The Open Standards Board, which exists to make recommendations to the UK (Westminster) Government Cabinet Office, met last week and completed the journey to the first milestone in the new process by which open standards are to be selected. This process is based around the idea that “challenges” are raised on the Standards Hub, proposals worked up to meet challenges under the supervision of two panels (“data standards” and “technical standards”), and subsequently put before the Open Standards Board.
Category Archives: Standards
Open Badges, Tin Can, LRMI can use InLOC as one cornerstone
There has been much discussion recently about Mozilla Open Badges, xAPI (Experience API, alias “Tin Can API“) and LRMI, as new and interesting specifications to help bring standardization particularly into the world of technology and resources involved with people and their learning. They have all reached their “version 1″ this year, along with InLOC.
A new (for me) understanding of standardization
When engaging deeply in any standardization project, as I have with the InLOC project, one is likely to get new insights into what standardization is, or should be. I tried to encapsulate this in a tweet yesterday, saying “Standardization, properly, should be the process of formulation and formalisation of the terms of collective commitment”.
Then @crispinweston replied “Commitment to whom and why? In the market, fellow standardisers are competitors.” I continued, with the slight frustration at the brevity of the tweet format, “standards are ideally agreed between mutually recognising group who negotiate their common interest in commitment”. But when Crispin went on “What role do you give to the people expected to make the collective commitment in drafting the terms of that commitment?” I knew it was time to revert from micro-blogging to macro-blogging, so to speak.
Crispin casts me in the position of definer of roles — I disclaim that. I am trying, rather, firstly to observe and generalise from my observations about what standardization is, when it is done successfully, whether or not people use or think of the term “standardization”, and secondly, to intuit a good and plausible way forward, perhaps to help grow a consensus about what standardization ought to be, within the standardization community itself.
One of the challenges of the InLOC project was that the project team started from more or less carte blanche. Where there is a lot of existing practice, standardization can (in theory at least) look at existing practice, and attempt to promote standardization on the best aspects of it, knowing that people do it already, and that they might welcome (for various reasons) a way to do it in just one way, rather than many. But in the case of InLOC, and any other “anticipatory” standard, people aren’t doing closely related things already. What they are doing is publishing many documents about the knowledge, skills, competence, or abilities (or “competencies”) that people need for particular roles, typically in jobs, but sometimes as learners outside of employment. However, existing practice says very little about how these should be structured, and interrelated, in general.
So, following this “anticipatory” path, you get to the place where you have the specification, but not the adoption. How do you then get the adoption? It can only be if you have been either lucky, in that you’ve formulated a need that people naturally come to see, or that you are persuasive, in that you persuade people successfully that it is what they really (really) want.
The way of following, rather than anticipating, practice certainly does look the easier, less troubled, surer path. Following in that way, there will be a “community” of some sort. Crispin identifies “fellow standardisers” as “competitors” in the market. “Coopetition” is a now rather old neologism that comes to mind. So let me try to answer the spirit at least of Crispin’s question — not the letter, as I am seeing myself here as more of an ethnographer than a social engineer.
I envisage many possible kinds of community coming together to formulate the terms of their collective commitments, and there may be many roles within those communities. I can’t personally imagine standard roles. I can imagine the community led by authority, imposing a standard requirement, perhaps legally, for regulation. I can imagine a community where any innovator comes up with a new idea for agreeing some way of doing things, and that serves to focus a group of people keen to promote the emerging standard.
I can imagine situations where an informal “norm” is not explicitly formulated at all, and is “enforced” purely by social peer pressure. And I can imagine situations where the standard is formulated by a representative body of appointees or delegates.
The point is that I can see the common thread linking all kinds of these practices, across the spectrum of formality–informality. And my view is that perhaps we can learn from reflecting on the common points across the spectrum. Take an everyday example: the rules of the road. These are both formal and informal; and enforced both by traffic authorities (e.g. police) and by peer pressure (often mediated by lights and/or horn!)
When there is a large majority of a community in support of norms, social pressure will usually be adequate, in the majority of situations. Formal regulation may be unnecessary. Regulation is often needed where there is less of a complete natural consensus about the desirability of a norm.
Formalisation of a norm or standard is, to me, a mixed blessing. It happens — indeed it must happen at some stage if there is to be clear and fair legal regulation. But the formalisation of a standard takes away the natural flexibility of a community’s response both to changing circumstances in general, and to unexpected situations or exceptions.
