LAMS 2008 European conference

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Despite the shadow of the lambsgate affair, the LAMS 2008 European conference was another bit step forward (imho) towards a consensus about the future development of learning design tools and the mechanisms for sharing designs. It seems that the pieces of the jigsaw are starting to come together and, from the cross section of projects in attendance, there was a genuine willingness to share best practice and not re-invent the wheel.

Grainne Conole has already done an excellent job of summarizing the conference keynotes from Stephen Downes, Helen Beetham and James Dalziel. Grainne’s own keynote gave an excellent overview not only of the work she and her team are doing at the OU, but also of the key issues researchers are faced with in the design for learning space such as just how/can design for learning help to exploit engaging technologies to create better learning experiences? Grainne highlighted some of the contradictions that they are finding through workshop and interviews with OU staff around design including:
*design as a process -v- design as a product
*the capturing of designs: when/what to concentrate on – the explicit or the implicit?
*representations: when to use textual or visual (or both)
*the life-cycle of designs: tensions between static and dynamic elements.

This mirrors the experience of the JISC Design for Learning programme. It was in a way re-assuring to see that even with the different production process that are in place in an institution like the OU, there is a commonality around the key issues in terms of capturing (and sharing) the design process.

One of the projects the OU is working on is a social networking site for designs called Cloudworks. In previous meetings Martin Weller has described this as a “flickr for learning designs”. The social networking aspect of the site could help move forward sharing of designs as many projects have found that the peer aspects of sharing are incredibly important to practitioners.

Grainne ended her presentation around the need to develop more simple widgets around the pedagogy of designing learning activities which could help to bring some more fun into the design process. The OU have started to develop some widgets and the ReCourse team is doing that too (as highlighted at the recent CETIS learning design meeting). An other example of convergence of development and exploiting of web 2.0 technologies for education.

My presentation focused on the sharing solution we (CETIS) as the JISC Design for Learning programme support project initiated. One thing we didn’t include was any form of social networking, so it was really useful was to catch up with the OU team and discuss possible ways in which we can work together to integrate outputs from the programme into their Cloudworks site.

BTW I think we now might have a theme tune for learning design events. Martin Weller created an animoto video of the conference and by some bizarre coincidence he chose the same music as I did for the video I made for the Design for Learning Programme Design Bash last year . . . spooky or just the result of limited choices of copyright free music :-)

Universal edit button for wikis – one more reason to install firefox 3?

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Some of the biggest wiki providers have launched a new icon to indicate in the browser bar that a page is universally editable. At the moment you need to have firefox 3 installed to see the icon, but it’s hoped other browser platforms will come onboard and the UEB (universal edit button) will become as ubiquitous as the RSS icon.

Nice idea and good to see platform providers working together to produce a simple solution to encourage contributions to wikis. ReadWriteWeb have good summary of the launch 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.

Bags of innovation

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I should qualify that this post is not just an excuse for me to write about bags, but since the JISC conference on Tuesday bags (and not just the “it-bag” variety) have been on my mind. When I read Pete Johson’s post this morning about the Open Repositories Conference, I have to confess it was his description of the conference “man-bag” that resonated with me most. I felt that it was a sign that this post was justifiable and that bags are related to educational technology.

The theme of the JISC conference was “enabling innovation”, which is where the bag thang comes in. As ever, at registration delegates were presented with the obligatory conference bag and accompanying glossy brochures etc. I have to say I think this year JISC were quite innovative in giving out eco-friendly cotton, re-usable tote style bags. There may even be a chance that I will actually use mine again and not just chuck it onto the conference bag heap under my desk:-) So thumbs up there for the conference organisers. But do we really need to have bags at all at this kind of event? Do the JISC audience really need to have glossy programmes – wouldn’t one bit of paper with the agenda and layout suffice – or a USB stick? (Again this is something Pete mentions in his post, and in fact I think it was a previous post from Pete that was instrumental for us in CETIS to try and keep the paperwork at conference to a minimum). Or is the power of a glossy brochure really still greater than all the web-resources at our disposal?

Anyway today at lunch time I bought a pair of shoes – stick with me, this is relevant, not just an excuse to talk about my (minor) shoe obsession. When I was paying I was asked if I would like to buy a sustainable bag to support charity. Great idea I thought, nice bag and buying it helps my counter my (very brief) consumer guilt by doing my bit for “charidee”. Then I thought, why couldn’t this idea be extended to conferences? So, if you had a burning need for a conference bag, you could buy one and the proceeds could go to charity. Would work for me . . .

NB – for more information on all bag related matters I would recommend having a look here.

Tweet Clouds

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A post from Martin Weller put me onto Tweet Clouds – a new tag cloud generating service for twitter. As someone who uses twitter mainly for work purposes I was curious to see what kind of cloud my account would generate. As expected (particularly after a relatively heavy twitter session at the OAI-ORE open day on Friday) there are a lot of “resources” and “aggregations” in my cloud:-)

I’m not sure just how much of a gimmick this is and just how useful it is to have another view on what you are writing about. As Martin points out the addition of more filtering and links would certainly help. But I think because I twitter in bursts at selected times, it may well be of more value to someone like me than a more regular twitter user as any clouds I generate might be a bit more focussed. Then again, for a more regularly user it may well be useful to get an overview of what you have been talking about . . . or is it just another ‘neat’ web 2.0 application that you use once, smile at the results and never use again?