Edtechpost: Technologies for Learning, Thinking and Collaborating

Open Textbook Authoring Tools Part 1 – Mediawiki

By sleslie on February 2, 2012

So my last post should have made it clear that what I am ultimately hoping to promote/support for BC is an authoring and publishing system for open textbooks that:

can enable collaborative authoring if desired
can be done “out in the open” to enable as much as possible the conditions for serendipity to emerge, so that content can spread viral-ly, new co-authors and unintended readers happily stumble upon it
results in all of a web, print and eBook version (maybe more!) being produced as automagically as possible – i.e making the material as accessible as possible to as many learners as possible
is easy for authors and readers alike to use
is free/cheap and open/extensible (and produces open standards-based content)
limits the choices upstream of what authors and reusers want to do with the book as little as possible
gets me dates (ok, this last one was just a test to see how closely you were reading)

That’s not asking much, is it?

Mediawiki and Wikieducator

Luckily, there are some real pioneers in our field who have blazed trails in this area that those of us coming along later can follow. One of those groups of pioneers is made up of the folks at the Mediawiki foundation and Wikieducator (and I’d be remiss not to mention the Commonwealth of Learning and Wayne Mackintosh in particular for funding a lot of this work.) They have created extensions to Mediawiki, the open source wiki software that famously powers Wikipedia, that allow one to collect pages together and publish them as a printable PDF book. In addition, they worked with a print-on-demand outfit called PediaPress to enable seamless printing of the results.

To see/use this in action you need only to visit the Wikieducator site. On the left-hand nav there’s a link to Add a wiki page to a book. That’s right – books aren’t predetermined but can be made on the fly to include whatever pages you like. That’s not to say the instructor can’t pre-assemble an official “text,” but whether it be a student personalizing it or another instructor wanting to adopt it, the book can contain whatever contents you choose.

But you needn’t try it only on wikieducator; the Collections extension is freely downloadable and installable by anyone wishing to run this in their own mediawiki. There is also a second, unrelated extension, ePubexport, available to convert a set of pages into an ePub.

Now before we get to far, let me make it clear, I am not suggesting you have to do this on your own or that you shouldn’t use wikieducator. Indeed, that should probably be your FIRST question to yourself if this approach seems appealing – why would I not use wikieducator? Not only is it likely to be better supported than what you will do on your own, there are already scores of folks involved, some of whom may prove to be future collaborators. In addition, they have done lots of work creating templates and styles that come in very handy. So many of us talk about the importance of communities but then forget we don’t always have to create them ourselves; often it’s a more a question of finding those that exist and joining in.

Trying it out locally

However, I did install Mediawiki and these extensions for our open textbook pilot, in part because I wanted to learn for myself how they worked and also see what parts could be customized or improved upon. As a test, one of my colleagues gave me access to a Desire2Learn-based course from the Applied Business Technology. I exported the course to get access to the source files. A few things to note here:

hey D2L – your exports still kinda SUCK! I don’t know who thought it would be cute to transform file paths into file _names_ but it’s just a PITA.
there’s no simple way I’ve ever found of getting from an IMS Content Package to a wiki (or much else for that matter, and thank goodness for that – it would mean someone outside of higher education was actually taking IMS specs seriously, pshaw!) There is however some html import tools for mediawiki that are useful. There are also web-based HTML to mediawiki conversion tools to that can be helpful too.
that said, the truth is that all of the approaches that let you output to multiple formats depend to a lesser or greater extent on clean markup. So while you can get existing stuff in, its almost always better, if you have the choice, to simply author in those environments from the get go.

Here are some of the results of this initial test (trust me, the irony of the subject matter is not lost on me) – the site itself, the generated printable PDF and the ePub.

Now before you criticize, these were done with no additional attention paid to page templates, transformations or additional CSS. I also did some initial tests and it does look like the resulting PDF is editable after the fact with Adobe Acrobat X Pro, meaning there is room for manual improvements to the file in addition to refinements to the export process. And I was able to open and improve upon other automatically generated ePub’s with the Sigil WYSIWYG ePub editor, and in very short order was able to remove some of the cruft and other formatting and turn it into something reasonably usable.

So how does this approach fare? Let’s run it through the above criteria I described and see:

collaborative authoring – in spades!
can be done “out in the open” – the very definition of it
results in all of a web, print and eBook version – yep
is easy for authors and readers alike to use – let’s come back to this
is free/cheap and open/extensible (and produces open standards-based content) – yep, yep and yep
limits the choices upstream of what authors and reusers want to do with the book as little as possible – given XML exports and a multitude of wiki conversion tools, I’d say the answer was yes.
gets me dates – still left to be seen

So this approach seems to hit on most fronts. The big question is – is it easy to do and will instructors and others supporting them be able to bridge the gap between there current workflow and approaches and this new one?

