The Ed Techie

Last.uni

I'm a big fan of LastFM, and whenever I find some technology I like, I think 'what would this be like in education?'. Let's play the technology determinist game for a while, and imagine what would education (or even just a course) be like if it was built around something like Last.fm, would it be a Last.uni?

Here's how it might work. Imagine educators don't create courses or give lectures but they create loads of resources: podcasts, articles, blog postings, animations, video clips, etc. Last.uni draws on all the databases where these resources are stored. In your Last.uni player you enter a subject you are interested in, lets say it's 'technological determinism' (to be all ironic about it). Now, what you get back is a stream of resources that are initially about technological determinism, but as you work through them they will be about related subjects. These connections will have been established by tagging and data mining. So after the first couple of resources on technological determinism there is a podcast on Marshall McLuhan. You rank this as something you are interested in, and the search is further refined.

Being Last.uni it is of course a social networking tool, so you can see who has also listened to the podcast, and if you feel so inclined, invite them in to a chat. As you continue to use the tool it generates a set of neighbours, that is people who have 'studied' similar resources as you. This in effect becomes your loosely defined student cohort, and you can use tools to arrange weekly discussion sessions.

As you continue to use the tool and you build up the list of resources you have liked it creates a set of recommendations for you, effectively building your course.

Now, there's a bit of a need for guidance in there, (how do you know to look for technological determinism) and I'm not sure where the educator fits in. Maybe they become redundant - thats why it's the Last Uni (gulp)? Accrediting the knowledge you get through Last.uni would probably require an eportfolio type approach (which would of course be built in to the tool).

So, any takers?

Web 2.0 course designs

I did a presentation yesterday to a group at the OU looking at new models of course design (the feeling is that what can be termed OU Classic is not a flexible enough model to meet all of our needs). I suggested 5 models:

1. The self-updating course - the course designer creates general activities, for example 'Analyse three of the resources below using X's theory...' The resources come from RSS feeds, user tagged content, etc. So the actual resources are unknown at the time of writing, but if the feeds are reliable they will be current when the student studies.
2. The content-lite course - content produced by the course designer that is. This is essentially a resource based approach, so students or groups might have a general task, e.g. complete a business proposal for a web 2.0 product' and then have a range of resources such as user generated content (the proposals from previous years), blog feeds, podcasts, etc. Again some of this content will be unknown, but some will be selected by the educator.
3. The personalised course - this is more of a competency based approach, so the student has to show their competence or understanding of X, and gathers together the resources they feel they need.
4. All marketing is content - in this one I suggested that the OU doesn't do marketing anymore and instead simply creates content, which is made freely available through the OpenLearn space. Anyone can take and use this content (thus fulfilling the outreach function) and the OU also draws upon this as the central resource pool for creating its own courses.
5. Course as aggregation - really another take on number 4. Here the focus is not on creating content for a specific course, but rather on creating content in subject areas, which is stored in a central content management system. When we wish to create a specific course we take and adapt content from here, and combine it with some specifically created material. This makes the course production process much more flexible.

There are probably more, and what these models hide is a wealth of complexity in terms of academic practice, institutional process and also an individual's sense of identity. But I think there are merits to all of them.

Here is the presentation via Slideshare:

Stringle implications

The last in this trilogy of posts...

Several things occurred to me when playing with Stringle yesterday. I'll try to elucidate them here:

Course design - increasingly I feel that writing course resources is a redundant activity. I think course design will move towards creating activities around as yet unknown content. For instance, we added in a feed for any content that is tagged elearning and evolution. Now it's a reasonable bet that this will contain some decent (and not so decent material). But it helps future-proof the course. I don't think you could quite rely on such resources but the ratio of educator derived material to external resources is surely going to decrease.

Why does HE develop tools - I know, I've commented on this before, but looking at the range of tools that are just out there, and the ease with which you can pull them in to a system made me wonder it all over again. I would like to propose Weller's rule of educational software development which goes something like 'if an educational establishment wants to develop a tool then by the time it has reached the functional requirements stage a better one will be freely available'. Allright, it's not a snappy one, but you get the idea.

