Learning Technology Blog Aggregator

US National Survey of Student Engagement

sschmoller — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 04:08:54 PST

[With thanks to Ray Schroeder]

The well organised and informative 2009 National Survey of Student Engagement [50 pages, 20 MB PDF] report is produced by Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research in cooperation with the Indiana University Center for Survey Research. The report aims to provide data to colleges and universities to "assess and improve undergraduate education, inform state accountability and accreditation efforts, and facilitate national and sector benchmarking efforts". This year's report has a two page section (go to pages 19 and 20) about Teaching and Learning Technologies, including a tantalising but all-too-briefly explained table (below, with its rubric) "Relationship Between Technology and Engagement, Deep Learning, and Gains".

"How Do These New Technologies Relate to Student Learning and Engagement?

Course management and interactive technologies were positively related to student engagement, self-reported learning outcomes, and deep approaches to learning (Table 7). Course management technology was most strongly related to student-faculty interaction and self-reported gains in personal and social development. It is possible that the use of this type of organizational technology encourages contact among classmates as well as between students and their instructors. Interactive technologies corresponded most strongly with students’ self-reported gains and the supportive campus environment benchmark. Students who use interactive technologies are also more likely to say their campus environment is supportive and contributes to their knowledge, skills, and personal development."

Links for 2009-11-09 [del.icio.us]

OUseful Info — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:00:00 PST

Augmented reality for Hursley mobiles | eightbar
Notes on how to set up a Layar augmented reality layer

P2P Assessment and Accreditation

openedblogger — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 11:47:54 PST

Philipp Schmidt, Christine Geith, Stian Håklev and Joel Thierstein have published an article on peer-to-peer assessment in the latest issue of IRRODL. From the abstract:

This paper makes the case for a peer-based method of assessment and recognition as a feasible option for accreditation purposes. The peer-based method would leverage online communities and tools, for example digital portfolios, digital trails, and aggregations of individual opinions and ratings into a reliable assessment of quality.

Open Source in Ghana

openedblogger — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 11:47:27 PST

Last week OEN reported on an open access conference in Ghana. Recently Akokoraaba Adansi Pipim published a lengthy letter to Ghana’s president outlining benefits to embracing open source software for education. From the letter:

The current brief seeks to bring home a few take-aways from the lessons of the past few decades, based on summation and extrapolation of observations extending at least a century and a half into the past. Two significant forces are explored: IT policy, especially with regard to adoption of free and open source software, and learner-focused education.

Thanks to OLPC on Twitter for the link.

Super OER

openedblogger — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 11:47:04 PST

The Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER) has a new post summarizing the definition of “super OER.”

Ed-Tech Vendors: The Unintentional Enemy Outside?

OLDaily — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 10:40:36 PST

The session title was outrageous to bring Christian Long back from his hiatus - a conference seminar by Chris Ridgway, Sophos, titled The Enemy Within: Stop Students from Bypassing Your Web Filters. It sparked a wave of reaction, including a two-part post (part one, part two) from Sylvia Martinez asserting bluntly that studetns are not the enemy. And as Bud Hunt wrote to Ridgway, "I find this session title and the frame that you're using to sell your services to be offensive and beyond the pale. Our students are not our enemies and their behaviors are not rooted in violence." And Long concludes, "At worst, your language strips the very industry you are paid to serve of its mission and heart, not to mention the fairly painful irony that it attacks the very group that schools exist to advocate for...and to empower..." Christian Long, Think:Lab, November 9, 2009 [Tags: Schools, Twitter] [Link] [Comment]

Impact Factors Adjusted for Reality

OLDaily — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 10:33:32 PST

I agree with the sentiment but I dislike the working. Discussing a widening of the metrics defining impact factors, the author writes, "The authors describe the way Oregon State University has adopted Boyer's definition of scholarship – which embraces not just discovery of new knowledge, but application, teaching, and integration." Fine, but innovations in "application, teaching, and integration are "new knowledge". Barbara Fister, ACRLog, November 9, 2009 [Tags: none] [Link] [Comment]

Learnover 2010

OLDaily — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 10:28:01 PST

I've always liked UQAM, because UQAM has students who do things like this. From Sliced Bread, who writes, "Learnover 2010 promises to be my type of professional learning. Active student voice, open, global, tech requirements even I could muster from home and learner centred." Mr. S., Sliced Bread, November 9, 2009 [Tags: none] [Link] [Comment]

Thoughts on JISCPress

OLDaily — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 10:17:50 PST

More on WriteToReply, which I mentioned here last week (it turns out that Eduserv will be covering hosting costs for the project). Tony Hirst describes in some detail how it works and what it is supposed to do in the context of the (wider? renamed?) JISCPress. Tony Hirst, OUseful Info, November 9, 2009 [Tags: Project Based Learning, Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)] [Link] [Comment]

IMS Learning Information Services: The State of the Union

OLDaily — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 10:13:21 PST

The IMS Learning Information Systems (LIS) specification (see here, here, and here) is intended to link learning information (as found in learning management systems) with student information services (as found in the Registrar's office). It facilitates things like access to online courses upon registration, or easier recording of grades from LMS records. This post outlines the 'state of play' of IMS-LIS, listing those "shipping code" (PeopleSoft, Sakai, Moodle, Schools on Facebook), "committed to adoption" and "thinking about it". Michael Feldstein, e-Literate, November 9, 2009 [Tags: Assessment, Schools, Traditional and Online Courses, Information, Student Record Systems, IMS Project] [Link] [Comment]

Create Your Own Google Custom News Sections

Tony Hirst — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 07:11:53 PST

For many years now, it’s been possible to subscribe to persistent (“saved”) Google News searches and so build up your own custom dashboard views of news… Indeed, it was over three years ago now that I hacked together a demo news feed roller (Persistent News Search OPML Feed Roller) that let users bundle up a roll of feeds in an OPML file (sort of!) for easy viewing elsewhere.

And if OPML isn’t your thing, then services like Netvibes or Pageflakes let you easily wire up your own news dashboard:

But we all know in our heart of hearts that RSS and Atom feed subscriptions are just not popular widespread as a consumer technology. Folk aren’t knowingly using feeds, and they not unknowingly using them directly either. (But feeds are being used as wiring/plumbing behind the scenes, so RSS is not dead yet, okay?!;-)

(In the Library world, as well as the wider news reading world, this failure to engage with feed subscriptions can be seen (in part) by the lack of significant uptake of RSS alerts.)

So when Google announced last week that you can now Create and Share custom News sections, it struck me that they were getting round the exposed plumbing problem that subscribing to a feed implies, and instead making it easy to create a custom view (the output of which can also be subscribed to) with the appearance of having to do much plumbing at all – How to Create Your Own Google Custom News Section (Tutorial):

You can search the directory of already created news sections – as well as find a link to a page that lets you create your own news sections, here: Google News: Custom sections directory.

So for example, here are a few I have already made:
- UK Higher Education News
- Isle of WIght News
- UK Broadcasting News
- Formula One News

The extent to which you can create a finely tuned view of the news is, admittedly, limited. You can’t, for example, limit the search to specified publications (which you can do in a Google news advanced/search limited search) – filtering is limited to keywords and locale (I’m not sure of the extent to which the order in which you enter the keywords affects things?). But if you already know how to create that sort of filtered search, you probably also know how to set up a new search alert, wire up an feed powered dashboard of your own, and so on. And if the Google Custom News sections editor was any more complicated, I dare say it would put off the users I imagine Google are reaching out to…

Thoughts on JISCPress

Tony Hirst — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 10:44:12 PST

As we come to the final month of the JISCPress project, we had some great news over on WriteToReply last week where we were able to announce that Eduserv would be covering our hosting costs for the immediate future (Eduserv funds hosting for WriteToReply, eFoundations: Write To Reply).

So what exactly does the platform we’ve been working on have to offer? Here’s one of the ways I think of it…

A document publishing platform that automatically atomises documents to the paragraph level, allows aggregated commenting at the paragraph and ‘user’ level, and supports the republication and re-presentation of documents in a variety of standard formats at the document level.

The first part of the process is the (manual assisted) ingress stage, in which documents are imported into the WordPress environment such that each substantive document section ideally maps onto a single WordPress “blog post”:

An RSS for the document as a whole, with one item per section, is generated automatically by the WordPress platform. A single item RSS feed is also generated for each page (so the content of each page can be easily transported around the web).

The second part of the process is the atomisation of each post, carried out automatically by the Digress.It theme, in which each paragraph in the document is given its own unique URI, derived from the URI of the web page (“blog post”) the paragraph appears on:

Potentially, an RSS feed can also be produced for each page in which each paragraph is a separate feed item, thus allowing a page/section to be transported around the web via a single feed, but in atomised form.

The paragraph level chunks produced by the atomistation process can be transcluded as independent elements in independent web documents in other documents by a variety of means (as an embeddable object, via XML, txt, JSON, etc):

The default nature of the WordPress platform allows comments to be made at the level of each web page, with an RSS feed of comments for each page being published ‘for free’. JISCPress extends this functionality by allowing comments to be associated with discrete paragraphs. Views over the comments are also available at the user level, (that is, grouped according to the user who made the comments, wheresoever they are made in the document). An additional RSS fed of comments by user is also available, which means that a document on the platform can actually be used as a scaffold for a critical response to the document by a particular user.

A further level of innovation is based on the automated generation of ’semantic tags’ at the page level. Once generated, tag based collections of posts can be syndicated in the normal way via WordPress generated tag based RSS feeds:

JISCPress also benefits from the Trackback mechanism implemented by WordPress. When a page or paragraph URI is linked to from a third party web page, a trackback to the originating page may be captured, which we interpret as the automated capture of links remote annotations or comments about the document.

When considered in these terms, the JISCPress/WriteToReply platform is seen to provide a powerful means of publishing documents in which individual sections may carry their own unique URI, and individual paragraphs within a section also contain their own unique URI (which in many situations may be rooted on the section URI).

The platform can also be regarded as republishing – or re-presenting – each section (i.e. page) and each paragraph as an independent entity. That is, whenever a document is published via the platform, each separate paragraph may also be thought of as being independently published “for free”, in the sense that:

- each paragraph is independently addressable,
- each paragraph is independently commentable, and
- each paragraph is independently republishable/syndicatable.

So, given that, can you think of any ways in which the JISCPress/WriteToReply platform can support your document publishing and comment gathering strategy?

Do you Read to Learn?

ostephens — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 15:06:52 PST

I’ve been promising a blog post of my entry into the JISC MOSAIC competition for a while now, so here goes.

The JISC MOSAIC competition was basically about demonstrating different ways in which library usage data could be exploited. The data made available for the competition is from the University of Huddersfield, where Dave Pattern has led the way in putting this type of data to work. I was also keen to dust off my rather rusty coding skills. I have to admit that when I first saw the large XML files that the project was offering, I was slightly worried – doing any kind of analysis on the files looked like it was going to be a bit of work. Luckily very soon after the competition was announced, Dave offered a simple API to the data which definitely looked more my kind of thing – a relatively simple XML format, with nice summary information available.

I had originally though that working on the competition might give me the push I needed to learn a new programming language – trying to get up to speed with Python or Ruby has been on my todo list for a while. However I ended up falling back on the language I’ve used most in the past – Perl. Several years ago I wrote some Perl scripts to parse various XML files so I was confident I could pick this up again. I was also slightly suprised that Perl still seemed to have some of the most extensive XML parsing options (although this may be simply due to my pre-existing knowledge – I’d be interested to hear what other languages I should be looking at?)

I wanted to come at the data from a slightly different angle. I had two ideas:

Generate purchase recommendations for libraries by finding the items they already owned in the usage data, and finding those linked items (in the usage data) that are not already owned
Get people to upload lists of books they owned/liked, find which courses they were linked to by the usage data, and suggest courses the person

I’d have liked to do both (and at one point thought I might pull this off with some help), but in the end I went with the second of these.

The idea was that if we know what books students on a specific course uses, if someone really likes those books then they may well find the course interesting. I’m still unsure of whether this assumption would be borne out in practice, and I’d be interested in comments on this. My program basically needed to:

Allow you to upload a list of books (I went for a list of ISBNs for simplicity)
Check which course codes those books were related to
Find where courses matching those course codes were available
Display this information back to you

The first thing I realised was how much Perl I’d forgotten – it took me quite a while to get back into it, and even now looking at the script I can see things that I would do quite differently if I were to start over.