Well many folks tell me this is just too much to expect, editing mediawiki seems just short of rocket science. And I have to concede, there is always room for improvements – I am holding out great hope that the still experimental Mediawiki WYSIWYG editor will be a big step forward, but even turning on the bundled (but not activated by default) WikEd editor is a major step forward. Even something like the Word2Mediawiki extension can serve as a useful bridging strategy (Open Office also exports natively to Mediawiki.) And implementing page templates (and wiki gardeners – a potential useful role for students too) can also make things much easier. So yes, there’s room for improvements, but is mediawiki simply just too difficult in the end regardless of what we do to improve it? If so, someone should tell the faculty and students at UBC to stop doing the impossible – their wiki continues to astound.

So I’m left thinking there is some real potential here that I want to pursue. I know there is technical work still to do. The bigger challenge, one that I’m not sure is surmountable, is the cultural chasm between the cult of authority in higher ed and the messy give and take that is a vibrant, collaborative wiki. It may well be that this is an approach that anticipates future potential benefits too highly over current realities of practice. That’s part of the reason we’re doing a number of pilots, to figure this out, and this is but one of a number of approaches being investigated. More on that in the next post. – SWL

(Author’s Note: This post was partly written, online I might add, while sailing across the Salish Sea. I just had to mention this as the fact that I could do this continues to blow my mind.)

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged mediawiki, open-textbooks | 2 Responses

The Moving Target of Open “Textbooks”

By sleslie on February 1, 2012

As part of our efforts here in BC around Open Textbooks, I have asked those involved with the project to single out some of their favourite examples. You see, when we use the term “open textbooks” we all think we know what we mean by it, but like the blind men and the elephant, depending on your perspective, “open textbooks” can end up meaning many things, and so it felt like being able to point to specifics would be helpful.

For many, “open textbooks” seem to be primarily about cost savings, about saving money for both funders and learners, but not particularly about challenging the “form” of what we have known as a textbook. And I agree, affordability is a strong motivator to get into this space, and an obvious selling point for all the stakeholders (well, almost all – commercial publishers don’t seem exactly thrilled about it.)

But the need to save money is not the only force shaping the future of textbooks.

It is impossible to ignore the rise of eBooks, especially since Apple has decided to disrupt this market too.

Add to that all that we have learned over the years about the important affordances of the digital (copy-ability, fork-ability, remix-ability, interactivity and rich media) the network-enabled (discover-ability, collaboration, enabling serendipity, real time-ness) and the mobile (any time, any where).

Add to that questions about whether the model of learning implicit in “textbooks” has become outdated, alongside the explosion in the quantities of information we are experiencing, and it would seem that simply producing cheaper versions of what we currently have in printed textbooks is the very least we could aim for, as big an accomplishment as that would be in the short term.

So given all of that, what indeed should we be aiming for?

An All-eBook Future?

One approach (which with the advent of Apple’s new iBook authoring tool is sure to lure many folks) is to leap directly towards full-on electronic textbooks. Given the recent explosion in sales in both eReaders and eBooks, this looks to many like the future.

And undoubtedly, in part it is. While the sheer number of platforms and packaging formats may give you pause, eBooks are here for the foreseeable future, and offer many of the benefits of being digital and mobile. But not necessarily all of them, or at least the extent to which they enable these is very dependent on the way in which they are implemented. On their own, without some sort of network-based publishing system, eBooks don’t lend themselves that well to collaborative authoring. While plugins like Firefox’s ePub reader make some formats accessible to those without eReader devices, they don’t necessarily serve other populations (offline, disabled) well. They deny the importance of the resale market in textbooks (though this is perhaps not an issue for open textbooks.) While digital note taking and annotation is often trumpted as improved in eBooks, I’m not personally convinced that we’ve made the leap yet in terms of how people study with textbooks.

Are we ready for ALL eBooks all-the-time? Well no, I don’t think so. Will it take 25 more years for the printing press to finally disappear, or less. I don’t know, but my guess is it won’t be the case anytime soon, nor is it even totally desirable.

Wither the Web?

In some ways, eBooks seem actually an answer begged by the question of eBook-specific devices and the whole metaphor of “books as objects.” People have been reading electronic materials even before the dawn of the web, and the rise of the multi-purpose tablet, led by the iPad and quickly followed by many Android-powered devices, seems to me to bode a short future for eReader-specific devices and the many of the formats they’ve spawned. And what of those eBook formats in general? Even those, when you dig in, most often look like just a packaging format for XHTML/XML content and little more. And with the increased rich media capabilities of modern browsers coupled with HTML5, one is left wondering if there is anything that specific to “eBooks.” Google seemed to question just that when it produced this “20 Things I Learned about the Web” book using only HTML5.