PLEs are possible - I've been a bit of a critic of PLEs, partly because they seemed obsessed with clients and partly because they underestimated some of the challenges I felt. But I can see how a mid-ground between the 'it's all down to the user' and 'central control' models could be found, by providing default tools, and allowing users to pull in their preferred ones if they wish.

Openness is the new king - if the struggle to get Vista shipped hadn't convinced me that the proprietary model of software development was dead, then this has. I kept thinking of the time I had spent getting a course ready for the UK e-university, who spent somewhere between 10 and 18 million pounds on developing a VLE. It wasn't very good. Imagine what you could do with something like a Stringle approach for a tenth (even a hundredth) of that money.

Anyway that's enough on Stringle.

Stringle 2.0

Having shown you Stringle, I thought it'd be interesting to think what else it would need to be a usable tool.

Here's my thoughts:

Tools –

A good range of tools that users can select from. Tony's working on this, so you should have a range to select from and can simply drag them into your toolset and give them a label (thus avoiding all that del.icio.us and URL stuff).

Easy way of adding new tool - if you come across a tool then you want to be able to add it simply by clicking a button. If we were providing students with a university social bookmarking tool, then this could be done easily.

Toolset related to resource - I think this would be quite powerful. If you select a particular tool then it has some metadata associated with it which automatically loads in the appropriate tool(s). Thus if you're doing a timeline activity the only tool available is a timeline, if you're doing a collaborative activity then maybe a discussion board and IM tool are displayed.

Content

Easy add - as with tools, you don't really want people to mess around with OPML managers, so you need a neat way of adding content in.

Icons - next to the links in the grazr widget it would be good if you can identify different types of resources, e.g. activities had an icon or were styled a particular way.

Enterprise -

Authentication - you're going to need some way of allocating roles and resources to individuals, which means all the tedious but mission critical stuff around linking with student record systems, assigning roles, security, etc.

Tracking - this is essentially dumb integration. If you really want to do tracking you need to know what people are doing in each of the tools. This might be insoluble if you want to allow an open system.

Usability - it's no oil painting at the moment and definitely could benefit from some good interface design.

Of course, you may be asking yourself 'why bother? Why not just use Pageflakes?' (or something similar). There may be something in this, but what impresses me is the way a system can be configured quite easily. More on this in the next post.

Stringle - almost a web 2.0 PLE?

Tony Hirst visited me yesterday in Cardiff and we spent the day going through his String n Glue VLE (Stringle). I'll split up my posts on this, so in this one I'll do a quick users guide, then I'll look at what else it needs in another post, and finally some thoughts.

Before we get stuck in I ought to just say that there is a bit of clunkiness about this, and the immediate reaction might be 'most students are not going to do this.' Which is true, but a lot of this clunkiness could be removed with a bit of resource and programming (e.g. creating a button that automatically adds a resource). I'll come back to this in the next post, but for now, assume it could all be made easy.

You will need a del.icio.us account and an OPML manager (e.g. from http://www.opmlmanager.com/) in place before you start.

Go to Stringle at http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/stringle2.php

You'll see a list of tools across the top like Docs, whiteboard, etc. Clicking one of these will load the tool in to the Tools tab in the central frame.

One the left there is a list of content. Clicking on one of these will open the content in the Web tab in the centre (or you can add in a URL in the box at the top and it will display it).

And that is essentially it - you have your tools at the top and your content down the side. Both are configurable, so let's start with the tools.

Say I want to add in a scheduler tool, like Remember The Milk. You need to bookmark the site using del.icio.us (any social bookmarking tool could be used but for demo Tony has opted for the best known one). You need to tell Stringle it is a tool, and to do this you use the tag stringle:tool You can create clusters or categories of tools, which you can load in to Stringle at different times. So for example you might have a collection of collaborative tools. Lets say I group my Todo tool in with admin tools. I would then add in the del.icio.us tag by leaving a space and adding 'admin'. Now I want to tell it what text to put along the top in Stringle, so I add another tag, say 'stringle:Milk'.

