Friday, March 03, 2006

Leaning Objects for Economics: Dynamic Graphs in SVG

I have been interested in the creation and metadata tags associated with Leanring Objects. To get started I have created a set of dynamic economic graphs on my web site: http://www.danmccreary.com/svg/ I wrote the graphs using SVG since I am already familiar with XML and JavaScript. These graphs are simple supply and demand graphs but with the dynamic nature it allows the learner to visualize that as inputs change how other factors such as total revenue and profit also change. I am willing to do more of these if people are interested. I have sent notes to several people that indicated an interest in economics but did not get any hits yet. One problem is that SVG is part of FireFox but still not 100% implemented. The Adobe SVG viewer also has some extensions. My friend Jack Nutting is doing work with SVG animation on cell phones. So students could study economics on the school bus with their cell phones. I would also like to allow the graphs to scale to fill the screen but the slider object I am using does not currently do this. So here are my questions: 1) Who would use these objects? 2) How would they find them? 3) What enhancements would you make? 4) How could these objects be integrated into a LMS using Moodle. I am allowing non-profits to use the initial versions free of charge but would people pay me to write more complex versions?

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