7 thoughts on “JLeRN Hackday – Issues Identified

  1. If it would be very useful to have “a series of simple tools to get data into and out of JLeRN”, why should JISC fund it? Why shouldn’t the people who would find it useful just go and build those tools, or even better, the people who would see value being realised from their operating of JLeRN?

  2. Valid point Tony. Perhaps some people might have good ideas for tools and services but lack the resources to build them without JISC support? For the record, I hope people will just go ahead and start building tools, with or without JISC funding!

  3. I think the issue is not one of funding tools, but of funding infrastructure.

    JISC could fund the infrastructure directly, in which case developers will likely produce tools that take advantage of it. This would probably be the most effective approach. However, if the infrastructure is unproven in terms of the benefits to the sector, then why should JISC take the risk?

    Conversely. if the infrastructure isn’t likely to be sustained beyond the short term, why would you risk building tools for it?

    So the purpose of funding tools would I think be for building the business case for supporting the shared infrastructure, reducing the risk on both sides.

    Personally I’d much rather JISC took a risk on investing for the longer-term in the infrastructure, but thats not my call to make.

  4. Very neatly summarised Scott. JISC are understandably wary of funding unproven infrastructure technologies and services. But what incentive is there for developers and users to invest time and resources in infrastructure that is unlikely to be sustained? There’s no easy solution. I think you’re right though, any approach that helps to mitigate the risk on either side has to be a positive step in the right direction.

  5. Good stuff here – seems you had an interesting and useful event.

    Some thoughts:

    For accessibility, can this just be paradata — someone states that a resource is good for a certain type of accessibility? Likewise someone states that a resource was used successfully in a learning situation that required a certain type of accessibility. The goal here would be to avoid having individual students making the statements, but someone else, trying to avoid some of the privacy issues and making it more anonymous.

    The useful experiment, which should be simple and just something that someone in the community should just do, is explore how/if accessibility information can be captured in paradata.

    I’d be interested to see how the dynamic learning maps can be used.

    And also what desktop widgets would look like. Pat Lockley has been working on a word press plugin with others, and the CaPReT work might be examples.

    And lastly, data normaliztaion is something that LR does NOT plan to do — just the opposite. We believe that different forms need to exist, and that normaliztion is too hard. We’ve tried to normalize and harmonize for years with no success — let’s try to just deal with the messy data, duplicates, no consistent ids, …

  6. Pingback: The Hackday: Report and Reflections « The JLeRN Experiment