One of the reasons I love the OER Programme…

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…is that it turns up stuff like this.

The VirtualDutch timeline of Anglo-Dutch relations. It’s built using MITs Simile software and it’s packed full of utterly fascinating detail. Amongst more familiar historical events it includes such gems as the following:

1120s: first appearance of name Fleming in Scotland,
post-1154: introduction of oxtail soup in England,
c. 1310: pirate John Crab moves to Aberdeen,
1457: first recording of golf in Scotland,
1576: calls for immigrants to be sent back in English parliament (plus ça change),
1585: cacao beans enter Europe for first time,
1587: first cultivation of sprouts in Europe,
1637: crash of tulipomania
1662: piracy legally forbidden
1673: first performance of The Dutch Lover
1685: first mention of Sauce hollandaise
1689: Dutch fire engines in England
1709: first raids on molly clubs in London
1712: frog as insult for the Dutch
1793: first description of Britain as treacherous
1824: Dutch translation of Waverley
1829: Mons Meg moved to Edinburgh

Brilliant! Of course this has completely derailed any “real” work I was going to do this afternoon ;)

JISC Persistent Identifiers Meeting: Teaching and Learning Materials

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During the second half the JISC Persistent Identifiers Meeting participants split into five groups to discuss identifier requirements for the following resource types: research papers, research data, learning materials, cultural heritage, administrative information.

Phil Barker, Matt Jukes, Chris Awre and I composed the small group that discussed teaching and learning materials and these were our conclusions.

Constraints

Much of the discourse of the day did not sit comfortably with the teaching and learning domain. There was an implicit assumption that resources reside in repositories of some kind and are accompanied by quality-controlled metadata.

In reality teaching and learning materials are stored in many different places that can not be regarded as repositories “no matter how big the quotation marks”. These resources tend to be unmanaged and are not persistent.

Learning materials have relationships to many other entities e.g. the concept being learned, educational activities, course instance, individual people and social networks. These entities are poorly understood and modelled and are difficult to identify.

There is still a “craft” view of the process and practice of teaching and consequently there is some resistance to formalising the management of resources and activities.

There is no clearly identifiable lifecycle for teaching and learning materials and frequently no formal mechanism for their management.

Learning materials are “made public” but they are not “published” in the formal sense and metadata is often poor or non existent.

Use Cases

Composite objects – learning materials are frequently composite objects that may be ordered in one or more ways. Identifiers need to be able to identify the component parts, specify the order and potentially also to recompose and reorder them.

Open educational resources – once resources are released under an open license there are likely to be multiple different copies, formats and versions all over the place. How do you express relationship between these multiple entities?

Resource / course relationship – what is the relationship between learning materials and concepts such as educational activity or educational activity? It is notoriously difficult to assign an educational level to a learning resources but it is often much easier to assign an educational level to a course. Is it possible to extrapolate from the course to the resource?

Drivers

Institutions are beginning to recognise that learning materials are valuable for the core business of higher education, i.e. teaching and learning; and that it may be beneficial to manage them for quality and efficiency gains.

The OER movement may be a significant driver for futher work in this area.

What approaches are being used at present?

There is no clearly identifiable workflow behind the use of learning materials. The url of a learning resource tends to become its identifier and is dependant on where the resource is stored e.g. vle, repository, slideshare. Clearly however the url refers to a specific instantiation of a resource in a specific location.

There is very little in the way of established practice in terms of management and identification of teaching and learning materials. Everything in flux. In the terminology of the Repository Ecology report things are still a “mess.” A mess being:

“a complex issue that is not well formulated or defined”

Issues regarding sustainability and scalability

Do teaching and learning materials actually need to persist? There are usecases for persistence e.g. non-repudiation. Also teachers have to be confident that a resource will be there next time they need to use it.

Does it actually matter if resources are scattered all over the place with metadata that is poor to nonexistent?

And finally…
…if you know the answer to that last question please comment below!