Time for more comment? You would be welcome.
QTI 2.1 spec release helps spur over £250m of investment worldwide
With the QTI 2.1 specification finalised and released, we’re seeing significant global investment in tools that implement the spec. Tools developed by JISC projects have been central.
It has taken a while, but since March this year, IMS Question and Test Interoperability 2.1 has been released as a final specification. That means that people can implement it, secure in the knowledge that it won’t change or disappear, even if there are likely to be future versions.
The release, not coincidentally, happens at a time when there is a lot of activity regarding the use of the specification around the world. This level of investment isn’t just due to a set of documents on a website, it is also due to the fact that there is a range of working implementations available that demonstrate how QTI 2.1 works, and that’s where a couple of Jisc projects play a crucial role. But let’s have a look at what people are doing with the spec around the world first.
The Netherlands
The biggest assessment project in the low lands at the moment is the effort to move all online school exams to the QTI 2.1 format. The multi-million Euro effort is led by the Commissie voor Examens, managed by DUO, with the CITO exam body and trifork as contractors. Because of the specific demands put upon the whole infrastructure, the partners will need an extensive profile.
Accompanying the formal exam profile is the NL-QTI effort led by Kennisnet. This pragmatic but relatively rich profile of the specification is meant to facilitate an eco system of material and software for general use in schools. We should see more of that profile in the near future.
Lastly, Surf is currently running the Assessment and Assessment Driven Learning programme in higher education, which will revolve around a sharable infrastructure for online assessment. Part of that programme will be an exploration to what extent such sharing can be facilitated by QTI 2.1
Germany
The main player here is the Onyx suite from BPS. This complete assessment suite of editor, test player, analytics module and converter is built around QTI 2.1, and has been used standalone as well as integrated with the OLAT VLE. One instance of the latter that is shared between all 13 universities in Saxony has about 50.000 users, with about 25.000 log-ins per day. Similar consortia exist in Thuringia and Rhineland-Palatinate, and there are further university specific installations with a combined total of about a 108.000 users. The hosted Onyx test player runs about 300 – 1000 test runs a day.
France
The work in France is on a smaller scale, but is mature and well targeted. The MOCAH team of UPMC, Paris 6 has developed a system where QTI 2.1 source is transformed such that it can be run on generic Java or PHP based web servers, as well as specialised QTI players. The focus is on the teaching of math to secondary schools students, and it has been used in 160 classes, where 400 patterns have been created. The latter are question item templates that generate large amounts of items for students to practice on; a key requirement.
South Korea
After experiments in the past with, among other tools, QTI 2.1 generated from common word-processing tools, KERIS – the Korea Education and Research Information Service – is now engaging vendors in a project to integrate QTI 2.1 in EPUB 3 ebooks. Various options are being explored at the moment, with results due later this year.
USA
This is where the development-at-scale is taking place at the moment, thanks to the Race To The Top (RTTT) projects that were funded by the Obama administration. There are two state-led consortia – Smarter Balanced and PARCC – with a mission to overhaul the whole assessment infrastructure in schools, base it on open standards and open source software, and provide a tranche of new material to go with it. They had an initial budget of $160-170 million each, with about a third of those budgets intended for tool development. QTI 2.1, along with the Accessible Portable Item Protocol (APIP) extensions, is at the heart of the initiative.
The size of those consortia is having effects elsewhere too. One major educational publisher has already decided to standardise internally on QTI 2.1, and others are looking at the same option. Not that such a thing is new: organisations such as the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) and the world’s largest testing organisation – ETS – have already chosen QTI 2.1 as their internal ‘lingua franca’. Rather than make many point to point integrations between their own systems and collections, and then having to do that again with each organisation they partner with, they translate each format to and from QTI.
UK
Meanwhile, back in the UK, JISC has sponsored a small community – most recently via the Assessment & Feedback programme – that has played a vital role in making QTI 2.1 real. ‘Real’ in the sense of checking whether and how the specification would work, as it was being designed, in the case of Jassess. ‘Real’ also in the sense of putting QTI 2.1 material in the hands of a range of teachers and learners, via editing tools such as Uniqurate and playback tools such as QTIWorks. An excellent RSC Scotland post outlines exactly how those outputs of the QTI-DI and Uniqurate projects work.
