.

Whew, what a day... Why am I blogging this? Time to drink a Tsingdao...

Today, Brent Simpson from the university of Auckland came to visit. The visit was great and successful, although he did not bring the New Zealand summer breeze with him. Instead, the snow continues to pour down, but luckily all programs at UBC remains normal. We had some great conversations at my office, and there was some excellent information exchanges. He is a true expert in web based content editing using online editors like "html area" and "BitFlux Editor"! Guys, you really should check out BitFlux Editor if you havn't seen it yet. "Bitflux Editor is a browser based Wysiwyg XML Editor – and that changes everything! You can edit now your content semantically and at the same time display it to your users and editors in its final form. " (From BitFlux's official site)

Brent is a Web Developer / Instructional Technologiest over at CDFL (Centre for Flexible & Distance Learning) of the University of Auckland. Brent has worked in UCLA and also worked on the Texas Information Literacy Tutorial (TILT) which was one of the early example of web content released under an open content license. Brent is also a key member in the eXe project which belongs to the EduForge network.

Brent managed to show us some great works done at CDFL, and some good discussions on the eXe initiatives. Hopefully, further collaborations can be developed in the open source e-Learning community between our units cross half of the earth. Thank you Brent for the visit!