JISC Persistent Identifiers Meeting: General Discussion

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Last week I attended a very productive and unusually amicable meeting on identifiers run by JISC and ably facilitated by Chris Awre. Besides their obvious critical relevance, my interest in identifiers goes back to an international symposium on the topic that CETIS hosted way back in 2003. That particular event generated a voluminous report and a series of usecases that I believe are still relevant today. The Digital Curation Centre ran a subsequent identifiers event in 2005 which presented various identifier technologies, a series of case studies and sparked considerable debate. I was interested to attend last week’s meeting to see how the debate regarding identifier requirements and technologies had moved forward given the significant developments of the intervening years, including Web 2.0, social networking, and OER.

And you know what? I think the debate has matured significantly. There was much greater acceptance that one size will never fit all, that there will always be multiple technologies to choose from, that choice of identifier scheme frequently depends on choice of technology platform (e.g. if you run DSpace you will use Handles) and that the technology is the easy part to solve. Previous identifier events tended to degenerate into holy wars but there was admirably little crusading evident last week. Although there was some flak flying around on the back channel.

I was slightly frustrated that, as usual, much of the debate focused implicitly on scholarly works and a particular form of “publication”. However there was much that was of relevance to the teaching and learning domain too. Here are some of the statement from the event that I would endorse:

Chris Awre, University of Hull

The emphasis on identifiers themselves can be distracting, it’s better to focus on the role and purpose of identifiers.

Identifying digital content at different phases of its lifecycle is key to the management of that content.

Identifiers need to have an associated meaning. An identifier is only an identifier if it is associated with a thing, otherwise it is just a string.

Identifiers need to disambiguate what they are identifying.

Henry Thompson, University of Edinburgh

Any naming schemes for sharing on the web are only as good as the services behind them.

Persistence of activity is critical, not persistence of technology. There are no purely technical solutions to vulnerabilities.

The only naming scheme of any technical sophistication is the Linean taxonomic scheme. (!)

Make it easy for ordinary users to mint good URIs.

Les Carr, University of Southampton

Persistence of URIs can be made difficult by institutions view of the web purely as a marketing tool.

Bas Cordewener, SURF Foundation

DOI is the only system that has a business model, but it can be expensive for repositories to implement.

Commercial influences should be kept at bay but we need to recognise that there are many different systems meeting different requirements.

Hugh Glaser, University of Southampton

Authority is established not bestowed.

Conclusion and JISC Interventions

The general conclusion of this event was that technology is not the problem, sufficient infrastructure already exists and one size will never fit all.

There was some debate regarding appropriate JISC interventions in this space but there was some consensus that JISC could usefully work with bodies such as UCISA, SCONUL and the Research Councils to provide advice on policy and business cases illustrating the appropriate use of identifiers. Case studies and demonstrators that situate solutions in context, articulate specific workflows and promote good practice in managing identifiers would also be of considerable value.

I’ll post a second piece shortly summarising the breakout group that focused specifically on identifier requirements within the teaching and learning domain.

Ada Lovelace Day 2010

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Ada Lovelace day is coming around again on the 24th March and you can plegde to participate here http://findingada.com/

The following is from the Ada Lovelace Day pledge announcement but I’m more than happy to repeat it here:

We had an amazing day last year, with over 1200 people writing about a woman in technology or science whom they admire. We got lots of coverage in the national press and even appeared on the BBC News Channel. Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We wanted you to tell the world about these unsung heroines, and you did. Thank you!

But our work is not yet done. This year we want 3072 people to sign up to our pledge and to write their tribute to women in tech. We have the 72, we just need the 3000, which is where you come in. Please sign the pledge at http://findingada.com/ and let all your friends know about it.

It doesn’t matter how new or old your blog is, what gender you are, what language you blog in, if you do text, audio or video, or what you normally blog about – everyone is invited to take part. All you need to do is sign up to this pledge and then publish your blog post any time on Wednesday 24th March 2010. If you’re going to be away that day, feel free to write your post in advance and set your blogging system to publish it that day.

To keep up to date with what is happening:

The Pledge: http://findingada.com/
The Blog: http://blog.findingada.com
on Twitter http://twitter.com/FindingAda

Thank you for your support!

