The Ed Techie

Twitter is your IT support

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/duncan/7172953614/>

This post isn't intended as a criticism of anyone, rather an observation on a trend I've noticed from several others also. 

I'm running my block of the Masters course H817 as a MOOC. It'll start this March, and one of the things I wanted is a DS106 style blog aggregator. That is, I want the contributors to register their blog, and for posts they tag appropriately to repost automatically in the course blog.

Now, the sensible way to do this seems to be to install WordPress and use the FeedWordPress plug-in. For reasons I won't go in to, I haven't been able to get this done at the Open University, despite trying since last July. I've spoken to people at others unis and it isn't isolated to the OU, it seems to be this low-level, experimental type of IT support is increasingly difficult to find.

Do you know who I think the culprit is? The VLE. As universities installed VLEs they became experts at developing enterprise level solutions. This is serious business and I have a lot of respect for people who do it. The level of support, planning and maintenance required for such systems is considerable. So we developed a whole host of processes to make sure it worked well. But along the way we lost the ability to support small scale IT requests that don't require an enterprise level solution. In short, we know how to spend £500,000 but not how to spend £500.

With time pushing on, I got some local support in IET (thanks Will), and investigated the best options. It became clear that hosting externally would be the easiest option. I asked on Twitter who the best hosting solutions were and got a great set of responses. Alan Cann suggested siteground and sent me a friend's introduction offer, so I signed up with them. In 10 minutes I'd followed their WordPress installation, installed WP, found the FeedWordPress plug-in and installed that too. The blog is here: h817open.net

My next problem was to get registration to work. I looked at what DS106 have done, and in response to a request on Twitter, Alan Levine pointed me to this solution from Martha Burtis. That was a bit beyond my coding skills. So I created a simple Google Form and embedded it in my blog. I then asked Martin Hawksey if he knew how to take a Google form output and turn it into an OPML file as FeedWordPress allows you to create a list of syndicated sites from an OPML file. He pointed me to this service, which does just that.

He and Tony also suggested some solutions which will help with autodiscovery (ie finding the feed for the blog if someone just enters their main URL). Martin lists some options here. I haven't quite cracked this yet, so it needs people to enter their feed url, which isn't ideal, so I'll keep working on this.

So, I think I have a working solution. If you have time, could you try it for me by registering your blog here and then posting something which has the tag #h817open. Only posts with this tag should appear. You can just do a test post, but perhaps more interestingly you could respond to the idea of whether "openness has won" or not with a post "Openness has (hasn't) won because..."

This took me about an afternoon. The problem is that it's quite a flaky solution, the OPML service could disappear, I don't really know if it will work for all blogs, and there's no support. So it could go down and I've got no backup. More worryingly I am at the edge of my expertise here, so I can't really do much more. So a university supported proper grown-up solution would be preferable. On the other hand, one of the things I frequently say is that the best thing we can teach our students is how to be good members of a network. And this is a clear demonstration of why I believe that. I think this tension between the innovative possibilities of new technology and the understandably cautious nature of institutional IT services will mean that we'll all need to do more of this DIY tech set-up and experimentation. And the only way to do that is to have a good network who can help.

One last plea - I joked with Alan that I needed DS106 out of a box. I think I'm serious though - it would be great to have a step by step, idiots guide to installing and setting up a DS106-like environment. The rest of us don't have Alan and Jim's tech skills, so getting to the starting line is difficult. I know they'll say you should invent your own way, but they done so much great work that I don't think they realise just how much expertise they have. A simple installation that let the rest of us get started, would mean we could all go off in different directions then. So any of the DS106 crowd up for it? And I do mean a simple guide, it has to be Weller-proof.