In many ways, the book/ebook/web distinction needs to be understood along the same lines as the App/Site distinction and the overall fight for generativity. (As an aside, if you haven’t read it already, please get yourself a copy of Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It [free PDF copy here] to help undestand this term and how it underpins what so many of us are fighting for in the trenches of open source, net neutrality and open content.) On the one hand you have open standards that lead to an explosion of individual freedoms and creativity, and on the other, enclosure, false scarcity and gatekeepers in the guise of “user friendliness.” Of course it is not so simple as that, nor such a clearcut binary. It never is. But given where we’ve got to in the short 20 years of the web, we are foolish to simply abandon it in favour of teh shiny.

The Best of All Worlds?

But do print, the web and eBooks need to be mutually exclusive choices? Emphatically NO! We now have dozens of examples of content that gets authored online, in collaborative spaces, that is usable on the web but also capable of output both as printable books and downloadable eBooks. What has for so long been the promise of first SGML and later XML, to detach content from presentation and allow content to flow seamlessly into various forms, is finally moving out of the realm of the experts and into end-user oriented environments. I will discuss two such approaches in the posts to follow, but there are more showing up every week.

Now a criticism has been made that, when it comes to textbooks, the “user generated” versions are a big step back from the polished versions we’ve come to expect from publishers. To be fair, that article is a couple of years old now, and things move quickly in this space. But at the same time, it’s an important criticism to acknowledge. And for now I think it’s still largely true – the state of open textbooks that are not commercially produced (in saying this I am excepting FlatWorld Knowledge) are mostly not stunning to look at, they lack some of the polish their commercial alternatives have developed. And I think David Wiley is also correct when he argues that currently most open textbooks are only focusing on what’s traditional thought of as the “student edition” of a textbook, and that the supporting materials (problem solutions, lesson plans, teaching tips) are very important to encourage faculty adoption.

But… where have we heard this before? Isn’t it clear by now how much better Encyclopedia Britannica is than Wikipedia? How superior Microsoft apps are to open source versions? This is the perennial charge by incumbents in all sorts of industries towards peer production and openness. To which, a few responses:

While at first it may be true, given enough people and an important enough goal, it becomes less and less so. cf. Ubuntu, Open Office, etc.
This is less damaging a critique when the alternative being proposed is not intended as an exact duplication of what it is replacing. So – mediawiki-based textbooks now offer both ePub and PDF outputs as well as the site. But in addition to being collaboratively editable, the “textbook” begins to take on a different role when it is embedded in a collaborative environment that can be used for teaching. And extensions like UBC’s EmbedWiki mean that it even small chunks can flow and intermingle in a way that is synonymous with virality.
But, and this is critical for me, as important as cost is as a motivator, we frame the discussion about openness and open textbooks as being primarily or solely about cost savings at our peril. Free beer is of little solace when it’s served to those who’ve lost the actual freedoms they’ve struggled to win. The co-evolution of “Good Enough” and open networked collaboration is not simply accidental – we seem slowly to be understanding that the WAY we do things, and the way we structure our relations with each other in producing things, is important, needs to be factored into the “value” of the things produced even if we can’t account for it. There will be an initial hit in terms of productivity, in terms of polish, as we transition, but unless we start to understand this we are all going to keep winning our race to the bottom.

The Process of Change & Innovation

Still, we all have to start somewhere. As described above, there are MANY factors potentially affecting the future of textbooks. One of the challenges we face in our institutions (themselves already by definition resistant to change) is balancing the need to respond to or take advantage of these varied factors with other real constraints. In my upcoming talk on open textbook authoring models and platforms, I try to depict the considerations an individual instructor might need to balance:

and offer some of the questions to ask oneself:

Who are the authors?
Who do you expect to read and use the textbook?
How will they author?
How they read (format)?
How they interact?

Ideally, after asking oneself these questions, one would select one of the many, many options now available to you.

