Widgets, educational technology platforms, and interoperability

One of the visiting PhD students here at SIAT, Vladimir Tomberg, is from Tallinn University in Estonia and works in the field of technology-enhanced learning, which I was excited to learn about since I had just finished developing a course on designing and evaluating multimedia learning materials. It was a good experience, but it was difficult to do because it necessarily had to be broad, whereas I was really interested in focusing in-depth in some of the stuff that I came across.

Anyway, I was telling Vladimir that UPOU uses Moodle and Google Apps. He pointed out that there is work in getting widgets to operate on a variety of platforms (I didn't even realize that there is a W3C widget standard). One of the tools he mentioned was Scott Wilson's Apache Wookie, which is an engine for getting W3C Widgets and Google Wave Gadgets to be embedded in Moodle. It looks pretty cool. Here's a video of me playing around in a Moodle course with widgets.