Category Archives: educational content

Did you hear the one about the man, the animation and the step ladder?

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As my colleague Christina Smart has already reported, the opening keynote of this years ALT-C by Hans Rosling was a great start to the conference. I have to say that this was the first time I have seen a step ladder, and a c.3foot long wooden pointer being used to enhance an animation. They were used with considerable aplomb!

The animations Hans showed were well executed and great examples of learning objects. However it was the expert and intimate knowledge of the content, which allowed the audience to be taken to another level of understanding through the added human interaction. If anyone is still worried about simulations taking over the world or replacing teachers, I would recommend viewing this presentation online.

Hans outlined a key challenge that faces everyone involved in education – misconceptions. Hans illustrated how using technology can help to overcome myths and preconceptions of subject areas by showing data in alternative ways which allow meaningful data comparison that (crucially) can be easily understood. Of course creating great user interfaces is never easy, and converting numerical data into a meaningful graphical representation takes time, but the end results are worth it.

Hans pointed out we need to find more “ways to bring data back into the world”. He used the analogy of sheet music to data collections – most of us need hear the music on an instrument before we can fully “understand” it. There are huge data collections out there (many of them publicly funded) and it should be available in a unified format so that it can be used to help educate us all. To this end we also need to help governments/data collections centres overcome their tendency toward DbHd (database hugging disorder) and “free the data”. Of course, we also need people like Hans to help make sense of the statistics:-) The gapminder website is where Hans is trying to do just that, bridge the gap between statistics and their audience.

Although a great advocate for making content freely available Hans did point out that you need to own your content before you can give it away freely. His own experience of the benefits of doing just that have far outweighed the time and effort taken to create the animations. And who can argue with someone who is the top hit when you put into google probably the three of the most popular search terms (sex, money, health).

Packages from the cloud(s)

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CETIS and Knowledge Integration are working together, with community input, to develop a content transcoder service prototype. What is being proposed is a web service which will convert content into a variety of standard packaging formats (e.g. IMS CP & CC and SCORM). The project also plans to look at the most frequently used proprietary formats such as those used by WebCT, Blackboard and Moodle and at significant UK application profiles such as NLN.

The first phase of the project will be looking at prioritizing which formats and platforms the service should use and general user interface issues. So, we are looking from input from the community to help us with:

*prioritising which formats to be transcoded
*supplying test-case packages
*verifying the quality of the transcoded results in your platform of choice.

If you’d like to get involved, or just find out a bit more about the project, detailed information including the project brief is available from the CETIS wiki.

I love sprouts!

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And not just the green ones :-) David Sherlock in our Bolton office put me onto Sprout Builder, a very simple widget builder. I have had a play with some other so called simple widget building tools which lost my interest in about 5 minutes or when I realised that they didn’t work with macs, but I have to say this one has really got me hooked.

In about half an hour I had build a widget which displays the outputs for the JISC Design for Learning programme (just taking a feed from the programme delicious site), published it onto the Design for Learning wiki and in my netvibes page. I’ve now just created a widget for my last SIG meeting with audio/video files embedded and a location map which I put into facebook and the CETIS wiki.

Now I’m not claiming that these examples are anything unique, or particularly well designed. However, what I really like about this particular tool is the simplicity of it and the way it integrates services that I use such as rss feeds, maps, polldaddy polls, video, audio etc. Publishing is really straightforward with links to all the main sites such as facebook, beebo, netvibes, pagesflakes, igoogle, blogger . . . the list goes on. You can also make changes on the fly and when you republish it automatically updates all copies.

Tools like this really do put publishing (across multiple platforms/sites) and remixing content into the hands of us non-developers. There are many possibilities for education too, from simple things like creating a widget of a reading list/resources from a delicious feed to a simple countdown for assignments. (OK, that might be a bit scary, but heck a ticking clock works for most of us!). Simple tools like this combined with the widgets that the TenCompetence project are building (and showed at a recent meeting) are really starting to push the boundaries, and show the potential of how we can mix and match content and services to help enhance the teaching and learning experience.

