abject learning

Photo by sephiramy

A more or less random sampling from my RSS newsreader:

Remember how the web (and “web 2.0”) were supposed to be a huge force of democratization? As we all know, time and again it turns into just another ad platform to sell lowest common denominator mass marketed commercial trash. That is really a tragedy.

When ReadWriteWeb is talking like this, then we know the times, they are a-changin’…

A few of us old dudes saw this sad moment coming. The best thing about aging is preemptive disillusionment.

I’m not sure how many of our friends to the south are aware of this, but using web services hosted in the United States is deemed to be a threat to the rights of Canadian students.

Indeed, a public institution such as the one I work for is expected to take ‘rigorous measures’ to “mitigate against illegal and surreptitious access” of students’ private data. What that means has been left open to interpretation, but apparently a student’s email address can constitute private data, and the effect has been a common perception that telling students to set up accounts on Flickr or WordPress.com represents a potential breach of the law. In the absence of a clear sense of what can and cannot be done, our old friends Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt become the default policy drivers.

I haven’t heard the groovy President-elect say anything about revoking the PATRIOT Act (then again, I don’t have cable TV, maybe he said it on Larry King), so I’m not expecting change I can or cannot believe in.

As someone who would like to see higher education tapping more of the fine online applications available outside the academy, and who intuitively favours a platform-agnostic, let-the-students-decide approach to tool selection, the personal privacy issue has been something of a showstopper. I can’t tell you how many times I have known of some free, popular online service that could meet a specific need quickly and easily, only to be shot down by the question “is it hosted in Canada?”

I’m kind of surprised some company hasn’t set up some sort of subscription-based proxy or hosting service for US-based apps to protect private data. The higher education market in Canada alone would be substantial. (As usual, the librarians have moved ahead on this, for example by setting up Canadian-based hosting for RefWorks.)

So I have this naive idea that wider adoption of OpenID might alleviate this problem. Not every service accepts OpenID, but lots of good ones do. I don’t know whether we should look into becoming OpenID providers ourselves, but at the very least, perhaps we can back a trusted Canadian-based OpenID provider so student data stays in the Great White North.

I’ve asked around, and am not sure whether I should be pushing this or not. Scott, while assuring me this wasn’t an idiotic idea, also cautioned me that this would not necessarily be easy to do… Then, as he often does, he said a bunch of smart stuff I didn’t really understand.

Then I run into the problem of explaining how OpenID works to the people I would need to support such a plan. To address this particular challenge, I was grateful to come across OpenID Explained, a very nifty tutorial – now, can I get people to look at it…

If I haven’t made my fuzziness clear, rest assured I would grateful for feedback on any of the above.

Photo by psd

No point easing into the new term, and out here at the UBC Mothership Campus there’s going to be a couple enlightening and provocative events to get 2009 rolling…

Next Tuesday, January 13th, 10am – noon, (Dodson Room, Irving K Barber Learning Centre) there will be a panel entitled Facebook and Education: The Pros and Cons:

Facebook’s popularity is uncontested but questions remain as to its role and purpose in an educational setting. How are students and educators using Facebook? What are the benefits and drawbacks of this social networking tool? Come join our diverse panel for a discussion that promises to provide multiple perspectives, deeper understanding and further questions.

The panel includes Phillip Jeffrey, whose session on Facebook at Northern Voice a couple years back convinced me to set up an account; Humanities and Social Sciences Librarian Sheryl Adam, who I have had the pleasure of working with on the Digital Tattoo project (see this recent Globe and Mail profile); and Cyprien Lomas, who between his gigs as Director of The Learning Centre at the Faculty of Land and Food Systems and as Scholar in Residence for the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative can always be counted on to offer up abundant insight and perspective. I expect a thorough and honest workout on the implications of this wonderful, creepy, wonderfully creepy social network.

Image by Leigh Blackall

And on Thursday, January 15th, 1:30 – 3:30pm (also at the Dodson Room, Irving K Barber Learning Centre), WikiEducator: Our journey in getting OER right for the academy:

WikiEducator is an international project working collaboratively on the development and reuse of Open Education Resources (OER). The OER movement shows considerable potential to reduce cost, improve quality and widen access to educational opportunities. Facilitated by the power of social software and peer collaboration, academics around the world are returning to the core value of education, namely to share knowledge freely. The founder of WikiEducator, Wayne Mackintosh, will visit UBC to share experiences from the project. Wayne will highlight selected initiatives aimed at resolving the “reusability paradox” associated with OERs in higher education and current projects designed to address quality in open environments.