But from an organization’s perspective, having limited resources that we need to dedicate to only a very few specific approaches, we need to settle on just a few. Over the next couple of posts I will outline a few that I am investigating in an effort to devise our strategy going forward. Ultimately, the point of this post (other than just trying to work out my own thoughts) was to make clear some of the boundaries I think are important in this decision making. I don’t have the perfect solution, not sure there is such a thing, but I have been doing this long enough to have erred in both directions, to have chosen the exigent over the long term, but also to have anticipated future possibilities over current realities. I can’t say I will never do the same again, but I know I’m even more likely to if I don’t become aware of where these boundaries are. – SWL

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged open-textbooks | 4 Responses

A Day in the life of an “OER Librarian”

By sleslie on January 30, 2012

OK, so “OER Librarian” is a bit of a stretch – much as I might secretly harbour a desire to be a librarian, I don’t even play one on TV. But recently I was asked to help find some suitable Open Textbook alternatives for a collaborative program in ICT here in BC, and I wanted to reflect on this process and this potential role of “OER Librarian.”

The Request

The initial request was to find suitable open textbook replacements for the “Foundations of Web Development” course and two database courses, “Database Design” and “Database Management.” These are but 3 of 18 courses that make up the program, all of which have both course outlines and learning outcomes well described and existing commercial textbooks in use. Both of these are VERY handy to have as reference when looking for alternatives.

As an aside, one thing I found odd was searching for “textbooks” at all in these areas. We’ll leave aside the whole question of what, in the networked, digital and open age, constitutes a “textbook” anymore – that’s an issue I plan to pick up in my next post. But when it comes to “ICT” and specifically technologies like web development and MySQL, the furthest thing from my mind when I think of learning these is to turn to a “textbook.” The web is literally strewn with good tutorials and references in these areas, ones that aren’t static but live and grow with new releases and learning by their communities. And these were for courses delivered entirely online! And yet…

As my contact explained to me, students were themselves asking for a physical textbook to accompany their course in cases where one didn’t already exist. Fair enough. And in addition, while the instructors were well aware of the reams of materials available for free online and how they could simply point to these, increasingly they were tiring of the ever-present link-rot, finding that each term whole sections of their course would contain broken links due to the seemingly natural decay on the web. Hence – open textbooks!

The Process

I started searching specifically for materials for these 3 courses and quickly realized that I was finding candidates not only for these subjects, but for many of the related courses and topics in the program. This led me to my first insight and action, which was that while you may be searching for one specific thing, it would be foolish of me to simply discard these related quality results. So I expanded the page where I was capturing all of the candidates I’d found to include all of the courses in the ICT Program. It turns out this was a wise thing to do, as even though I hadn’t been asked to find replacements for these others, in two cases when the instructors say how well the free and open candidates fit the course, they felt these would be easy choices. Score one for the good guys!

I am not ashamed to say that one of the first places I turned to was freelearning.ca, the OER search portal I built on top of delicious and Google CSW. The first thing I learned was that it had broke (doh!) The whole delicious move had caused some things to go out of whack. Once fixed, I found a few resources, but even though we’ve tried to constrain the open textbook search to just textbook sources, I admit a fair bit of cruft still gets through.

The next obvious (to me) place to turn was College Open Textbooks. They have a large collection of open textbooks classified by Subject that is up to date and added to regularly, in my experience. This turned up some decent possibilities.

College Open Textbooks is a curated collection, and one of the sources they pull from is Connexions. But a direct search of Connexions didn’t find anything particularly different. Similarly wikieducator and wikibooks, other sources the College Open Textbooks aggregates, didn’t offer a lot more than I had found earlier.

I kept trying a bunch of individual sites, FlatWorld Knowledge, Free Technology Academy, and FLOSS Manuals. In each found a few good candidate open textbooks. But still no motherload. I decided to turn to some of the major aggregators/OER portals, the two biggest IMO being OER Commons and MERLOT. I was encouraged to see in MERLOT that “open textbooks” had become a category I could refine a search on, and did find some decent choices But the specificity of this filter is thwarted by a lack of quality control on what gets classified as such, and by the seeming desire to be as inclusive and comprehensive as possible. OER Commons suffers from a similar fate, and in each case finding duplicate upon duplicate would easily discourage most faculty.

The full set of sources I searched is available here. To that list I would add both straight-ahead Google and Bing searches, which were by and large not very productive – lots of results, very few of which were either textbooks or open.

What I Found

There are 18 courses in the ICT Program (not including the Capstone project which doesn’t use a text). In around 7 hours of search I managed to turn up 41 potential candidates for 12 of the sources. Not all of these are explicitly “textbooks”; maybe half are, the other half being courses or manuals that could serve this purpose. The informal feedback I received from my contact at the ICT Program was that in two cases the candidates seemed holus bolus like good replacements. In two others there were ones that with work might serve as the basis for a new textbook.