I was able to pinch quite a few bits from existing tutorials and examples on the web (this is one of the great things about using Perl – lots of existing code to use). Things like uploading a file of ISBNs were relatively trivial. I’m not going to run through the whole thing here, but the bits I want to highlight are:

Dealing with UCAS
UCAS really don’t make it easy to get information out of their website on a machine-to-machine basis. I’ve done an entire post on scraping information from UCAS, which I’m not going to rehash here, but honestly if we are going to see people developing applications which help individuals build personalised learning pathways through Higher Education courses this has got to improve.

How much overlap is significant?
The first set of test data I used was the ISBNs from my own LibraryThing account. This is a free account, so limited to 200 items – so approximately this was 200 ISBNs. I realise that most people are not going to have a list of 200 ISBNs to hand (a major issue with what I’m proposing here), but it seemed like a good place to start. However, I found that only 2 of these 200 items matched items in the usage data from Huddersfield. Initially these two items resulted in several course recommendations – because I’d assumed that any overlap was a ‘recommendation’. However it was immediately apparent that the fact I owned ‘The Amber Spyglass’ by Philip Pullman didn’t really imply I’d be interested in studying History with English Language Teaching, or that owning Jane Eyre meant I’d be interested in Community Development and Social Work – these were just single data points, and amounted to ‘coincidence’.

Given this, I introduced the idea of ‘close matches’ which meant that you owned/read at least 1% of all the items associated with a course code. However, this led to my own data generating zero matches – not a good start. For the purposes of demonstration I basically faked some sets of ISBNs which would give results. I have no idea whether 1% is a realistic level to set for ‘close matches’ – it could well be this is too low, but it seemed like a good place to start, and it can easily be adjusted within the script.

I think it is really important to stress that the only usage data the competition worked against was that from the University of Huddersfield. This was bound to give limited results – any single institutions data would suffer from the same problem. However, if we were to see usage data brought together from Universities from across the UK I still think there are some possibilities here (and who knows what might turn up if you added public library information into the mix somehow?).

So – the result is at ReadToLearn and you are welcome to give it a go – and I’m very interested in comment and feedback. I’m hoping to at least partially rewrite the application to use the UCAS screenscraping utility I’ve since developed. Although I’m rather embarrassed by the code as it definitely leaves alot to be desired, if you want to you can download the ReadtoLearn code here.

Lessig Encourages Academia to Fight For Sharing

openedblogger — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 10:30:06 PST

The Chronicle of Higher Education: Wired Campus has a new article on a recent presentation by Larry Lessig on copyright. Lessig, who founded Creative Commons, argued that academia needs to fight for the ability to share and remix. From the article:

It is time to fight back, he told his audience, adding: “You geeks have to become radical militant activists.”

P2PU Minus Copyright

openedblogger — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 10:29:49 PST

Leigh Blackall has a new post giving feedback to Peer-2-Peer University with regards to copyright. Blackall suggests that avoid any trappings of copyright and focus on sharing. From the post:

P2PU wants to be a network, made up of individual action and responsibility. As such P2PU should not impose a particular copyright policy on these individuals, instead focusing on the facilitation of the free exchange of learning and educational advance.

How do you connect - the rise of serendipity

mweller — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 05:47:57 PST

D'Arcy Norman has set up a project which asks the simple question 'How do you connect to people online'. He says we are free to interpret that how we want, and responses can be in any format. He is publishing the open responses as it goes along. Many people have chosen to respond in video format, and here is my offering:

There different ways of interpreting the question, so I gave four answers. There is the purely technical, practical answer - so I connect mainly through twitter and this blog, plus a bunch of other tools. But there is also a set of behaviours associated with connecting, so you do it by linking (and being linked to - I find a lot of people because they link to my blog, and my blog stats tell me this, hey presto, we're connected), commenting (on blogs, or in twitter), responding to requests, cries for help, etc, but really it's about sharing. There is the social element to connecting, so I engage in debates (which can be related to work but might are as often about tv, football, politics), making jokes, giving people answers or experience, and what we might call just chatting. And the fourth way of responding to the question is to think in terms of fundamental principles one operates on which I list as embrace serendipity and be open.

I've probably said lots on the latter, but the serendipity comment can probably bear a little more examination. In an earlier post about Science 2.0 I wondered if scientists struggled with the web 2.0 approach because so much of it was about unpredictability and this went against their scientific training. Serendipity has come to the fore in the socially connected world I believe. It's no longer an eccentric relation at the family gathering, who may give you a great song on the piano but equally may wet their pants and fall asleep at the dinner table. Two things have changed the status of serendipity: the number of connections and the ease of connecting. Now you can rely on serendipity - something will turn up which is relevant, you just don't know what it is.

Here is Jim Groom also responding to D'Arcy's project, who makes the point that these technologies allow us to 'imbue our work with a sense of personality':

So, how do you connect?

HTML 5 Drag and Drop + Microformats = a whole world of possibilities

s.wilson@bangor.ac.uk (Scott Wilson) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 18:57:13 PST

In my last post I provided an example of HTML 5 drag and drop - I hope you had chance to download Firefox 3.5 to try it out. Because this time I have a much more exciting demo.

Drag and drop in HTML 5 can operate across sites in different domains; so you can drag from one site and drop onto another. Also, the data transfer object that you move in a drag and drop operation can store multiple data values.

This means as well as simple operations, we can potentially move whole blocks of structured information between websites. Lets look at an example.

First off, we have our source site, which is a fake social network. I've put it in an iFrame here:

I have another, similar site, called LikeTotallySocial.com. Right-click this link here and open it in a new window, and arrange it so you can easily see both sites on screen.

Currently the profile in "LikeTotallySocial.com" has no friends - so why not try dragging one of the profile images from MyFaceSpace onto the "drop here" icon LikeTotallySocial.com and see what happens? (You should see the profile appear...)

How this works is that a ondragstart function in MyFaceSpace puts multiple values into the datatransfer object based on scraping the information from the user profile, which has been marked up using the hCard microformat. When LikeTotallySocial.com gets the ondrop event, the transfer object has values for "fn", "photo", "foaf:interest" and "status" that it can use to create a new profile object. (Note that the property names I've used in the transfer are a mix of vCard and FOAF property names)

Now, another interesting thing... try dragging the profile image from MyFaceSpace onto the Weather widget in the last blog post (you'll probably need to open that in a new window, too, unless you have a really big screen). You'll notice that the weather is now displayed for the person's location. This was also part of the transfer data that MySpaceFace created - but in this case its information that's ignored by LikeTotallySocial.com, but is of use to the weather widget.

So while drag and drop is undoubtedly cool, drag and drop with standardised microformats for drag data takes this feature to a completely new dimension. Imagine if any profile image in any site can be used to move profile data between friends lists in different applications - or you can drag titles of events from listings sites straight into a schedule app, or a train timetable site. I think its fair to say there are one or two applications of this feature. Which is why I'm quite surprised no-one is really shouting about this yet - I think a few good demos and everyone will be demanding HTML 5 in their browser right away!

Meanwhile, Over on the Arcadia Blog(s)…

Tony Hirst — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 09:26:30 PST

So it feels as if I haven’t been posting that much on this blog over the last few weeks, but I have been blogging elsewhere, 2-3 times a week, in fact, on:

- the Arcadia Project Blog;

- the Arcadia Mashups Blog.

Here’s a quick round up of some of the more notable posts that you can find over there that I would, in the normal course of events, have probably posted here on OUseful.info:

Do Libraries Cater for Today’s Researchers and Research Students?, a quick response to a new interim project report from the British Library reporting on a longitudinal study about the information related behaviour of research students; [Arcadia Project]
Open Library Training Materials and Custom Search Engines, in which I describe a simple Google Custom Search Engine that searches over all the UK HEI Library websites. If you’re looking for infoskills/Library training resources, this might be a handy way of finding them… [Arcadia Mashups]
Getting Started With Yahoo Pipes: Merging RSS Feeds, an quick guide to creating your first Yahoo Pipe [Arcadia Mashups]
Stack Request Delivery Slots: the Cambridge University Library has many of its borrowable books on closed stacks, which means you have to request the books and then they are fetched for you. Might it be an idea to allow bookable collection slots, so you can request an item for a future date? [Arcadia Project]
BookServer – Like URIPlay, but for Books…? and LibraryDNS, cf. RadioDNS: Books that Can Phone Home, where I pinch a couple of ideas from online video (content negotiation) and digital radio (linking radioplay back to the web) and start to apply them to books; see also What If? Livescribe Book Support for one possible way of relating written notes to (e)books; [Arcadia Project]
The Library’s Role in Organising “Course Knowledge”, or how the Library might be the natural place for all manner of content recommendation services to learners; also relates to Looking Out for “Linked Course Data, where I have a poke around various bits of the Cambridge university website looking for unique identifers that can be used to pivot around; [Arcadia Project]
JISC MOSAIC Competition Entries – Imaginings Around the Use of Library Loans Data, a brief review of the JISC MOSAIC (Library loans data) competition entries;
‘Get Current URL’ Bookmarklet Pattern and ‘Get Selection’ Bookmarklet Pattern, in which I describe a couple of bookmarkelt patterns that have generic reuse value; each post includes a bookmarklet generator to help you create your own bookmarklets [Arcadia Mashups]
Visual Links – Sharing Links With QR Codes, or what might a library catalogue look like if we added a QR code to it; also includes a demo of Cambridge Library short link service that could provide the first step in making it easier to scribble down a book reference [Arcadia Mashups]

They’re all Library related, so if that’s your thang, maybe worth a read…?

Write to Reply

Andy Powell — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 06:37:02 PST

I've noted before how much I like the Write to Reply service, conceived and developed by Tony Hirst and Joss Winn:

A site for commenting on public reports in considerable detail. Texts are broken down into their respective sections for easier consumption. Rather than comment on the text as a whole, you are encouraged to direct comments to specific paragraphs.

On that basis, I am very pleased to announce that we have made available a small amount of funding for the service, initially covering the website hosting costs for the next 6 months but with a commitment to do so in some form for 2 years (whether that be through a continuation of the current hosting arrangement or by moving the content to Eduserv servers or elsewhere).

It strikes me that Write to Reply has already demonstrated its value in various fields, notably in the areas of education and government policy, and I'm sure it will continue to do so. It's one of those ideas that is rather simple and obvious in hindsight, yet very powerful in practice - give people a public space in which they can make comments on important documents and make it social enough that commenting feels more like having a conversation than simply annotating a text. Good stuff. Long may it continue.

Links for 2009-11-04 [del.icio.us]

OUseful Info — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:00:00 PST

BBC - Media Literacy - Home
BBC website with lots of short educational pieces about digital media
Google News Blog: Create and Share custom News sections
Create your own custom news channel on Google News

Using "Moodle Wave" - Live demo

s.wilson@bangor.ac.uk (Scott Wilson) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 07:45:50 PST

It looks like its going to be a while yet before Google lets more people play with its own Wave implementation (and details on any open-sourcing remain vague at this point). However, we've put up our own implementation of the Wave Gadget API (not the complete Wave system by any means) for anyone interested to play with.

I've created a Moodle course that uses some widgets, all of which make use of the Wave Gadget API. Some of these are Google examples (converted to W3C format) and some are ones we've created.

To take a look, you need to head over to our Moodle sandbox and register yourself a profile (you'll need to confirm your email address to activate the login). After that, go and enrol yourself on this course.

Feel free to play Sudoku, mess with the poetry magnets, use the chat, and vote in the polls. All these tools are Widgets, written entirely in regular HTML and JavaScript, and don't use any PHP or any part of the Moodle platform they appear in other than using the context it supplies (the course ID in this case) and participant information (display name and avatar image); this means they can be embedded into any platform. Wave - the actual conversation engine - is the obvious one, but I think it makes sense to put live-updating collaborative applications into many different kinds of contexts - social networks, VLEs, blogs - anything with users and contexts.

In addition to the W3C Widgets API and Google Wave Gadgets API, the Wookie engine that renders the widgets also provides a moderator API, enabling admins to lock and unlock widgets. (However, test accounts are in the "student" role and so won't see these controls)

What is a "mashup VLE" really like?

