The Wales-Wide Web

I/ve written before about the Reflective Evaluation project. It is a two year European Commission funded project, now drawing to a close, which aimed to produce ICT based resources for facilitating self evaluation activities by teachers. Pretty challenging, huh?

At the outset the project coordinators had the idea that this could be done with a tool developed in Powerpoint. The rest of the partners were not so sure. For many of us Powerpoint had little appeal, in terms of its scriptability and attactivess for users. The coordinators, Ira and Gerald form the University of Flensburg, were fortunately flexible and open to new ideas.

Jen, Chris and myself designed a web 2.0 (ish) tool, allowing teachers and trainers to access and answer multimedia questions designed to stimulate reflection, to see and compare with the answers of others and to create their own tools.

OK, it doesn/t go as far as I would like but there are real challenges getting people for five different countries to share meanings and ideas, and pedagogic limitations in the European Commission demand that the questions should be available in each partner language.

But the best bit of the project has been the multimedia. Despite most partners being traditional academic researchers, with limited computer experience, by this weeks workshop all of them were working together, sharing in creating videos and other multi media artifacts. Its creative and great fun.

Want to have a look? Better still, want to create your own learning materials. All you have to do is go to www.refelctive-evaluation.eu and create yourself an account.

NB We are still editing the help videos so you will have to learn as you go. But if you would like more information please get in touch. And before you ask, of course it is Open Source.

As part of my work for the the European Bazaar project I am  running a seminar entitled Social Software and Web 2.0: a challenge to the future of schooling. You can find details about the seminar and how you can take part below. But first here is the topic of the seminar.
 
'In a recent blog post Rita Kop says: “There is currently a vast array of communications options available on the Internet. Especially young people have grasped the potential offered to them by blogs, web pages and increasingly personal spaces such as 'My Space' and 'youtube' to make links with like minded people and to invite comments and messages to their postings. The speed in which communities are being formed has surprised most observers. Participants in these developments, though, take them for granted as expressing themselves to the wider world has increasingly become part of their life style.

The education world has not grasped yet the revolution that is taking place outside the class room. The discrepancy in the way technology is being used inside and outside the class room seems to be growing.

The availability of blog and web authoring tools and their ease of use have made that a vast number of people are now engaged in interacting on the Internet. It has created a huge leap forward in moving people on from being consumers to becoming producers of information.

As educators know, the pace of change within institutions is a lot slower than outside the brick walls, which raises questions about the ability of formal education institutions to keep engaged the generation that lives in a technology saturated world and has grown up with technology.”

At the same time researchers have begun to explore the idea of Personal Learning environments or PLEs. Rather than access a single learning application or a walled institutional learning area, the idea of a PLE is that learners can configure different services and tools to develop their own learning environment, bringing together informal learning from the home, the workplace as well as more formal provision by education institutions. The PLE is controlled by the learner and as well as offering an environment for accessing different information and knowledge allows access to web based publishing and other opportunities for creating content and expressing and exchanging ideas.

The idea behind the PLE is to harness the power and potential of social software and web 2.0 applications for learning.

As Graham Attwell has pointed out PLEs may be a seriously disruptive development, challenging the present model of schooling. The seminar is intended to examine the changing ways in which we are using technology for learning, to look at the potential of Personal Learning Environments and to discuss the implications for the future of our education systems.

This could include (but is not limited to) the following issues:

• Young people are increasingly using social networking sites and social software applications - but are they learning?
• What does the new uses of technology for learning imply for pedagogy and the future role of teachers
• What is the role of school in the future of more and more learning takes place over the internet
• How can technology supported informal learning be recognised
• How disruptive are the new technologies to the education system - is it just a bubble?
• How can Personal Learning Environments be reconciled with the social nature of learning?
• What are the implications of technology supported learning and PLEs for social equity within education?
• What sort of technological infrastructure should the education system be providing for learning?
• If content is increasingly created by teachers an learners and is open for access, how will we guarantee quality?
• Does increasing learner control and autonomy spell the end of centralised curricula?

and

• How dude, where’s my data?'

Click 'more' to find out how you can take part.

