The Ed Techie

Is Uniglu what I need?

A warning upfront: I think this post may expose my ignorance, and there may be a 'duh, we've been working on that for ages', type reaction. But based on previous experience, I've found that my ignorance is often shared by others, I'll forge ahead.

I'll give you the background: On Friday I had a quick play with video in Googlemail. Naturally it works fine, so I put out a rather facetious tweet about why do we bother to design software specially for education when this stuff is just there. Niall responded saying:

"can it be linked to student registration systems for automated population of tutor groups etc? "

This is a good point, and one that people like Scott and co have kicked around a few times.

The IMS Tools Interoperability Spec seeks to do some of this, stating:

"The IMS Tools Interoperability (TI) approach addresses the growing demand for a reusable mechanism for integrating third-party tools with core LMS platforms."

And Chuck Severance pointed me at something he is playing with called Simple Learning Tools Interoperability.

I may be wrong, but these don't quite seem to be what I'm after. What I want is the tools equivalent of eduglu, which for the sake of not bothering to come up with an original name, we'll call Uniglu. Here's my user scenario, so you can tell me if these will do what I want:

Tom is a lecturer at Strummer University in French Language. He wants his students to get used to engaging in online audio/video discussions, capturing mobile input. He has distance as well as campus based students so wants something asynchronous. Seesmic seems to be ideal. But rather than tell his students to sign up there and swap ids, he just wants them to be able to use it as a suite of tools. If they decide to go there, it will be already configured for them.
So he speaks to his IT services dept. who tell him that Seesmic is one of the 2138 applications that are listed in the Uniglu directory. This means they are trusted and are capable of accepting university data. They pass the secure data to the Seesmic API which automatically creates accounts for all the students, using their OpenID and preferred user names. It adds in all the students in the cohort as Followers and Following.
Similarly, in the course wiki, Tom is using Wetpaint. This also adds in all the students, and also sets up Tom and the two course assistants as moderators. The access to the wiki is set to registered only (ie the course cohort only, not public) which is the default option when it is available.

It seems to me that we aren't far off doing this, and that a combination of existing data standards would get us some way there, for instance OpenID, OAuth and OpenSocial?

I accept there would be issues around data protection and privacy, but one could imagine universities being declared trusted data owners and that applications have to be vetted to be in the Uniglu directory. The difference here with the IMS spec is that we are sending data out to these apps, not requiring them to come into our systems. I'm not sure if that's significant or not. The standard is probably something that is in the domain of IT Services, not individual educators, but it would need to be easy enough to implement for application providers if want the rich tapestry of apps to choose from, and of course, from the user's perspective it must be seamless.

So my questions are:

1. Does this make sense?
2. Is it desirable?
3. Does it exist already?
4. If not, could we do it easily?

And here I am asking the question in Seesmic:

UnigluWhat I want is Uniglu>

Here comes everything

I've been reading Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody. In it he argues that organisations have costs that means they struggle to compete with masses because the masses can afford to have lots of failures, because the cost of failure is low, and the ease of organising is now drastically reduced. I made a similar argument in the Future of Content, by using natural selection as an analogy. Natural selection can afford to make lots of mistakes because it has thousands of individuals and millions of years to experiment over. An individual designer cannot afford to have so many dead-ends. But when it comes to producing complexity, this massively distributed process wins.

Shirky's argument is that social communication tools have lowered the threshold for organising. He gives an example of organising photos from an event - previously this would have required someone to organise it, to get in touch with all possible photographers, to collect and publish their photos. Now all that's required is that people stick them up on Flickr, and use a tag, independently of each other. The cost of organisation has collapsed overnight.

Things such as eduglu, sociallearn, loosely coupled teaching apps, and PLEs have been much on mind recently, so when reading Shirky's book I thought some of the same arguments he makes for organising people could be made for technologies. The 'cost' of organising, or integrating, applications used to be high, but through approaches such as widgets, RSS, web services, etc this cost has drastically reduced.

To make my point here are a couple of Shirky quotes which I'll then rephrase for technologies.

"By making it easier for groups to self-assemble and for individuals to contribute to group effort without requiring formal management, these tools have radically altered the old limits on the size, sophistication, and scope of unsupervised effort"

becomes:

"By making it easier for tools to (self) assemble and for applications to contribute to the environment without requiring integration, these approaches have radically altered the old limits on the size, sophistication, and scope of any individual to create their own environment"

And this Shirky statement:

"because the minimum costs of being an organisation in the first place are relatively high, certain activities may have some value but not enough to make them worth pursuing in any organised way. New social tools are altering this equation by lowering the costs of coordinating group action."