Go Swurl yourself

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Taking a break from ICALT 2008 I’ve just discovered Swurl a site that visualizes your digital life stream. You can add feeds from services like flickr, facebook, twitter, delicious, lastfm etc and it aggregates them and provides a timeline view of your online activities. Unfortunately my timeline is a bit twittertabulous at the moment as I’ve been at conferences for the last week or so, so it’s not that visually exciting. However if you do upload photos it’s probably a lot more visually appealing. I’m also thinking that it might be a good lightweight time-recording mechanism too.

Opening up the IMS

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Via Stephen Downes OL Daily I came across this post by Michael Feldstein about his recent experiences in IMS and around the contradiction of IMS being a subscription organisation producing so called open standards. This issue has been highlighted over the last 2 years or so with the changes in access to to public versions of specs.

Michael puts forward three proposals to help IMS in becoming more open:

    “Eliminate altogether the distinction between the members-only CM/DN draft and the one available to the general public. IMS members who want an early-adopter advantage should join the working groups.”

    Create a clear policy that individual working groups are free to release public general updates and solicit public input on specific issues prior to release of the public draft as they see fit.

    Begin a conversation with the IMS membership about the possibility of opening up the working group discussion areas and document libraries to the general public on a read-only basis.”

Getting sustained involvement in any kind of specification process is very difficult. I know I wouldn’t have much to do with IMS unless I was paid to do it :-) Thankfully here in the UK JISC has recognised that have an organisation like CETIS can have an impact on standards development and uptake. But the world is changing particularly around the means and access to educational content. Who needs standards compliant content when you can just rip and mix off the web as the edupunkers have been showing us over the last few weeks. I don’t think they are at all “bovvered” about needing for example to convert their videos to Common Cartridges when they can just stick them onto Youtube.

Here at CETIS we have been working closely with IMS to allow JISC projects access to specifications but the suggestions Michael makes would certainly help broaden out the reach of the organisation and hopefully help provide the development of useful, relevant (international) standards.

Wikiaudio

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The lastest edition to the wiki family is wikiaudio, which aims be “an easily accessible user created database of information pertaining to the art and science of anything audio or sound related.” Once logged in users can add audio and video as well to their personal pages. The addition of sound and video give the potential to enhance static text based wikipedia entries into something far more interactive which will hopefully be attractive to educators.

At the recent EC SIG meeting in Manchester, Cormac Lawler gave a fascinating talk around the Wikiversity project, and how the whole notion of openness is forcing us to change our notions of personal learning spaces. This latest edition to the wikifamily will surely help to push these boundaries even further.

Education 3.0

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Though maybe not quite as hip and happening as the whole edupunk thang, the latest posting in the Terra Incongita series on open content and open source, does put forward a case for promoting new attitudes and developing new infrastructures for educational content.

In his article entitled “Evolution to Education 3.0″Derek Keats, describes the impact of what he refers to as ‘digital freedom’ both in terms of producing and sharing resources. He also strikes a cautionary note about the move to accredit open educational resources and argues instead for the wider uptake at institutional level to a framework of “Freedom and Openness”. This framework would encourage aggregation and interoperability between institutional and personal learning networks.

“. . . a possible brave new world of education 3.0, one in which the organizational constraints and boundaries are removed, the need for aggregation is not the only model for accredited learning, and the long-tail reaches into higher education at last. I do not see it as a replacement for institutional learning as it happens currently, but as another layer on top of it that extend the value of higher education into new spaces and that enable synergy among different individuals and institutions to be created “

Lots of interesting comments to the article have been posted too.

And then there was Edupunk

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I’ve just been catching up on my regular blogs today and Edupunk is everywhere. I’m not sure how long this craze will last, or if it’s already soo last week in the blog/twittersphere. But in the light of some of the discussions we had at the EC SIG meeting last week around open content, personal learning environments etc many of the issues raised through the edupunk debate are becoming more and more relevant to us in HE. Particularly if we really want harness the power oftechnology to allow staff and students to share and re-use content. Community engagement is key, as Jim Groom points out ” . . . the idea of a community and its culture is what makes any technology meaningful and relevant.”

Tony Hirst has a good summary of the debate and it’s worth having a look at Martin Weller’s response.

