elearning2.0

I'm starting to realise just how big the communications challenge is for us 'elearning2.0' advocates and developers. This stuff seems obvious to those of us who have invested years of painful development effort in artefacts like heavyweight learning objects repositories, and who have since have come to prefer loosely coupled, lightweight services for our own working practices. But I am discovering that web2.0 is counter-intuitive and even repellent to a lot of other people in the educational technology business. It takes time and practice for people to become happy with the web2.0 way of getting things done. We need to start spreading the word about compelling practical examples and vividly written explanations.

Scott Wilson has been producing some great, "gettable" figures and presentations lately. In this post I discuss a presentation he recently gave in Norway in which he reflected personally on the failure of the Big Standards approach, and the opportunities opened up by web2.0 with its smallscale standards and services and largescale emergent benefits.

A powerpoint presentation I gave yesterday in Norway - eduresources (PPT, 8.6Mb). Apologies for the file size, I included a lot of screen captures! If you'd prefer a smaller file, or just have problems with the powerpoint, I've also got an archive of JPEGs: eduresources.zip (ZIP, 3Mb)

I've attached a conversion of his ppt slides into a pdf on white background for printing. (Scott, this version has corrected the oversize text in the one I emailed you originally; I've made a little KeyNote theme to handle that in future conversions). As you might guess from that, I like to read things like this offline. And just about the only real chance I have to do so is when I'm on a train, which thank heavens has been seldom these days. Yesterday I finally gave Scott's presentation my full attention, and realised what a great resource it is for communicating these opportunities and issues to ed-tech folks.

I particularly liked his slides 10 and 11:

• So, we can create libraries of learning objects, and assemble them in all kinds of combinations to suit any need, all a teacher need do is select the correct combinations for their context.

• But there is one small problem...

• It doesn’t work

Scott goes on to qualify and explain that dramatic assertion, and to introduce some of the services and architectural styles that make the web2.0 approach to using learning resources so attractive. He also develops some ideas about other ways of approaching the issue of using resources. See for instance:

• slide 41 : using resources; the repository view
• slide 42 : using resources; the web view
• slide 46 : using resources; the web2.0 view
• slide 39 : so how are we to share [1]?
• slide 67 : so how are we to share [2]?

Now, I guess I should fess up about 2 things which explain some of my personal delight at reading those words:

1. In the mid to late 90's, I was a committed advocate of the approach I have since come to call Big Standards: people like me used to go on at great length about how wonderful these 'learning objects' were going to be, and why heavy-duty structured metadata and object repositories were essential to realising our vision of open, active elearning
2. Since the late 90's, I have opposed the Big Standards approach: It became clear to me that there were not going to be many highly interactive learning objects (in the object-oriented programming sense) and that we had all just bought a lot of snake oil.

I have spent the years since 1999 increasingly convinced that:

• concepts like "learning objects", "learning objects metadata" and "learning object repository" have lost their ambition and become overblown ways of denoting low-tech concepts like 'web pages', 'categories' and 'database'
• the reality of Big System / Big Standards elearning for almost all its users has been disastrously bad
• fundamental breakthroughs in the collaborative web were needed before organised online learning was of any use to learners

In fact, that pretty much sums up the mission of KnowNet: work hard to try to exemplify and explore those much-needed improvements to the collaborative web. (For instance, see this Online EDUCA 2001 paper).

And ( no thanks to us :o) improvements have started to appear. The web is much more collaborative now than it has been, and extremely rich new functionalities have started to emerge from an ecology of simple services, rich interfaces, massive uptake and easy re-use.

The web is smart because of the richness and variety of the interactions people have within it, not because its content is getting any smarter. Resources do not have to be smart for the system - the whole wild web and its real world users - to be rich and interesting. We do not have to regulate and contain the resources that learners use; on the contrary, our job is to add value to the system by making it even easier for people to interact meaningfully with each other, single, in groups or in emergent communities.

Thus, although it's been a long time since I've had any interest in Big Standards Learning Objects Repositories, it makes me very happy to read Scott's sharply-put words helping the rest of the ed-tech community to 'think out of the repository'.

Technorati Tags: elearning, elearning2.0, learning-resources, web2.0, repositories

OpenDock is a new european pilot project put together by Dai Griffiths in Barcelona. It is funded by Leonardo and thus very small, but it is a well-conceived pilot with some very good people among its partners and so we expect it to produce some useful results. The kickoff meeting is being held in Barcelona, yesterday Nov 4, and today, Nov 5.

I gave my talk down a telephone line while Dai kindly stepped through the slides in the pdf. I attach two versions of the pdf here (suitable for screen and print respectively), and include a link to the slides as a flickr slideshow.

The overall project remit is as follows (emphasis added)

• Create a corpus of learning materials...
  • published under the Creative Commons license, with provision for IMS Learning Design, drawn from a range of different sectors of VET from different languages and cultures.
• Establish a repository of learning resources
  • building on current best practice and existing Open Source repository implementations and ...standards
• Demonstrate, evaluate, review the materials and repository
• Valorise and disseminate the outcomes, and plan for sustainability

My talk was about how we might concentrate our resources on a few parts of the problem to effect a service-oriented solution rather than create yet another database that no-one wants to use. I think the talk might be useful as an introduction to web2.0 approaches to the web as repository. I also introduce what seems to me a fairly sensible partitioning of the problem space, which is worth using s a discussion-starter:

Isn't the web 'a repository'?