So let’s say, for arguments sake, that this effort results in 4 commercial texts being replaced with free and open alternatives. These courses are delivered by 4 partnering institutions. So maybe conservatively 50 students/year x 4 courses? At $100/textbook? That’s a $20,000/year. Even if we include a $10,000 one time cost to transform 2 of these to be more suitable, that’s still a potential $10,000 savingsin the first year passed on to these students. It is of course not as simple as that, but seems very easy to illustrate the value of this exercise and approach.

What I Learned

Google on its own won’t save you – generic Google search was nearly useless for this – using “textbook” as one of your search terms doesn’t particularly help, nor does it’s advanced search with usage rights particularly guarantee that you will actually be able to reuse the results.
Open is as Open Does – if you want free (and open) textbooks about ICT, teach open source platforms and apps. While there was an absolute dearth of open textbooks around proprietary platforms like Microsoft, there were serveral high quality open textbooks on Linux easily available. This sounds obvious, and clearly there are proprietary softwares that people still want to get formal instruction about, but we have to remember that one of the freedoms preserved by free software is the freedom to LEARN.
OER Portals can help… – there are a few decent OER portals, but there is definitely no single “one stop shop.” If asked to recommend to faculty only a couple of general portals (e.g. not specific to any one discipline) then I’d likely focus on OER Commons and Merlot as the two best candidates. That said, discipline-specific engines and portals will almost by definition be better at helping you find what you need, and the extent to which one exists in your specific area, you are fortunate.
…and yet have some conflicts of their own – in their haste to bulk up their collections, repositories and other search engines have in fact done themselves a disservice as there is often now a lot of crap in them, or a lot of resources of huge heterogeniety of granluarity, usability and quality.
The “reusability paradox” is a real thing – and its corollary is also true: the large the granularity of thing you are trying to find, the less likely you are to find an “exact match” on any of the specific items.
It’s all about “the flow” – even if you have some subject matter expertise, if you are not the person ultimately responsible for assembling the curriculum or teaching the course, there will need to be at least one more pass by the people who are, as ultimately they are the ones who will use it. This is not to say that this “OER Librarian” role is useless, far from it, but the ideal for me remains a persistent workflow like I described in the “Open Educator as DJ” where seeking & collecting open content is not something that happens once a year for a few days but an ongoing part of the open educators workflow. Serendipity does not work to a schedule!
But until then… – Still, what it is showing me is the possibilities of some hybrids; I can foresee a dynamic approach, supported by any number of systems (a wiki might work well) in which, say, a course description and basic outline is first shared, and various content found at that level by someone with some search expertise, and then both the course units and corresponding searches iterated by instructor/subject matter expert and “oer librarian.” If done in something that allowed for easy “clipping” and republishing of collected work into a new textbook, this iterated approach could go a long way to the creation of a new text that worked at all the levels of granularity it needed to.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged OER, open-textbooks | 3 Responses

Your Favourite Open Textbook Examples?

By sleslie on January 17, 2012

While I predicted that 2011 would be the “Year of the Open Textbook” (and I don’t think I got that wrong), for me personally it’s looking more like 2012 will be. BCcampus is hoping to help catalyze the production of a number of open textbooks here in BC. While we’re still working on the funding, we’ve created a site to document the work and have been doing research on potential authoring models & platforms (see also the draft of my upcoming talk) as well as existing sources of open textbook content.

Another step that seems obvious to me is to find good examples (regardless of discipline) to be inspired by. Which is where you come in – I would really appreciate links to your favourite examples of open textbooks. Of especially great interest are examples of what I think of as “hybrid” open textbooks, ones that are available in all of web, print and eBook formats. While this used to be just a dream, of writing once but reproducing in many forms, this is incresingly a reality, and one I’d like to see good examples of.

So, what are your favourite examples of Open Textbooks? – SWL

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged OER, open-textbooks | 3 Responses

A Short Poem about S.O.P.A

By sleslie on January 5, 2012

With sincere apologies to Martin Niemölle, and in no way meaning to diminish the seriousness of its original subject, I offer this short remix, prompted most recently by SOPA:

First they came for the file sharers,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a file sharer.

Then they came for the free content creators,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a free content creator.

Then they came for the political activists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a political activist.

Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

I know, I know, this seems like just so much hyperbole and overreaction. Just call me Cassandra. But only if you really believe that things like SOPA and Canada’s Bill C-11 (formerly C-32) or the DCMA or ACTA or… are the ultimate battlefield. They are not. They are simply initial skirmishes in a much large battle about CONTROL and FREEDOM, not just of what you watch or read, but what you are allowed to do. More hyperbole, you think. Well, I URGE you to watch Corey Doctorow’s keynote at the 28C3, “The Coming War on General Computing,” which does as good a job as any in explaining how big the stakes are here.

