abject learning

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suedzentrale – graffiti I, originally uploaded by NeonCoil.

The following points are somehow connected for me, though I can’t say exactly how.

Via Tony Hirst’s increasingly essential weblog, I learn that Nine Inch Nails will be releasing all tracks on their new album as GarageBand source files. I’ll mute my instinct to bitch about the proprietary format, or make catty remarks why it always seems to be acts in the twilight of their careers that embrace this sort of thing. My primary response is bemusement at how infrequently open content provides source materials alongside finished product, and how infrequently this requirement for sharing is even discussed. Is it less important than I think it is? Or is the point so obvious it doesn’t even merit discussion, just a doleful shake of the head (you know, death, taxes, and frozen content).

Which brings me to Scott Leslie’s post ostensibly about a tool that allows content extraction liberation from BlackBoard. But I’m more interested in the riff that follows [emphasis mine]:

I was willing to develop a powerlink that extracted the entire set of content modules at once in a format that could be used in other systems. Except, much to my chagrin, I learned that WebCT/Blackboard had systematically left out the module export functionality from their API, and there are no plans to ever include it. Meaning there is no programmatic access to export content packages out of WebCT CE6. If you want to move an entire course worth of content, do it one module at a time.

This is probably enough that they can claim to not be playing the content lock-in game, but if I were at an institution that had recently adopted WebCT CE6, I’d be asking what the exit strategy from the product was (you do have one, right? because it won’t be long before you’ll have to have one) and shudder to think it amounts to “we’ll wait until WebCT offers us a good solution.”

Which reminds me of Stephen Downes’s recent post on why the semantic web will fail. Read the post yourself, but my takeaway is that meaningful convergence depends on a set of attitudes that will eventually conflict with corporate imperatives. Maybe it’s in a business’s enlightened self-interest to play nice up to a certain point, but priorities are priorities. In an era where “we have an obligation to our shareholders” is a manager’s Nuremberg defense, I find it hard to disagree with Stephen’s depressing conclusion.

Then I am reminded of a conversation I had at the OER meeting last week with a developer of a very popular and very important open source application. He shared some promising plans for an upcoming overhaul of the code. As an aside, he mentioned that the issue of integration with systems such as Flickr and YouTube had come up, and that technically some cool things were possible, but they were off the table because the core developers did not want to support applications that were themselves not open source.

I’m sympathetic to the logic, but thinking narrowly within my own role I couldn’t help but feel dismayed by this stance. I’m trying to get people rolling using the best tools possible, I do not have the option of ideological purity. I wonder, for instance, how good the online learning video awards would have been had we banned clips hosted on proprietary services such as YouTube, blip.tv, et al…

Whoops, hollers, high-fives, maybe even a manly virtual hug to Andy Rush at University of Mary Washington for his triumph integrating the styles of WordPress and MediaWiki so seamlessly.

Not only great work in itself, but something that gives the rest of us something to aspire to. I know it’s got my cognitive wheels grinding into motion…

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XIXth Century Close Encounters of the Third Kind, originally uploaded by Feuillu.

Thanks to the friends who dropped by and offered their thoughtful responses to the discussion questions in the previous post. I’m grateful that people took the time and energy to share their thoughts, and unsurprisingly they were really smart and provocative contributions.

You can see the emerging discussion in the following links, and my own responses to each. I did not try to answer any of the questions comprehensively, just offer a couple angles.

What does transformed teaching and learning look like?

Where teaching and learning are almost indistinguishable from one another. I’m not saying that the roles cease to exist, but that teachers model excellent learning in their practice (among other skills), and learners model the sorts of skills we associate with teaching — for instance, can we ask students to create useful learning resources as their assignments? If we bust the “walled garden” model, at least some of the time, what groovy stuff might happen?

What are the key components needed to effect this transformation?

There is a huge cultural shift required. Great teaching may be something of a science, but it is at least as much an art. Perhaps we should ask, “what environments, attitudes and tools would foster these artists to do their best work?” And we should encourage teachers and learners to make their processes, not just their outcomes, visible, accessible and reusable.