Now I want to load my admin tools in to Stringle. To do this I add in some text after the URL - ?t=del.icio.us name/category name. So in my case I would add in ?t=mjweller/admin to give the url http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/stringle2.php?t=mjweller/admin

Okay I said it got a bit clunky, but this could all be automated. Now let's add some content in to the left hand panel, which comes courtesy of Grazr. To do this you'll need to go to your OPML manager. If you are in OPMLManager, then right click on the main folder and create a sub-folder. Let's say I'm creating a course on Evolution, so I'll add in a folder with this name. As I discover different resources I can add them in here using the add link function. These can be sites, rss feeds, podcasts, etc.

Once you've built up your collection of resources, you want to import it in to Stringle. This requires URL jiggery-pokery again. This time add ?oURL for OPML feed so in my case it would be ?o=http://www.opmlmanager.com/opml/mweller.opml giving the URL http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/stringle2.php?o=http://www.opmlmanager.com/opml/mweller

Now we can of course combine the two to give my toolset and my content -

http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/stringle2.php?o=http://www.opmlmanager.com/opml/mweller.opml&t=mjweller/admin

It may be a bit buggy still (especially in IE Tony tells me), but you get the idea. That's the boring stuff, I'll look at what else could be done to it in another post.

RSS as universal acid - revisited

I blogged before about RSS becoming the universal acid or lingua franca of web 2.0. Yahoo have just released the beta of their pipes, which is a way of remixing feeds and creating mash-ups without getting too dirty in the programming. With his talent for understatement Tim O'Reilly says it is "a milestone in the history of the internet."

Tony Hirst has had a go creating a pipe for the openlearn content, and seems to like using them.

I'm not quite as convinced that they are a) as easy to use as people think (what techies think is easy is not the same as the rest of us) and b) they will have quite the impact suggested. However, I do think they mark another step in the RSS march to domination, and that is what will be interesting. When RSS is the standard format for all content, then aggregating it, sharing it and reusing it become standard practice. If one thinks of all content like this then the idea of creating static stuff locked away in a VLE seems at odds with the rest of the world, and rather uninspiring.

With my learning design hat on, I also wondered whether the pipes interface might be combined with something like LAMS to produce a powerful means of mixing content and activity.

What does HE provide exactly?

A few people (e.g. weblogg-ed) have blogged about the following demo of Zoho Notebook (which isn't released yet)

It does look very good and one can immediately see all sorts of possibilities for it in education, with students sharing and collaborating on content.

What it made me think was, as I posted a few days ago, increasingly I wonder why we bother to develop technologies in higher education. None of the stuff we develop is ever as agile, cool, usable or useful as this wealth of free commercial software out there now. Imagine you were employed to find the technology that would have the most significant impact on education in the next 5 to 10 years. Would you seriously look at what universities were doing to find the answer?

Partly this is cultural - the values that higher education holds dear are things like rigour, transparency and thoroughness. These are reflected in the software approaches it adopts with very sound stakeholder consultation, deeply studious problem analysis, measured and precise software specification, user testing, etc. By which time the product is irrelevant.

The pace of change is worrying too, my colleague Tony Hirst (who pointed me at this video) says he finds something every weekend that he thinks he could use in a course, and I don't doubt him. So even as it stands I want to say to developers 'can we just freeze everything for two years so we can catch up and start using this stuff?'

But the problem for higher education is even worse when you consider the wealth of content out there. Perhaps this is the sort of admission a professor shouldn't make, but I read more (and get more from) blogs now than I do from learned journals. And I would advise students to do the same. Add in podcasts, YouTube, Slideshare, open educational resources and the idea that the university or educator is the provider of the content looks decidedly shakey.

In essence we are all autodidacts now, but rather than being the oddball dilettante of Sartre's Nausea, autodidacts are now able to take any subject to a fine level of detail while maintaining a social life. Even worse, we are all autotechsupport now as well.

So, with the net providing the content and the technology I am reminded of the quote in Schindlers List when Itzhak Stern says to Schindler "Let me understand. They put up all the money. I do all the work. What, if you don't mind my asking, would you do?" I think increasingly this is a question that students will ask of HE, but more importantly which it should ask of itself.

web 2.0 workshop

I ran a workshop for the e-learning community at the OU today. It went quite well, I had two activities, one of which got people to consider their current practice and how they might add some 2.0 to it, and another which got them to look at some web 2.0 applications and think about how they might be used in a course.