Best,
Suw Charman-Anderson

Semantic Technologies: Which Way Now – outputs and activities

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Rather belatedly we have finally found time to synthesise the outputs of the “Semantic Technologies: Which Way Now” event CETIS hosted at the University of Strathclyde at the beginning of December. All the presentations from the event are available from the wiki page and you can read Sheila’s liveblog from the day here.

Based on the discussions that took place throughout the event we have identified the following activities that could potentially be taken forward by JISC and CETIS.

1. Briefing paper
There is considerable ambiguity regarding the use of terminology in this space, particularly among those who are less familiar with the semantic technology domain. There was general agreement that it would be useful to attempt to disambiguate some of this terminology including: Semantic Web, semantic technologies, linked data, linkable data and open data with relevant examples where possible and to identify the role that different standards play in this domain.

Output
A short CETIS briefing paper targeted at the teaching and learning community and referencing the forthcoming JISC Linked Data Horizon Scan. This briefing paper could be supplemented by a Delicious page linking to a collection of relevant resources.

2. Business cases
Based on the outputs of the JISC SemTech project, the Linked Data Horizon Scan and other relevant resources, develop a series of business cases for institutional senior managers and information systems directors outlining the potential benefits of investing time and developing expertise in exposing semantic data.

Output
Business cases for senior managers and IS directors.

3. Tools and services
Develop tools, applications and services for consuming and manipulating existing linked data sources to show how they might benefit the domain of teaching and learning and to demonstrate how the business cases identified by Activity 2 might be addressed. E.g. a linked directory of teaching expertise as an exemplar of the sort of service that could be built from foaf and doap.

Output
Tools and services for consuming and manipulating existing linked data sources.

4. Affordances for curriculum design and course approval
Exploration of the affordances of linked data within institutions to facilitate a number of institutional processes including curriculum design and course description. Identify areas in the course approval process where open and or linkable data could be exploited. There may be potential to work with existing programmes and initiatives such as Curriculum Design and XCRI to start exploring affordances and barriers in this area and possibly to begin scoping requirements for XCRI phase 2.

5. Developer events
One or more technical events, possibly similar to Google’s summer of code, open to developers, and students, to produce implementations and resources relevant to education based on open and linked data. These activities could potentially be developed around existing JISC and Talis events.

Outputs
Demonstrators, proof of concept implementations, etc.

We would welcome feedback on these or indeed other activities so please post comments below. CETIS will continue to explore the domains of semantic technologies, open and linked date with a view to facilitating further working groups in this area. We’ll look forward to hearing from you!

OER, RSS and JorumOpen

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Many of you who have an interest in open education resources and the Academy / JISC OER Pilot Programme will already be following the development of JorumOpen. JorumOpen will enable users worldwide to search, browse and download open educational resources deposited by UK Further and Higher Education Institutions and licenced under Creative Commons licence. OER Projects already have access to the JorumOpen deposit tool and the service itself, which is based on a customised version of DSpace will be available to the wider community from the 19th of January 2010.

CETIS have been liaising closely with the Jorum team in order to support the OER Programme’s requirements. One early requirement that has emerged is the need for bulk deposit and a request from some projects that this may be partially fulfilled by ingest of RSS feeds. Sounds simple enough but as with all such requirements the devil is in the detail. And in this case some of the details include which version or RSS to support, how to encode and handle licence information, what metadata to include, how to process said metadata, what is a realistic size for feeds?

In order to kick off a discussion on these and other issues Gareth Waller, Jorum’s Technical Manager (and DSpace wrangler extraordinaire) has written a short white paper titled Issues surrounding feed deposit into institutional repositories which presents the pros and cons of using syndicated feed formats to facilitate deposit into repositories such as JorumOpen. Gareth presents a succinct overview of syndicated feed formats and raises a number of questions relating to: item identification, item updates and deletions, missing items, polling periods, feed formats, metadata formats, local metadata application profiles, handling licences and whether to store links or download resources.

JISC, CETIS and Jorum would like to move towards the development of an agreed RSS profile for open educational resources so we are actively seeking comments from the community on the kind of issues Gareth raises in his paper. If you would like to comment or raise additional issues please post your comments here or on the Jorum Community Bay. You can download Gareth’s paper here or from the Community Bay.

