The Ed Techie

Moving from being a provider to a meaner

Question: What have librarians, IT services and academics got in common (apart from occassionally questionable dress sense)?

Answer: All have one key element of their role undermined or removed by the web, which can be loosely described as provision of content or service.

Back around 1999 when the likes of David Noble were bemoaning that the internet would make academics redundant (he was the Andrew Keen of his day), us e-learning advocates would argue that merely providing content is not all that educators did. Which led to the oft-quoted move from the sage on the stage to the guide on the side.

Librarians have also faced a similar challenge from the internet. When everything is available and Google can find you it, what is the role of the library or the librarian? Part of their function was to store, organise and then help us find physical resources. This changes fundamentally when things become digital. For a start, the idea that librarians need to decide which one, and only one, category a book can go in, seems absurd in an Amazon world. It just isn't a task we require someone to do on our behalf anymore.

Then last week Brian Kelly posted his talk about IT services and web 2.0. I posted a comment about my recent Google conversion, claiming the type of tools I could get was an order of magnitude better externally. Andy Powell has a post about social networks and IT services, stating:

So what is the lesson here for institutions and institutional IT services? I think they need to take note.  Whilst (in some cases) they may have the technical competence to build global-social social services, it is not typically part of their function to do so.  To put it bluntly, their business is to serve the institution, not to serve the world.  As a result, IT services have to begin seeing themselves as the enablers rather than the providers of such services.

I think Andy hits the nail on the head here. This is actually the same solution for all three groups mentioned here. There are two basic rules we should follow here:

1) In a world where content and technologies are free don't fight against them - you cannot compete as the sole  provider.

2) Such a world is disaggregated, and complex. Therefore there is a need to help users with the skill set in combining these disaggregated components into a meaningful whole, be that a PLE (if you're IT services), a set of resources (if you're a librarian), or a course (if you're an educator).

So we are less providers now, more frameworkers. We need a new term for this - I propose the term my daughter uses for anyone who is less than generous to her - a 'meaner', since our role is to help add meaning to disparate components. Meaners of the world unite!

Feedburner, no Typepad, goes AWOL

[Update - the problem was Typepad's not Feedburner's, so I humbly apologise to Feedburner. See Sue Waters post]

Got a tweet from Sarah Horrigan today, saying her Feedburner feed for my blog was sending her to a blog on pregnancy called Jumping Monkeys. Sure enough, Google Reader had pulled in that blog's feed for me also. I checked in Feedburner, everything seemed normal, the feed pointed to my blog, the pages listed were my pages, but my reach had dropped to zero.

I tried unsubscribing in GReader and resubscribing, but to no effect. I was now panicking somewhat. Having worked hard to build up around 500 subscribers, they were now all getting posts about baby sitters (okay, some are probably preferring them). I could feel my technorati rating tumbling. The Feedburner help is, let's be fair, rubbish. There seems to be now way to contact them direct and the forums didn't contain anything useful.

So, I had to disconnect from Feedburner and reinstate and RSS feed on this blog. It's here by the way: http://nogoodreason.typepad.co.uk/no_good_reason/rss.xml

But the thing is lots of people won't know I've turned feedburner off, they'll assume I've either had a sex change and started blogging about pregnancy, gone insane or just stopped blogging. Thank heavens I could at least put a call out in Twitter.

I'm whimpering now.

A PLE - VLE continuum

There's been a bit of a PLE flurry of posts, generated by some Twitter discussion. Chris Lott posted that he couldn't see why people think you can't teach PLEs, or about PLEs. Scott Leslie argues that some don't like the acronym:

It’s personal, not monolithic” complaint with the term, which I get and agree with. My response is not to defend the “PLE” acronym but instead just say if it bothers you, come up with a different one, or don’t use a moniker at all, but more importantly, model model model it for the 95% of learners (and teachers) who are drowning in the tsunami of information and choosing to turn their backs rather than learning to surf

Meanwhile D'Arcy Norman maintains (with the aid of some cool diagrams) that one person's PLE will differ from another's, and it is the people that are important:

the exact technologies that are in use at any particular point in time don’t matter as much as the fact that it is people being connected through them. Tools come and go constantly, and the only constant is that the people are the important part of the equation.