One of the interesting things I've noticed with the test is that it feels very different to a typical course site. For one thing, it doesn't encourage clicking through to other pages - instead you just leave the page open, often in the background, and drift back over to it if anything interesting happens. More like a Twitter-type application than a regular VLE; I wonder how this would work in actual use - would you open a browser tab for each module and flip between them to see what's going on?

This certainly has the potential to mess up the "tracking" functions that VLEs use as these are based on clicking on internal links, rather than interacting within a set of Widgets all within a page. You could be online all day chatting, voting, playing, etc., and the VLE would think you just accessed one page in the morning. Oh well, I think the tracking model in VLEs was always broken anyway - but using this kind of functionality means it'll have to be revisited if VLEs are going to use external tools. The IMS LTIv2 spec defines an "Outcomes service" but its way too complicated to use for this - it seems designed for hooking up a fully-fledged exam system not a simple widget; something simpler would be far more appropriate.

Going further

If you've got a Moodle site, and want to use Widgets and Wave Gadgets in it, we'll get some documentation together soon to show you how. Basically you need to install a Moodle block, and either get an API for our test server, or deploy the Wookie Widget Server on your own network.

If you would like to integrate Wave Gadgets into another web application, send me an email or comment on this post and I'll talk you through what you have to do. Its not difficult - just a few calls to get Widgets and set participant info. (If you're using Sakai, then the Sakai 3 team at CARET in Cambridge have already done a lot of work in this area, and I suggest contacting them.)

If you're a developer and would like to have a go at writing your own Wave Gadgets and seeing them work, then again get in touch and I'll see what I can do to let them get tested on our platform.

(PS this is being hosted on a sandbox server used by our development team, so don't rely on it or get upset if its not available!)

"Simple DC" Revisited

PeteJ — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 06:41:20 PST

In a recent post I outlined a picture of Simple Dublin Core as a pattern for constructing DC description sets (a Description Set Profile), in which statements referred to one of the fifteen properties of the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, with a literal value surrogate in which syntax encoding schemes were not permitted.

While I think this is a reasonable reflection of the informal descriptions of "Simple DC" provided in various DCMI documents, this approach does tend to give primacy to a pattern based solely on the use of literal values. It also ignores the important work done more recently by DCMI in "modernising" its vocabularies, emphasing the distinction between literal and other values, and reflecting that in the formal RDFS descriptions of its terms.

In a document presented to a DCMI Usage Board meeting at DC-2007 in Singapore, an alternative, "modern" approach to "Simple DC" was proposed by Mikael Nilsson and Tom Baker. (I don't have a current URI for the particular document, but it is part of the "meeting packet"). That proposal suggested a view of "Simple DC" as a DSP (actually, it proposed a DCAP, but I'm focussing here on the "structural constraints" component) in which the properties referenced are not the "original" fifteen properties of the DCMES, but rather the fifteen new properties added to the "DC Terms" collection as part of that modernisation exercise:

A description set must contain exactly one description (Description Template: Minimum occurrence constraint = 1; Maximum occurrence constraint = 1)
That description may be of a resource of any type (Description Template: Resource class constraint: none (default))
For each statement in that description, the type of value surrogate supported depends on the range of the property:
- For the following property URIs: dcterms:title, dcterms:identifier, dcterms:date, dcterms:description (Statement Template: Property List constraint):
  - There may be no such statement; there may be many (Statement Template: Minimum occurrence constraint = 0; Maximum occurrence constraint = unbounded)
  - A literal value surrogate is required (Statement Template: Type constraint = literal)
  - Within that literal value surrogate, the use of a syntax encoding sceme URI is not permitted (Statement Template/Literal Value: Syntax Encoding Scheme Constraint = disallowed)
- For the following property URIs: dcterms:creator, dcterms:contributor, dcterms:publisher, dcterms:type, dcterms:language, dcterms:format, dcterms:source, dcterms:relation, dcterms:subject, dcterms:coverage, dcterms:rights (Statement Template: Property List constraint):
  - There may be no such statement; there may be many (Statement Template: Minimum occurrence constraint = 0; Maximum occurrence constraint = unbounded)
  - A non-literal value surrogate is required (Statement Template: Type constraint = non-literal)
  - Within that non-literal value surrogate
    - the use of a value URI is not permitted (Statement Template/Non-Literal Value: Value URI Constraint = disallowed)
    - the use of a vocabulary encoding scheme URI is not permitted (Statement Template/Non-Literal Value: Vocabulary Encoding Scheme Constraint = disallowed)
    - a single value string is required (Statement Template/Non-Literal Value/Value String: Minimum occurrence constraint = 1; Maximum occurrence constraint = 1) and the use of a syntax encoding scheme URI is not permitted (Statement Template/Non-Literal Value/Value String: Syntax Encoding Scheme Constraint = disallowed)

This pattern seeks to combine the simplicity of use of the "traditional" "Simple DC" approach of using only 15 properties with a recognition of the value of using literal and non-literal values as appropriate for each property. However, it is, by definition, slightly more complex than the "all literal values" pattern outlined in the earlier post, and it differs from the patterns described informally in existing DCMI documentation (and I think it would be difficult to argue that it is represented using formats like the oai_dc XML format, which of course predated the creation of the new properties by several years.)

This does not have to be an either/or choice. It may well be that there is a use for both patterns, and if they are clearly named (I don't really care what they are called as long as the names are different!) and documented, there is no reason why two such DSPs should not co-exist.

Having said all that, I'd just re-emphasise that I think both of these patterns are fairly limited in the sort of functionality they can support. It seems to me the notion of "Simple DC" emerged at at time when the emphasis was still very much on the indexing and searching of textual values, and it largely ignores the Web principle of making links between resources. It would be difficult to categorise "Simple DC" - in either of the forms suggested - as a "linked data" friendly approach. I fear a lot of effort has been spent trying to build services on the basis of "Simple DC" when it may have been more appropriate to recognise the inherent limitations of that approach, and to focus instead on richer patterns designed from the outset to support more complex functions.

P.S. I know, I know, I promised a post on "Qualified DC". It's on its way....

7 conversation starters

mweller — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 03:35:42 PST

In a post about how twitter had changed my ALT-C experience I commented that we needed to find new social behaviours for when we meet people face to face who we know well on twitter. And Jim Groom is always saying how it's the personal element that makes blogs meaningful. So, in the spirit of those '7 things you didn't know about me' memes, although hopefully less annoying, I thought I'd give 7 conversation starters for occasions when I might meet people I know virtually, and we don't want to talk about blogging or twitter. I think everyone should have a social crib sheet, particularly with the advent of mobile devices now - if you're on your way to a meeting with someone, call up their conversation starters page and you instantly have grounds for a social connection.

As a child I was a bit koumpounophobic - I had a fear of buttons. Couldn't stand them being separate, or to touch them. If someone said 'I've lost a button' then that room became a no-go zone. I was also not very keen on jewellery. Of course it doesn't bother me now, I can do up a shirt with the best of them. Interestingly, although I've never mentioned or displayed it, my daughter doesn't like buttons either and won't wear clothing that has them if she can help it. This is, to me, an example of the strange subtlety of genetics.
So I'm happy to talk about childhood phobias, genetics, nature versus nurture, etc.
I like most non-offal based foods and am constantly amazed at how fussy a lot of grown-ups are. But I have never been able to stomach baked beans and hate the insidious way they infect a whole plate of food. And celery of course, but then no-one really likes celery do they?
We can chat about the nightmares of organising a dinner party with a range of fussy eaters, food dislikes, disgusting things you have eaten, etc.
My favourite authors are Graham Greene, Martin Amis, Saul Bellow, Dickens, William Boyd, Nabokov, Conrad. The sharp ones amongst you will have spotted that this is an entirely male list. This is not the result of a deliberate policy - it's not as if I boycott women writers. I read and like a lot (Margaret Atwood, Iris Murdoch, George Eliot, Zadie Smith are all good, although Austen and the Brontes don't do much for me) but my favourites are all men. This can't just be coincidence can it? There must be something in their writing that appeals to me. So if we discount blatant sexism as the reason for my tastes (of course, you may not), it might be interesting to consider why this is so? You could maybe convince me away from my male preference in literary tastes.
I grew up in the age of the home video-player, and this was probably the most significant technology in my formative years (far more than early computers). As a teenager there was a group of us who used to occasionally bunk off school and go to someone's house to watch a range of video nasties: Driller Killer, I Spit on your Grave, Rollerball (game scenes only), The Thing, Quadrophenia (we were mods), Dawn of the Dead, Friday the 13th, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, My Bloody Valentine. These were the staple diet, and yet I didn't grow up a disturbed individual and later went onto be a fan of 'nicer' cinema (I cry at It's A Wonderful Life every year), so we can talk about the impact of violence in films, influential technologies, etc.
I like to drink tea, beer and wine, not necessarily at the same time, and probably in that order of preference. I have a vague mistrust of people who drink 'flavoured tea'. I have the potential to become a beer bore. I once had an exchange with Alastair Campbell on the merits of tea over coffee (we were in agreement). I don't like spirits, except gin and tonic naturally. I thought when I reached 40 I would suddenly develop a taste for whisky. Recently someone poured me a very fine whisky but I had to concede defeat - every minuscule sip made me want to gag. I fully accept this proves I am a wimp.
The first gig I went to was The Beat at the Rainbow Club in London. I was thirteen and it was full of burly skinheads. When The Beat came on it erupted and the whole floor was bouncing. I had grown up in the suburbs and found it both exhilarating and frightening. I spent about 4 years going to lots of gigs after that, but now I don't get much from them. Martin Amis once commented that at some age all men stop going to football games. I disagree with that, but I do feel that about gigs - I don't want to stand at the back and clap politely and I certainly don't want to be down the front anymore, so I'm not sure I see the point in them. Good bands I saw in that period: The Jam, New Order, Happy Mondays, Echo and theBunnymen, Teardrop Explodes, Billy Bragg, The Cure. Embarrassing acts: Ultravox, Toyah, King.
I once won a film review competition judged by Mark Kermode. I wrote a critical piece on Rodriguez' Sin City. My argument was that people loved it because it was 'stylish', but for me it wore its style too obviously. Martin Scorsese once complained that the Oscar for Best wardrobe or similar always went to a costume drama, but as much detail went in to a film set in the 1950s. I think the same is true of Sin City, other films have better style, it's just not as blatant. I also argued that Hollywood continues to make the mistake that graphic novels make good films because they have similar elements - strong visual style, linear narrative, often based around good vs evil, etc. But the results are nearly always poor, maybe because as with traditional novels, the differences between the mediums are underestimated, or because graphic novels are a bit rubbish to start with (ducks).
Happy to discuss Sin City, novel adaptations or to have you defend graphic novels.

If none of those work for you, pick one from: Spurs, running, Wales/Cardiff, daughters.

Teachers as Learners (Part 32)

Will Richardson — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 03:06:30 PST

Recently at the beginning of a day long workshop, I used a Google form to get feedback on this question:

If there was one part of your personal learning practice that you wanted to focus on today, what would it be? What questions would you seek to answer?

Now I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not a perfect question in terms of trying to get some sense of the personal learning lives from the teachers who were participating. But in the context of a discussion we’d been having about the passion-based learning opportunities that the Web now affords, I was hoping to learn what they wanted to think more deeply about when it came to their own interests and their own learning. Unfortunately, most of what I got back (on the first go round at least; I asked them to do it again) was about how to use the tools in the classroom, and very little about what they wanted to learn about learining around their own passions with others who share them.

I know that over the years, I’ve thought about and written about this quite a bit here and elsewhere, this idea that teachers need to see themselves as learners first. In our PLP cohorts, Sheryl and I are constantly working to get teachers to be selfish about the learning at the outset, to not see the experience as simply a way to learn tools that they can then bring into their classrooms. (We didn’t call it “Powerful Tools Practice” for a reason.) And I usually end most of my presentations with that plea as well, most times only to get asked a question about how to overcome the difficulties of making this work in the classroom. It’s always a struggle.