All of these UK projects’ tools, guidance and assessment materials are known to all the above communities, as well as plenty of others I’ve not even mentioned. In some cases, the JISC sponsored tools have been extended by others, in other cases, the presence and online accessibility of the resources meant that those other communities knew what was possible, what their own tools and materials should look like, and how they could interoperate.
At this point, it’s not clear whether new Jisc will support future work in this area. What is clear, however, is that JISC’s past investment will continue to have a global effect well beyond the initial outlay.
Learning Analytics Interoperability
The ease with which data can be transferred without loss of meaning from a store to an analytical tool – whether this tool is in the hands of a data scientist, a learning science researcher, a teacher, or a learner – and the ability of these users to select and apply a range of tools to data in formal and informal learning platforms are important factors in making learning analytics and educational data mining efficient and effective processes.
I have recently written a report that describes, in summary form, the findings of a survey into: a) the current state of awareness of, and research or development into, this problem of seamless data exchange between multiple software systems, and b) standards and pre-standardisation work that are candidates for use or experimentation. The coverage is, intentionally, fairly superficial but there are abundant references.
The paper is available in three formats: Open Office, PDF, MS Word. If printing, note that the layout is “letter” rather than A4.
Comments are very welcome since I intend to release an improved version in due course.
InLOC moving on
Today is the final day of the InLOC project — a European ICT Standardization Work Programme project I have been leading since November 2011. So a good day for an initial review and reflection. I blogged some previous thoughts on InLOC in November 2012 and February this year, and these thoughts are based on some aspects of the project’s final report.
InLOC — Integrating Learning Outcomes and Competences — is all about devising a good way of representing and communicating structures of learning outcomes, competence, skills, competencies, etc. that can be defined by framework owners, and used by many kinds of ICT tools, including those supporting: specifying learning outcomes of courses; claiming skills and competences in portfolios; recruitment and specifying job requirements; learning objectives relevant to resources; and possibly many more.
Project outcomes
We have produced three CEN Workshop Agreements, two formally approved and awaiting publication (Information Model, and Guidelines), and one where a workshop vote will be concluded in the coming days (Application Profile: we don’t expect any problems). Further work includes technical bindings, and two demo prototypes kindly contributed.
The Information Model
There are a number of key advances made in the InLOC Information Model, with respect to other and previous work. “LOC” here stands for “Learning Outcome or Competence”.
- A clear distinction is made between a LOCdefinition and a LOCstructure.
- A LOCdefinition is similar in some ways to IMS RDCEO or IEEE RCD. Any idea of structure is kept separate from this, so that the definition can potentially be reused in different structures. Thus, a LOC definition is like the expression of just one concept about learning outcome, competence, etc.
- A LOCstructure is the information about the structure and compound properties, but this is kept separate from any particular single definition. While it is recognised that in practice the two are often mixed, the InLOC specification separates them for clarity and for effective implementation.
- A clear distinction is made between defining levels with level definitions, and attributing levels (from another scheme) to definitions. This is explained in InLOC treatment of levels. This is necessary for logical clarity, and therefore at some point for applications. A decimal number is introduced as a key part of the model, to allow level information to be automatically processed.
- A single structural form, the LOCassociation, is used both to represent relationships between LOC structures and definitions, and to represent several different kinds of compound properties, each with more than one part. This results in structures that are easier to process, with fewer distinct information model components. It also is responsible for the relative ease of representing InLOC naturally in RDF, with minor changes to the model.
Within InLOC in general, a recurrent pattern is of one identifier together with a set of multilingual titles or labels. This is a common pattern elsewhere, and ensures that InLOC representations can naturally work multilingually.
There is a diagrammatic illustration of the Information Model structure as a UML diagram, and many more illustrative diagrams in the Guidelines section on InLOC explained through example.
The Guidelines
The central feature of the Guidelines is a detailed examination of a cross-section of the European e-Competence Framework, given as a good example of the power and flexibility of InLOC in a case from real life. The e-CF is a useful example for InLOC as it identifies 5 levels of competence. The e-CF is analysed in the section on InLOC explained through example. In this section, there are more diagrams illustrating the Information Model and how it is applied in this case.
The e-CF is fully expressed here in InLOC XML format.