When automatic metadata generation goes bad…

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Or the strange case of Drs E. Embuggerance and H. Feisty.

This has already been reported on several other blogs but it’s too good not to share again. Looks like Google Scholar needs to work on its automatic metadata generation algorithm:

Embuggerance, E., and H. Feisty. 2008. The linguistics of laughter. English Today 1, no. 04: 47-47.

This curious incident was originally reported by Stephen Chrisomalis and subsequently picked up by Language Log. The comments on the latter post are particularly entertaining. Mark Liberman helpfully provides Google Scholar’s BibTex citation

@article{embuggerance2008linguistics,
title={{The linguistics of laughter}},
author={Embuggerance, E. and Feisty, H.},
journal={English Today},
volume={1},
number={04},
pages={47–47},
year={2008},
publisher={Cambridge Univ Press}
}

And goes on to suggest

“Perhaps we should continue the tradition of metonymic names for new linguistic natural kinds, and use embuggerance for cases where the automatic tagging of entities and relations goes astray.”

Over on Stephen Chrisomalis blog the comments have taken a rather different turn and degenerate into a rather thoughtful discussion of the relative merits of Google Scholar and JSTOR and automatic metadata generation vz human indexing. One commentor, Laughingrat, is appalled that any academic would even consider using Google scholar:

“…unless your college or university is extremely underfunded, the school library should have access to high-quality databases which contain records indexed by information professionals rather than unqualified hirelings or, worse, computers.”

Another commentor, Dale, puts forward a robust argument in favour of Google Scholar in particular and automatic metadata generation in general:

“Many in libraries and academia are keen to point out all of the warts in Google Scholar, but are less keen to be so critical of the databases for which they pay. That the MLA Bibliography, for example, is years behind in indexing scores of journals, and has incredibly poor coverage in many non-English languages (despite the International boast in its name) is a little known or explored fact in libraries. Other fee-based databases evince similar flaws (Library Literature, ironically, is one of the worst), but it isn’t nearly as much fun to pick on them as it is to shellac Google.”

The last words also has to go to Dale:

“What it comes down is machine indexing vs. human indexing. I cannot get the image of John Henry out of my mind when I think about this matchup. I think the human indexers can only win by extreme effort, and we all know what happened to poor John.”

Amen to that!

An interesting tracking case study…

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Earlier this afternoon my colleague Phil Barker led a fascinating Elluminate session exploring resource tracking issues for the JISC / HEA Open Educational Resources Programme. One approach to tracking Phil raised was the use of unique keys or tag combinations which are embedded in resources and then released into the wild. Googling for the unique key will then indicate where your resource has been reused and by whom, more or less.

Now I’m no authority on tracking technologies but this reminded me of a very interesting article I read in the Guardian today How Belle de Jour’s secret ally Googlewhacked the press. This explains how a blogger known as Derren used some astute guesswork and a unique key combination of two terms associated nowhere else on the web to monitor whether anyone else was coming close to guessing the identity of the anonymous call girl Belle de Jour.

At the OER Technical Roundtable at last week’s CETIS Conference one of the actions participants prioritiesd was case studies and examples of different approaches to tracking. I’m not entirely sure that the above is the kind of case study the projects had in mind but it’s a pretty good real world example never the less! Just thought I’d mention it….. ;-)

Phil’s slides from the Elluminate session are available on Slideshare and no doubt there will be blog posts to follow.

Semantic technologies: which way now?

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Cast your mind back to the CETIS Conference 2007 and you may remember a session on Semantic Technologies for Teaching and Learning. This session sought to introduce current developments in semantic technologies, explore their potential application to the domain of teaching and learning and facilitate discussion between these two apparently disparate communities. The case for the relevance and potential of semantic technologies was ably presented by a range of international experts through a series of short position papers which formed the basis for a wide ranging discussion. Following this discussion there seemed to be general consensus that it would be valuable for JISC to facilitate further exploration of the affordances of semantic technologies to the domain of education.

JISC responded to this requirement by issuing an ITT for a scoping study to:

“…investigate how applications which use semantic technologies can add value to learning and teaching.”