Tonia emails: "Hi Graham

That John Steinbeck that you read on your podcast, Brilliant. Do you have the text for that in a digital form?"

Here you go, Tonia. Its on pages 52-53 of the Penguin edition of East of Eden.

"Meanwhile Samuel got no richer. He developed a very bad patent habit, a disease many men suffer from. He invented a part of a threshing machine, better, cheaper, and more efficient than any in existence. The patent attorney ate up his little profit for the year. Samuel sent his models to a manufacturer, who promptly rejected the pans and used the method. The next few years were kept lean by the suing, and the drain stopped only when he lost the suit. It was his first sharp experience with the rule that without money you cannot fight money. But he had caught the patent fever, and year after year the money made by threshing and by smithing was drained off in patents. The Hamilton children went barefoot, and their overalls were patched and food was sometimes scarce, to pay for the crisp blueprints with cogs and planes and elevations."

Tonia also points me to the brilliant Cast on - podcast for knitters site. Its very cool - check it out.

Technorati Tags: blackboard patent, patents

for the last two years i have written regularly on this blog about the dangers of privatization of education and more particularly about the risk from privately owned technology companies.

And so it has come to pass. Blackboard have announced that it has been issued a U.S. patent for technology used for internet-based education support systems and methods. The patent, they say, covers core technology relating to certain systems and methods involved in offering online education, including course management systems and enterprise e-Learning systems.

Already Blackboard have issued legal action against Canadian company DesiretoLearn, claiming infringement of patent. Obviously this poses a threat to large parts of the Open Source educational technology movement.

I could go on but to be honest I fail to find words which adequately describe such stupidity. See Stephen Downes for a summary of what people are saying.

Two immediate things need to be done. we must put more effort into the campaign against software patents in the European Union. And Blackboard claim to have patents pending in Europe. Does anyone know what this means and if there are ways of opposing them?

Technorati Tags: Copyright, e-learning, no patent law, Open content, Open source

I received the following message from Anne Oestergaard from the Master-Libre lists server (incidentally if any of you are interested in establishing masters courses in Free / Open Source Software this server list is an excellent resource).

I have to confess I haven't had time to follow up the references. But the issues Anne raises seem to me important so I am posting it on.

Anne says: "It seems that the Free- and Open Source Software community is debating this serious "male mono culture issue" after this report has been
published:

"The report states that there is 1½ % women active in the FLOSS community.

That about 80 % of the women have felt discrimination - but on the other hand, some 80 % of the guys claim that they have not been discriminating women.

The report also found that women are being (unconsciously) excluded!"

The full report can be found here and the recommendations here.

Anne is making a presentation on Wome in Free Software at GUADEC this month. In her abstract she asks: "Are women in FLOSS considered as bugs, groupies, or equal partners in their field of skills?"

She goes on to say "most discrimination of all kinds is utterly unintentional, and that kind of discrimination is harder to tackle because there is no evil intent and no-one to directly blame. It still needs tackling and that is in part about making people understand when their culture and actions put off or exclude others."

Anne says: "A lively debate is on going on this list: foundation-list@gnome.org at
the moment: Key words "Code of conduct" and "Women in GNOME"

Technorati Tags: open source

Guardian Unlimited Technology | Technology | A sidestep in the right direction:

I love the creativity of the new breed of projects seeking to use geomapping technologies of open content. In the UK the main mapmakers are the Ordnance Survey, now a privatised concern, who guard their copyright over data. Now there is a new initiative to create maps in the public domain.

It is also raising interesting questions about how we look at maps and other forms of digital data and how up to date data needs to be.

"Steer is taking part in an attempt to map the Isle of Wight's roads in one weekend for OpenStreetMap.org, a website that helps create maps free for anyone to use for any purpose (See http://tinyurl.com/ny84m). If Ordnance Survey and other national agencies will not make their data freely available, then OpenStreetMap, developed over the past two years, will re-collect it from scratch."

Technorati Tags: Copyright, Open content, Open source

John Naughton - my favourite newspaper IT pundit, has written an article about the problems Microsoft has hit in introducing a new operating system.