Readers of this weblog will know how enthusiastic I am about what WikiEducator has accomplished, not only as an open content project but as a model for open educational training and community engagement. Wayne gave a compelling and inspirational keynote at last year’s Open Education Conference, and I am delighted and honoured that he will be able to speak at UBC as his term based in Vancouver with the Commonwealth of Learning comes to an end.

Anyone is welcome to attend these sessions, and there is no charge. We do ask attendees to register.

A snap from the daily commute, in the neighborhood

Most of you never been, and never will you go
to Barcelona
So I have to tell you, what I now know
about Barcelona – Bonnie “Prince” Billy

[The rest of the lyrics don’t apply to my experience at all, but the vibe of this song is perfect for my mood…]

I’ve been back in an unusually frigid Van Rock City this week, but part of me remains in the wondrous city of Barcelona, where it was my privilege to spend more than a month with my family while working with the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. I’ve been mulling for some time how I can begin to sum up this experience in a blog post, and as I so often do when faced with such a challenge I have to admit defeat. I simply can’t express how fortunate I was to share time with these people in this place.

I’ll try to blog a few short posts between now and the new year articulating some of what I’ve learned, or been prompted to begin thinking about… There is some fantastic work happening at the UOC that I hope I can whoop up. And I read a few fine books.

And there are too many people to thank — both at the UOC, and the people in my network who enabled me to make some sort of contribution. But I would be remiss if I didn’t single out my host Julià Minguillón. It was Julià who invited me, who framed my work. Our workdays mainly consisted of dialectic workouts, often incredibly intense, but always provocative and rewarding. We filled a lot of white boards, entertained a lot of ideas. We argued without malice or ego. I learned lessons about my field, about Catalan culture, about ‘real food’, and a whole lot more… We shared memorable and long lunches, and daily train commutes. Though his English is superb, he patiently endured conversations in my tortured Spanish (which is much improved as a result). And at the end of our sojourn he took us into his home and made certain our final day in Barca was a special one. I am pleased to have some ongoing work to do with Julià, as I would be saddened to end this collaboration.

Barcelona, I would like to flatter myself, and imagine that I have been forever changed by my time with you. That I will be able to summon your beauty, your charm, your energy, your intelligence, your spirit of resistance. That I will carry a piece of Barcelona with me for the rest of my days. That I will return to you, again and again. I can only hope these vanities carry some truth.

Photo by Juan Freire

Being an anxious sort, I’ve worried a lot about whether I have provided my wonderful hosts at the IN3 at the UOC (not to mention my accommodating peers at OLT-UBC) with fair value for the considerable investment involved with bringing me over to Barcelona for a month.

So when Julià Minguillón invited me last week to be a collaborator for a book chapter he is putting together on content management and e-learning I was both a little relieved and more than a little intimidated. I told him that while I did not feel qualified to add much in terms of traditional approaches to educational content management, or the emerging deep semantic web, I did think there were some important considerations I would be happy to try and articulate. (Not that he needs me to express a web-savvy perspective.)

This effort aligns quite nicely with another article I am planning with a wonderful friend (which will be blogged when the time is right), as well as an ongoing need to work towards a campus digital content strategy at UBC with our many stakeholders.

So below the jump are my preliminary thoughts as I enter the process. As ever, any feedback is gratefully received (and evidence to the contrary, thought about)… I would especially appreciate pointers to sources that have made it to the ‘established’ publications. In my own opinion, most of what follows has been amply demonstrated in both argument and deed in the blogosphere – but I worry the book’s publishers may not agree.

The long excerpts in italics are from Stephen Downes’s The Future of Online Learning: Ten Years On, which has been a companion during my sojourn in Catalonia.The dynamic nature of digital content… syndication

Photo by psychemedia (actually Jim Groom)

In the networked learning environment, however, learning resources are best thought of not as content objects about a discipline that are retrieved and studied, but rather as words in a multimedia vocabulary that is used by students and teachers in an ongoing conversation within a discipline to engage in projects and activities. (Downes, The New Literacy, 2002) Content and learning resources, rather than being thought of as static objects, ought to be thought of as a dynamic flow. They are more like water or electricity and they are like books and artifacts.

