elearning2.0

I've been wanting to do this for a while now, but thanks the del.icio.us API and Steve's hard work there is now an accompanying elearning2.0 linklog.

I'm a pretty serious resource collector and tagger, especially in del.icio.us, with quite a few colleagues and clients following my linkstreams. We here at KnowNet are very serious about exploring new ways to integrate the web2.0-ish social software services with community portals and learning environments, and so we try to understand the potential by being active users of the services ourselves.

It has often occurred to me that I frequently see "blog entries" which are really bookmarks - in fact, because there is little work put into the tagging of these casual notings-of-other-content, they often have considerably less intellectual added-value than a well-tagged social bookmark. I can see why some bloggers are wont to "blog it on" by quickly quoting and linking - this passes on the hot links through chains of like-minded bloggers, allowing for some commentary along the way. And of course these posts are exposed to google indexing (whereas del.icio.us does not allow search engines to index its content), which makes life much easier for people looking for contexts in which people link to things. On the other hand, "blogging it on" does not naturally lend itself to the accumulation of categorically dense or rich resource bases - blog categories are like sections or departments, whereas del.icio.us tagging practices tend to throw a number of tags at each resource to reflect multiple uses and facets, and so del.icio.us tagging can lead to rich categorical schemas. For an example, see another view of my del.icio.us bookmarking - as a rich set of tag clouds - at the SIGOSSEE project Standards and Architectures Working Group resource base.

So we've added the linkroll as a blog-like view of the same resources that the SIGOSSEE resource base gives a library-like view of.

An extra benefit is that you can track more of my bookmarking by subscribing to the linklog's RSS 2 feed than by subscribing to my main del.icio.us feed. I often bookmark more than 20 items a day - sometimes a lot more than 20 items. del.icio.us feeds only deliver the latest 20 items, so unless you refresh often you'll miss some bookmarks when subscribing to del.icio.us feeds for busy bookmarkers. This is not a problem when subscribing to the full-content feed for the linklog; no matter how many items I bookmarked on a particular day, that day's digest is one entry in the linklog feed.

We'll make the linklog a feature of knotes, by the way, so that other users can make use of it - chron jobs / retrospective batch processing to pull del.icio.us bookmarks into daily digest blog entries using del.icio.us' API.

And we'll be trying to do the same for Connotea, citeulike, etc. Watch this space!

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.

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.

First, let me say that I'm in favour of conserving Joshua's bandwidth and cycles, so I am not recommending this as a permanent solution or for high-traffic sites. What follows is in the spirit of experimenting with these great service-oriented functionalities to see how we can make it easy for real authors to effectively mash up their own links and content.

OK. We've been planning to do some work, starting with simple Plone content types, to help editors, authors and site-managers to pull social bookmarks into their content. Since del.icio.us, for instance, delivers wonderfully flexible RSS, it is pretty easy to bring bookmarked links into portlets or RSS-feed objects. In other words, it is easy to include delicious RSS wherever a separate content object might be expected.

But real-world authors want to be able to include links within their content, not in separate objects. So much so that they will hand-edit links into their page content even when those links have already been collected into tags or containers. We here at KnowNet developed our 'indexFolder' Plone container/content-type to help authors with similar issues, but it is a tad demanding of their awareness of containment (see the NGRF site for plentiful examples of bringing listings into page content). We're well-aware that this style of 'object-wise' editing does not appeal to people without computer science or engineering degrees. Developers must find ways to make it easier for ordinary editors and authors to create the content they want and benefit from the goodness of logical links-objects.

The editors of the NGRF site have been 'getting' the power of social-bookmarking lately, and have started to assemble a useful resource at their del.icio.us account. While drafting an email to them about options for leveraging that resource within the NGRF site, it occurred to me that a very easy technique already exists for bringing 'live' links lists into discursive site content, using the del.icio.us javascript linkroll feature. This post explains how to do that.

Two more caveats before explaining the technique:

• It depends on javascripts which fetch content from del.icio.us before the rest of the page loads. Thus it can sometimes be a bit slow, and sometimes appears a bit wonky, and will only display if javascript is available and enabled ( fallback is to link to delicious/tag etc )
• It requires editing "raw html". If you are used to a WYSIWYG editor like kupu, you'll have to go into 'raw' editing mode briefly to paste the special code. In kupu and ecto the link for 'raw editing mode' looks like "<>".

In its favour though, the technique is completely independent of your content-publishing system - you can use it anywhere you can edit web content - and very easy to place in a particular context within your own words and pictures - just choose where you paste the special code. It also has the great merit of working now, with absolutely no further work needed to get some useful content brewing. Read the rest of this entry for a full explanation and to see some rather arbitrary examples.

Technorati Tags: social-bookmarking del.icio.us structured-blogging elearning2.0 elearning web2.0 content2.0 authoring how-to

Graham Attwell has just asked for some help sorting out 'repositories' in his head, from the point of view of project-funded researchers who want to publicly share the work which they post on project sites.

I have sort of tracked the repositories debate over the last couple of years but have lost sense of where it is going. Now i need to sort out a couple of questions in my head. It seems to me one of the problems is that repositories have always been envisaged as institution wide or cross institution things.

