Training Packages Unwrapped - more like unleashed!

Peter Shanks has been at it again. Not long after releasing his FlickrCC app (see previous post here), he's released Training Packages Unwrapped which presents units of the Australian NTIS Training Packages in a variey of easy-to-use formats. Along with a basic HTML view you can also export as moodle frameworks, tiddlyWiki's and wikiversity ready text, CSV, and XML! This is a fantastic idea, and executed with a simplicity that lots of educational software lacks. Hopefully we can get something like this going with similar unit standards in New Zealand. Problem with NZs ones are that they're currently only available in Word or PDF which will be considerably harder to siphon through than Australia's which came in RTF I understand.

Leigh Blackall has already done some experiments importing the Wiki text export into Wikiversity ready for people to add real content around (see http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Design_and_Develop_Learning_Resources). I think that both Leigh and I see this as being the real benefit of this idea - that the export acts as a kind of support around which real content and learning can be scaffolded in actual learning environments whether they be in Wikis, or in Moodle, a TiddlyWiki on your desktop, or whatever presentation/delivery system you wish to use. If we could start convincing the powers responsible for producing these things that Word Evil / XML good then we'd be halfway there and people like Peter could move on to even more interesting stuff.

Tags: wikiversity, moodle, tiddlywiki, peter shanks