Can be recast as:

"because the minimum costs of being an integrated environment in the first place are relatively high, certain applications may have some value but not enough to make them worth pursuing in any organised way. New data techniques are altering this equation by lowering the costs of integrating all applications."

So, it isn't a case of here comes everybody but here comes everything. What's an educational tools? Whatever you want it to be.

An eduglu learning scenario

I was part of an ad hoc Flashmeeting recently with David Wiley's team, plus some of the edugluers (Jim, Brian, D'Arcy and Scott), along with the OU social:learners (Tony, Simon, Patrick and Stuart). We batted some ideas around about the idea of eduglu, loosely coupled apps, open courses, etc. There was lots of common ground, but we don't want to tie it up in consortium or anything - so we're going to work in the open, in a loosely coupled manner. And of course, anyone else is free to join.

We agreed to come up with some stories, or scenarios, as to what it might be like for a learner in eduglu land. This is my attempt at doing one:

Character: Ellen is a professional vet, living in Wales. She is married, with a four year old son, and is a fan of 60s sci-fi movies and is a keen skier.

Scenario: Ellen is called out to look at a sick Pot Bellied Pig. She is unsure of the symptoms, but thinks she has a diagnosis. She uses her mobile device to put out a call for help on her learner network. This is built on top of Twitter and allows her to filter tweets to groups, e.g. 'vets', 'parents', 'friends', etc. Dan, from Sussex is an expert in Pot Bellied pigs and confirms her diagnosis, sending her a link to a resource. She saves this to her study list in her learner profile, with the tags 'vet', 'pigs', and studying it is automatically added to her To Do list in Remember the Milk, so she will study it later.

Back home she gets a prompt to watch a programme on skiing on BBC 4, which is generated by an automatic tweetscan and schedule scan she has set up with filters. She won't watch it live, but a link to the replay in iPlayer is automatically added to her To Study list, with the tag ski.

This is part of a content aggregator that finds content related to the learning goals Ellen has set up. Her current goals/interests are "To learn snowboarding", "60s Sci-Fi movies", "Blue Tongue virus", "Teaching children French" and "Harry Potter novels". Content related to each of these is found using data-mining, and social recommendations, building on 43Things. Recommended resources are then attached to each goal, with a score, and a category, e.g. 'video', 'book', 'person', 'course', etc. Ellen sees that there is a weekend snowboarding course running at the dome in Milton Keynes. She sees that one of her skiing contacts has taken the course and sends her a message asking about it.

She is doing an 'informal course' on 50s/60s Sci-Fi movies, created by an enthusiast in Oregon. The course is delivered through his blog, and is free to study. Today, having watched 'The Day the Earth Stood Still' yesterday, she reads the blog entry on it. She sees that John from Queensland is online at the same time, and they use Gabbly to chat around the topic, which is embedded in the blog. This is the last entry in this course, so she decides to have a go at the end of course quiz, which is delivered via a free MCQ engine. The score is automatically passed back to her profile, as authentication is handled in both by openID.

A suggested task for the course is to create a mash-up, which she has been working on. She has taken clips from Invasion of the BodySnatchers, Them! and The Blob all of which show women screaming, helplessly, and mixed this with a 1950s magazine article about how women should be protected from rock music. This is overdubbed with a PJ Harvey track, which she hopes makes the ironic point clear. She posts this on her blog, with the tag 'DonsSciFi', which means it will be pulled in to the resource pool for the course for future students. This also pulls it into her profile as one of her public outputs, and this action notifies her sci-fi friends via a tweet.

Purpose: I wanted to take some existing tools, and some imagined ones, and show how these could be easily combined for a learner. I also wanted to combine formal and informal learning, professional and private life.

Next: I'm going to try this as a mini-meme. Not because I want to be annoying, but because I think this is a genuine way of building up a set of scenarios that might inform what we want to do. I am keen to explore this open, distributed model of collaboration. So, if you want to be involved, simply write a scenario and link here (I'll do a wiki later). The 'rules' are:

1. It can be about teaching or learning (or both)
2. It can be as long or short as you like
3. Try and link to existing technologies
4. It's purpose is to show how loosely linked applications could make learning/teaching easy, pedagogically sound and fun.

I'm going to tag Scott next, as I think he has some ideas from the teaching angle. Take it away Scott.