Application Profile of Europass CV and Language Passport
The most used Europass instrument is the Europass CV, and Cedefop have recently been revamping it. It is a kind of simple e-portfolio, and the challenge here is to allow it to refer effectively to InLOC structures, so that the end users — the people who have the skills and competences they want to show off — can refer directly to InLOC identifiers, and so have better hope of having them accurately recognised and found in relevant searches. For the Europass CV, the InLOC team have proposed a modification of their XML Schema, and it looks like several if not all of our proposals will be taken on by Cedefop, paving the way for the Europass CV being a leading example of the use of InLOC structures in practice.
Technical bindings
No information model is complete without suggestions for how to bind it to currently relevant technologies. The ones chosen by InLOC were:
We hope that they are reasonably clear and self-explanatory.
While the project found no great motivation for developing other bindings, I personally believe that it would be very valuable in the future to develop something with RDFa and schema.org.
Prototypes
We have been really lucky to have two initiatives filling in where the project was not funded to deliver. There is a Viewer-editors page on the project wiki with access details.
- A team from Eummena, led by one of the team, have produced an InLOC viewer/editor based on PHP and MySQL. Here is their login page.
- Henk Vos from Rapasso has produced a prototype using Python and Django. The interface starts here. The code is open source, GPL v3, available on GitHub.
Challenges
The main challenge in this project has been trying to generate interest and contributions from interested parties. It’s not that the topic isn’t important, just that, as usual, busy people need a pressing reason to engage with this kind of activity. This challenge is endemic to all “anticipatory” standardization work. Before either policy mandation or clear economic interest, it takes some spare effort and a clear vision before people are willing to engage.
I’m intending to write more about what this means for my own personal view of what standardization could best be, or perhaps “should” be.
Recommendations
It seems to me good practice to make some recommendations at the end of the project — after all, if one has been engaged in some good work, there should be some ways forward that are clearer at the end than at the beginning. The recommendations that the team agreed included:
- focusing on trying to get people to publish frameworks in InLOC, as this will in turn motivate tool builders;
- ensuring that when people are ready to adopt InLOC, they can find resources and expertise;
- persuading developers to make it easy for users to refer to definitions within InLOC structures;
- get other Workshop, and other European, projects to use InLOC where possible;
- work on APIs, and on automatic configuration of key domain terms within user interfaces.
Open Standards Board and the Cabinet Office Standards Hub
Early last week the government announced the Open Standards Board had finally been convened via a press release from Francis Maude, the Minister for the Cabinet Office, and via a blog post from Liam Maxwell, the government’s Chief Technology Officer. This is a welcome development but what chuffed me most was that my application to be a Board member had been successful.
I say “finally” because it has taken quite a while for the process to move from a shadow board and a consultation on policy (Cetis provided feedback), through an extension of the consultation to allay fears of bias in a stakeholder event, analysis of the comments, publication of the final policy, and deciding on the role of the Open Standards Board. The time taken has been a little frustrating but I take comfort from my conclusion that these delays are signs of a serious approach, that this is not an empty gesture.
Before going on, I should publicly recognise the contribution of others that enabled me to make a successful application. Firstly: Jisc has provided the funding for Cetis and a series of supporters(*) for the idea of open standards in Jisc has kept the flame alive. Many years ago they had the vision and stuck with it in spite of wider scepticism, progress that has been often slow, a number of flawed standards (mistakes do happen), and the difficulty in assessing return on investment for activities that are essentially systemic in their effect. Secondly: my colleagues in Cetis from whom I have harvested wisdom and ideas and with whom I have shared revealing (and sometimes exhausting) debate. Looking back at what we did in the early 2000′s, I think we were quite naive but so was everyone else. I believe we now have much more sophisticated ideas about the process of standards-development and adoption, and of the kinds of interventions that work. I hope that is why I was successful in my application.
The Open Standards Board is concerned with open standards for government IT and is closely linked with actions dealing with Open Source Software and Open Data. All three of these are close to our hearts in Cetis and we hope both to contribute to their development (in government and the wider public sector) as well as helping there to be a bit more spill-over into the education system.
The public face of Cabinet Office open standards activity is the Standards Hub, which gives anyone the chance to nominate candidates to be addressed using open standards and to comment on the nominations of others. I believe this is the starting point for the business of the Board. The suggestions are bit of a mixed bag and the process is in need of more suggestions so – to quote the Hub website – if you know of an open standard that could be “applied consistently across the UK government to make our services better for users and to keep our costs down”, you know what to do!