Anyway, it’s interesting to review some of these responses that did attempt to reach beyond tools:

How to take the learning practices that I’ve been taught by senior teachers, as I am a new teacher, and make them work in concert with the needs of my students when in the face of so much negative energy from my coworkers?
We are dealing with numerous “tools” that help us find, sort and use information in a directed manner. Is there a “best” approach to pulling these together to enable us to better deal with and share these in one place.
Interested in gathering ideas about how to motivate groups of teacher to value the importance of developing their own PLN. Often educators understand the idea of developing a PLN but they are not consistent about maintaining it. The shift from sit n’ git to planning a goal and following a custom path seems foreign.
I really like having ammunition for the folks who say learning 2.0 is eeeeviiiil, that the state of education is going to pot and literacy is at an all time low.

Obviously, these reflect a lot of the messiness that exists right now around technology and the Web in learning practice. (That’s why I picked them.) But it still leaves me wondering why it’s so hard to get educators in particular to be selfish about this stuff. Maybe it’s not in our DNA?

We must ..... a call to action to create the university of the future

sschmoller — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 23:47:41 PST

Here are five tasks prioritised las month at a "create the university of the future" meeting sponsored by the Open University of Catalonia and the US based and led New Media Consortium, and attended by "forty leaders in open education and technology" Barcelona. Source [140 kB PDF], with thanks to Phil Candy.

We must encourage the reuse and remixing of rich media. In order to achieve this, it must be easier to find, use, and cite pieces of media, especially for educational purposes. Contextual tools that perform these tasks, co-developed by students as the end-users, must be created and made available to all. We must also develop ways to translate rich media, not only between languages, but also between modalities, such that content produced in a certain geographical area and medium may be accessed and reused in other places and in other forms. Portability of rich media is key; content must not be tied to a certain platform for delivery, nor to a specific medium or environment.
We must embrace the full promise of mobile devices as learning platforms. Mobiles - not simply phones, but all kinds of handheld and portable devices - are a powerful tool for learning because they are controlled by the holder. With mobile devices, users can direct their own learning experiences, accessing information where and when they need it. It is critical that we effect a paradigm shift toward recognizing mobiles as a primary platform for delivery of educational content — not content that is translated for use on mobiles, but content that is designed for such use from the outset. We must actively encourage development practices that remove platform independency. Likewise, we must advocate for a global mobile network that is as easy to use, as inexpensive, and even more ubiquitous than the web.
We must award credentials based on learning outcomes. It is time to recognize the learning that occurs outside of courses and beyond classroom walls. The model of awarding credentials solely on the basis of participation in established programs must give way to a more flexible design that separates credentials from coursework and recognizes mastery regardless of where or how it is attained. As more learners choose alternate means of education, including non-university programs, mentoring, apprenticeship, and other informal or innovative options, we must accept and recognize their achievements as equivalent to those gained in more traditional ways.
We must enable a culture of sharing. Recognizing that the sharing and reuse of scholarly work is a key component of the university of the future, we advocate building a culture of sharing in which concerns about intellectual property, copyright, and student-to-student collaboration are alleviated and the model of proprietary work dissolves in favor of a more open one. To this end, we must establish reward structures that support the sharing of work in progress, ongoing research, highly collaborative projects, and scholarly publications of all kinds, including reputation systems, peer review processes, and new models for citation of such content. We must empower students to share knowledge with one another in ways that are viewed as collaboration rather than cheating. Assessment models must change to support these practices. Ultimately, we see a culture of sharing as a crucial piece of the infrastructure of a scalable educational system that can support the millions of learners who will participate in it.
We must take care that open resources include the context that will enable its use and understanding. Content out of context is at best easy to misconstrue, and at worst, too difficult to use. Producers of open content must consider ways of attaching pedagogical narratives to content that will help provide necessary context. One approach is the notion of "pedagogical wrappers" - specific guidelines and processes that can ensure the content is placed in an appropriate context - or in the case of broadly useful topics, a variety of appropriate contexts. Such wrappers would ensure that the focus remains on learning objectives and process, rather than on the technology used to deliver the learning materials.

A Wiki in a Widget

s.wilson@bangor.ac.uk (Scott Wilson) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:09:32 PST

Just how much typical VLE/CMS/Groupware tools can you actually replace with Widgets? Well I've long disliked the Moodle wiki, so decided to have a go at writing a Wiki Widget. I've embedded it below.

Now its not exactly brilliant, but then again it wasn't a big job; mostly I used the Creole javascript WikiText parser, and hooked it into Wookie's Wave Gadget API implementation to handle shared persistence. So you can have a shared wiki per course area, or indeed per blog post. I'm sure with a bit of effort it could be quite usable - sometimes less is more.

The source package for this widget can be downloaded here. (Change the file extension from .wgt to .zip to open it up and look at the source).

(I wonder how long until it gets spammed?)

If you're in the UK education sector, or develop a platform used in the sector, and would like to get involved or better informed about developing, using or supporting W3C widgets and related technologies like Google Wave, then probably the best place to start is the CETIS Widgets Working Group.

Remote conference participation - results

mweller — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 08:48:03 PST

Last week I set up a discussion around the changing nature of conferences and particularly how remote, vicarious participation was impacting upon them and our practice. There has been some excellent discussion over in Cloudworks, so please check that out if the subject interests you.

I also set up a quick 5 question survey on how people found remote participation. I had 53 responses (quite good I thought), so here are the results.

The first three questions asked about how remote participation compared with face to face attendance on some of the main functions of conferences, namely networking, content and socialising. Here are the results:

So for networking most people ranked it as between 25% and 50% as good as attending face to face, while for accessing the content, most people ranked it as around 75% as effective. Unsuprisingly, socialising didn't fare as well, with most people ranking it between 25% as good and no good at all.

The next question was a bit vague, but I wanted to get an impression of how 'green' people reckoned remote participation was compared with face to face attendance. This will obviously depend on lots of factors such as where the conference is, how they travel, what the facilities are like, how green their own energy supply is and how we interpret 'greenness' anyway. But to gauge an overall impression I thought it was worthwhile (of course people's impression could be wrong, this isn't based on actual CO2 emission data). Here are the results:

Perhaps no surprises here either, most people ranking it between 75% and 100% greener.

Lastly, I asked about how much time remote participation took compared with face to face attendance:

This came in around 25% as the most popular response.

I think this gives us an interesting starting point for a conversation about conferences. To put it simply the question we can ask goes something like "If you can achieve 50% networking, get 75% of the content for 25% of the time and it's 75% greener, then what are the real benefits of attending?". I don't want to say remote attendance is better, or that we should do away with traditional conferences, but we probably need to be clearer as to what we get from attending, and maybe trade some of our face to face attendance for remote participation. There is also an argument that institutions/managers could allocate specific time to allow people to 'attend' remotely, given the benefits it offers.

Over in the cloudworks discussion Alan Cann picked up on something more intangible - the manner in which attending 'real' conferences liberates us from much of the day to day work and provides us with thinking room or 'headspace'. I find this to be true for myself - many good ideas I have for research, projects, books, journal articles, blog posts, etc come when I'm at conferences. So we need to acknowledge that and cherish it I think.

The other issue is the way in which conferences themselves need to change to accommodate this, and we are seeing lots of examples of this, from streaming, designated live-bloggers, aggregators, hybrid approaches, satelitte conferences, etc.

Accessing Sconul Access

ostephens — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 06:03:38 PST

This is a very quick lunchtime post to document a script I’ve been working on over the last week or so. SCONUL Access is a scheme that offers reciprocal access to various university libraries across the UK.

The SCONUL Access website allows you to enter details of a UK university affiliation, and then will list details of those libraries which you can use via the reciprocal agreement scheme (you have to apply for a SCONUL access card at your ‘home’ institution before you can use the other libraries).

I’ve occasionally thought it would be nice to do something like map the results of a SCONUL access enquiry on a Google map, or integrate the question of ‘which libraries can I use’ with ‘where can I get a book’ – so that users could potentially do a search of all the libraries they can access (perhaps limited by a geographical radius?). Aside from these ideas, the SCONUL Access directory actually contains quite a bit of useful information on each library it lists – including the insitution website, the library website and the library catalogue URL.

Further, I was recently inspired by Philip Adams from Leicester (@Fulup) on Twitter who pointed me at http://www.library.dmu.ac.uk/Resources/OPAC/index.php?page=366 which combines information from SCONUL access with the Talis Silkworm directory to show SCONUL Access libraries (relevant to those at the University of Leicester I guess) on Google Maps.

Unfortunately the SCONUL Access website doesn’t provide an API to query the data it has on the libraries, so I thought I’d start writing something. I haven’t (yet anyway) tried to replicate the function that SCONUL access provide of taking user details, and giving a list of available libraries – to get this function you still have to go to SCOUNL Access website and fill in their forms. What my script does is simply provide SCONUL Access member library details in an XML format. The script lives at:

http://www.meanboyfriend.com/sconulaccess

It supports three modes of use:

1. Summary of all SCONUL Access libraries
URL: http://www.meanboyfriend.com/sconulaccess
Function: returns a summary of all institutions participating in SCONUL Access from their A-Z Listing. This XML (see below for format) only includes the SCONUL Access (internal) code for the library, the name of the institution and the URL for the full SCONUL Access record

2. Full records for specified SCONUL Access libraries
URL: http://www.meanboyfriend.com/sconulaccess/? e.g. http://www.meanboyfriend.com/sconulaccess/?institution=2,3,4
Function: returns full records for each institution specified by its SCONUL Access ID in the URL (see full XML structure below)

3. Full records for all SCONUL Access libraries
URL: http://www.meanboyfriend.com/sconulaccess/?institution=all
Function: similar to 2 but returns full records for all institutions that are obtained via 1. This takes some time to return results as it retrieves over 180 records from the SCONUL Access website – so it isn’t recommended for general use.

XML Structure

<sconul_access_results>
<institution code=”4″ name=”Aston University”>
  <inst_sconul_url>
    http://www.access.sconul.ac.uk/members/institution_html?ins_id=4
  </inst_sconul_url>
  <website>http://www.aston.ac.uk/</website>
  <library_website>http://www1.aston.ac.uk/lis/</library_website>
  <library_catalogue>http://library.aston.ac.uk/</library_catalogue>
  <contact_name>Anne Perkins</contact_name>
  <contact_title>Public Services Coordinator</contact_title>
  <contact_email>a.v.perkins@aston.ac.uk</contact_email>
  <contact_telephone>01212044492</contact_telephone>
  <contact_postcode>B4 7ET</contact_postcode>
</institution>
<source>
  <source_url>http://www.access.sconul.ac.uk/</source_url>
  <rights>Copyright SCONUL. SCONUL, 102 Euston Street, London, NW1 2HS. </rights>
</source>
</sconul_access_results>

The <institution> element is repeatable.
For (1) above the only elements returned are:
<institution>
</inst_sconul_url>
<source> (and subelements)

Anyway, I’d be interested in comments, and would be happy to look at alternative functions and formats – let me know if there is anything you’d like to see.

EDUCAUSE - 7 things you should know about Google Wave

sschmoller — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 08:28:44 PST

Via Stephen Downes, here is a link to a new EDUCAUSE outline: 7 things you should know about Google Wave - [380 kB PDF - two pages]. Given that Wave is only in its early stage of roll-out, EDUCAUSE is taking a gamble asserting much about it. And when you read in the guide that "answers to questions about who in higher education is likely to find value in it and how exactly they will use it remain speculative" you realise that publication is possibly premature. (I have some spare Wave invitations which I am happy to share.)

Venki Ramakrishnan discusses the ribosome, and why measures of "impact" should not be used when assessing the quality of fundamental research

sschmoller — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:03:10 PDT

Venki Ramakrishnan was one of the people who won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for deducing the structure of the ribosome, the protein macro-molecular machine that takes the genetic information in DNA using RNA to create protein. This seven minute video is a set of snippets with Ramakrishnan's talking about his work (and the ribosome). He concludes with a convincing critique of the approach currently favoured by government that which research gets funded should by decided in part by its economic impact. Ramakrishnan (and many others) believe that knowledge should be pursued for its own sake: and that economic impact follows.

Digital Inclusion: an unusual opportunity to help develop a critique of current digital inclusion research, policy, and practice

sschmoller — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 10:09:52 PDT

Digital Inclusion is a contested term and I think the ESRC/EPSRC funded Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) Programme¹ is onto a good thing with this Digital Inclusion Commentary Site.

Why?