"The really interesting comparison", he says...

...is with Linux, a product of comparable complexity developed by an independent, dispersed community of programmers who communicate mainly over the net. How come they can outperform a stupendously rich company that can afford to employ very smart people and give them all the resources they need?

Here's a possible answer: complexity. Modern operating systems are staggeringly complicated. In terms of the number of their components, and the richness of the interactions between them, they are far more complex than an Airbus or a jumbo jet.

Microsoft's problems with Windows may be an indicator that operating systems are getting beyond the capacity of any single organisation to handle them. Whatever other charges might be levelled against Microsoft, technical incompetence isn't one. If the folks at Redmond can't do it, maybe it just can't be done.

Therein may lie the real significance of Open Source. In a perceptive book published in 2004, the social scientist, Steve Weber argued that it's not Linux per se but the collaborative process by which the software was created that is the real innovation. In those terms, Linux is probably the first truly networked enterprise in history.

Weber likened Open Source production to an earlier process which had a revolutionary impact - Toyota's production system - which in time transformed the way cars are made everywhere. The Toyota 'system', in that sense, was not a car, and it was not uniquely Japanese. Similarly, Open Source is not a piece of software, and it is not unique to a group of hackers. It's a way of building complex things. Microsoft's struggles with Vista suggest it may be the only way to do operating systems in future.

A problem too jumbo-sized for Bill Gates to solve? John Naughon, Sunday May 7, 2006. The Observer

Technorati Tags: Open source, OSS

The absolutely central thing to understand here is that production logic of the industrial era is changing from centralized (central IP control, centralized production, controlled distribution, few developers) to decentralized (decentralized production, distributed costs, lots of developers, IP in the commons). The driver here is that as you benefit from the commons, you are likely to contribute something back to the commons. This is technically enabled by the licensing, which often requires that you give the next person the same rights you received in the first hand. It’s a gift economy, but driven by economical benefits. It supports free markets by creating an open market, rather than a closed market.

IP in an Open Source Society; who is paying who? - FLOSSE Posse

There are two ways of looking at this. One is to argue that Open Source and Open Content represents 'merely' a new form of market organisation under capitalism. And of course for many companies that is what it is - I am unsure mind that IBM licensing under the GPL represents a 'gift economy'.

On the other hand a lot of the work done on Open Content and Open Source is freely given and is undertaken in peoples own free time. I don't think think this is part of a capitalist market economy at all. Is this possible under capitalism. It seems to me there have always been instances of meaningful and socially valuable activities undertaken in the period of capitalism but for which no market value as such has been asked for or ascribed.

The big move in the last 10 years or so has been to attempt to place a market or exchange value on everything - including, critically knowledge. It is juts this move which has driven the attempts to extend IPR.

We should celebrate activity which takes place outside the bounds of the market, rather than try to recognise market value. (Incidentally this is why I disagree with those trying to introduce LETS systems - or barter systems for software and content development. these represent a market economy using time as cash - rather than cash itself for exchanging goods. But it is the same thing at the end of the day).

Would welcome any other opinions on this.

Technorati Tags: Open content, Open source, OSS

I am getting more and more excited by the potential of multi media through the web.

Dave Tosh introduced me to Dave Cormier who has set up the Webcast Academy - I love the pedagogy behind this.

"The goals of the Webcast Academy include

• increasing the number of people who are capable of producing live, interactive webcasts
• applying the open source community approach to skill development
• creating a place that formally recognizes proficiency, excellence, and innovation in these new media skills."

And Dave showed me the WebheadsinAction site - this is indeed cool stuff.

"Webheads is a world-wide, cross-cultural, and vibrant online-community of educators with an open enrollment for anyone who wants to join. Webheads in Action was created in 1997-8 by Vance Stevens, in Abu Dhabi, Maggi Doty in Germany, and Michael Coghlan, in Australia, for ESL learners and facilitators as a student-teacher community. It has expanded to encompass a myriad of educators involved in e-learning in TESOL EVOnline (Electronic Village) and other language or cultural-based curricula. Webheads meet online regularly to explore the latest synchronous and non-synchronous communications technologies, including video and voice, to adapt and demonstrate new innovative ideas for e- learning and classroom curriculum. These educators also display a deep warmth and dedication to helping others. They are evolutionary and enterprising scholars who are harmonious and know how to have a lot of fun."