The technology of learning – and of the web generally – is evolving to accommodate flow. (Jarche, Learning is Conversation, 2005) Probably the most significant development in the last ten years has been the deployment of the Rich Site Summary standard – RSS – that allowed content creators to syndicate their writings and other creations. Using RSS feed readers, web users do not go to web pages or search for content, but rather, subscribe to RSS feeds and let the content come to them. (Downes, An Introduction to RSS for Educational Designers, 2003) (pg. 18 of .doc file)

Nobody who knows me or who follows this weblog can be the slightest bit surprised that this is my first consideration. I am still a little bit shocked at how little discussion seems to consider the profound importance of syndication (and its cousins such as embed code) as a content management strategy with potentially revolutionary effects. I could obviously say more…

The dynamic nature of content… interaction

While the traditional conception of learning objects was that designers or instructors would assemble smaller chunks of content into coherent presentations of learning material, this is rather the idea that the management of re-use would be placed directly into the learner’s hands, so that reuse could occur, not simply within a course content, but in any context where re-use makes sense.

In this way, the reuse of learning resources is consistent with the sort of reuse we see happening elsewhere on the internet. Rather than being structured to form larger wholes, individual bits of content are being remixed and repurposed to form new content objects, (Downes, e-Learning 2.0, 2005) and these content objects are being used in what amounts to a rich multi-media based conversation. From the perspective of the learner, the learning resource is like a YouTube video or a Flickr image or any other type of content: something to be shared with friends and used to express ideas and points of view. (pp 37-38 of .doc file)

I am a little fearful to bring this up, as the last time I made some tentative forays in this direction I feel I was widely misunderstood both by people who “agreed” and “disagreed” with me. (There seems to be something about this subject that makes this a common feeling.)

So instead of saying much more, I will point to some of the principles articulated by my “Learning Content Development and Delivery” group at the Open EdTech Summit:

* Content as infrastructure, thus OER has to go beyond content and enter into meaning creation.
* Content is not static: it has a source but evolves multi-directionally.
* New roles shaped by the new landscape: teachers and institutions become guides, enablers, capacity builders.
* Cultural shift: from the notion of controlling knowledge towards an open environment.
* Superiority of open content for reuse and reproduction, but as it is not static, the concept of preservation is at stake and needs redefinition.
* OERs should provide context-sensitive output formats: open distribution.
* Open quality assurance: not only open content creators, but also curators.
* Rethink copyright and fair use.

And thanks to Mara Hancock, who was part of that group (and someone I quickly realized had much to teach me about many things), for this pointer to Trent Batson’s article:

Content is now augmented content. The disciplinary knowledge has been made more accessible. Students engage with content converted into an image, or with content that has been deployed as a series of problem-solving activities, or with content that is raw out in the field.

And while I do not want to reinforce a false dichotomy between ‘content’ and ‘interaction’ (I will refer once again to David Wiley’s notion of content as infrastructure), this wonderful riff from Gardner Campbell (and all the links downstream from Udell and others) seems to say a lot about the ‘interactive’ elements of the dynamic:

Jerome Bruner’s observation continues to resonate with me: school is, to some crucial extent, always “consciousness-raising about the possibilities of communal mental activity.” The word “collaboration” is far too weak for what I’m trying to describe here. It’s more the moment one realizes a calling, within community, to be oneself most deeply by joining in the conversation.

That idea is obviously counterintuitive on one level, since college is a daunting experience for almost everyone at one time or another. Yet the idea is also utterly intuitive for anyone who’s ever stayed up late, drunk on the wine of a marvelous conversation.

Too many of our current educational paradigms focus on individual affordances. I’ll get a better job. I’ll get a degree. I’ll get tenure. I’ll get promoted. I’m not saying these aren’t important goals. Of course they are. But education is most deeply personal when it’s inter- and trans-personal, just as high-speed computing becomes truly transformative only when those machines are networked and the network’s platform (where would we be without the World Wide Web?) supports robust development.

So tonight I’m thinking that education is the platform for the human network, and the World Wide Web gives us a very powerful way to demonstrate and understand that fact.

The costs of sharing

We might think that these educational delivery systems will be delivering learning objects. This is not entirely incorrect, although a learning object today has come to be seen as more like a unit of text in a textbook or a lesson in a programmed learning workbook. It will be more accurate in the future to say ‘learning resource’, since many such resources will be available that do not conform to the traditional picture of a learning object – and may be as simply as a single image, or as complex as a simulation or training module. (pg. 15 of .doc file)

As he so often does, Martin Weller expresses a complex and little-understood truth with bracing, common-sense clarity:

…sharing is easy, frictionless. If I come across something I share it via Google shared items, Twitter, my blog, etc. If I want to share I stick it up on Slideshare, my blog, YouTube. There is a small cost in terms of effort to me to do the sharing, and zero cost in anyone wanting to know what I share. Sharing is just an RSS feed away.