 

To the ghosts who write history blogs

Okay, maybe it's not an Obama moment in history, but, as you may have heard, the OU has adopted Google Apps for education for its students, and I think this may be a significant move in educational technology. Niall announced it and Tony has given his reaction. We're by no means the first to do it, but I think the OU's adoption is significant for a number of reasons:

1. It ain't Microsoft - there will have been strong lobbying to adopt an MS solution, so the move to Google marks a shift in the power base or at least the default assumption that it's MS who do enterprise solutions.
2.  It's the cloud - a lot of other universities use the OU as a benchmark I think. I know that when we adopted Moodle, that made the decision to go with open source easier for other institutions. A kind of 'well, if the OU is doing it, then it has to be reliable' argument can be put forward. So, just as Moodle acted as a seal of approval on open source VLEs, so Google Apps signifies a reliability of cloud based solutions. 
3. It puts powerful collaborative tools in the hands of students - I commented on twitter that Google Docs might end being the most significant educational technology around. Not because it's fantastic, but because it's there and it's easy to use. Or maybe it'll be chat. Or large email storage. Whatever it is, I think students (and tutors) will start to use the technology in ways that we don't predict or demand, but because it makes their lives easier. We have struggled to crack collaborative learning for distance students for ages - maybe Google Apps will do it in one move.
4. They are not education specific tools - although it's packaged as Google Apps for education, it is really just standard Google Apps. Like a lot of ed tech people I have argued that our role is no longer to develop bespoke educational applications, but rather to take existing tools and see how these can be used in education. Google Apps reinforces that view and makes you ask the question, 'why do I need a Virtual Learning Environment, and not just a virtual environment we use for learning?'

So it'll be interesting to see how it pans out. One disappointing aspect is that staff don't get it until later. As I'm already in Google I'm waiting for everyone else to come and join me.

Oh, and the pretentious title is really just an excuse to embed this song from the Low Anthem:

	The Low Anthem - To The Ghosts Who Write History Books
	Found at skreemr.com

The centralisation dilemma in educational IT

I wrote an article for a new journal, the International Journal of Virtual and Personal Learning Environments (IJVPLE). My piece was entitled 'The centralisation dilemma in educational IT'. I argued that we have a centralisation - decentralisation cycle in educational IT, so we had distributed versions of VLE, which moved to a central VLE, and we are now seeing a shift back to decentralised cloud services.

The arguments for a centralised VLE are:

1. Uniformity of student experience
2. Centralised support
3. Quality assurance
4. Efficiency
5. Robustness
6. Integration of different tools
7. Staff development
8. Platform for expanding elearning offerings

Whereas the arguments for a decentralised model can be summarised as:

1. Quality: The individual components of an integrated system will not be as good as specialist tools performing any one of these functions
2. Flexibility
3. Pedagogic suitability
4. Relevance
5. Educator control
6. Personalisation

I then look at some of the issues around both the centralised and decentralised models before coming to this (maybe woolly) conclusion:

"Having looked at some of the issues surrounding centralised and decentralised educational IT services, we can see that there is dissatisfaction with the current centralised model, but also problems with the implementation of a decentralised model. What this may signify is that we are in a transition point as educational IT services evolve from a tightly controlled and deployed set of systems to a broader continuum of tools...

This next succession of IT services is likely to see an attempt to retain some of the benefits of a centralised system with the diversity of a decentralised one. This will see the easy, open integration of third party applications into an existing hub of central, core services.

However, this approach is still unlikely to satisfy those in the decentralisation camp, because the implementation of educational technology can also be seen as a metaphor for how the institution itself operates. The primary benefit of a centralised system is that it facilitates control – this enables universities to perform their duty of care, both pastoral and educational, to their students by controlling the environment. In order to realise a decentralised model it would necessitate a good deal of relinquishing control. But for those who favour a decentralised model, this control is both restrictive in terms of the technologies they use, but also what they do with them."

Because it's the first edition the journal is freely available so you can access a PDF of the full article here.

OU chum Niall Sclater also has an article in the same journal, entitled 'elearning in the cloud', which you can also access.

Web 2.0 - even if we're wrong, we're right

Brian Kelly has a good slidecast talking about exploiting the social aspects of web 2.0.  He gave a similar talk with the title 'Web 2.0 - what if we're wrong?' and in Twitter I tried to argue that even if we're wrong, we're right, but struggled with the 140 character limit, so I'll put my argument here.

