Eureka Repository (Collective Catalog of T&L Resources)

Eureka Project:http://eureka.ntic.org/
Eureka (English Version): http://en.eureka.ntic.org/
Guided Tour:http://eureka.ntic.org/videos/guided_tour.mov

"The Eureka project is an initiative of Vitrine Technologie-Éducation within the framework of a Quebec-Wallonia-Brussels joint venture. Its' main objective is to promote the sharing and exchange of learning object resources. It provides a collective catalog of teaching and learning resources gathered by various organizations involved in the production of ITC educational resources. Eureka’s shell is based on open source code. The data can be federated with other repositories built on a LOM application profile."

If you are still wondering "what is a learning object?", here is their definition:

"A learning object is usually a digital resource which can be incorporated into a teaching and learning assignment. It can also be an electronic publication, an artical and an interactive exercise, animation or video or audio document. The main idea is that the resource is sufficiently modular that it can be reused in different contexts than for which it was created. A video for road safety could, for example be used in a physics course (acceleration, vectors) or psychology ) reflexes, alcohol and drug use) ...more"

According to Pierre-Julien Guay they are in the process of populating the repository (Currently there are 5278 resources), and are looking forward to share metadata descriptions with other repositories. It is an interesting project, which hopefully will encourage a lot of knowledge sharing and participation.

Overall, I believe (based on what I have seen and read) one needs to have a dedicated team to populate these repositories (at least for starters), because it would be wishful thinking to believe that people will come where the technology is. From what I have learned when it comes to learning object repositories, is that people (in general) will come where there is quality content (or where they can find value) and it is easy to locate the resources (simple and fast search). Another issue one should consider is whether to use a fixed taxonomy, or a folksonomy ( collaborative categorization using freely-chosen keywords called tags. E.g. del.icio.us), or a juicy combination.

Also, I am still dreaming of a learning object repository whereby we can upload (or link) learning objects without much hassle, and then the meta-data (or tags) are automatically (and intelligently) generated on-the-fly without requiring to enter an exhausting number of entry fields. If some of the fields were entered wrongly we can of course update them as we like, but most of the hassle would have been taken care of due to the system's intelligent tag extraction methodology.

Finally, people are often more interested in networking and discussing their knowledge, ideas and thoughts than simply finding content online (Human beings are themselves dynamic and engaging learning repositories, especially within their own expertise and interests), meaning that all these resources should be dynamically linked to discussion groups, experts, communities, ratings, peer-review, comments, wikis and even blogs. By doing so, connectivism can really take place :)