But institutions don’t believe this, or know it. It used to take consortium agreements to share, conferences, best practice guides, incentives, metrics. How can all that be replaced by an RSS icon? Obviously it must be something different they reason, so for our needs we have to invent a system. Except it isn’t.

Just as the record industry thought this online stuff was something different, it couldn’t possibly relate to their chain of record shops, their carefully maintained back catalog, their army or A & R professional, their logistically beautiful distribution chain, the sophisticated marketing campaigns. All of this had to be different to this online stuff, it just didn’t make sense for all of these carefully constructed elements to be replaced by the same, messy uncontrolled online world. Except that, oh yes it did.

The moral here is that just because something used to be expensive, time consuming and complex doesn’t mean it will always be.

Weller references Clay Shirky, and the observations above complement a recent presentation by Shirky (via Ewan McIntosh) on the declining costs of group action:

As well as formal groups around certain types of photography on Flickr (like this HDR group for beginners) there are the more impromptu adhoc communities that form around just one photo. It means that whereas destination sites' half-lives were relatively short, the half-life of a "insta-community" photograph like this becomes very much longer. Flickr, in this case, is an organisation that has created more by doing less – less intervention, less 'management' of community, less structure around debate.

…All the walls have fallen around the world of information. There are horizons but no barriers. What’s the next good thing to do? The answer is likely to be: explore. Try several things at once. If someone has a million pound idea for exploiting the social web, then send them out for a long walk and lock the door behind them. Get them to come up with ten of £100,000 ideas or 100s of £10,000 ideas.

Self-publishing and user-owned platforms

The personal learning environment, however, is not based on the principle of access to resources. It should more accurately be viewed as a mechanism to interact with multiple services. (Milligan, 2006) The personal learning environment is more of a conferencing tool than it is a content tool. The focus of a personal learning environment is more on creation and communication than it is consumption and completion. It is best to think of the interfaces facilitated by a personal learning environment as ways to create and manipulate content, as applications rather than resources. (pg. 16 of .doc file)

The ability for both instructors and learners to exert meaningful control over the means of publication and communication was what first excited me about weblogs and wikis years ago, and I still think that distinction is key.

So much can and has been said in terms of user-owned platforms in terms of authenticity, authority, network effects and peer review. Then there are basic workflow, ownership and content management considerations, as efficiently expressed this week by Dave Cormier:

This idea of life long learning being connected to the platform is one that I continue to feel stronger about the more that I work on these topics. If people are continuously working in a walled garden like moodle, they are going to have to make separate copies of the work if they consider it worth keeping. They are not, for instance, using that work to build a network that will last beyond the point of the course. They are also not building a body of work that they can refer to.

Photo by e.dward

There are so many other voices in my community that have informed my evolving thinking in this regard, and I am sorry not to be directly referencing them here. (WHAT? no direct links to Jim Groom, Tony Hirst, Scott Leslie, George Siemens, D’Arcy Norman, Alan Levine, Nancy White, Leigh Blackall, Jon Beasley-Murray, Bryan Alexander, Barbara Ganley, Alec Couros, etc infinitum…?)

…educational institutions will need to see themselves as providers of learning resources (and not merely learning objects). These resources will be online services that connect students with: learning content; games, simulations, and other activities; ad hoc communities of learners; and experts and other practitioners. They will be specialized multimedia content consumption, editing and authoring systems designed to facilitate a student’s ability to perceive and perform as modeled by experts in a community of practice. (pg. 17 of .doc file)

Thank you to all my experts and friends who have guided me through this community of practice. I have miles before I sleep…

It came as an unpleasant shock to realize that I had completely failed to respond to or even acknowledge some pretty amazing feedback for an admittedly tentative post I wrote floating an alternative grading structure for essays. I feel like a terrible host, and even now with my current obligations I don’t feel like I can do these ideas justice… but at the very least I can urge you to check out the comments yourself, and offer a few excerpts below.

Barbara Ganley: Some students carry ridiculously heavy loads due to major requirements, and their profs seemingly have no idea (or care) about what might be going on in other courses. Far too many courses punctuate a semester with the same pattern of due dates instead of allowing students more flexibility in deadlines. Your plan could just add more to a student’s plate if s/he chooses a later due date and has to take on the other students’ work.