Technorati Tags: communities of practice, edublogs, Open content, Open source, podcasts

An email from Riina Vuorikari - speaks for itself I think. The document is attached at the bottom of this post.

"To whom it may concern,

Please find attached the answer to the community consultation regarding patents in EU.

The concerns in this document represent the views of more than 400 e-learning practitioners, teachers, learners, parents, researchers, decision-makers, e-learning providers and developer who do not want to allow the future patent policy in Europe to threaten technology enhanced learning in European education, which has become a key element in providing education to prepare Europe to participate creatively, technologically and economically on a global level.

Our views do not only seek to improve innovation and competitiveness, growth and employment in the knowledge-based economy in Europe, but also to provide better education to all learners in Europe.

On behalf of more than 400 signed e-learning practitioners, (please see them on-line and read more about our on-going campaign)"

consultation_e_learn#1FA314.rtf

Technorati Tags: e-learning, patents

Regular readers will have noticed the big change in style on this blog.

But there are also small upgrades happening almost every day.

One of those relates to the licensing.

I have - for a long time - had a Creative Commons logo on the site.

Instead of being a graphic, The license is now generated in RDF through a new addition tot eh management interface. OK doesn't look much different.

BUt it is an important upgrade. Using the Creative Commons license properly is a big tool fro fighting the stupid Copyright restrictions the EU are trying to introduce.

Whilst I am on the subject of the blog software - Knownet have released an upgrade of KNotes on Sourceforge. Al Harris says "Knownet has just released a major OSS discussion system for Plone, it's on Sourceforge and it's called KNotes.

To gain a flavour of the product visit

http://www.knownet.com/writing/elearning2.0/entries/knotes_in_mature_beta

This developement platform allows us to quickly produce customised
Personal Learning Environments (PLE's) and develop powerful collaborative
workflow processes. It allows us to harness all the goodness of Web 2.0
distributed services. "

Great stuff. If you'd like to know more about how you can use KNotes for learning, email me.

Technorati Tags: edublogs, OSS, plone, Knotes

Just got this email from Ray and Sara - been meaning to post about this for the last few days but the email says it all - sign the petition now!

Hi All,

In one way or other you share our interests in the field of e-learning, as a collegue or a friend, and that is why we are sending you this e-mail.

As partner in the SIGOSSEE EU funded project we were one of the organizers of the Conference on Open Source for Education. Research and Practice, which was held on November 14-15 2005 at the OUNL in Heerlen, The Netherlands. Information about the conference: http://www.openconference.net/

At that conference we brainstormed in one last session about a pre emptive position paper on no EU software patents for e-learning. One of the main issues is, as we see it, guaranteed access to information and knowledge for all.

Out of this came a petition which aims to alert European authorities and policy-makers to the dangers of software patents, and particularly to the negative impact they could have on e-learning that uses information and communication technologies (ICT) to enhance education. This petition will be sent to the European Commission as an input for the “Consultation on future patent policy in Europe” by March 31st. The petition will be distributed to other European and national decision-makers to raise awareness on the issue of EU-wide software patents and how they threaten to inhibit innovation among European e-learning developers and practitioners.

If you are a concerned teacher, learner, parent, researcher, decision-maker, e-learning practitioner, developer or citizen, read this petition on-line at:

http://www.noelearningpatents.info/

Consider signing it! Let others know about it.

We aim to raise awareness and gather as many signatures as possible by Thursday 30th March 2006.

Technorati Tags: no patent law, software patents

I was in Flensburg on Friday for a meeting with colleagues from the University who are working with me on a number of different European projects. The projects are focused on education and training, not Information and Communication Technologies, but like many European projects, include the development of ICtT based tools and the use of an electronic platform for communication. That's my bit of the work. But of course I have to work with other members of the project team in developing these tools.

