Blackboard, MERLOT . . . and now CAREO?

CAREO (Campus Alberta Repository of Educational Objects) is a learning object repository run out of the University of Calgary, University of Alberta, and Athabasca University. Ed-blogger extraordinaire and he-of-the-apostrophed-name, D'Arcy Norman, notes our earlier MERLOT announcement and writes:

"At the user’s conference, they appear to have announced a new Building Block for Bb that lets you search Merlot from within the Bb interface, to easily add resources to courses.

That’s exactly what I’ve been hoping to build for CAREO/APOLLO, but haven’t had any time to address. They’ll be releasing the source for this building block, so that might get me at least partially there…" [from D'Arcy Norman Dot Net]

Hey, D'Arcy, great idea!

The MERLOT Building Block is a fairly straightforward search servlet accessing metadata through MERLOT's web services. Assuming CAREO has their own search & retrieve web service, it shouldn't be too difficult to modify the code to function with a CAREO web service. So a lot of the work is probably already done for you.

This kind of idea is precisely the reason we decided to share the source code for this Building Block. We really want other developers to take this code and run with it, using it as a basis for making similar search & retrieval Building Blocks for a variety of services (or even combining all of those search services into one Building Block).