I also think that not everyone needs to complete the same work. What if students could complete a certain percentage of assignments as first-wave writers (without taking into account their peers’ work) and a certain percentage as reviewers (responding to the ideas of their peers) and a certain percentage as second-wave writers (putting forth their own ideas as well as synthesizing and building on their peers).

[BL – I agree that flexibility in the assignment structure itself, not just the assessment, is key. Just goes to illustrate how tight the relationship between those elements needs to be. ]

Oh, do check out Barbara’s latest post which offers up this observation: Over Thanksgiving break, I watched my younger daughter wade into the four term papers she has to write, the three presentations to prepare and several final examinations to study for. And she attends a college that on paper, at least, understands the foolishness of grades and short-term-memory learning and the disconnect that comes from single-discipline-based majors. I also see on Twitter that people across the world are grading papers and preparing exams. Every course in every institution seems to follow the same pattern, the same kinds of assignments over and over and over. Where is the creativity? The larger view? Do we think students are that dull that they need to repeat the same exercise scores of times?

D’Arcy Norman: How would you address papers submitted close together? With not enough time between them, there would be difficulty in citing previous work, etc…

[BL – Good point, D’Arcy, not really sure how to address that…]

Tania: I have always grappled with this not only as a student but as a teacher/learner. I find the whole process redundant especially when I know that the ‘product’ was more valued than the process and that most of us rote memorized and forgot much of what we memorized a few days later. Journals, video, and just plain old talking/collaboration….gives me way more information about myself and my students.

Dean Shareski: If someone submits something at the end of the course, it penalizing the other students who did not have a chance to learn from that student. If assessment is really FOR learning, it must occur with enough time for the learner and others to learn from it. Otherwise we’re just talking about evaluation which is really not the same thing.”

Julià Minguillón: when your assignment is about solving some exercises with only one possible answer, you cannot allow such a solution to be posted and discussed; if you are more in a discussion or debate-based answer, then it is possible to take care of who is answering first, who is adding real comments and who is just copying and pasting, we are indeed already doing that…

Leigh Blackall (very detailed post): What we are working out now is managing the increased numbers of informal enrollments so that they are not an unreasonable drain on facilitator resources that are not yet paid for. For this we have found it acceptable to have both formal and informal participants starting and moving through at the same time. So far we have not noticed a drop in formal enrollments.

Elena: We’re changing our point of view: we’re telling them that we grade not only the final product (the video) but the amount of social conversation it triggers. This way they know that if they upload their stuff at the very last minute, chances are they won’t get that many comments from the other side (MIT or UPV) than those who upload their assignments long before the deadline. We want to compare results, so we can back it up with figures, but we can see there’s a change in their attitude.

Gardner: I tried something along these lines in my Film, Text, and Culture class in summer 06 and spring 07 when I had students post their final papers online *and* for the second half of these papers cite and link to specific blog posts their peers had written earlier in the term. I’ve spoken about this assignment several times but I should probably blog about it at length–aligning all the parts is a bit tricky to understand (and of course tricky to do as well). I’m certainly not satisfied with all the bits and pieces. For one thing, I didn’t do any marginal commentary on the essays; instead, I offered a paragraph-long narrative evaluation, which didn’t feel like quite enough to me. On the other hand, the folks who did well with the assignment did *extremely* well, and there were more of them than usual. Or so it seemed to me.

As ever, I am humbled by the richness of the discourse my community affords me. Thanks to all of you, and apologies for not according your contributions with the attention they deserve.

Part of me feels as if I have just arrived, but in fact this is my last week working at the UOC. Like every other week, it’s been a blur so far. Monday was a whirlwind of meetings with the UOC’s Office of Learning Technologies, and I hope I will be able to blog about some of their current and pending projects before I go – some of that work is truly mind-bending. Yesterday, among other things I did a presentation of some of the work I am involved with, interspersed with my demented ravings on media and learning, which was better received than I had any right to expect.

Among other things, I spoke with Julià Minguillón this morning about some course proposals he is currently preparing. He is supposed to prepare the basic framework for four courses, that would be delivered at the Masters level to students taking degrees either in “Education and ICTs” or Computer Science. (Most students who take a Masters will work in the field, a minority will continue on and pursue a PhD.) So one of the challenges is creating investigations that would be useful to students in both those disciplines, and for academic and applied environments.