I'm lucky with these projects in that Flensburg has employed a couple of very good young project managers. They do not know a lot about ICT but they are interested and keen to learn. And like at so many other meetings earlier, I found myself explaining how social software can be used for communication, sharing and learning. Simple things like how to install and use Skype. More complex things like how RSS works. How to use wikis for shred editing of a document. Oh - and newsreaders and blogs. And tagging and Flickr.

I'm more than ever convinced that we have great software tools for sharing and learning. But the ability to configure and explain the tools lies beyond the expertise of the average educational project team. University computer departments are not interested. Private sector consultancies and research institutes lack the expertise. they also lack money and tend to employ 'kid programmers' who do a good or bad job in developing products. But the products are not the main thing. The most important step is sharing knowledge and expertise - for the educational researchers to be aware of the potentials of the software applications and for the programmers to understand the needs of users and learners. That is still not happening.

Technorati Tags: e-learning platforms, open source, social software

This is an important publication so I am quoting the press release in full.

For non UK readers JISC is the Joint Information Systems Committee. JISC works with further and higher education by "providing strategic guidance, advice and opportunities to use ICT to support teaching, learning, research and administration."

"Supporting institutions, informing choice

JISC sends guidance on open source software to all colleges and universities

24th Feb, 2006. JISC today issued a briefing paper to all colleges and universities in the UK to raise awareness of the issue of open source software. With almost every further and higher education institution in the UK making using of open source software, and with the European Commission and the UK Government giving their support to its development and deployment, it has become a central issue for institutional management of IT systems and services in education.

‘Open source’ refers to software whose source code is openly available to be modified by end-users, in contrast to proprietary software. While such software is already in use in colleges and universities, it is rarely yet part of institutional policies and strategies and there are still a great many misunderstandings concerning it.

The new briefing paper comes after guidelines issued last year by JISC for its projects and follow from the Government’s published policy which, in 2004, set out guidance for the exploitation of publicly funded software development. In its latest guidelines, JISC – supported by its advisory service OSS Watch - advocates the use of open source as the default for software development as well as providing guidelines on copyright, licensing, trademarks, patents and development practice.

Colleges and universities spend millions of pounds on ICT and, with open source increasingly being considered a viable and cost-effective option, they are looking for independent and informed guidance on the choices open to them.

Niall Sclater, VLE Programme Director at the Open University, which recently selected the open source Moodle as a core component of its VLE, said: “By fully engaging in the Moodle open source community we are pooling our resources with other developers working across the world to enhance the software by adding new tools and features, and improve its accessibility, robustness and scalability. While continuing to utilise commercial software, we see open source software (and the skills to exploit it) as an increasingly necessary component in our overall systems architecture.”

Co-author of the new guidelines Sebastian Rahtz, director of OSS Watch, said: “Including open source as an option in ICT keeps the focus where it should be – on technical and end-user requirements for ICT solutions, and not on who has the glossiest sales pitch.”

JISC’s Development Director (Systems and Technology) Bill Olivier, said: “JISC sees open source software as an important component in developing a sustainable ICT infrastructure for UK higher and further education. This briefing paper sets out JISC’s position clearly, providing institutions with the information they need to make informed choices. JISC also emphasizes the separate but complementary role of open standards which is key to enabling institutions to integrate both open source and commercial products in their ICT infrastructure according to their priorities, needs and available budgets.”

Technorati Tags: Open source, OSS

Have been laid up with a bad cold for the last few days - hence the lack of posts. But I have a little brain power returning.

In the backlog of emails I found this interesting question.

"If you wanted to announce/publicise a prototype tool for creating, editing and viewing report's on student's work, where would you go? What lists or websites would you approach? I'm asking on behalf of a friend who has developed the tool.

This is a web application written in java which will eventually be released under an open source licence. So the goal at the moment is just to find out if there really is a strong enough interest in it, or something like it, in the community of potential users."

I am not sure of the answer. Posting on Source Forge does not really reach the education community. Do we need a space of our own for developing communities around Open Source projects in education?

Any ideas would be very welcome.