The Open Standards Board has an interesting mix of members and I’m full of enthusiasm for what promises to be an exciting first meeting in early May.
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* – there are too many to mention but the people Cetis had most contact with include Tish Roberts, Sarah Porter and Rachel Bruce.
Open Source and Open Standards in the Public Sector
Yesterday I attended day 1 of a conference entitled “Public Sector: Open Source” and, while Open Source Software (OSS) was the primary subject, Open Standards were very much on the agenda. I went in particular because of an interest in what the UK Government Cabinet Office is doing in this area.
I have previously been quite positive about both the information principles and the open standards consultation (blog posts here and here respectively). We provided a response to the consultation and were pleased to see the Nov 1st announcement that government bodies must comply with a set of open standards principles.
The speaker from the Cabinet Office was Tariq Rashid (IT Reform group) and we were treated to a quite candid assessment of the challanges faced by government IT, with particular reference to OSS. His assessment of the issues and how to deal with them was cogent and believable, if also a little scary.
Here are a few of the things that caught my attention.
Outsource the Brawn not the Brain
Over a period of many years the supply of well-informed and deeply technical capability in government has been depleted such that too many decisions are made without there being an appropriate “intelligent customer“. To quote Tariq: “we shouldn’t be spending money unless we know what the alternatives are.” The particular point being made was about OSS alternatives – and they have produced an Open Source Procurement Toolkit to challenge myths and to guide people to alternatives – but the same line of argument extends to there being a poor understanding of the sources of technical lock-in (as opposed to commercial lock-in) and how chains of dependency could introduce inertia through decisions that are innocuous from a naive analysis.
By my analysis, the Cabinet Office IT reform team are the exception that proves the general point. It is also a point that universities and colleges should be wary of as their senior management tries to cut out “expensive people we don’t really need”.
The Current Procurement Approach is Pathological
There is something slightly ironic that it takes a Tory government to seriously attack an approach which sees the greatest fraction of the incredible £21 billion p.a. central government spend on IT go to a handful of big IT houses (yes, countable on 2 hands).
In short: the procurement approach, which typically involves a large amount of bundling-up, reduces competition and inhibits SMEs and providers of innovative solutions as well as blocking more agile approaches.
At the intersection between procurement approach and brain-outsourcing is the critical issue that the IT that is usually acquired lacks a long term view of architecture; this becomes reduced to the scope of tendered work and build around the benefits of the supplier.
Emphasis on Procurement
Most of the presentations placed most emphasis on the benefits of OSS in terms of procurement and cost and this was a central theme of Tariq’s talk also. Having spent long enough consorting with OSS-heads I found this to be rather narrow. What, for example, about the opportunities for public sector bodies to engage in acts of co-creation, either to lead or significantly contribute to OSS projects. There are many examples of commercial entities making significant investments in developer salaries while taking a hands-off approach to governance of the open source product (e.g. IBM and the eclipse platform).
For now, it seems, this kind of engagement is one step ahead of what is feasible in central government; there is a need for thinking to move on, to mature, from where it is now. I also suspect that there is plenty of low-hanging fruit – easy cases to make for cost savings in the near term – whereas co-creation is a longer term strategy. Tariq added that it might be only 2-3 years before government was ready to begin making direct contributions to LibreOffice, which is already being trialled in some departments.
Another of the speakers, representing sambruk (one of the partners in OSEPA, the project that organised the conference) seems to be heading towards more of a consortium model that could lead to something akin to the Sakai or Kuali model for Swedish municipality administration.
Conclusion
For all the Cabinet Office has a fairly small budget, its gatekeeper role – it must approve all spending proposals over £5 million and has some good examples of having prompted significant savings (e.g. £12 -> £2 million on a UK Borders procurement) – makes it a force to be reckoned with. Coupled with an attitude (as I perceive it) of wanting to understand the options and best current thinking on topics such as open source and open standards, this makes for a potent force in changing government IT.
The challenge for universities and colleges is to effect the same kind of transformation without an equivalent to the Cabinet Office and in the face of sector fragmentation (and, at best, some fairly loose alliances of sovereign city states).
What is my work?