The site is implemented in Comment Press (a variant of Wordpress) that allows users to comment on a complex document at the level of individual paragraphs. [Explanation]
The site is open to the world.
The aim of the document that is in the process of being written is to influence future research relating to digital inclusion.

By the look of the first two chapters, the work is going to be thorough and free of the glibness that sometimes infects discussion about digital inclusion. Excerpt from the introduction:

"This is an area of the Digital Inclusion that we have created to facilitate the creation of an online document that reviews and critiques current digital inclusion research, policy and practice: with a particular focus on drawing out potential implications for future digital inclusion research. This document, when completed will have a stand-alone life of its own, but it will also form the foundation of a separate publication towards the end of the TEL programme that highlights ways in which each of the TEL projects has (or has the potential to have) made a contribution to advancing our understanding or practice in relation to digital inclusion."

¹ Disclosure. I am a member of the TEL Programme's Advisory Group; at one point I made a point to Jane Seale (the principal author of the two chapters to date) about the suitability of Comment Press as a platform for this kind of thing. So I have an interest in this project being a success.

IMS's three-pronged strategy

s.wilson@bangor.ac.uk (Scott Wilson) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 09:54:59 PDT

Two weeks ago I attended the IMS Learning Impact conference in Barcelona; this was one of the first IMS events I'd attended in some time, and I've tried to put together some thoughts on the IMS technical strategy.

Now a lot of discussion around IMS is about its policies, politics, membership, processes and so on, but I'm not going into any of that here; for now I want to focus on specifications. (Note also this is a personal reflection, and doesn't necessarily represent the view of JISC or CETIS)

IMS currently sets out its stall as offering three key "products" in its specification portfolio; together they make up its "Digital Learning Services Standards" portfolio.

Common Cartridge

The first product is the IMS Common Cartridge. I remember this originating in discussions way back as to whether there should be a SCORM-like profile of standards (packaging, metadata, runtime and so on) that was better suited to Higher Education. Its come a long way since, and has gathered a lot of influential support. However, ultimately it is still a means of putting a bunch of web pages into a zip file to import into an LMS, which seems increasingly an odd thing to do.

CC does add some interesting capabilities - it adds the QTI (Question and Test Interoperability) specification to the profile, enabling automated assessments along with content (something ADL was considering for SCORM a few years back but never got around to), and it also adds a capability for adding "tools" using a version of the IMS Learning Tools Interoperability specification (more on which later). However it misses out things like SCORM's tracking functionality and CMI runtime, which have been a major selling point of SCORM.

Overall CC is an odd mix (one of my colleagues referred to it as the "curate's egg" specification) but is quite likely to gain some traction with publishers and commercial LMSs. But what will the impact be? I'm not convinced a market for common cartridges will open up in HE in the same manner as occurred in commercial training with SCORM; they really are quite different. However, IMS is putting a lot of effort into marketing CC to get adoption, so I remain open minded.

For the moment the key question is whether OER and CC are a natural fit - clearly the UK's Open University considers it an option.

Learner Information Services

IMS Learner Information Services is the latest revision of the IMS Enterprise specification, which was one of the first IMS specifications and the first I was personally involved in. IMS LIS, like its predecessor, is focussed on the connection between an LMS and a student record system; this means being able to provide groups and users to the LMS and to handle reporting back for things like final grades or tracking data. LIS extends Enterprise with new services for areas like course structures (a bit similar to XCRI, though not compatible with it) and continues the service-oriented approach that started with IMS Enterprise Services 1.0.

However, IMS LIS also plans to add batch-file bindings that would also enable REST services; this is important, as some of the most successful applications of IMS Enterprise have focussed on simple REST services and batch processing, and I'm glad to see IMS is recognising this and providing official support.

Learning Tools Interoperability

IMS LTI v2.0 is a specification for enabling LMS's to include external applications running in iFrames that can communicate with the host LMS for things like user information. (There isn't a page for v2.0 yet, but there is a description of LTI on this page)

If you've been following this blog you'll know that I've been contributing to the W3C Widgets familiy of specifications, and have been keen to point out that the IMS specification is rather similar, begging the question as to why IMS is bothering to reinvent this particular wheel. Part of the reason is historical - IMS LTI started earlier than W3C's activity (although that itself is based on earlier technologies, such as Apple Dashboard Widgets and Yahoo! Konfabulator) and so has had time to diverge from common practice. Its also harder to backtrack on the legacy of its "version 1.0" which was really an exploration of a possible common extension mechanism for (back then) WebCT and Blackboard (and later Sakai). Another part of the reason is that many IMS members are not really that well connected into web standards generally, and even though I personally prompted the IMS working group to look into Widgets they never really managed to connect it with what they were working on.

I think IMS is putting a lot of pressure on LTI to succeed, although I think its fundamentally misconceived. For example, the current IMS LTI 2.0 document set consists of 20 word documents covering everything from inter-widget messaging to APIs for passing "outcomes" from widgets to the LMS - most of it involving lots of SOAP and WSDL. Using the W3C Widgets specification I reckon this could be whittled down to one or two very basic documents for things like common education vocabularies and how to use Widgets with an open API on the LMS end (or more likely, just IMS LIS with a REST binding). Already I've seen a lot of European projects working with W3C Widgets and Google OpenSocial to deliver IMS-LTI-like functionality; we've also been working with Sakai 3 and Moodle to integrate both Widgets and OpenSocial applications. Perhaps the main value IMS could contribute would be to sort out the REST APIs that Widgets could call to enable tracking.

Its unlikely that IMS would embrace W3C for LTI for a number of reasons, mostly that the whole approach doesn't just invalidate most of the effort on IMS LTI 2.0, it also calls into question the whole "DIgital Learning Services" strategy: if we used web standards, plus a REST API for things like cohorts, would we even need IMS Common Cartridge or IMS LTI at all? From this perspective, the IMS strategy seems less about opening up education systems so much as supporting an education technology silo into which a few suppliers can offer services with limited external competition. After all, who apart from a few established players in the HE sector is going to implement those 20 IMS LTI documents?

The Missing Specifications

As well as what is IN the IMS strategy, its worth considering for a moment what's OUT of the strategy:

IMS Learning Design is one of the most widely discussed specifications in a European context (or certainly seems to be in the circles I move in) and yet is completely absent. It had some discussion in relation to a K-12 profile of Common Cartridge, but I don't think this progressed anywhere. Its especially unusual that IMS isn't promoting any further development or marketing for LD, given that quite a few of the entrants to its own Learning Impact awards were using LD.

IMS ePortfolio was a relatively recent specification, but was released with some fundamental problems. So far there has been insufficient interest from members to fix it, and CETIS has switched its efforts to looking into practical interoperability between ePortfolio applications using Atom feeds (see PIOP).

IMS QTI 2.x is largely completed, but was recently withdrawn by IMS and then reinstated after a number of complaints. I think its fair to say IMS doesn't really know what to do with it, given that IMS CC uses the older 1.x version of QTI.

Finally, IMS has a number of specifications that really should be retired - IMS LIP, IMS SSP, IMS RLI, IMS VDEX come to mind.

The Rub?

Overall the IMS specifications seem oddly out of step with the wider web. There is still an adherence to SOAP and WSDL doctrine that has slid rapidly into the Trough of Despond elsewhere. Where REST APIs are considered, they are a bit of an add-on rather than at the core - IMS specifications are not based on web architecture, irrespective of binding. And, most critically, there is a big gap between IMS and web standards, as evidenced by the disconnect between IMS LTI 2.0 and W3C Widgets (or even Google OpenSocial). This was pointed out at the plenary of the event by Mark Stiles (who chairs the JISC-CETIS board as well as being on the IMS board of directors): IMS really needs to work more closely with horizontal standards rather than build a silo.

I think IMS LIS is worth a look when it comes out, as is Common Cartridge (though in the short term we can easily convert Cartridges to the more commonly-supported formats such as SCORM 1.2 and using the Content Transcoder). However I'd give IMS LTI 2.0 a miss.

But more generally, is IMS too old-fashioned to remain relevant? Or is its focus on rather "unfashionable" areas of education technology a good bet for longer-term survival? A lot will depend on the success - or otherwise - of the current three-spec strategy

Google Wave Widgets: Implementation using W3C Widgets and Wookie Server

s.wilson@bangor.ac.uk (Scott Wilson) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:56:26 PDT

Unless you're living in a cave somewhere you've probably heard about Google Wave. (There's a good post by Wilbert Kraan here, and another by Michael Feldstein here). What you probably haven't been able to do is see some of it in action. However, over the weekend I implemented the Wave Gadget API for W3C Widgets using our Wookie Widget engine, so you can see some of the widgets in action.

Google Wave is actually several discrete components. On the one hand you have the Wave Server, which is basically a Jabber instant messaging service with some extensions. Then you have the Wave Client, which is a bit like a web-based IM client with bells and whistles. And finally you have the application that lets you use contextualized collaborative applications that can update in real time - the Wave Gadget Server.

Now I don't have a Wave Server or Wave Client to hand, but we have been fortunate enough to have already developed a Widget Server (Wookie) that already has the functionality described in the Google Wave Gadgets API, which is shared state and participant information. So implementing the Google Wave Gadget API was quite simple, and mostly involved mapping the API calls to our existing APIs and web services.

In Wookie we primarily support the W3C Widgets specification rather than Google Gadgets, so I converted the Google Wave Sample Applications to W3C Widget format. This is quite simple in practice - I remove the proprietary Google markup to make the pages regular HTML5, create a W3C Widgets "config.xml" file for the widget metadata, and then zip it up and change the extension to ".wgt".

Once "de-googled", the Widgets need to run in a Wave Container - that is, an application which manages participants and can have a shared state context, and can then communicate this with the Widget. We already do this in Wookie by creating plugins for different web applications; the plugin enables the web app (e.g. Moodle) to ask Wookie for a Widget for a given person in a given context (such as a course or a user profile page - in Moodle we use the Block identifier). The result is something like this:

However, we can also run some of these sample applications in "anonymous" environments if they don't need participant information. So, below I've included the "fridge magnet poetry" Wave Gadget example. If you move the "magnets" around, this is synched with the view of everyone else reading this post (so you may see them moving about by themselves if you're viewing this at a busy time of day). You can also check it out if you open this post in two different browsers. (NOTE: As this is running on a Wookie development server using prototype code there may be some latency and the odd bug. It also hasn't been tested on anything other than Safari4beta and Firefox)

By itself this is not a very exciting example, as most of the cooler examples need a participants model, and so lend themselves better to running in something like Elgg or Moodle than a plain blog site like mine. However the basic principle is that Widgets with this level of interaction could easily replace LMS-specific tools in the near future.

You can now download and run your own Wookie server that can run Wave gadgets (suitably converted to W3C format as above) - you need MySQL and Tomcat, and a bit of patience in setting it all up. You also need to either download our Moodle Block plugin for a Moodle installation, or write a plugin for your favourite web container to try them out in.

An interview with the future

mweller — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:46:04 PDT

I am one of the 'presenters' at the JISC 09 online conference. I don't actually present, but instead have been asked to create a short video for the session looking at Do educational institutions have a future? Graham Attwell and Rob Howe are the other presenters. We had a chat about the session and I mentioned that I had considered doing an interview with a future version of myself, as a means of exploring the issues. They liked the idea so we have decided all to adopt it, with myself taking the academic perspective, Rob the learner one and Graham the institutional view.

Below is my video, although it's meant as a bit of fun I hope there are some issues in it that we can explore in the session. Please sign up for the conference if you haven't already, it should be fun (it costs £50 I think).

BTW - I think everyone should do an interview with their future selves, so if you do one let me know.

Remote conference participation - flash debate

mweller — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 05:30:08 PDT

One of the things I am interested in is the subtle ways in which new technology begins to alter standard practice over time, and without these changes being planned. In the academic world I think the conference is one such area. The academic conference can be seen as one of the core practices in higher education. It achieves many vital functions in academic practice, including:

Knowledge sharing - you get to present and listen to other talks
Validation - by sharing research and ideas within a subject community you get validation
Networking - you establish a network of peers
Recognition - publishing conference papers is often a first step for researchers to publishing papers and are recognised outputs
Socialising - slightly different from networking, there is a social element to conferences which make them enjoyable

Over the past few years remote participation has become more commonplace. By remote participation I don't mean solely online conferences, but rather the sort of vicarious, casual participation many of us undertake. This type of participation is often unofficial, and uses low key, free technology. It is often a hybrid of the following examples:

Twitter hashtags
Live streaming (whether official or via an individual)
Blogging
Live-blogging
Video/audio updates
Flickr streams
Slideshare presentations
Cloudworks/Friendfeed aggregations

There are a few things that interest me about this. The first is how does it change the nature of the conference to have this broader participation? Secondly, how can conference organisers and presenters best take advantage of it and incorporate it into the conference? Thirdly, what is the experience like for the remote participant compared with the 'real thing'? For this last question, I have created a quick 5 question survey to get a feeling for how remote participation compares with real attendance.