The debate on twitter seems to have been about whether one can usefully talk about PLEs since, by their nature, everyone's is different. There is no The PLE.

I'd like to argue that the term is okay, it has context (that of VLE), and also there is some benefit in 'teaching' PLEs. But maybe we need to nuance the term a bit, as we may be lumping things together. If in doubt about an acronym, let's create some more! So we have:

• VLE/LMS - a centralised system that gives a consistent user experience to everyone
• TLE - Teacher learner environment. This is along the lines of Scott Leslie's loosely coupled teaching applications. Less centralised than a VLE, the educator determines the range of tools, e.g. a blog with specific widgets, but all students use the same.
• DPLE - Default PLE. In this novice users (could be educators, students, employees, etc), are given a default set of applications to constitute their PLE, but they have the freedom to switch them out over time. A minor example might be my recent conversion to iGoogle from the standard Outlook provided services. Except the option and ease of switching would be stressed more. Imagine a default Netvibes page, which people would soon customise.
• PLE - the type of thing we ed techies have accrued over time, and continues to evolve. Work might be required on getting these apps to talk to each other, but really the people who operate at this end don't need much help.

This gives us a continuum of personalisation:

One thing to appreciate here is that there is no value judgement attached by the placing on the diagram - being further to the right isn't 'better'. These different approaches to technology will be suited to different contexts  and audiences. That is probably obvious to everyone, but was something of a mild epiphany for me - PLEs and VLEs are NOT in competition necessarily.

[Update - that last sentence originally had the 'not' missing (such a small word). I've added it in, but now I'm not sure - which is truer for you - they are in competition or they aren't?]

An audit on where stand with PLEs

1999 A.D. Learning
by donaldtheduckie

(via Scott Wilson)

Back in 2006 I posted some of my reservations about PLEs. At the time I thought these issues were insurmountable, and largely being ignored by the PLE advocates. Now, I'm more convinced of the possibility, and worth of a PLE, I thought it would be good to see where they stood against my original set of reservations.

This of course comes with a massive pre-question 'what do you mean by a PLE?' (as Alan Levine said in a twitter post, it seems to be a spoke diagram with lots of web 2.0 logos - what can he mean?). And maybe the notion has softened somewhat from a purely personal learning environment to a more distributed learning environment built on a range of applications. Some of these will be teacher selected e.g. 'we'll be using this wiki', and some user selected e.g. 'post to your own blog'. Anyway, here is my initial set of reservations, with some random indication of progress.

1. Support. My initial argument was that VLEs allow centralisation of support which becomes unmanageably complex if every user has different applications. While this is true, the need for support has diminished I feel because a) there is a greater level of familiarity out there (although I am not naive enough to think that even amongst the digital natives everyone is computer savvy) and b) the sort of third party tools available are easy to use and robust. People don't take courses in how to use Facebook after all.
   Progress: 50%
2. Quality assurance. My argument was that universities could not ensure a certain quality of provision with PLEs. I feel that given the superiority of many third party applications over institutional systems, the reverse may now be true. But it still remains that it is much more difficult with a PLE type world to point at something and say 'that's what student A is doing at time X'.
   Progress: 75%
3. Suitability. My argument here was that users may adopt or use the wrong technology. This brings us back to what we mean by a PLE, since it might not be the case that they are left completely to their own devices (pardon the pun). And in addition I don't think I envisaged the way widgets would come in to play, so your blog, Netvibes or iGoogle page is easily populated.
   Progress: 60%
4. Negotiation of activity. My argument here was that if everyone is using a different tool it means that every activity starts with some negotiation about what you will use, instead of just getting on with the task using the default VLE services. I still think there is something in this, but if we take the slightly looser interpretation of a PLE, then it may not mean that every task is negotiated, but rather that the educator has a choice of tools to choose from.
   Progress: 40%
   
5. Technological complexity. This is the big one. Since 2006 the rise of RSS as a common data standard, the use of widgets and the development of standards such as openID makes a lot of the potential complexity less of an issue. Look how easily a user can embed different tools, video content, feeds, etc. But at the moment the different applications are dumb to each other, and this is where work will focus over the next few years (through things like Social:Learn and eduglu).
   Progress: 50%

That's not bad progress so far I reckon. What we need now is to move away from the spoke diagrams to some real applications.