One of the things I’ve learned about Julià is that he thrives on feedback (even when it is critical), so I thought I would post some of his provisional ideas here. I should note that any sloppiness in presentation is my fault alone. The four courses might be broken down as focusing on some of the following topics:

* Users – Human computer interaction as applied to online learning; user modeling and behaviour; personalization; usability; accessibility; mobility.

* Content – the concept of learning objects (granularity, taxonomies, metadata) and associated standards (SCORM, IMS, LOM, MPEG-7, etc…); the changing notion of what constitutes content (interaction as well as ‘static stuff’)… (Along those lines, I urge you check out Gardner’s newest post on a crucial conceptual leap – which is not explicitly about content but seems profoundly relevant to me somehow.)

* Open architectures – tools; APIs and mash-ups; OKI and service-oriented architecture; RSS and syndication-oriented architecture; VLE/PLE, social learning

* Trends analysis – Open education, open content, Creative Commons; the semantic web, ontologies; economic considerations and sustainability; formal and informal learning

Obviously, anytime you take complex subjects and group them it can’t help but be arbitrary. But are there any glaring absences? Other suggestions?

Photo by drp

@import url(http://skreemr.com/styles/embed.css);

	The Who – Going mobile
	Found at skreemr.com

Dec 2, 2008 UPDATE: Added link to João Fernandes’ blog.

Ever since I acquired a certain much-hyped fetish object, I’ve accepted on some sort of instinctive level that mobile is indeed the future of personal computing. Along those lines, I’ve been struggling with how I should conceptualize this in terms of my work.

Since Europeans seem to be further along the curve in this respect, I’ve made quite a pest of myself on this trip by asking them their opinions whenever I can. I met Teemu Leinonen when he was speaking at the UOC UNESCO Seminar on the Digital Divide, it was a pleasure to interrogate him since MobilED is just one of the cool projects in this area that he is involved with. So a picture had slowly been coming together for me…

Then, as he does in so many other ways in his recent Future of Online Learning paper, Stephen Downes succinctly and I think accurately nails the significance of mobile learning (my own emphases added):

As the capacity – and functionality – of mobile devices increases, the activities they support also become highly mobile (and much more widely distributed across society). People now listen to music or audio recordings wherever they are. They take photographs more than ever, so much so that ‘no camera’ bans in museums and rock concerts are unenforceable. Video recording is now commonplace, and video cameras, it seems, are everywhere, recording everything from baths in restaurant sinks to a teacher mooning the judges at a debate.

There is, of course, no reason why learning cannot be one of the many mobile activities now possible, but this transition will occur more slowly, as designers realize that, instead of delivering content to the student, they can require the student to go out and get it – or even better, to go out and create it. Once we understand that learning can and should occur outside the classroom, it will become commonplace to see students engaged in learning activities throughout the community. Instead of being rare events – such as the way student create newsletters at teacher conferences in Saskatchewan – these will be commonplace events.

And it is important to understand that place independence means that real learning will occur in real environments, with the contributions of the students not being some artifice designed strictly for practice, but an actual contribution to the business or enterprise in question. We sometimes think of people today ‘learning on the job’. In the future we should also think of students ‘working at school’. We are already seeing cases of this, from the business Teemu Arina built in Finland to the Chaos Pilots in Denmark to the Collaborative Open Environment for Project Centered Learning (COOPER) project in Holland.

It is worth mentioning at this juncture a different sort of place-independence: cyber place-independence. Current online learning efforts are based on the idea that learning will occur in a certain online place – a learning management system, say – or will be conducted using certain software tools. This is a trend that will erode as students’ capacities increase and web resources and services are available inside other website or applications. Independence of online place will be as important to the future of online learning as will be independence of physical place.

As an aside, I read Stephen’s paper for the first time on my handheld device while taking the train out to the UOC’s IN3 offices in Castelldefels. Though having skimmed it in that medium, I ended up printing it out on paper for closer perusal and inky mark-up.