Going open, what does it really mean?

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Openness was the theme of the EC SIG meeting hosted by the Jorum team earlier this week at the University of Manchester.

The CETIS community has been actively engaged with the open source movement for the past couple of years, and although we have been keeping a watching brief on developments such as the OpenLearn, we haven’t really been as engaged with the open content movement. However with the announcement that Jorum was planning to become an open service, it seemed timely to have revisit the notion of open content and look at the many and varied aspects of producing, sharing and re-using open content.

To set the scene in the morning, Cormac Lawler and John Casey gave presentations from the content creator and the content distributer points of view.

Cormac gave us an overview of the Wikiversity Project which he is actively engaged in and some of the issues that the project is grappling with in terms of creating an open learning space. One of the key challenges they are facing is trying to decide when a resource is complete – or if there are stages of creation that can be identified and tagged is some way. Some educational resources may never be complete and there is, I feel, an underlying assumption that once material is published in someway that it is complete – even it it is put in an editable space such as a wiki. Using an open wiki based philosophy in education challenges some of the editorial notions associated with wikipedia, particularly in terms of allowing branching or different points of views to be expressed. However as Cormac illustrated how open are we really about our educational content? Do we want for example to have extreme, un-pc material available – or at least allow people the right to publish it? Can/should our education system ever be that open?

John Casey then outlined the journey that Jorum is taking in trying to become a more open service. John outlined some of the political issues surrounding the whole notion of openness, relating it to use of common land and the erosion of that system through the development of a property owning society. He also pointed out how risk averse institutional management are regarding rights for learning materials, but they don’t seem to have the same problems with other (arguably higher risk associated) projects such as major building works and IT systems.

Liam Earney from JISC Collections gave us an overview of the RePRODUCE project. Liam and his colleague Caren Milloy are providing support in IPR and copyright for the projects. One key issue that seems to be coming up is that it is crucial for projects to think about the staff time issues relating IPR/copyright issues when they are writing their project bid. Liam pointed to what he described as the clash between academic and publishing cultures. Leaving two weeks at the end of the project to sort out the IPR stuff isn’t really going to work :-)

The afternoon was given over to discussion. To help frame the discussion, Phil Barker from the MDR SIG, shared some reflections on what he thought we should be working towards in terms of creating valuable learning content for students. Phil put forward the case that communities of subject based disciplines were probably best placed to really figure out what content needed to be created/re-purposed etc.

The discussion was wide and varied, with lots of input from everyone in the room. It is difficult to summarize all the points made, however some of the key points that did come up were:
*process is more important than content
*sorting out institutional processes for IPR can be a positive driver for change
*funding bodies should make projects more accountable for creating open content and populating repositories such as Jorum, and ensuring that IPR and rights aren’t seen as last minute tasks
*the value of educational resources needs explored in more detail – can we really qualify what we mean by a valuable piece of learning content?
*some things are maybe best not open
*the notion of an open learning space is really in its infancy but could (already is) providing many exciting opportunities for teaching and learning.
*web 2.0 techniques can help us make our “stuff” more discoverable, and we should look to the tips and techniques of popular sites and try and learn from their practice
*education should be smarter about developing content and learn from publishers e.g. recognise the need for more professional processes, different types of staff (learning technologist, developers, and academics).

More information including slidecasts from the day are available from the wiki.

Poll shows postive attitudes towards an open Jorum service

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After the recent announcement that Jorum will be moving towards an open model, I polled the EC list to see what, if any effect this change would have on people.

Almost 70% of respondents said that the change would make them more likely to use and, perhaps more importantly, contribute to the service. Let’s hope that when the service does become operational that these percentages are realised. The full results of the poll are available from the wikl.

The Jorum team will be presenting (and hosting) at the next EC SIG meeting on 27th May, and will be giving more details on the current proposals for JorumOpen. The meeting is fully booked at the moment, but if you would like to be added to the waiting list, then please email me (s.macneill@strath.ac.uk) and I will add you to the list. As usual slides, podcasts and slidecasts will be available online after the event for those of you who can’t make the meeting.