This is difficult to explain to many people as it seems arcane, philosophical, excessively technical and geeky. Yet don’t we already see all around us expressions (albeit incredibly tepid ones) of the extent to which technological wherewithal is now a core “21st Literacy.” Get used to it – like Lessig said, “Code is Law,” and unless we start to engage with these “arcane” technical issues, we will be the ones being programmed. – SWL

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged copyright, Doctorow, freedom, SOPA | Leave a response

Buddhify

By sleslie on December 8, 2011

I was extremely privileged to help facilitate, along with Ross Laird and Brian Williams, a session on mindfulness and technology at last month’s Fall ETUG gathering at Kwantlen College in Richmond B.C. We did the session in three parts; Brian opened with a guided meditation, which Ross followed with a wonderful drawing exercise that asked people to depict their centered selves and then additionally the way they felt technology related to this self. The results of these drawings and starting the day this way was quite special and we got lots of positive feedback from participants for this novel beginning to an ed tech gathering.

For my part, I followed up these two great facilitators by leading a bit of a discussion about our relationship to technology, its effects on mindfulness and attention, ways we can cultivate mindfulness in the face of distraction, and even ways in which technology itself might be used to help improve our attention and mindfulness.

It was in the context of this last point that I made mention of Buddhify, an iphone (and android) app I had only been made aware of, via a tweet by openbuddha, the day before. So when I mentioned it I had only had a single day to try it and wasn’t able to endorse it too vigorously, though it did already feel like something that could be useful for folks.

Well, a month later I have had a much better chance to give Buddhify a whirl and unreservedly can say that for the novice/beginner to meditation, it might be the best $2.99 they could spend. The main component of Buddhify is a collection of guided meditations (the male voice, which I have it set to, provided by the mellifluous founder Rohan Gunatillake, but a nice touch is there is a female version too.) Now guided meditations are nothing new, you can find many good ones for free all over the internet, and I often recommend to people who are completely new to meditation or who claim they have tried but “can’t meditate” to start with a guided meditation. Not only can it be a gentler introduction, there are often lots of good tips and encouragements to help you through common frustrations. Buddhify is no different in this regard; the instructions will be very familiar to seasoned meditators, and I really appreciate the light-heartedness of Rohan’s laugh when he recognizes some of these common struggles we all face.

But this is where Buddhify has something extra going for it, actually a couple of things. The first is that it is explicitly built to be a mobile app that recognizes the various different contexts people generally have their phones in. So at the start of the session, it asks you to select one of four settings in which you are using it – Walking, Traveling, At the Gym and finally At Home. It further contextualizes the guided meditation you’ll be offered by asking you to select what you’d like the focus of that session to be – Clarity, Connection, Stability or Embodiment. Based on your choice you’re offered a guided meditation, typically 15 minutes or so, that fits with the context.

Very cool. But in addition, Buddhify brings in some game-like aspects to your beginning practice; the Dashboard keeps track of the percentage of recordings you’ve listened to, how often and the longest stretch of days you’ve used it. Now ultimately, like so many things that are “good for us,” meditation is its own reward, but I think the addition of this game aspect is likely very helpful to people getting started. Just as with exercise practices, early on the tangible results might be slight and the impetus to give up strong, as who doesn’t attach to “outcomes,” and the trick with both is to just “stick with it” for a bit, until it becomes a regular thing (and surprise, surprise, the “results” start to show up too!)

In addition to the Dashboard is the Check-In feature; you check in by rating (on a non-numerical sliding scale) how you are feeling on a number of fronts like Joy, Calm, Curiosity and Balance, and the dashboard then shows you which way you are trending. Again, positive feedback that can help you acknowledge subtle effects that can be difficult to see at any one moment (as an aside, one small addition I’d love to see would be the ability to see the longer trend diagram of these.)

After the ETUG session I used buddhify pretty much solid for 2 weeks. I then found myself using it less, only because I already had a well established sitting practiced. The app is really aimed at people just starting out, I think. But that said, even people who have been sitting for a while can use a hand; while I strive to be dilligent and sit every day, I have my ups and downs too, and just this week I turned back to Buddhify (indeed that’s what prompted this post) in an effort to get myself back on track, and have really appreciated the support and encouragement it offers. (Plus I must say I am pretty intrigued to see what happens when the community unlocks the “Buddhify Mode,” another clever motivating feature that uses skillful means to exploit our curiosity for our own benefit.)