I think there is a lot to discuss here, so I have set up a space in cloudworks for a flash debate. I'd be interested in your thoughts on any of the three questions above, or other opinions. Of course you can add comments here too - I'll post them over in Cloudworks also.

Virtual World Watch Request for Information

PeteJ — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 06:00:42 PDT

Over at Virtual World Watch, John Kirriemuir is embarking on collecting data for his seventh "snapshot" survey of the use of virtual worlds in UK Higher and Further Education, and has issued a request for updated information:

The question

How are you using virtual worlds (e.g. Second Life, OpenSim, Metaplace, OLIVE, Active Worlds, Playstation Home, Blue Mars, Twinity, Wonderland) in teaching, learning or research?

Things you may want to include:

Why you are using a virtual world.

If teaching using a virtual world, how it fits into your curriculum.

Any evaluation of the experience of using the virtual world.

Will you do it again next year? Why (or why not)?

Please send any response to John, by Tuesday 10 November 2009. For further information, see the post on the Virtual World Watch weblog.

UCAS Course code lookup

ostephens — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 14:12:21 PDT

While I was writing my entry for the JISC MOSAIC competition (which I will write up more thoroughly in a later post I promise – honest), one of the problems I encountered was retrieving details of courses and institutions from the UCAS website. Unfortunately UCAS don’t seem to provide a nice API to their catalogue of course/institution data. To extract the data I was going to have to scrape it out of their HTML pages. Even more unfortunately they require a session ID before you can successfully get back search results – this means you essentially have to start a session on the website and retrieve the session ID before you can start to do a search.

I hacked together something to do enable me to get what I needed to do for the MOSAIC competition. However, I wasn’t the only person who had this problem – in a blog entry on his MOSAIC entry Tony Hirst notes the same problem. At the time Tony asked if I would be making what I’d done available, and I was very happy to – unfortunately the way I’d done it I couldn’t expose just the UCAS course code search. I started to re-write the code but writing something that I could share with other people, with appropriate error checking and feedback proved more challenging than my original dirty hack.

I’ve finally got round to it – it works as follows:

The service is at http://www.meanboyfriend.com/readtolearn/ucas_code_search?
The service currently accepts two parameters:

course_code
catalogue_year

The course_code parameter simply accepts a UCAS course code. I haven’t been able to find out what the course code format is restricted to – but it looks like it is a maximum of 4 alphanumeric characters, so this is what the script accepts. Assuming the code meets this criteria, the script passes this directly to the UCAS catalogue search. The UCAS catalogue doesn’t seem to care whether alpha characters are upper or lower case and treats them as equivalent. For some examples of UCAS codes, you can see this list provided by Dave Pattern. (see Addendum 2 for more information on UCAS course codes and JACS)

The catalogue_year parameter takes the year in the format yyyy. If no value is given then the UCAS catalogue seems to default to the current year (2010 at the moment). If an invalid year is given the UCAS catalogue also seems to default to the current year. It seems that at most only two years are valid at a single time. However the script doesn’t check any of this – as long as it gets a valid four digit year, it passes it on to the UCAS catalogue search.

An example is http://www.meanboyfriend.com/readtolearn/ucas_code_search/?course_code=R901&catalogue_year=2010

The script’s output is xml of the form:

<xml>
<ucas_course_results course_code=”" catalogue_year=”" ucas_stateid=”">
<institution code=”" name=”">
<course_name>xxxx</course_name> (repeatable)
</institution>
</ucas_course_results>

(I’ve made a slight change to the output structure since the original publication of this post)
(Finally I’ve added a couple of extra elements inst_ucas_url and course_ucas_url which provide links to the institution and course records on the UCAS website respectively)

<xml>
<ucas_course_results course_code=”" catalogue_year=”" ucas_stateid=”">
<institution code=”" name=”">
<inst_ucas_url>[URL for Institution record on UCAS website]</inst_ucas_url>
<course ucas_catalogue_id=”"> (repeatable) ~~(the ucas_catalogue_id is not currently populated – see Addendum 1)~~
<course_ucas_url>[URL for course record on UCAS website]</course_ucas_url>
<name>xxxx</name>
</course>
</institution>
</ucas_course_results>

For example:

<ucas_course_results course_code=”R901″ catalogue_year=”2010″ ucas_stateid=”DtDdAozqXysV4GeQbRbhP3DxTGR2m-3eyl”>
<institution code=”P80″ name=”University of Portsmouth”>
<course_name>Combined Modern Languages</course_name>
</institution>
</ucas_course_results>
(I’ve made a slight change to the output structure since the original publication of this post)
(Finally I’ve added a couple of extra elements inst_ucas_url and course_ucas_url which provide links to the institution and course records on the UCAS website respectively)

<ucas_course_results course_code=”R901″ catalogue_year=”2010″ ucas_stateid=”DtDdAozqXysV4GeQbRbhP3DxTGR2m-3eyl”>
<institution code=”P80″ name=”University of Portsmouth”>
<inst_ucas_url>
http://search.ucas.com/cgi-bin/hsrun/search/search/StateId/DtGJmwzptIwV4rADbR8xUfafCk6nG-Ur61/HAHTpage/search.HsInstDetails.run?i=P80
>/inst_ucas_url>
<course ucas_catalogue_id=”"> ~~(the ucas_catalogue_id is not currently populated – see Addendum 1)~~
<course_ucas_url>
http://search.ucas.com/cgi-bin/hsrun/search/search/StateId/DtGJmwzptIwV4rADbR8xUfafCk6nG-Ur61/HAHTpage/search.HsDetails.run?n=989628
</course_ucas_url>
<name>Combined Modern Languages</name>
</course>
</institution>
</ucas_course_results>

The values fed to the script and the StateID for the UCAS website is fed back in the response.

If there is an error at some point in the process and error message will be included in the response in an <error> tag.

Addendum 1
The script relies on the HTML returned by UCAS remaining consistent. If this changes, my script will probably break.

Having done the hard work I’d be happy to offer alternative formats for the data returned by the script – just let me know in the comments. I’d also be happy to look at different XML structures for the data so again just leave a comment.

Something I should have mentioned in the original post. Given the data returned by the script you should be able to form a URL which links to an institution on the UCAS website using a URL of the form:
http://search.ucas.com/cgi-bin/hsrun/search/search/StateId/<insert state ID from xml here>/HAHTpage/search.HsInstDetails.run?i=<insert institution code here>

Since finishing this work last night I’ve realised that I’ve left out one important piece of data which is an identifier that would let you form a link to a specific course from a specific institution. I have slightly restructured the XML to leave a space for the ucas_catalogue_id in the XML. I’ll add this in as soon as I can.
This has now been added.

Addendum 2
I’ve just found quite a bit more detail on the format and structure of the UCAS ‘course codes’. UCAS now uses JACS (Joint Academic Coding System) for course codes (see JACS documentation from HESA). JACS codes consist of 4 characters, the first being an uppercase letter and the remaining three characters being digits. JACS codes are essentially hierarchical with the first character representing a general subject area and the digits representing subdivisions (in with increasing granularity). The codes in the UCAS catalogue are a mixture of JACS 1.7 and JACS 2.0 codes. A full listing of JACS v2.0 codes is available from HESA, and a listing of JACS v1.7 codes is available from UCAS as a pdf.

UCAS have an explanation of why and where they use both JACS v2.0 and JACS v1.7.

However because UCAS need to code courses which cover more than one subject area, they have rules for representing these courses while sticking to codes with a total length of 4 characters. These rules are summarised on the UCAS website, but a fuller description is available in pdf format. This last document is most interesting because it indicates how you might create the UCAS code from a HESA Student Record which could be of interest for future mashups.

The implications of all this for my script are relatively small as I currently assume that there is a 4 character alpha-numeric code. On the basis of this documentation I could refine this to check for 3 alpha-numeric characters followed by a single digit I guess – perhaps I will at some point.

Finally it looks like UCAS and HESA are currently looking at JACS v3.0 which could introduce further changes I guess, although it looks unlikely that this will affect the code format, but rather the possible values, and maybe the meaning of some values. While this isn’t a problem for my script, it would mean that historical course codes from datasets such as MOSAIC could not be assumed to represent the same subject areas in the current UCAS course catalogue as they did when the data was recorded – which is, to say the least, a pain.

Addendum 3
A final set of changes (I hope):

The ucas_catalogue_id is now populated
Added inst_ucas_url element which contains the URL linking to the Institution record in the UCAS catalogue
Added course_ucas_url element which contains the URL linking to the Course record in the UCAS catalogue

Everyone’s a winner?

ostephens — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 02:33:02 PDT

The results of the JISC MOSAIC competition were announced this week. The winning entries were great, and I think their prizes were well deserved. The only downside in this was that my entry didn’t make the cut. I will admit to having a moment of disappointment over this, but this passed in about 5 seconds – after all, I’d really enjoyed the challenge of writing my entry and was relatively pleased with the result.

Later in the week I fell into conversation with a couple of people on Twitter about how there hadn’t been much collaboration in the competition. With one notable exception none of the contestants had published early thoughts online, and all the entries had been from individuals rather than teams.

During the course of this conversation I managed to both insult and upset someone I greatly like, admire and respect. For this I am truly sorry. This post is is in the way of an apology as well as an attempt to express my own thoughts around the nature of ‘developer competitions’ such as JISC MOSAIC.

The idea of a developer competition is that you set a challenge, aimed at computer programmers and interested others, and offer prizes to the best entries – the criteria can vary wildly. Perhaps the biggest prize of this type we’ve seen is the $1million NetFlix prize, but in the UK HE community where I work there have been a few smaller prizes on offer, and more widely in the UK community there have been prizes for ideas about using government data, and we are about to see one launched on the use of Museum data. The JISC MOSAIC competition offered a 1st prize of £1000 for work on library usage data.

One of the amazing things about the web, and perhaps particularly about the communities I’m engaged in, is the incredible personal commitment made in terms of time and resource by individuals to what many would regard as ‘work’. Both of the people I was talking to put in a great deal of effort into contributing to and developing ideas that many might think of as ‘the day job’ – and they do so with no thought of reward.

So – given this tendency to be self-motivated to solve problems, contribute, take part etc. Why do we need developer competitions?

My starting point is to look at my own motivation for entering the JISC MOSAIC competition. Would I have done this work without the competition? Trying to be completely honest here – probably not. However, I would almost certainly done other things instead – perhaps blogged more, perhaps done some other development (like this). So the competition focussed my energy on a particular area of work. Was I motivated by the cash prize? I’m not sure – at the end of the day it isn’t that relevant to me (although no doubt I could have found something to treat myself to). I think it was just the idea of the ‘competition’ that gave me the focus. I’m the kind of person who works relatively well with clear deadlines – so having a date by which a set of work was to be done definitely gave me something to aim at.

So – the competition was one element. However, I was also looking for ways to dust off my scripting skills. I used to script in Perl as part of my job, but I haven’t done this for several years – I had been looking for ways of picking this up again as it was something I always enjoyed doing. I am also extremely interested in the ideas behind the competition – I believe libraries should be exploiting their usage data more, and I was keen to show the community how valuable that usage data might be.

I don’t assume that others are motivated in the same way as me. When the usage data that was part of the JISC MOSAIC competition was first put online somebody immediately took it and transformed it into RDF – they weren’t motivated by a competition, they just did it.

My conclusion is that such competitions harness existing energy in the community and focus it on a particular problem for a particular time period. It won’t generally work where people aren’t inclined to do the work anyway. You need an interesting problem or proposition to engage people.