Is there a good term for my specialist area of work for CETIS? I’ve been trying out “technology for learner support”, but that doesn’t fully seem to fit the bill. If I try to explain, reflecting on 10 years (as of this month) involvement with CETIS, might readers be able to help me?
Back in 2002, CETIS (through the CRA) had a small team working with “LIPSIG”, the CETIS special interest group involved with Learner Information (the “LI” of “LIPSIG”). Except that “learner information” wasn’t a particularly good title. It was also about the technology (soon to be labelled “e-portfolio”) that gathered and managed certain kinds of information related to learners, including their learning, their skills – abilities – competence, their development, and their plans. It was therefore also about PDP — Personal Development Planning — and PDP was known even then by its published definition “a structured and supported process undertaken by an individual to reflect upon their own learning, performance and/or achievement and to plan for their personal, educational and career development”.
There’s that root word, support (appearing as “supported”), and PDP is clearly about an “individual” in the learner role. Portfolio tools were, and still are, thought of as supporting people: in their learning; with the knowledge and skills they may attain, and evidence of these through their performance; their development as people, including their learning and work roles.
If you search the web now for “learner support”, you may get many results about funding — OK, that is financial support. Narrowing the search down to “technology for learner support”, the JISC RSC site mentions enabling “learners to be supported with their own particular learning issues”, and this doesn’t obviously imply support for everyone, but rather for those people with “issues”.
As web search is not much help, let’s take a step back, and try to see this area in a wider perspective. Over my 10 years involvement with CETIS, I have gradually come to see CETIS work as being in three overlapping areas. I see educational (or learning) technology, and related interoperability standards, as being aimed at:
- institutions, to help them manage teaching, learning, and other processes;
- providers of learning resources, to help those resources be stored, indexed, and found when appropriate;
- individual learners;
- perhaps there should be a branch aimed at employers, but that doesn’t seem to have been salient in CETIS work up to now.
Relatively speaking, there have always seemed to be plenty of resources to back up CETIS work in the first two areas, perhaps because we are dealing with powerful organisations and large amounts of money. But, rather than get involved in those two areas, I have always been drawn to the third — to the learner — and I don’t think it’s difficult to understand why. When I was a teacher for a short while, I was interested not in educational adminstration or writing textbooks, but in helping individuals learn, grow and develop. Similar themes pervade my long term interests in psychology, psychotherapy, counselling; my PhD was about cognitive science; my university teaching was about human-computer interaction — all to do with understanding and supporting individuals, and much of it involving the use of technology.
The question is, what does CETIS do — what can anyone do — for individual learners, either with the technology, or with the interoperability standards that allow ICT systems to work together?
The CETIS starting point may have been about “learner information”, but who benefits from this information? Instead of focusing on learners’ needs, it is all too easy for institutions to understand “learner information” as information than enables institutions to manage and control the learners. Happily though, the group of e-portfolio systems developers frequenting what became the “Portfolio” SIG (including Pebble, CIEPD and others) were keen to emphasise control by learners, and when they came together over the initiative that became Leap2A, nearly six years ago, the focus on supporting learners and learning was clear.
So at least then CETIS had a clear line of work in the area of e-portfolio tools and related interoperability standards. That technology is aimed at supporting personal, and increasingly professional, development. Partly, this can be by supporting learners taking responsibility for tracking the outcomes of their own learning. Several generic skills or competences support their development as people, as well as their roles as professionals or learners. But also, the fact that learners enter information about their own learning and development on the portfolio (or whatever) system means that the information can easily be made available to mentors, peers, or whoever else may want to support them. This means that support from people is easier to arrange, and better informed, thus likely to be more effective. Thus, the technology supports learners and learning indirectly, as well as directly.
That’s one thing that the phrase “technology for learner support” may miss — support for the processes of other people supporting the learner.
Picking up my personal path … building on my involvement in PDP and portfolio technology, it became clear that current representations of information about skills and competence were not as effective as they could be in supporting, for instance, the transition from education to work. So it was, that I found myself involved in the area that is currently the main focus of my work, both for CETIS, and also on my own account, through the InLOC project. This relates to learners rather indirectly: InLOC is enabling the communication and reuse of definitions and descriptions of learning outcomes and competence information, and particularly structures of sets of such definitions — which have up to now escaped an effective and well-adopted standard representation. Providing this will mean that it will be much easier for educators and employers to refer to the same definitions; and that should make a big positive difference to learners being able to prepare themselves effectively for the demands of their chosen work; or perhaps enable them to choose courses that will lead to the kind of work they want. Easier, clearer and more accurate descriptions of abilities surely must support all processes relating to people acquiring and evidencing abilities, and making use of related evidence towards their jobs, their well-being, and maybe the well-being of others.