So, novice or experienced meditator, I think there’s something here for us all. I highly recommend Buddhify, and hope it can help others on their journey to mindfulness. – SWL

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged ETUG, iphone, meditation, mindfullness, mobile | 1 Response

Why I am going to #occupyvictoria on October 15th

By sleslie on October 8, 2011

Last night I attended my first meeting of the People’s Assembly of Victoria, the name chosen for Victoria’s version of #occupytogether. It was a long, slow, occasionally tense (or at least tenuous) meeting – in other words, exactly what it needs to be.

With only a week to go until the initial action (which I do hope is followed by an actual camp), the desire to move “past process” and onto some specific issues and decisions was palpable (and indeed, important.) And hopefully some of that happened by the end of the meeting – I actually don’t know what ended up happening in the last half hour, as I broke off with others to discuss technology support and expand that team beyond the heroic efforts of the initial two volunteers.

People's Assembly of Victoria consensus making process

This is What Democracy Looks Like

Yet I have nothing but praise for the folks trying to facilitate the meeting and help this assembly be born (nor indeed nothing but praise for ALL who attended the meeting.) This isn’t to say there aren’t ways to improve the process, there always are, but NOT forsaking process (and the overlooked and under-represented people and perspectives it is meant to protect) in favour of “efficiencies” is EXACTLY part of “the point” of this movement, from where I am sitting.

Someone on twitter yesterday (I think quoting Naomi Klein on Democracy Now) summed up one of amazing aspects of this emergent phenomenon – it has the courage to ask questions for which we don’t have answers. Many will see that as weak, as being simply idealism. To which I say, firstly, when did idealism become a crime? But much more than that – not only is it not weak, it represents the very best, the most courageous, of us as loving humans, to hold space for a multitude of voices clamouring to be heard and not collapse our discomfort with uncertainty through violent imposition of will, but instead, through patience and listening, allow real learning and change to occur, something that can only happen over time.

If the facilitators have not already experienced Open Space Technology (which seems unlikely given the level of awareness many of the folks seem to bring) I do hope some aspects of it can be brought into play on October 15th and following. As its originator, Harrision Owen, describes in his book “Open Space Technology: A User’s Guide,” the conditions for which Open Space process works best sound a whole lot like the conditions we are all facing right now:

a real issue of concern, that it is something worth talking about.
a high level of complexity, such that no single person or small group fully understands or can solve the issue
a high level of diversity, in terms of the skills and people required for a successful resolution
real or potential conflict, which implies that people genuinely care about the issue
a high level urgency, meaning the time for decisions and action was “yesterday”

I know this will sound like old hat to many folks, especially activist types. Consensus process has LONG been common in activist circles. But instead of jadedly dismissing what we are seeing as simply “Johhny Come Lately’s,” people have to recognize that for many of the “99%,” consensus process (and learning how to speak and listen in a way that doesn’t replicate the dominant paradigm) is extremely new; we should be rejoicing that what was once a discipline practiced by only a few is coming to the fore, and expect that it may take a while for people to learn this new way of relating. But isn’t that in part what we are gathering for?

So – I’m not going to list out here the many issues I have with the current massively-interconnected financial/government/military/educational/entertainment complex that has come to dominate our world (and for which resistance has always existed.) My analysis of that hasn’t changed for a long time – though if anything I finally found the courage not to abandon the truths I’ve come to understand in exchange for security and a mortgage. Those are certainly part of why I am going to #occupyvictoria. But even more so, I’m going precisely to participate in a General Assembly, one that hopefully includes many who don’t self-identify as activists, to participate in the birth of this new conversation, this new way of relating. And I’m bringing my kids, so that one day, when they are old and I am gone, they can tell their grandkids they were there when it was born.

If you are in Victoria, I hope you will come and join us – the Assembly is on October 15th at Centennial Square but hopefully that is just the start. If you are elsewhere, I hope you seek out an action near you, or find other means to show your support. In the words of the Democracia Real Ya, a collective created in Madrid:

An Ethical Revolution is necessary. We have put money above human beings and we must put it at our service. We are people, not the products of the market. For all of the above, I am outraged. I believe I can change it. I believe I can help. I know that united we can do it. Come out with us. It’s your right.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged consensus, occupytogether, occupyvictoria, open space, paov | 4 Responses

SEO as Enclosure – Another Real World Example

By sleslie on September 19, 2011

Wikipedia Device, aimed at the elderly

I know in the past people have given Stephen and others lots of grief about their stance on the Non-Commercial clause. And I admit that, while I understood the theoretical possibilities Stephen was concerned about, that commercial entities often seek to obscure or enclose free resources so that even if the original is still literally “open” it becomes effectively lost, I initially wrote that off as edge-case fear mongering.