Social:Learn kickabout

Tony has posted about a potential get together to thrash out some issues around the Social:Learn project. To recap, it's an attempt by the OU to build an open system that helps facilitate social networking for learning. Along the way it may be a VLE killer too, but don't tell anyone.

Tony puts it like this:

"Work on the API has already begun - an external development team are scoping it out at the moment over in the US - and the design theme for the site we're gonna get someone else to build around those APIs are already being put together by an external design agency...

...but we all know that's not enough, right? Platforms and APIs only gain traction when people start to play with them, developers as well as users, which is why I'm floating this post...

So - we're looking to see if there are any developers out there who are working for educational institutions (formal or otherwise) or training organisations (public, private or voluntary sector) who'd like to meet up for pizza and and pint in a Barcamp/unconference like setting, and share a story or two about the itches that are bugging you in plugging institutional services together, and the third party systems you'd love to pull into your organisation, whether it's the VLE, your dreams of a PLE, the LMS or the WTF..."

So, if you're in the UK and fancy a get together, let us know. We'd also be interested in a north American get together sometime (perhaps with those demented edugluers...)

Google up your life

(Keso - http://flickr.com/photos/keso/108805307/)

It's official, my soul belongs to Google. At the risk of winning 'slowest person on the uptake' award, I have switched all my tools over to Google now. Inspired by my wife who got frustrated that she can't save to her own hard disk in her work and her allocated space runs out every month, and my own institutional frustrations, I decided to switch everything over to Google.

Here's what happened:

1) Email - set up a Gmail account if you haven't already got one. Go to Settings - Accounts - and click Add mail from another account. A pop up window comes up where you need to fill in your email server and port number for the POP3 server (I had to get these from our IT people). Then it chunks through them, pulling them in to your Gmail account, and clearing your old one. Under Settings - Accounts you can then set this to be your default account, so email appears to come from my OU account.

Result: Whereas I was continually over my mailbox limit, and had to delete messages in order to send a new one, I am now using 1% of my Gmail limit. Talk about orders of magnitude. Search is really fast too.

2) Calendar - I exported a cvs file from outlook and now have a calendar that is publicly shareable. I've not quite figured out how those in the OU outlook system will work with it.

Result: again no problems with space, but still haven't tested it in anger yet.

3) iGoogle - set up a page in iGoogle. I have three tabs: Work which I added the Gmail, calendar, RemembertheMilk, Google Talk, and Google Docs widgets to; Stuff which has things like Spurs news, Flickr photo of the day, weather, etc; Networks which has Twitter (via BeTwittered), Facebook, LogYourRun, the Technorati tab for links to this blog, Google Reader plus some bookmarks of other sites.

Result: Everything I need is in one place, with blurring between professional and personal. Who said PLE?

4) Docs - I use Google docs quite a lot anyway, but incorporating it with my main email and having it on my iGoogle page means it is now my default system. Only downside is that it doesn't allow docs over 500K.

5) Anything else - with this widget for iGoogle Your Page Here, you can add in any web page in it's own tab in an iframe, so for instance, I have my blog editor as its own tab.

Result: Ah, I'm so easily pleased. Everything under one roof.

When you can do all this for free you wonder how any institutional service can compete really, and that goes for students as well as staff.

Run me through the Blackboard business model again

So Blackboard has won the initial ruling in Texas, with Desire2Learn ordered to pay $3.1 million compensation. Obviously a stupid and dangerous ruling, but as the excellent Michael Feldstein points out, who's made money out of it anyway?

It strikes me there are three ways to be the market leader in an industry:

i) Have such cool products it doesn't matter how you behave (cf. Apple)

ii) Have an average product and bully everyone else out of the market so the customer has no choice (cf. Microsoft)

iii) Work with your customers to develop your product and get good will (cf. nearly every other tech company).