My most recent interests are evidenced in my last two blog posts — Critical friendship pointer and Follower guidance: concept and rationale — where I have been starting to grapple with yet more complex issues. People benefit from appropriate guidance, but it is unlikely there will ever be the resources to provide this guidance from “experts” to everyone — if that is even what we really wanted.
I see these issues also as part of the broad concern with helping people learn, grow and develop. To provide full support without information technology only looks possible in a society that is stable — where roles are fixed and everyone knows their place, and the place of others they relate to. In such a traditionalist society, anyone and everyone can play their part maintaining the “social order” — but, sadly, such a fixed social order does not allow people to strike out in their own new ways. In any case, that is not our modern (and “modernist”) society.
I’ve just been reading Herman Hesse’s “Journey to the East” — a short, allegorical work. (It has been reproduced online.) Interestingly, it describes symbolically the kind of processes that people might have to go through in the course of their journey to personal enlightenment. The description is in no way realistic. Any “League” such as Hesse described, dedicated to supporting people on their journey, or quest, would practically be able to support only very few at most. Hesse had no personal information technology.
Robert K. Greenleaf was inspired by Hesse’s book to develop his ideas on “Servant Leadership“. His book of that name was put together in 1977, still before the widespread use of personal information techology, and the recognition of its potential. This idea of servant leadership is also very clearly about supporting people on their journey; supporting their development, personally and professionally. What information would be relevant to this?
Providing technology to support peer-to-peer human processes seems a very promising approach to allowing everyone to find their own, unique and personal way. What I wrote about follower guidance is related to this end: to describe ways by which we can offer each other helpful mutual support to guide our personal journeys, in work as well as learning and potentially other areas of life. Is there a short name for this? How can technology support it?
My involvement with Unlike Minds reminds me that there is a more important, wider concept than personal learning, which needs supporting. We should be aspiring even more to support personal well-being. And one way of doing this is through supporting individuals with information relevant to the decisions they make that affect their personal well-being. This can easily be seen to include: what options there are; ideas on how to make decisions; what the consequences of those decision may be. It is an area which has been more than touched on under the heading “Information, Advice and Guidance”.
I mentioned the developmental models of William G Perry and Robert Kegan back in my post earlier this year on academic humility. An understanding of these aspects of personal development is an essential part of what I have come to see as needed. How can we support people’s movement through Perry’s “positions”, or Kegan’s “orders of consciousness”? Recognising where people are in this, developmental, dimension is vital to informing effective support in so many ways.
My professional interest, where I have a very particular contribution, is around the representation of the information connected with all these areas. That’s what we try to deal with for interoperability and standardisation. So what do we have here? A quick attempt at a round-up…
- Information about people (learners).
- Information about what they have learned (learning outcomes, knowledge, skill, competence).
- Information that learners find useful for their learning and development.
- Information about many subtler aspects of personal development.
- Information relevant to people’s well-being, including
- information about possible choices and their likely outcomes
- information about individual decision-making styles and capabilities
- and, as this is highly context-dependent, information about contexts as well.
- Information about other people who could help them
- information supporting how to find and relate to those people
- information supporting those relationships and the support processes
- and in particular, the kind of information that would promote a trusting and trusted relationship — to do with personal values.
I have the strong sense that this all should be related. But the field as a whole doesn’t seem have a name. I am clear that it is not just the same as the other two areas (in my mind at least) of CETIS work:
- information of direct relevance to institutions
- information of direct relevance to content providers.
Of course my own area of interest is also relevant to those other players. Personal well-being is vital to the “student experience”, and thus to student retention, as well as to success in learning. That is of great interest to institutions. Knowing about individuals is of great value to those wanting to sell all kinds of services to to them, but particularly services to do with learning and resources supporting learning.
But now I ask people to think: where there is an overlap between information that the learner has an interest in, and information about learners of interest to institutions and content providers, surely the information should be under the control of the individual, not of those organisations?