I'm not completely sure where Graham is going with this, since I know him to be aware of lightweight social software tools as well as heavier-weight educational materials repositories, digital libraries and content management systems. I am going to interpret that Graham's line of pondering went something like :

1. Is there an easy way for ordinary researchers to share their documents with - and make them discoverable by - the wider world?
2. Is there a 'best way' to do that, different from the 'easy way'?
3. Where is the development of educational or research 'repositories' going, and if it is not dead, is this the way to do [1]?
4. What is the relationship between the lightweight 'social bookmarking' services and the more controlled and featureful repositories and digital libraries?
5. Is there a middle way between ad-hoc tagging and controlled metadata vocabularies, so that us mortals can tag our materials to make them discoverable?
6. What about content management systems and tools such as Plone and KNotes?

I'll try to say a bit about each of those questions below, but my main reasons for replying are to point out just two things: (a) a way to approximate [1] now using very simple and widely available tools, and (b) work that I've started planning which should make more sense of [4, 5 and 6] above.

I've been meaning to dig into wikisource more closely for a while. Inspired to have a look by seeing this noted in the de.lirio.us: entries RSS feed. Ahhh... the Levellers. For some reason this resonates like DADGAD tuning for me, I guess thanks to the punkfolkistas of the same name, and of course to the sublime World Turned Upside Down (by Leon Rosselson) so powerfully rendered by the great Dick Gaughan.

It seems appropriate. Wikipedia, wikisource and similar efforts are modern examples of mass democratic movements, 'great levellers'. And they work! Amazed and delighted, me...

The Agreement Of The People. The Levellers' Manifesto, printed 30 April 1649

Oh - and it turns out I've been wrong all these years trying to play TWTUD in DADGAD :o) Dick comments on all the tracks in Handful of Earth at footstompin.com, including notes of tuning and capo. His remarks about peaceful revolutions and violent counter-revolution are worth reading as well!

So much has been written in recent years about this period of English history that there's not much I could add here.

The English Civil War, which was in fact simply a Bourgeois Revolution, left many of its early supporters feeling cheated and betrayed.The Diggers were Christian, pacifist and could be described as primitive communists.

The conclusion of the song, in my interpretation, is that, as they were not prepared to defend themselves, they were annihilated. The evidence of history is that revolutions are usually peaceful - but the resulting counter-revolution is usually extremely bloody and ruthless. Anyone who believes that any ruling class will give up power without extreme resistance is living in a different dimension.

The guitar tuning used here was DADDAE with a capo at the 2nd fret

Technorati Tags: political folk music, social software

Graham has just written a little note on Google Scholar:

More important from my point of view is that it shows the potential power of distributed and associated metadata. We need something like this for e-learning materials - able to aggregate data on materials use in practice.

This would overcome the present problem when to be standards compliant materials developers are required to fill in endless metadata fields.

We've both been thinking about the implications of Google Scholar for the academic and research communities we support. I've been meaning to post a quick summary of some of the possibilities from a technical/architectural point of view:

In brief, we've been planning to design and implement a resource-repository system, taking over the kinds of functionalities currently exposed (badly) through things like adding Annotated-Reference objects inside site or document content. We've even made some progress on the system: for the group-weblogging/team-tasks work in the smelearning site, we have an abstract resource-pointer type so that discussions can collect resources multiple, but with all commentary and trackbacks attaching to the original 'real' copy of the resource. We'll be working on making resource-management 'placeless' once we finish the present binge of knotes work. We've also implemented blogging categories in such a way as to be ready for generic structured metadata (and knotes' blog categories already allow categorical structures like 'development/knotes/weblogging/features') In my previoue work for the REM and Resource Locator projects and the IMS, I spent a lot of effort designing abstract repository systems, so we're not without ideas or motivation :O)

One of the most vivid and accesible use-cases for this kind of resource-repository approach is citation and schorarly referencing. For the NGRF site, we implemented a quick little content type called Annotated Reference in order to try to abstract referencing into independent objects (out of the html content of the documents which 'contain' the citations), and to allow special discursive content to be associated with bibliographic records. There are upwards of 1800 Annotated References in the NGRF site at present, but some number of these are duplicates, since the abstraction is one-level: the references are not in the body content of the documents, but they do live directly within its folder-wise content. Thus a list of references will contain duplicates. We would like to replace this with an extra abstraction, so that the record-details for a bibliographic record live placelessly in a repository, with citations within doccuments pointing to those. We would probably try to piggyback the trackback machinery to effect the linkage, so that we could have this working across CMS systems.

So where does Google-Scholar come into these plans? One of the attractions of a placeless, resource-centred way of handling citation and reference is that it removes the requirement of repeatedly filling-in record details. We would of course have to provide some kind of user interface for searching the existing reporitory, selecting items there for referencing, and adding new items where required. Google-Scholar may allow us to add an extra layer of search... if a record does not exist in the repository, we could allow users to search google scholar (using their XML-RPC API, and to one-click add to the repository and reference from the search results returned.

We also have hopes of developing a cross-CMS API for sharing repositories once we've implemented and trialed initial work on repositories in Plone. Google-Search could present important constraints on the design of such an API, and in the case of scholarly materials may even make it redundant. Because google will be harvesting its 'records' from real-world publications, it sidesteps the detailed entry of record details which presents such a barrier to getting structured content out of ordinary end-users.

We're great believers in thin, lightweight standards - for instance XML-RPC, trackback, RSS, Really Simple Discoverability, the weblog-management APIs - as opposed to comprehensive, heavyweight standards like the IMS specifications of old. Many small standards interacting with a rich universe of freely-created content can effect a lot more power than large-scale monolithic standards which try to envisage or constrain the way content will evolve. We're hoping that the advent and uptake of Google Scholar will create some new opportunities for leveraging the little standards.