I spoke with an attendee yesterday who noted that there was little in the (excellent) Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement that promoted cultural change in our higher education institutions. Even with the dramatic changes in the broader techno-cultural landscape in the past ten years, how much has essentially changed with universities in the western world? Isn’t it all too easy to imagine universities remaining essentially unchanged — or at least clinging to business as usual — ten, even twenty years from now? Given the critique by Downes, Attwell, et al… that the current Hewlett OER vision is institution-centric (personally, I think I understand how that bent evolves, but the critique stands) perhaps promoting change in this culture should be on the agenda?

How do we build these key components and connect them?

Strongly urge projects to make their content available in open remixable formats. Valid XHTML addresses accessibility concerns, and also makes content easier to reuse. And man, how about RSS? Not just RSS updates alerting subscribers to changes in content, but RSS feeds transmitting the learning content itself whenever possible. I would also step up efforts to identify (and perhaps support) open educational content and initiatives that are developing out in the wider world — and that we broaden our definitions of what constitutes educational content.

We need an enthusiastic grassroots community to move this initiative forward. The OERderves blog is a welcome development, I would really try to kick out the jams with it — connect with bloggers and other online educators outside the Hewlett community (offer shout-outs and constructive critiques), try to bring in new voices, and don’t be afraid to have some fun and take a few risks. Let it be a blog, not a newsletter with a comments function.

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The $100 laptop!, originally uploaded by MrGluSniffer.

… to be amongst many smart and idealistic peers here at the Hewlett Foundation Open Education Resources grantees meeting. The range of projects represented here is awe-inspiring, and the projects themselves often just plain inspiring.

And there is much to discuss. The event is going now, so I’m not going to do much blogging for the next few hours. If you are curious what’s going on, the talks are being webcast (direct link here). I learned that from Erik Duval’s blog… To no surprise, he has no problem coming up with good summaries and analysis on the fly. My addled brain don’t work that way.

See also Graham Attwell, and Stephen Downes offers some sharp criticisms, some of which have been raised so far today. I’ll try to raise a few as well, so far the Hewlett hosts seem genuinely interested in having a frank and freewheeling discussion.

So we delivered the Web 2.0 Online Learning Video Awards for the NMC conference a couple hours ago, and it was an absolute blast to do. We ended up using MediaWiki for our presentation space, you can check it out at http://video.learningparty.net/ — and yeah, I think we’re going to do more with that domain.

This was a simple idea, but immensely satisfying to move along. Just before the session started I remembered a post that Gardner wrote last month that really hit me:

My friend (it was usually one-on-one) would bring over a stack of records, and I’d have my latest acquisitions, and for several golden hours we’d play songs for each other. By the end, I’d have had a full run of sharing and learning in about equal proportions, and with about equal intensity, so much so that sharing and learning became two versions of the same thing.

At times, teaching is like playing records, even though (or perhaps because?) I’m now the one with the huge “collection,” much of it unfamiliar to students, and most of it something they’re paying to find out about. I have a good deal to share, but I still like to be shared with as well, and I’m always thrilled when a student responds to something I’ve said with “hey, that’s interesting; have you read (or seen, or heard) this other thing too?” I’m especially taken when the exchange happens in a surprising context. Some of that serendipity factor: not random, but not predictable either.

I think that riff speaks to why this session was so much fun, and why I feel I learned so much. Thanks to all the people who sent in nominations (58 great clips as of now). We were blown away by the number and the quality of videos, so much so that we mostly dispensed with the whole idea of assigning awards to a small number of them.

And as ever it was a special privilege to work with my friends. Jim was a MediaWiki master, and provided monster energy to the whole process. He was a riot during the IM planning. D’Arcy made a quick transition out of holiday mode and was his usual genial, knowledgeable, articulate self during the session. And Gardner was Gardner. During a wee hours IM session last night, Jim, D’Arcy and I came up with the idea of giving a “lifetime achievement award” to Doug Engelbart, largely in recognition of the stunning prescience of 1968’s “The Demo”. We knew that if we did it, Gardner would have to be the guy to do it. Not only did he agree on extremely short notice, but he absolutely hit the encomium out of the park… really, he actually did Engelbart justice.

And special thanks (and no small amount of contrition) to Alan, who was an arms-length co-conspirator from the beginning, and who once again had to deal with some unpleasantness because we took it down so close to the wire. I keep promising that next time it will be different… And his colleagues at the NMC were more than open to this admittedly off-beat presentation proposal.