What is the sum of this information?
Can we name that information and reclaim it?
Again, can people help me name this field, so my area of work can be better understood and recognised?
If you can, you earn 10 years worth of thanks…
Developing a new approach to competence representation
InLOC is a European project organised to come up with a good way of communicating structures or frameworks of competence, learning outcomes etc. We’ve now produced our interim reports for consultation: the Information Model and the Guidelines. We welcome feedback from everyone, to ensure this becomes genuinely useful and not just another academic exercise.
The reason I’ve not written any blog posts for a few weeks is that so much of my energy has been going into InLOC, and for good reason. It has been a really exciting time working with the team to develop a better approach to representing these things. Many of us have been pushing in this direction for years, without ever quite getting there. Several projects have been nearby, including, last year, InteropAbility (JISC page; project wiki) and eCOTOOL (project web site; my Competence Model page) — I’ve blogged about these before, and we have built on ideas from both of them, as well as from several other sources: you may be surprised at the range and variety of “stakeholders” in this area that we have assembled within InLOC. Doing the thinking for the Logic of Competence series was of course useful background, but nor did it quite get there.
What I want to announce now is that we are looking for the widest possible feedback as further input to the project. It’s all too easy for people like us, familiar with interoperability specifications, simply to cook up a new one. It is far more of a challenge, as well as hugely more worthwhile and satisfying, to create something genuinely useful, which people will actually use. We have been looking at other groups’ work for several months now, and discussing the rich, varied, and sometimes confusing ideas going around the community. Now we have made our own initial synthesis, and handed in the “interim” draft agreements, it is an excellent time to carry forward the wide and deep consultation process. We want to discuss with people whether our InLOC format will work for them; whether they can adopt, use or recommend it (or whatever their role is to do with specifications; or, what improvements need to be made so that they are most likely to take it on for real.
By the end of November we are planning to have completed this intense consultation, and we hope to end up with the desired genuinely useful results.
There are several features of this model which may be innovative (or seem so until someone points out somewhere they have been done before!)
- Relationships aren’t just direct as in RDF — there is a separate class to contain the relationship information. This allows extra information, including a number, vital for defining levels.
- We distinguish the normal simple properties, with literal objects, which are treated as integral parts of whatever it is (including: identifier, title, description, dates, etc.) from what could be called “compound properties”. Compound properties, that have more than one part to their range, are a little like relationships, and we give them a special property class, allowing labels, and a number (like in relationships).
- We have arranged for the logical structure, including the relationships and compound properties, to be largely independent of the representation structure. This allows several variant approaches to structuring, including tree structures, flat structures, or Atom-like structures.
The outcome is something that is slightly reminiscent both of Atom itself, and of Topic Maps. Both are not so like RDF, which uses the simplest possible building blocks, but resulting in the need for harder-to-grasp constructs like blank nodes. The fact of being hard to grasp leads to people trying different ways of doing things, and possibly losing interoperability on the way. Both Atom and Topic Maps, in contrast, add a little more general purpose structure, which does make quite a lot of intuitive sense in both cases, and they have been used widely, apparently with little troublesome divergence.
Are we therefore, in InLOC, trying to feel our way towards a general-purpose way of representing substantial hierarchical structures of independently existing units, in a way that makes more intuitive sense that elementary approaches to representing hierarchies? General taxonomies are simply trying to represent the relationships between concepts, whereas in InLOC we are dealing with a field where, for many years, people have recognised that the structure is an important entity in its own right — so much so that it has seemed hard to treat the components of existing structures (or “frameworks”) as independent and reusable.
So, see what you think, and please tell me, or one of the team, what you do honestly think. And let’s discuss it. The relevant links are also available straight from the InLOC wiki home page. And if you are responsible for creating or maintaining structures of intended learning outcomes, skills, competences, competencies, etc., then you are more than welcome to try out our new approach, that we hope combines ease of understanding with the power to express just what you want to express in your “framework”, and that you will be persuaded to use it “for real”, perhaps when we have made the improvements that you need.
We envisage a future when many ICT tools can use the same structures of learning outcomes and competences, saving effort, opening up interoperability, and greatly increasing the possibilities for services to build on top of each other. But you probably don’t need reminding of the value of those goals. We’re just trying to help along the way.