Yes, but 5 (at least) kinds of problems for most authors:

• posting my resources
• helping others to find my resources
• licensing others to use my resources
• using formats that work with other resources
• making my resources usable and re-usable

The talk goes on to elaborate a bit on how users encounter these more particular isues, and to introduce service-oriented options for addressing some of them. It includes a number of screenshots of open, general repository-web tools and clients like del.icio.us, flickr, connotea, citeulike, netnewswire, cocoalicious, ecto, writely, gada.be, collaborative rank, guten tag, google blogsearch, WriteBoard and Video Egg.

...by the way, for those who were there in the 90's - yes, "OpenDock" the name is an homage to the wonderful docucentric middleware as was: "OpenDoc" (see this aborted knotes team-tsk in the sigossee site for more links and info about the old OpenDoc project: History: open software in education | catagory view: OpenDoc.

For more links and tags related to this issue, see an earlier post I made about how ad-hoc repository-like features can be assembled from simple tools.

PS [added Tuesday Nov 8 10:30am gmt] - I was so busy writing and presenting the talk on Friday that I forgot to explicitly include a creative-commons declaration in the pdfs. Feel free to re-use the content of this blog entry or of the pdfs, provided you give me some credit if you re-use large chunks.

Just a little note about a feature I did not know Writely had - but which makes such obvious good web2.0 sense. You can post to an API-supporting weblog or CMS from within Writely. Another great example of features falling out of the small, loose way :o) And it makes me very happy about the effort that we here at KnowNet have invested in the implemention of the APIs that support this! Similar to my realisation that ordinary users can already mash up content and live tagfeeds (see Monday's post for a big how-to)... we'll be seeing a lot more of this kind of emergent feature in the future I think!

I got a beta account with Writely some time ago but forgot to give it a try. stung into action by Microsoft announcing their move to web based software I though I would give it a go. Its fabulous - greta potential for changing work flow in terms of sharing documents. And...I saw this blog tab. Thought I would give it a go. Entered the url and all the rest. And it worked - first time - wonderful.

For my del.icio.us tracking of Writely and similar services, see my webtech/office tag, or enjoy the goodness of live embedded links from my more selective services/file-editing tag below:

KnowNet leads a european project called SIGOSSEE - a mouthful I know but the acronym makes sense: Special Interest Group for Open Source Software for Education in Europe. One of the project's key activities is a set of working groups which will report on aspects of open source for education. I'm responsible for the working group on standards and architectures. In June I wrote a draft report, which is available on the SIGOSSEE site. Since then one of my jobs has been to furiously collect and catalog resources relevant to the issue, with the preparation of a final draft report in mind. Last week I built the tag cloud for that resource base into the WG's area of the SIGOSSEE site, and together with Al Harris wrote a presentation to introduce the resource base and outline the benefits of doing things like this in the 'content outside', web2.0 way. I blogged about it to the project news blog:

Al Harris is presenting a talk to the Conference on Open Source for Education in Europe, announcing the Standards and Architectures Working Group's resource base. This weblog post introduces the resource base, links to an online version of the presentation, and has a printable pdf version attached.

(By the way, the SIGOSSEE Project jointly organised that conference... see www.ossite.org for more info). My project news post just pointed to the resource base tag-cloud page and quoted its introductory paragraphs:

A large part of the work entailed by the Working Group's report is the comprehensive collection and categorising of web reseources related to standards, architectures and open-source in education. Mike has been seriously collecting, tagging and annotating resources for the WG since July, and we now have a very substantial and growing resource-base.

Most of the resource-base is back-ended by Mike Malloch's del.icio.us account, with others in Connotea. See Mike's main weblog, elearning2.0, for other materials and writings which explain why we are using external services to host the WG's resource-base, and about the theory and practice of architecting for education with open source and open standards. Please send me any links you think belong in the resource-base: if you are a del.icio.us user, add the tag for:Mike_Malloch- otherwise email mike AT theknownet DOT com. Because the resource-base is backended by well-known, open services, we can collaboratively build on it, and anyone is free to aggregate from it using del.icio.us and Connotea's rich and flexible APIs and RSS. You can also subscribe to my del.icio.us stream's RSS - all tags and queries are also avilable via RSS.

Below is a "tag cloud" showing the relevant categories in Mike's del.icio.us account. Click a tag to see the resources tagged with it along with a list of related tags.

Sadly I don't have the time to explain any of the groovy details or implications here. There are many benefits from accumulating resource collections using the lightweight public services, and soon I'll try to write about them here :o) In the meantime, the presentation is worth reading / viewing if you are interested in resources the web2.0 way.

A printable pdf version of the talk is available as an attachment to the SIGOSSEE post. Links: Stds Archs Talk Printable [ Download ] (stds_archs_talk_printable.pdf - 10.49 Mb ) Preview . An online version is available as a Flickr slideshow of the presentation.