So far, so good? I’m not sure. The problem with a competition is that it is, well, competitive. Again trying to be honest about my own situation (and I’m not particularly proud of this, so don’t take it as an endorsement of my own approach) is that I immediately became more protective of my ideas. The competition had put a ‘value’ on them that they hadn’t previously had. I should say I actually started work on two entries to the competition – one was in collaboration with someone else, which unfortunately we weren’t able to pull together in time – so it wasn’t all about ‘me’. However, I didn’t announce my own entry until I was ready to submit. This isn’t how I usually work – I’m usually happy to share half baked ideas (as readers of this blog will know only too well!).

Again I think the factors around this are complex. It wasn’t just that I didn’t want to give away my idea. The truth is that I’m not a very good programmer. I wanted to take this chance to develop my programming skills (or at least get myself back to my previous level of incompetence). I am under no illusions – any developer worth their salt could take my idea and do a better job with it. In general this would be great – if my idea is good enough to inspire other people to do it much much better than I can I’d be very happy. But for the period of the competition this suddenly seemed like a bad idea.

Reflecting on this now, this shows a pretty rubbish (on my part) attitude to others – the ‘fear’ that my idea would be ’stolen’ (and of course the egoism that says my idea was worth stealing). I’m pretty confident in retrospect that the only possible outcome of publishing early would have been a better entry (possibly in collaboration with others). However, I would say that my guess is it would have resulted in me not doing the coding – which I would have been sorry about.

I am going to blog my entry in detail, and release all the work I’ve done – which others are more than welcome to use and abuse.

So although I think developer competitions work in terms of focussing people on a problem, I think there are some possible downsides, perhaps chief of which is that competitions may discourage collaboration. I don’t think this is a given though, and so in closing here are some thoughts that future developer competitions might want to consider:

Is there an element in your competition that encourages team entries above or aswell as individual entries?
Can you reward collaboration either within or outside the competition structure?
How are you going to ensure that the whole community can share and benefit from the competition outcomes? Plan this from day 1!

Perhaps consider splitting the prizes in different ways to acheive this – not one ‘big winner’, but rather judging and rewarding contributions as you go along. Perhaps consider having a ‘collaboration’ environment where ideas can be submitted (and judged separately) and where teams can form and work together.

A final thought – I really enjoyed entering the JISC MOSAIC competition – it stretched my skills and scratched an itch for me. I am in no way disappointed I didn’t win – the winning entries were very deserving. I fully intend to do more scripting/programming going forward. And sharing.

Teaching, Testing and Counseling

Will Richardson — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 14:58:44 PDT

It’s no secret that many of us who had high hopes that the Obama administration would start a meaningful conversation on re-envisioning education are feeling sorely disappointed these days. All of the hoopla over “The Race to the Top” as a catalyst of real “reform” is getting a bit much to take, and to be honest, I’m surprised that more educators aren’t voicing their displeasure at the idea of being paid based on the scores their students make on standardized tests (among other things.)

But I have to tell you, David Brooks’ column in the Times today literally sent a chill down my spine when I read the following paragraph:

The changes also will mean student performance will increasingly be a factor in how much teachers get paid and whether they keep their jobs. There is no consensus on exactly how to do this, but there is clear evidence that good teachers produce consistently better student test scores, and that teachers who do not need to be identified and counseled. Cracking the barrier that has been erected between student outcomes and teacher pay would be a huge gain.

Ok, there is just so much wrong with that sentiment that it’s hard to know where to start. How about the “there is no consensus on exactly how to do this” part. Why is that, do you think? Could it be that there might be, oh, I don’t know, a few dozen factors that impact a student’s performance on tests that have nothing to do with the teacher? And where exactly is this “barrier that has been erected between student outcomes and teacher pay”?

But if you’re a teacher and you read the part where teachers whose kids don’t get good test scores “need to be identified and counseled,” I can’t imagine how you could be feeling very good about your profession right now. Forget the relationships you build with those kids. Forget the love you give many of them that they may not be getting at home. Forget the way you try to help them navigate the complexity of their lives or their families or their relationships. Your kids don’t measure up on the test, you will be “identified” and “counseled.”

Whoa.

It’s a bit ironic that on the same page a day before, Thomas Friedman was espousing the idea that to fix the economy we have to fix the education system, and to fix the education system, we have to do more than focus on reading, writing and arithmetic. We also have to consider “entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.” Not that Friedman isn’t at times as much asea about education as Brooks, but seriously, is there a test for that? ‘Cause if there isn’t, and I’m a teacher trying to win the “race to the top,” how am I supposed to get my raise?

Is it me, or are we just sinking deeper into this dark, confined educational pit where every national conversation about “reform” lacks the “creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship” that we’re supposed to be teaching to and modeling for our kids?

Mercy.

Would you recommend your recommender?

ostephens — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:46:02 PDT

We are starting to see software and projects emerging that utilise library usage data to make recommendations to library users about things they might find useful. Perhaps the most famous example of this type of service is the Amazon ‘people who bought this also bought’ recommendations.

In libraries we have just had the results of the JISC MOSAIC project announced, which challenged developers to show what they could do with library usage data. This used usage data from Huddersfield, where Dave Pattern has led the way both in exploiting the usage data within the Huddersfield OPAC, and also in making the data available to the wider community.

On the commercial side we now have the bX software from Ex Libris, which takes usage data from SFX installations across the world (SFX is an OpenURL resolver which essentially helps makes links between descriptions of bibliographic items and the full text of the items online). By tracking what fulltext resources a user accesses in a session and looking at behaviour over millions of transactions, this can start to make associations between different fulltext resources (usually journal articles).

I was involved in trialling bX, and I talked to some of the subject librarians about the service and the first question they wanted to know the answer to was “how does it come up with the recommendations”. There is a paper on some of the work that led to the bX product, although a cursory reading doesn’t tell me exactly how the recommendations are made. Honestly I actually hope that there is some reasonably clever mathematical/statistical analysis going on behind the recommendation service that I’m not going to understand. For me the question shouldn’t be “how does it work?” but “does it work?” – that is are the recommendations any good?

So we have a new problem – how do we measure the quality of the recommendations we get from these services?

Perhaps the most obvious approach is to get users to assess the quality of the recommendations. This is the approach that perhaps most libraries would take if assessing a new resource. It’s also an approach that Google take. However, when looking at a recommender service that goes across all subject areas, getting a representative sample of people from across an institution to test the service thoroughly might be difficult.

Another approach is to use a recommendation service and then do a longitudinal study of user behaviour and try to draw conclusions about the success of the service. This is how I’d see Dave Pattern’s work at Huddersfield, which he recently presented on at ILI09. Dave’s analysis is extremely interesting and shows some correlations between the introduction of the recommender service and user behaviour. However, it may not be economic to do this where there is a cost to the recommender service.

The final approach, and one that appeals to me, is that taken by the NetFlix Prize competition. The NetFlix Prize was an attempt by the DVD/Movie lending company NetFlix to improve their recommendation algorithm. They offered a prize of $1million to anyone who could improve on their existing algorithms by a factor of 10% or more. The NetFlix prize actually looked at how people rated (1-5) movies they had watched – based on previous ratings the goal was to predict how individuals might rate other movies. The way the competition was structured was that a data set with ratings was given to contestants, along with a set of ratings where the actual values of the ratings had been removed. The challenge was to find an algorithm that would fill in these missing ratings accurately (or more accurately than the existing algorithm). This is a typical approach when looking at machine based predictions – you have a ‘training set’ of data – which you feed into the algorithms, and the ‘testing set’ which is the real life data against which you compare the machine ‘predictions’.

The datasets are available at the UCI Machine Learning Repository. The Netflix prize was finally won in September 2009 after almost 3 years.

What I find interesting about this approach is that it tests the recommendation algorithm against real data. Perhaps this is an approach we could look at with recommendation services for libraries – to feed in a partial set of data from our own systems and see whether the recommendations we get back match the rest of our data. As we start to see competition in this marketplace, we are going to want to know which services best suit our institutions.

This is me – now what was the question?

Andy Powell — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 07:42:26 PDT

I note that the call for papers for the TERENA Networking Conference (TNC) 2010 is now out. Given that the themes focus (in part) on network lifestyle and identity issues I wondered about putting in something based on Dave White's vistors vs residents work (yeah, that again!). Something like the following:

The Web used to be seen as a tool to get various jobs done – booking a holiday, finding a train time, reading email, catching up on lecture notes, checking a bank account, and so on. The people using such tools adopted a largely visitor mentality, - they fired up their Web browser, undertook a task of some kind, and left. Little or no trace was left.

Over the past few years the Web has changed significantly. It is now a social space, as much a part of people's lives as going down the pub, going to work, or turning up for lectures. As a result, many people are now increasingly adopting a resident mentality – cohabiting a social networked environment with others and intentionally leaving a permanent record of their activities in that space.

In a world of visitors, the principle reason for asserting identity (“this is me”) is so that the particular tool being used can determine what an individual's access rights are. But in a world of residents, that is only part of the story. They are more likely to assert their identity as part of a “this is who I am”, this is what I’ve done”, this is who I know” transaction with other people in their social space.

The functional requirements of the identity infrastructure are therefore very different for residents than they used to be for visitors. SAML is geared to meeting the needs of visitors and the tools they wish to access. OpenID caters much more to a ‘resident’ way of thinking.

If we believe that the Web is changing us (as it certainly is), and particularly if we believe that the Web is changing learning and research, then we have to be prepared to change with it and adopt technologies that assist in that change.

Does that resonate with people? I'd be interested in your thoughts.

SharePoint in UK universities event

Andy Powell — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 04:03:31 PDT

We've just announced an event (in London on 25 November 2009) based on the work that's been done by Northumbria University (and others) as part of the Investigation into the Uptake and use of Microsoft SharePoint by HEIs study that we funded a while back.

Do you want to learn about how and why HEIs are using SharePoint? What worked well, lessons learned?

Do you want to hear from some HEIs about their experience of implementing SharePoint?

Do you want the opportunity to network and learn about real experiences with SharePoint in HEIs and benchmark yourself?

The event will provide a chance to hear from the project team about their findings, as well as from 4 university-based case-studies (Peter Yeadon, UWE, University of Glasgow, and University of Kent).

Please go to the registration page to sign-up - places are limited.

On Common Standards

Will Richardson — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 05:18:42 PDT

So without bemoaning in the fact that I haven’t been able to find any time of late to get to this space to do some reading and thinking and synthesizing and extended writing and that I feel like a truly important part of my life is being slowly and painfully left behind and that there is a post that I really need to write about that at some point sooner rather than later…

Tom Hoffman has been bugging many of us to blog about the English Language Arts Standards that are being written by Core Standards group as an attempt to provide some national standardization for ELA (and Mathematics skills), standards which are open for comment for another five days or so, and ones that it appears will ultimately lead to the creation of a national assessment. Forty-eight states are participating in this effort, and Tom created a must-read FAQ on the initiative and has been doing some really thoughtful analysis in the past few weeks about what all of it means. I’m sorry to say that the whole process has been flying under my radar of late (as have many of the important conversations going on out there.) I’ll admit to a certain sense of “whatever” about these standards; there’s little doubt at this point they will be adopted pretty much as is, and they reflect even more a continuing, frustrating retrenchment of traditional thinking about education that seems to be permeating the conversation right now. When we hear that our kids’ performance on the Math NAEP is essentially flat, and the Secretary of Education’s response is that the results “underscore the need for “reforms that will accelerate student achievement,” and that those “reforms” include “opening more charter schools and linking teacher pay to performance,” you know that the way we assess kids isn’t going to change any time soon. At the end of the day, it still feels like the battle for sanity when it comes to the future of education won’t be won until there are enough people who understand that many of the traditional standards and assessments that “worked” for us won’t work for our kids. In other words, no time soon.