I don't have an MBA, but it strikes me that option i) is damn hard to pull off and happens to only one or two products in a decade. Option ii) is so old school, industrial type thinking that even Microsoft are shying away from it now. This is particularly true in a sector like education. Unlike, washing machines say, people really care about education. You can't bully them, treat them with contempt and work against the community and expect to have the market. People are too smart and will work around you. Which leaves option iii) as your only sensible option. And the BB patent is about as far as you can get from this as is imaginable.

So when universities find ways to deliver, support, facilitate learning online (for instance using a set of third party apps held together by eduglu), are BB going to sue them? And will they sue every application in the pack? Google Calendar when used in a loosely coupled learning suite is now in infringement of copyright?

You have to say that when it comes to misunderstanding your market, the BB patent will be a classic case study. Until we have the opportunity to look back and laugh however, we should make sure we do everything to boycott them.

Top widgets (or why Google runs the world)

(charlessc - http://www.flickr.com/photos/charlesc/100343106/)

My favourite search tool, Lijit, has a feature on the top widgets. The top two by quite some distance are Google Analytics and Google Syndication (AdSense). Surprisingly mybloglog is third (well above Technorati and Twitter).

The post also breaks them down by type, with 'metrics' being the most common type of widget people add. They also show the most popular tools within each category, and it's here you really see the dominance of Google. In the Analytics category Google Analytics scores 39.9% compared with Sitemeter in second place with 16.2%. In Ads, Adsense has a whopping 84.8% share of the market, and in video, YouTube unsurprisingly sweeps the board with 86.6%.

One rather ironic, and thus sweet result - Google comes third in Search (behind Snap and Lijit).

Still it shows one thing - all that twenty percent time is paying off for Google.

Blog as educational platform, VLE even

(http://flickr.com/photos/jbird/19650368/ JBrd)

This is really an re. loads of other people post, but I wanted to pull them together for my sake anyway.

There have been a few experiments recently in taking open content and putting it in a blog. Not mindbendingly innovative and yet very powerful when you see it.

I remember Tony showing me something like this around the early 19th century which he had knocked together using a penny farthing, carrots and a chimney sweep (Update: it was Nov 06), and he comments on the recent stuff. Then recently David Wiley took some of his open education course and republished it in WordPress. It looks really neat, enticing, well structured. Looks a damn site more inviting than, say, a Blackboard version of the course might.

Then Jim Groom took the OU's openlearn Goya stuff and put it in Wordpress. Guess what? It looks better than the original.

Brian Lamb (who easily has the best titles for blog posts around) sums it all up nicely and points to a session Jim Groom and D'Arcy Norman are doing at Northern Voice entitled  'Don't call it a blog, call it an educational publishing platform'. Which sums it up really.

There are several things of interest here for us ed techies. The first is that presentation matters. I like the look of these blog courses, and that would make me more inclined to participate in them, make me feel well disposed towards them and make me feel as though the people running them were vaguely modern and knew what they were doing. The aesthetics of the interface is something we pay scant attention to in education.

The second thing is that you may be thinking it's just a blog, it doesn't have tool X or Y that my VLE might have. Well maybe, but I think we're in disruptive technology territory here. Disruptive technology doesn't do the same things better for the same audience, it is often worse on some things, but it offers some new features for a different audience. The new features I would argue here are:

1. Ease of publishing - whether it's your own content or others, getting in to blogs is fairly straightforward
2. Ease of extendability - adding widgets and tools to blogs is just a click away, since blogs have become the universal platform across the web.
3. Openness - you can pull content and tools in from anywhere
4. Ease of navigation - blogs come with an inbuilt navigational structure that is easily co-opted for course structure.

I wonder if this isn't another example of how we in education create complex solutions to complex problems, whereas simple solutions often work better.

The most difficult part of installing Linux?

Getting Windows to burn the CD in the first place.

Doug Clow has a nice log on installing Ubuntu on an old laptop. This is really by way of outing Doug as a proper blogger now - welcome to the fold Doug, all your academic publications are behind you now...