elearning2.0

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.

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.