I am also indebted to João Fernandes (my quick search does not turn up a link, sorry), another fellow I pestered at the Digital Divide Seminar. He followed up with an extensive and very useful email that I will quote at length after the jump:
I told you I would send you some stuff on mobile learning so here it goes:

http://www.shozu.com/portal/index.do
exploring publishing from mobile devices to several web tools in one go

http://www.mscapers.com/
exploring location based information displaying

https://www.edutxt.co.uk/login.htm;jsessionid=9CF90F08F8C63D3A8D87E858B0949EA2
using sms with Moodle and other systems

http://www.futurelab.org.uk/
not for profit in the UK that works with technologies in edu, some work with mobile, handhelds etc. good stuff

http://gseacademic.harvard.edu/~hdul/
http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=harp
some work made at the Graduate school of edu in Harvard

http://www.lsri.nottingham.ac.uk/msh/Papers/BIG_ISSUES_REPORT_PUBLISHED.pdf
great doc from the Kaleidoscope network

http://www.handheldlearning2008.com/handheld-learning-conference-and-exhibition/presentations
conference near the Barbican center in London. Was there, have a look at the presentations, some examples of uses

http://partners.becta.org.uk/index.php?catcode=_re_rp_02&rid=14204&section=rh
BECTA has something on this too, especially http://partners.becta.org.uk/upload-dir/downloads/page_documents/research/mobile_learning_july07.pdf

You could have a look at a HTC + google android with wireless+gps+photo/video solution (no need for contract with mobile company in this case), as a hardware/software possibility – a more open one?

Some ideas for uses of the above:
1. Voting system

2. Online short quizzes

3. LMS and web 2.0 tools publishing on the move, 1 click (for example photos/videos of students work, e-portfolios, study trips, etc)

4. Broadcast video of class/event –hm, tripods for mobiles should be fun!

5. VoIP (with camera or not)

6. GPS activities, geotagging

7. Museums stuff (user generated content, with tagging, commenting of pieces of work)

8. Calculator

9. Audio notes, publishing with one click for podcasting for example

10. Data collection device (with sensors or direct input of data)

11. Teacher notebook (write summary, register absences, fill assessment grids, comments about students to add to their file)

12. Wireless connection to projector, device to control which students computers should be shown in the projector (a synchroneyes like thing), as visualize also

13. With web access you can do millions of things of course, use online software, moodle, connect to devices – for example energy monitoring devices with sensors that broadcast data to server – see http://www.greenenergyoptions.co.uk

14. Just a music/video player eheh

Don’t need in this case much storage/processing power as we can use the web to extend the device.

uocunescoseminar2008

cloudythinking, originally uploaded by zanzo.

I mentioned in my previous post that Julià Minguillón and I have been throwing around Mike Caulfield’s suggestion that we think about how we might exploit a third party system with a good API such as Delicious.

For a while, I was just thinking it might be used as a social adjunct to the main search indexing, something like the Social Search view on the MACE Portal. But Julià seems prepared to push the idea much further. The following text is his:

We would like to use DSPACE just for storing content, not for browsing or searching. Each piece of content receives a permanent URL that will be used for retrieving it. Let’s suppose we set up a Delicious account which is going to be primarily managed by the “repository gardener.” Every time we add a new resource to the repository in DSPACE we bookmark the URL provided by DSPACE using Delicious and we add all tags there, we do not add tags as metadata fields in DSPACE.

The tags added to the Delicious entry for every piece of content would ideally be a mixture of basic tags, keywords, etc. but it would be interesting to add some tags like “dc.title=”, etc., following the Dublin Core metadata scheme (or in fact, any other scheme such as LOM, or even a mixture of both).

It would be great to use the delicious API to simplify the process of adding such tags, especially those related to metadata fields. Then, once the gardener determines that the tags for one item are complete, he or she could tag it as “validated” or whatever in order to allow another process to retrieve such validated resources from Delicious and automatically import metadata into DSPACE using its API.

In fact, such objects could be automatically tracked using RSS so future changes or updates can be imported into DSPACE easily (mainly new metadata) as long as the gardener “approves” such changes. The basic idea of this thing is to take advantage of all social and web 2.0 tools for building tag clouds, searching (i.e. Director), etc., allowing users to “use” DSPACE within their blogs, learning spaces, etc. without using DSPACE.

There are a number of reasons this approach appeals to me:

* It builds on a fairly intuitive and user-friendly system, one with a sizable user base, with a well-established API. There are a ton of third-party mash-ups already built, and I would expect that further custom development and interfaces would be relatively easy. Delicious also has fantastic RSS support for accounts, tags, and (as I just discovered) individual URLs on the web that have been bookmarked.

* It builds on a system that is already widely used. People could interact with the system externally via their own accounts via features such as the network, subscriptions, and inbox, or simply suggesting items by using a tag.

* It can incorporate resources from outside the repository into the browser. It also brings the resources from the repository into the wider web ecosystem. Students would be able to access the resources after they’ve graduated from the course.