This study was awarded to the SemTech Project at the University of Southampton and at the same time CETIS established the Semantic Technology Working Group. The remit of this group was firstly to act as an expert working group for the SemTech Project, and secondly to develop recommendations for potential future work based on the outputs of the project.

The SemTech project successfully concluded in July 2009 having undertaken an extensive survey of semantic technologies relevant to learning and teaching and an investigation of the use and uptake of related tools and services by UK HE institutions. In addition to producing a comprehensive report the SemTech Project has also drafted a roadmap for semantic technology adoption by the UK F/HE community.

Semantic technologies appeared again at this year’s CETIS Conference, this time in the guise of linked data which was discussed in both the Find and Seek and Giant Global Graph sessions. The latter session has already generated a number of blog posts by Adam Cooper, Paul Walk and Andy Powell.

In order to disseminate and discuss the SemTech roadmap, the outputs of the CETIS conference and potential future activities in the area of semantic technologies for teaching and learning CETIS are holding a public meeting of the Semantic Technologies Working Group on the 10th of December at the University of Strathclyde. This meeting will:

  • Review the outputs of the SemTech project.
  • Consider the roadmap and recommendations to JISC.
  • Respond to these recommendations and explore future directions.
  • Investigate ways that CETIS can raise awareness of the potential affordances of semantic technologies to the teaching and learning sector.
  • Discuss future activities in this areas that CETIS could potentially engage in.

The meeting is open to all those with an interest in semantic technologies and their potential application to the domain of teaching and learning. We will be actively seeking comments and feedback from the community and would encourage colleagues to join the discussion.

To register for this meeting and for further information please visit the CETIS events page.

Orders from the Roundtable

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The Roundtable.

The CETIS conference always strives to address current and cutting edge issues in the domain of education technology, however the OER Technical Roundtable session was arguably more timely than most given that it coincided with a Guardian article on open courseware and open educational resources: Any student, any subject, anywhere.

The session was attended by over thirty participants representing a wide range of projects and initiatives, all of whom brought a plethora of technical issues to the table. These issues were ably captured by my colleague R. John Robertson using some recalcitrant mind mapping software which he is still fighting with. John has already posted the raw list of issues on his blog and on Slideshare.

As expected the range of issues was considerable but the following broad themes did emerge:

  • Tracking – metrics, Google analytics, statistics to support advocacy.
  • Usability of repositories – deposit and the role of SWORD, discovery and use.
  • Streaming large media files.
  • Licensing and rights encoding.
  • Resource description – metadata and JorumOpen, portability and interoperability, tagging, automatic metadata generation, identification of derivative works, SEO, Google discovery, how to users search for resources?
  • Aggregators to manage distributed resources – metadata aggregation, resource aggregation, iTunes & iTunesU, OER broadcasting, batch upload, Flickr & Slideshare APIs.
  • Granularity – disaggregation and reuse, content packaging, dependencies between resources.

Participants voted with their feet and broke into groups to discuss tracking, resource description, aggregators and granularity. We’ll try to synthesis the outputs of these breakout groups in later blog posts but in the meantime here’s a summary of the potential activities the groups identified that JISC and CETIS could take forward to benefit both the OER Programme and the community more generally:

  • Develop an agreed RSS / Atom profile for open educational resources.
  • Undertake research to analyse how teachers and learning actually search for educational resources. What terms do they search for and what metadata is actually necessary to facilite their searches? Synthesise data from projects, including Jorum and Steeple that are already gathering information about search terms, techniques and characteristics.
  • Investigate how successful commercial systems such as Amazon and iTunes create and manage resource descriptions. What can we learn from them?
  • Opening access to analytics and anonymised user data. Encourage the sharing of Google analytics data between projects.
  • Set up shared Piwik or Google analytics accounts for each JISC programme.
  • Share and synthesise good practice in resource tracking. Record and disseminate case studies.
  • Identify requirements and minimum recommendations for resource tracking.
  • Fund mini-projects on esoteric approaches to tracking.

We intend to discuss these recommendations with JISC in the not too distant future with a view to taking some of them forward. Hopefully we’ll be in a position to discuss progress in some if not all of these areas at #cetis10!