Technorati Tags: Open source, oss_education

I had been holding off reporting on the OECD meeting on Open Educational Resources in Malmo last week until I has the time to write something longer and coherent. But given that an interesting debate has broken out by email on the subject of Open Content this afternoon - in the context of the forthcoming Open Culture workshop in Italy in June - i thought I would post my email reply in the hope of opening out the debate.

"There was a lively session at the workshop on the sustainability of Open Educational Resources.

Paul Dholakia from the Connexions project presented a number of different models for sustainability. Stephen Downes contested that all these models - at the end of the day - rested on scarcity. he proposed that for fundamental change we needed to break down the divider between producers and consumers in order - in my words to develop an ecology of production.

There was also some discussion on quality. One quality measure was branding - seen as a marketing and sustainability factor by larger institutions. The Hewlett Foundation are promoting this approach. there was some opposition to this from some of us who saw the large institutions as trying to claim ownership of the idea of Open Educational Resources.

There was also a discussion as to whether or not peer review processes - prior to publication were effective as a measure of quality. OER's are contextuialised through use. Quality can then only truly be measured within context of use. Quality could better be measured by developing a meta data trail on the use of resources - rather than previewing prior to their use."

Technorati Tags: Open content, Open source, oss_education

I am busy finishing off a project application for the EU Leonardo da Vinci programme. As usual I am totally fed up with the endless repetitive questioons, with trying to understand what the questions mean and what they are looking for and with trying to match something I want to do (and think is important) with the somewhat abstract categories that EU policy deliberations dictate.

OK - EU project procedures are somewhat strange. But it is not limited to the EU. And it is an important issue. Much of the innovation - at least in the use of ICT for learning and in vocational education and training - depends on project funding. In European universities 'core' funding is being constantly reduced. Project funding is no longer the icing on the cake but a integral and important part of any innovative research programme.

There must be better procedures for allocating this funding. In this respect I must praise the UK Higher Education JISC programme. JISC issue many calls for proposals. Most stipulate that proposals can be no longer than 10 - and in some cases - 6 pages. Having also worked as an evaluator for a JISC call, ten pages is perfectly adequate for conveying an idea and activity. There is an argument that if someone cannot explain clearly in ten pages what they want to do then they have not thought out the idea properly.

I suppose the length and complexity of EU proposals operates as some kind of filter. But I fear it serves to filter out many of the best and most innovative ideas.

Technorati Tags: European_projects

I like to add the occasional photo. This one was taken at the SIG Open Source Software in Education in Europe (SIGOSSEE) seminar in Sweden in September.

Technorati Tags: puppy

I am totally tied up in meetings at the moment. am presently on the 28th floor of Centre Point - a tower block in the centre of London for a meeting of the JISC e-learning programme.

Another day with no time to post. But, just to keep you going here is an audio interview I did last week for e-tecahing.org. The web site is in English but the interview is English.

NB You will have to scroll past Steven Downes to get to me - I can't seem to find unique urls for each interview.

Technorati Tags: open source

The conference on Open Source for Education in Europe, organized by the SIGOSSEE and JOIN projects, in conjunction with the Open University of the Netherlands, got underway Monday morning.

I got to Heerlen yesterday afternoon. Fred de Vries and his team from the Open University had organised everything perfectly, but we felt the need to be here for the non existent last minute preparations for the conference. Went to the pub and has a pleasant afternoon with Ray and alexandra and the rest of the gang.

Last night has a very fine meal in a castle near here. Talked a bit with Stephen Downes who is one of the key note speakers for the conference.

I must admit to being nervous this morning. Despite having some 130 delegates enrolled a horrible number had not paid before the final deadline. In reality my fears were (reasonably groundless) with over 100 turning up by lunchtime. Great work by Marina on the conference organisation desk.

The morning discussion was given over to four key note presentations, myself, Alexandra Toedt, Colin Tatersall and Stephen Downes. I will post more on the content and discussions. If you would like to catch up with the presentations we are trying to get them all posted on the conference website.

A copy of my presentation - entitled 'Learning with Open Source' is attached below.

Technorati Tags: open source