I do have a few more questions that linger…

* Are their risks I am not accounting for? I suppose there is the standard risk of using a third-party system, but the workflow model Julià proposes would allow for the importing of keywords into the DSpace repository. And it is fairly easy to get data out of Delicious. But maybe an open source Delicious clone such as Scuttle would be better?

* I have not done an exhaustive check of alternatives to Delicious that might offer features that could be useful.

* Does anyone have favorite sites or clients for tag management and visualizations? We would be especially interested in how to connect concepts. I can’t for the life of me figure out how to work this thing. But it looks very close to what we need.

Oh yes, I can’t seem to load my bookmarks and tags into the Director Interface either. I go through the steps, and it says it will not recognise my account, that it is “Unable to load [my] bookmarks!”

Any other thoughts or suggestions are welcome!

Kicking ass chart, Emerging Tech 2008, San Diego, CA.JPG, originally uploaded by gruntzooki.

I posted some early work that I have been doing with Julià Minguillón and his team here at the UOC on trying to make the act of searching statistics resources in DSpace in itself a learning experience. I am hoping to get an update on our thinking up later this morning, but before I do so I would be remiss if I didn’t review some of the responses to that post:

* Both Julià and I have been reading Stephen Downes’s monster paper The Future of Online Learning: Ten Years On, which we agree puts forward a great deal material of relevance to the project. So it was a kick when Stephen noted on OLDaily that “what we need for such a system to work is a social layer that exists outside walled-garden websites like Facebook and LinkedIn – a social network without the social network website. Enabled by something simple, like OpenDD.”

* Tannis Morgan (whose attempts to use OER’s to teach herself statistics is itself a crazy bit of serendipity) points to the Visual Understanding Environment, which looks like it may be very useful to the project – as one of the things we have been discussing is a resource browser that is structured something like the Visual Thesaurus. Awesome!

* Doug Symington makes an observation we have been repeating throughout the process of planning: ‘”Rules of engagement” especially in terms of tagging, or “meta-tagging” may help with the delineation of content along lines that make sense to users, and provide for the evolution of the content, as well as the exercise of tagging itself. The secret comes in providing direction without being so prescriptive that one undercuts creativity in the use (and tagging) of resources.’

* When someone like Erik Duval comes forward and says he and his team are “happy to help” on a project like this… well, that pretty much justifies the effort of the initial post in itself. And you can bet we will be following up on that offer. Anyone who thinks that an online resource collection cannot be an engaging and aesthetically pleasing experience should check out the amazing interfaces on the MACE Portal. Stunning work.

* Mike Caulfield offers up a number of interesting observations on the notion of studying illicit learning environments… and he got me thinking a lot harder how the APIs of external services such as Delicious or Twitter (or Wikipedia) might be exploited… and the Ning source code may well be worth a look (hard to argue with their adoption rate).

* Paul Joseph, someone I’ve owed a beer for months, will definitely get another one when I get back to Van Rock City for pointing us to the VRE Community work, which points to encouraging signs of collaborations between DSpace and Fedora. (And this is doubly exciting, judging from some of the rumours I hear about impending enhancements to the already-amazing Fedora-based Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes.)

* And Scott Leslie (oh my, I still haven’t blogged his amazing and relevant work with Free Learning – BAD, ABJECT, BAD BAD!!!) points to this interesting presentation by Les Carr (new blog to me, subscribed). Oh yes, “embed codes” and “widgets” may well help the content to flow. And as Scott adds, “Dspace has a lot going for it in facilitating the conventional institutional/library/archive concerns; its lack (and to be fair, the lack of ALL repositories) has always been in how it facilitates the USERS’ concerns around sharing and reuse.”

I often have people tell me that they would like to blog, but they do not have the time. And I understand that problem. It was a challenge for me to find the time to write the post that stimulated all this feedback. But, I wonder, how much work would it have been for me to gather such amazing input from such an accomplished range of contributors? How many dollars would it cost in terms of consulting fees or convening a think tank? And how much time would it take for me to learn all this researching on my own? (Assuming of course, that I would find it at all?)

When Julià outlined this project for me, I felt I had to be honest. I have not been keeping up with developments in the world of resource repositories. My basic inclinations have led me ever deeper into the world of fast, cheap and out of control. But, I added, I had a network that kicked serious ass, and I was pretty sure they would come through with some interesting ideas.

Thanks to all of you for more than justifying that faith in the network.