Anyway, the powerpoint is on slideshare, and embedded below. If you've looked at any of my other web 2.0 presentations, you'll see that it's not dissimiliar. I used to feel bad about this, but actually each one changes slightly, so the presentation evolves over time. Having been schooled in learning objects, open source software and web 2.0 over the past few years, endless reuse has lost its shame for me - I now embrace it.

The irrationality of preference

Having posted about Google desktop and Netvibes it made me consider why Netvibes is my preferred personal portal. There are many others available and while I could come up with a justification for Netvibes over Pageflakes, say, it would all be a bit post hoc. In a recent survey on VLE use in universities the OECD pointed out that

"there was little to choose between different systems. The past seven years of intensive LMS development and adoption in tertiary education have seen considerable system convergence…. Some respondents asserted that a particular system was the “only genuine” enterprise LMS, or “by far the easiest” to use, but it was difficult to evidence such claims. "

I think in some ways we choose software on a much less rational basis than we might like to admit, and rather like our choice of football team (or religion if you prefer), this very irrationality of selection makes us defend our choice more vigorously. Having made a selection free from logic, we are then able to indulge it at an emotional level. I have often been struck by how emotionally attached people are to particular software packages. When deciding on a particular piece of software to use for a project or course I have found myself in very heated debates, which pretend to be about functionality, or database compatibility, but are in fact about personal identity, emotional attachment, love even. Within particular functions we tend to be monoamorous, so you only love one browser/operating system, etc. We can be happily be polyamorous across different functions ie you can love an operating system and a browser.

The analogy with football is too tempting (and obvious) for me to pass up. You have to be monoamorous supporting a team at one level (any football fan that tells you they support Arsenal and Chelsea say is by definition, not a football fan and deserves your contempt). But you can be polyamorous across different levels, e.g. you can support one national team, one main team and maybe your local non-league team also. I'm being slightly flippant here, but there does seem to be a similar process in operation - it may be an evolutionary tick, the process for promoting monogamy to secure the succession of your genes latching on to other aspects in life also.

And then you have to produce a 20 page business case for a committee that incorporates your software choice in an objective manner...

Google Desktop vs Netvibes

I installed Google Desktop a few months back, but didn't really do anything with it, mainly because I was viewing it as it is billed - a desktop search tool. Probably because I'm quite linear in the way I work (I'm male - I don't do multi-tasking), a desktop search tool isn't something I really need a lot. Sure I need to find online resources, but then I use normal Google, or search journal databases (if Google could sort out the federated search across multiple database problem, that would be useful). But now I have my new laptop (a Vaio - why did it take PC manufacturers so long to realise that just because we use Windows doesn't mean we like beige - Mac users need not reply), I took the time to configure the other parts. I'm now almost a fan, and usually I don't bother with client-based software much. I love having my main blogroll going continually - it's a small window so you couldn't have all blogs in there, but the people who post a lot it's worth following. I put some quick reminders in the scratch pad, I have a number of different Flickr photo streams, as well as the My Pictures archive scrolling through on Photos, I use the To Do list to organise my day, and I even check the weather (it says it is raining in Cardiff today, and a quick look out the window - yes, it's right!).

So it's very quickly become part of the constellation of tools and services I operate within. I also use Netvibes for some similar purposes, so here is how they compare for me:

Google Desktop:

Pluses - always present, embedded search facility, good range of tools

Minuses - can be a distraction (I keep jumping off to look at photos that come by, or read blog entries - not good when you are trying to write a project plan), slow to load (maybe a result of the indexing process), photo streams seem to get stuck showing the same pictures (particularly if it is loading ones from hard drive).

Netvibes:

Pluses - tabs makes it much more structured, seems much quicker at loading RSS (postings that have yet to appear in GD show up immediately), potentiall richer tool set

Minuses - no desktop integration, need to visit site, not a search tool