One things about these more participatory structures for events… they always seem like less work when you think them up (“Hey! We’ll just play our favorite YouTube videos!”), but usually if anything they take a lot more time and mental energy. When so many people make such wonderful contributions, you have to treat them right. The risks of disaster are omnipresent. But the payoff is more than worth it.

The wiki is open — if there are more videos to add, or if you have commentary to offer, please go to it. Nothing would be cooler than to keep this video party rolling.

OK, just one other thing that’s gnawing at me…

Separated at birth?

Post-Hawaii D’Arcy Norman…

AND

…Leon Redbone?

It might as well be a Monday morning ritual — I have to apologise to my housemates and houseguests for my boorish behaviour the previous Friday night. Everyone else had gone to bed, I was reviewing the many awesome entries for the online learning video festival, and between my heavy feet, my clumsy snack preparation, and my many whoops, giggles and groans I apparently made quite a racket.

I also had lots of late-night fun firing URLs into the Great Firewall of China site, which tests whether sites are safe for Chinese consumption. Like all censorship regimes, the logic of what is acceptable and what is not is tough to fathom. From what I can determine, all WordPress.com sites are blocked, whereas blogger.com and most blogspot.com blogs get through fine (perhaps Automattic should cut a Google deal, or help round up dissidents like Yahoo does). The most innocuous Wikipedia articles don’t seem to make it through, at least not in English.

The first URL I tested was my own of course, and I’m too hot for Beijing (see image above). I wondered if it was the weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca domain, but I tested the root URL and numerous other blogs we host (including ones with fairly pointed political commentary) and mine was the only one on the redlist.

What could I have done to merit such recognition? Perhaps some cog in the machine thought posts like this one or this one were impolite. Then again, maybe they’re trying to keep their information ecosystems clear of trash — and who could blame them?

It might also be that http://irrepressible.info/ widget from Amnesty International I slapped on my sidebar last week. I had been wavering on whether the payoff was worth dragging down my site load time with yet another chunk of javascript… I’m more likely to keep it there now.

Postscript: according to a comment on Alan’s blog, there’s at least one school district in North America blocking access to greatfirewallofchina.org. Repressive minds think alike.

It’s hard not to get excited by some of the recent developments with MediaWiki lately. I finally started to wake up to the potential when Andy Rush blogged about a nifty online video extension, and all the other third-party extensions that are coming out. There was some great discussion of what MediaWiki could do during Northern Voice, and I came out of the conference very excited about our own plans for a set of WikiFarms on a powerful hosting environment we are hoping to launch next month.

Then this morning I looked in on the Commonwealth of Learning’s project at WikiEducator.org — it’s really come some ways since I last checked it out. These tutorials (open license, naturally) are going to be very useful, and they’re in a format that will make them a snap to customise for our own context. We’ll just have to create some content they can use as well so we’re not total parasites…

And just a few minutes ago David Wiley posts on Send2Wiki, which allows you to move any content on a webpage into a formatted MediaWiki page with a single click of a bookmarklet. Once it’s there, the text is totally wikified. Narcissist that I am, I tested it out with one of my blog posts and after about ten seconds of clean-up ended up with a pretty nifty result. David says that the “goal of the project is to make it really, really easy for people to reuse and adapt open content. Does it do that?” — Um, YEAH!

Oh, and do check out David’s recent foray into speculative fiction — 2005-2010: The OpenCourseWars, a very fun way to learn about the big issues around open educational content.

Seeing something like Send2Wiki just reinforces my bemusement that apparently “serious” content reuse revolves around creating repositories or collections — when it seems more and more obvious it’s about open licenses and good decisions on tools and formats. Scott Leslie summed it up beautifully, even if he failed to do so with appropriate pirate lingo:

… there is NO reason (as we will see in the next example too) to ever provide another list, another calendar, another set of links, etc, in a way that by default traps the content in a single presentation, only ever editable by a single author. NO REASON, and lots of GOOD reasons not to. The separation of content and presentation should have already become one of the default criteria you use to select any technology. If the tools you are using don’t support RSS or some other means to do this, use one of the HUNDREDS of FREE ones that do. And at the very least, please adopt tools that produce proper XHTML – accessibility means providing access, and if you won’t do it to cater to web wonks like me, do it at least to serve people who have no other choice but to consume your page through a text reader or other assistive device. If you don’t, someday someone may make you.

Maybe make you do it with a baseball bat, if you catch my drift… I’m just sayin’.