Brian makes a good case about avoiding the Gartner Hype Curve where you have rising expectations, which are not met, and then a trough of despair (I can't embed the actual slide direct, but it's slide 19). He is right about this, and the possible risks. Many web 2.0 companies don't have a sustainable business model, and there is undoubtedly some hype amongst all of this. Brian gives a good account of how these risks can be overcome without retreating from the brave new world. His angle is from IT services, but I want to broaden out his argument.

Just as with the initial dot com bubble, the fact that there is hype doesn't mean that the overall direction isn't correct. It may not completely change the world in the next 18 months, but it will significantly change the world in the next 5 years. Ewan McIntosh digs up a great quote from Clifford Stoll in 1995 saying (amongst much pooh-poohing of this internet stuff):

"Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog shopping - just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?”

Few would doubt we do all of those things online now, and much more. So even if the e-commerce enthusiasts were wrong about the speed and extent of change back then, they were more right than Stoll was in dismissing it.

And that's the case with social networking, web 2.0, user generated content, liberation of content, etc. Even if it doesn't turn out as some enthusiasts predict there is one key point that the detractors always miss - it will never go back to how it was. After wikipedia, Flickr, YouTube, iTunes, etc the idea that consumers of newspapers, books, music, television, and yes, education, will realise it was all just a silly mistake and go back to how it was may be what the industry leaders dream of, but is unlikely, to say the least.

Which brings me on to my even if we're wrong, we're right argument. Sure things won't be the utopian vision of free services, open education and democratisation that some talk of, but whatever comes after the current trends will build on top of them. Just as web 2.0 built on what had happened in the first wave of web development. And the people who got it, the founders and the visionaries weren't people who had dismissed the web and insisted it would go away. They were people who engaged with it, and could see how to take it forward. So, whatever comes after web 2.0 (don't say web 3.0), the people best placed to understand it and adapt to it will be those who have immersed themselves in the current technological climate, and not those who have sat waiting for it to fail so they can say 'told you so.'

Offsetting some of the dangers of outsourcing

Niall Sclater raises some issues around potential dangers of outsourcing your IT services, picking up on my recent decision to go all things Google. Niall is referring to a talk by Alan Bell and the two particular potential problems he raises are:

1. You tell your students to use a system hosted externally, maybe one which downloads client software to the learners’ machine. A student’s system gets corrupted and they claim that your institution is liable.

2. You use a free externally hosted collaboration system for audio conferencing for a tutorial and a student tells you during the session that they can’t complete an assignment due to a bereavement. You take no note of this and it slips your mind. Because there is no accessible record of the session you’re again opening up your institution to a liability.

I would say the first of these - not really an issue, since most of what we're talking about are web based services anyway. The second might be an issue, and is part of the broader issue of having less direct control. A similar problem might be that a student claims a particular system was down, or the student says they haven't read a message, etc. All of these are verifiable when you have integrated systems with monitoring. I would say that I think monitoring as an excuse to use internal systems is overplayed, since no-one actually uses it much, and you have other tools available, e.g. Google analytics, but let's ignore that for now, and think about how this might be addressed.

The first way would be to decide on core services that you really need to host internally. Assignment handling might be one. I suspect the danger with this approach is that some people would soon argue that everything is a core service.

The second approach is to use reliable third party services who you have some level of partnership, or at least discussion with. So you can at least ask them if their system was down. The danger with this approach is that it would soon be pulled in to the institutional bureaucracy and before you know they would be demanding that Slideshare (or whoever) sign a service level agreement.

The third approach is to spread risk. By having a range of activities and systems, then failure in any one is mitigated as students can do something else. This is a definite advantage over the centralised system as when that goes down, everything is lost.

The fourth factor is to have a light integration touch between institutional systems and third party apps, that can at least offer a degree of monitoring. I'm not sure if institutionally hosted authorisation services would do the trick, but this kind of thing.

And the last approach is probably the most interesting and not related to technology at all. And that is to engage with, and trust, your students more and create more activity based courses. A lot of these 'issues' are only issues when you need to be directing students to do very specific tasks. If one adopts a more research, activity based pedagogy then some (not all) of these issues become legitimate problems for the student to work around.