The Common Core ELA standards narrow the definition of what kids should know, and they do nothing to take into account the changing nature of reading and writing that this moment brings us. While the National Council Teachers of English espouses all sorts of new definitions for literate readers and writers in the 21st Century, very little of that shows up in any clear way in the proposed national standards. One look at the reading standards and you can’t help but be left with the impression that the authors have never “read” anything much beyond words on paper and that the idea of “remix” and even links are outside of their experience. There is nothing here about how reading and writing in online and digital spaces changes the interaction, nothing about the social interactions that readers and writers will have around texts that are changing rapidly and substantially. (Yet, it appears that NCTE hasn’t made much of a push against the initiative.) To that point, a really interesting “debate” in the New York Times appeared a couple of days ago “Does the Brain Look Like E-Books?” including this observation by Alan Liu, the chairman of English at U. C. Santa Barbara on how all of this is shifting:

My group thinks that Web 2.0 offers a different kind of metaphor: not a containing structure but a social experience. Reading environments should not be books or libraries. They should be like the historical coffeehouses, taverns and pubs where one shifts flexibly between focused and collective reading — much like opening a newspaper and debating it in a more socially networked version of the current New York Times Room for Debate. The future of peripheral attention is social networking, and the trick is to harness such attention — some call it distraction — well.

The debate is a lively one, and the comments are worth reading through as well, but regardless of how you view the current landscape from a reading and writing literacy standpoint, it’s hard to see how the core standards being proposed come even close to capturing the complexity of the moment and, more importantly, reflect the flexibility needed to understand the moment. I doubt there was any of that much discussed.

Even more importantly, Chris Lehmann captures the reason why we should all feel unsettled by this, regardless of how we think about reading and writing:

This Core Standards movement should scare everyone who believes that meaning and learning is still most powerfully made in the spaces that students and teachers share. More than teachers, students, state administrators, the group that stands most to gain from national standards and a national test is the education-industrial complex.

In all of this, the thing that most frustrates me both in the talk about national standards and national assessments and the whole “Race to the Top” bunk that is coming out of the administration is just a total lack of vision, this sense that nothing has fundamentally changed, that this is the same old classroom with the same old expectations and the same old ways of proving them that we’ve had forever. I’m not saying we don’t need assessments, but there’s a lot of required learning right now that few if any standards are addressing.

Don’t, Don’t, Don’t vs. Do, Do, Do

Will Richardson — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 06:11:47 PDT

Recently, I presented at a school on an opening day for teachers where the first thing that greeted everyone on the table in the lobby was an 8-page Acceptable Use Policy which staff members were picking up as they filed into the school. I picked one up too, and when I had a moment I started paging through it, looking at all the ways in which students (and teachers) could get themselves in trouble on the school network. The middle three pages were filled with an A-Y double spaced list (guess they were saving room for one more rule next year) which spelled out the many transgressions that were not going to be tolerated, things like people shouldn’t be harassing one another, going around the filter, accessing shopping sites, accessing any sites that were “social in nature” and, the big one, downloading software to school computers for personal use. And much, much more.

Frankly, I couldn’t help thinking that if I was a student in this district, I think I would actually beg NOT to get a computer. Between the filters and the restrictions, I had a hard time imagining what I would be able to use them for in ways that would actually stimulate my learning. I’d rather take my chances with my phone and my computer at home. (About 90% of students in this district had access from home.)

But the other part that struck me was what this policy said about the curriculum in that district. I wondered aloud to some administrators and teachers later if the stiff policies spoke volumes about what they weren’t teaching in their classrooms K-12 as their students went through the system. I mean wouldn’t it seem that if kids were taught throughout the curriculum about the ethical and appropriate use of computers and the Internet that much more of that policy could be spent going over what students could actually do with the computer rather than the “don’t dos” that were listed? At that point, we’d probably have to change the name to an “Admirable Use Policy” or something, but imagine if students walked in on the first day of class, picked up that policy and read things like:

“Do use our network to connect to other students and adults who share your passions with whom you can learn.”

“Do use our network to help your teachers find experts and other teachers from around the world.”

“Do use our network to publish your best work in text and multimedia for a global audience.”

“Do use our network to explore your own creativity and passions, to ask questions and seek answers from other teachers online.”

“Do use our network to download resources that you can use to remix and republish your own learning online.”

“Do use our network to collaborate with others to change the world in meaningful, positive ways.”

Etc. (Add your own below.)

Now, obviously, that would mean that the curriculum would be preparing students to do that all along, But I’m thinking that if I was a student and I read those “dos” on the first day of school, I’d be itching to get to class.

(Photo by Checlap.)

The Obama Speech

Will Richardson — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 05:04:21 PDT

In the midst of all of the “uproar” over the President’s planned speech to school kids on Tuesday, I keep thinking about what all of this says about schools, about what they are for, and about the perception that a lot of people in this country have of them.

It would seem to me that there should be no better place for my children to watch that speech (or any other, for that matter) than in a place where ideas are encouraged, where critical thinking about those ideas is a natural part of the conversation, and where appropriate response and debate can flourish. Where the adults in the room lead my kids to dig deeper, to validate facts, and consider the many levels of context in which every speech and every debate takes place. Where the discussion around it is such that it lays to rest the concern that many seem to have about this particular speech in general, that in some way the President will be able to “indoctrinate” our kids into some socialist mindset. If schools are the fully functioning learning communities that we hope they are, they should be the place where our kids learn to make sense of ideas, not to fear them. That, however, is not the message we are sending.

All of this speaks to the ever narrowing role we as a society have assigned to our schools. And that is truly something to fear. School is the place kids go to learn the stuff they need to pass all of the tests, not the place that they go to engage the diversity and complexity and beauty of the world. If we cannot offer our students wide ranging opportunities to examine the world from many sides and teach them how to do that with rigor and respect, then we subvert the very idea of school.

I keep thinking of how much could be taught in this moment: oratory, research skills, statistics (drop-out rates, etc.), history, media, analysis, debate, composition, social justice, and on and on and on.

I keep thinking of those teachers out there right now who have had a level of confidence and professionalism stripped away by school districts who have ceded to parents wishes to avoid rather than to trust them to teach.

I keep thinking about what kids are learning by the way their schools are reacting, what it says to them about what school is and its value in their lives.

I keep thinking what this says about a public school system that has “educated” the people at the front of all of the screaming and yelling.

My kids both start school on Wednesday, so our schools have avoided all of this. Still, I hope they play the president’s message, regardless of whether it’s a motivational speech to work hard and pursue a love of learning or whether it’s a paean to Stalin, and then engage my kids in conversation about its merits, its flaws and its omissions. And better yet, I hope they take a step back and look at this “controversy” in the context of media analysis, information literacy, political dialogue and debate. Talk about a teachable moment.

But without that, any way you look at it, this is not a great moment for schools.

Sharing, not just planning to share - Crowdsourcing OER Search for Africa

Scott — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 09:33:34 PDT

http://twitter.com/findanoerafrica/

I am hoping that Dave Cormier will write this up fully, as it was his idea for which he deserves full credit, but the eleganceand simplicity of it, coupled with the real need it hopes to serve, compelled me to post something right away in hopes of helping it get going.

As I understand it, after Catherine Ngugi’s powerful opening keynote at Open Education ‘09, Dave spent some time chatting with Catherine, in which he came to learn that there was a person tasked with locating useful open resources for faculty but that this was an overwhelming task. Dave, being Dave, immediately saw the potential for our existing networks to pitch in, sharing as we already do, and set about creating a twitter account, findanoerafrica to send out requests to the community for help finding appropriate resources. The idea was hatched on Wednesday and announced this Friday morning.

Only time will tell if it works and how effect it is. You can help, really easily. If you use twitter, then follow findanoerafrica and basically respond in the helpful way you already do. The difference being you’ll be helping someone who is in turn supporting hundreds of educators. The beauty - it isn’t asking you to do anything you’re not already doing, and the cost was essentially zero. Obviously, this is not going to solve all the worlds ills, but it’s one of those little steps to maybe make it better than it was. Dave - your energy and enthusiasm are both infectious and inspiring. Getting to hang with you this week in Vancouver has definitely been one of the highlights for me. - SWL

How to participate in the Open Ed conference even if you can’t get to Vancouver

Scott — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 11:42:59 PDT

http://sites.wiki.ubc.ca/opened09/index.php/Virtual_Attendee_List

So the Open Ed conference has begun and I am frankly overwhelmed to see the 200 or so amazing folks who have come together in Vancouver around “Open Education.” But this movement is far larger than that, it’s a global movement, and we are doing our best as organizers to help folks who couldn’t make the journey participate in various ways. In addition to streaming every session live via the conference uStream feeds, many folks are following along on the extensive twitter coverage via the #opened09 tag.

And that’s not all - I am SO chuffed as an organizer to see this community of network learners creating their own ways of interacting, without any help or coordination.

If you’ve found yourself accessing any of these, we’d love if you’d consider adding yourself to the list of “virtual attendees” - both as a way for people here to connect with you, and also to help demonstrate to our sponsors how the conference has had some impact outside of the immediate physical attendees. And please, let s know if there’s anything we can do to help improve your experience, you are an important part of this community and conference too. - SWL

My Comment to CNIE on the Canadian Copyright Consultation process

Scott — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 16:05:31 PDT

You may have heard that the Canadian federal government is currently consulting with Canadians about planned changes to our existing copyright laws. In addition to getting my own submission together and working on something on behalf of BCcampus, I was extremely pleased to hear, via Rick Schwier’s blog, that one of the few groups in Canada with a truly national reach in education, CNIE (formerly CADE), were also planning a submission. Rick’s post encouraged comments and concerns be sent to their leadership, and here is the comment I submitted. There is MUCH more to be concerned about the previously badly crafted Bill C-61 (start with these few issues, to begin with), but the move to resign online educational fair dealing to ‘privately protected spaces’ is one I feel we must specifically resist, as not only does it corrupt the notion of education and fair dealing, but it does so in such a way that may enshrine incredibly impoverished models in our already beleagured institutions for decades to come.

Have you had your say yet?

I was very pleased to hear that CNIE will be submitting a brief to the Federal Copyright consultation. It is great that you are staking out a position for distance/online education and recognition that ‘virtual classrooms’ should be afforeded fair dealing rights too. However, I would urge you not to compund the currently stiffled innovation in online education by arguing that content need to be behind password protected “learning management system” sites or the like in order to qualify for fair dealing rights. While this at first seems like a palatable compromise with the copyright barons, it will only lead to a further entrenching of a fundamentally broken technology, the LMS, whose replication of the physical classroom in the virtual world looses almost ALL of the benefits the network has to offer learners.

Instead, I would urge you to stake out a position that the position and intent of the user/usage is of much more importance in ascertaining fair dealing, and that course and content delivered ‘out in the open’ should also be able to exert their fair dealing rights. I believe this is a truly important distinction to make, not only for distance education but indeed for higher education institutions in general, as their future will increasingly hinge on being able to integrate and interoperate with the larger community of informal learners who make up the entire Internet, and enshrining in law the requirement that any fair dealing be exercised solely behind closed doors will only continue our march into the margins.

3 Travel Scholarships Available for Open Ed & Other Various Conf News

Scott — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 11:43:30 PDT

http://openedconference.org/archives/324

Hopefully you are already following the Open Ed 2009 conference news feed and this will be just so much cruft, but if not I thought it worthwhile to re-post here in Edtechpost the fact that, due to some very generous sponsors, we are able to offer 3 travel scholarships to Open Education in Vancouver, August 12-14, 2009.

I should also note that the deadlines for getting the secured hotel room rates are fast approaching, and a gentle reminder that we will have limited space for the (included in the reg fee) Barbeque-to-end-all-Barbeques on the Wednesday night, so if you want to come, getting your conference registration in as soon as possible will make that entirely more likely.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming… - SWL

Sharing your PLE just got a little bit easier

Scott — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 16:55:42 PDT

Big hat tip to Gerry Paille for knowing me well enough to realize that the huge Firefox Add-On nut that I am would be extremely excited to learn about a new feature/service for Firefox called “Collections.”

Basically, the Collection part of the site (and the related Add-On Collector Add-On - ha!) allow people to create collections of add-ons, annotate each of the add-ons with commentary, share these with other users who can subscribe to these collections!

So, for instance, if you are interested in some of the key add-ons to help yourself become an Open Educational DJ (ahem) you may want to check out my “Open Educator as DJ” collection which I just published, and better yet, subscribe to it, so that as new tools get added they are pushed to you.

Clearly, the PLE is more than just one tool, more than just the browser, and definitely more than MY use of either of these. But for me, the browser, and the various ways I can pimp it out, are a big component of my workflow as both an educational DJ and network learner, but one which has always been really challenging to share with people. With Firefox Collections, that just got a lot easier. - SWL