But over the last few years I have come to see this not as an edge case at all but is actually a real practice that we see emerging over and over, whether it be in various threats to “net neutrality” or SEO practices that effectively bury the free versions of content. This post is just a brief note about yet another example that came up in conversation with a potential partner in government who wants to share openly some training resources aimed at helping immigrants to Canada have their foreign credentials accepted and become members of professional organizations in Canada.

I raised the question of “flavours” of Creative Commons license simply because the current configuration of SOL*R supports the 2.0 Attribution Share-Alike license and wanted them to realize they had a choice. This gave them some pause, and then mentioned that actually, one of the challenges faced when communicating with new immigrant populations in general is that there are certain groups (e.g. immigration lawyers and others who “facilitate” the process) who have a strong motive to short circuit official channels so that they can communicate “on behalf” of new immigrant clients (read – “charge them lots of money for things the government actually provides for free.”) Fair play to Google, the top unsponsored hits for “Immigrate to Canada” are indeed government websites, but the first one is a sponsored commercial link, and on that same first page of results are a number of commercial “immigration consulting” services pretty much masquerading as government sites.

All of which is simply to add yet another to what seems to me to be the long and ever-expanding list of examples of ways in which commercial entities, usually through legal if not totally ethical means, obscure what should be free and public resources. This is not make believe or edge case. This is in fact the modus operandi of capital. – SWL

Posted in The Rest | Tagged enclosure, OER, SEO | 5 Responses

Public Apology

By sleslie on September 9, 2011

Last February a small tempest erupted in our little corner of the edtech world. Ostensibly what sparked it was a post and an accompanying image by Leigh Blackall (which I won’t link to here, not to hide anything, just that the purpose of this post isn’t to stir anything more up or inflict further harm) which led to a string of responses, including mine, which only seemed to add to whatever hurt those initial posts might have created.

Too often we I haven’t admitted when we’ve made mistakes and apologize, and this is not a practice I want to continue in. After many months reflection I am able to acknowledge that I was not practicing deep listening or mindful speech, but simply reacting defensively, and did so in a way that compound the problem. I am sorry for this.

I don’t expect that this will heal the rifts that were created over those few days; trust is something that is difficult to build, easy to break. The greater shame too is that, as a few wise folks like Chris Lott and Nancy White tried to flush out, underneath the poorly framed/badly received post & images were issues, about public personas and their importance for catalyzing communities, amongst other things, that are indeed worthy of discussion. I am sorry for the role I had in derailing that potential outgrowth too. – SWL

Posted in The Rest | Tagged apology, right speech

Bookmarklets I have Known and Loved

By sleslie on September 9, 2011

You can thing the inimitable Rick Schweir for this post.

A brief exchange on twitter made me realize that there may be value to some for me to come back to an old topic near and dear to my heart, Bookmarklets. I have written about the utility of Bookmarklets to augmenting your web experiencea number of times over the last 9 years of this blog, but haven’t for a while, and thought maybe there are maybe some new ones I use that might be of interest. But first…

A Little Background (skip this if you already know, love and use bookmarklets)

So bookmarklets. Huh? Well, basically they are little pieces of javascript, stored as a bookmarked URL, that can be easily launched and either themselves do something to the web page you are looking at or often send that page (its contents or its URL) to some other application for processing. This will get clearer as we look at some specific examples; the really important thing to understand is that for them to be useful, you should really have your browsers “Bookmark Toolbar” visible. This is a little bar that runs across the top of your browser window; it takes up maybe 20 pixels of screen real estate, but it allows you to add a ton of functionality to your browser in exchange.

Most modern browsers have some equivalent of a “Bookmarks Toolbar” (Firefox’s name for it.) Chrome calls it the “Bookmarks Bar,” as does Safari. Internet Explorer? LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU LA LA LA.

To view it, typically look under the “View” menu, e.g.

After enabling it, you will see an additional toolbar under the main address bar of your browser.

Once this is visible, installing new bookmarklets is as simple as dragging them onto this bar. NOTE: As Bookmarklets do contain small pieces of code, they can be used for malicious ends. As with ANY link, it is important to have some trust before clicking on it; if you don’t read javascript yourself (and really, if you are reading this section still, that seems quite possible) then only install ones from sources you trust/people you trust. Still, don’t be afraid; I mean, where has that ever got you?

Bookmarklets I have Known and Loved

Now you are ready to install some Bookmarklets to make your life on the web easier, quicker, more powerful. Here are some of the ones I use regularly.

Press This – http://codex.wordpress.org/Press_This

This first one will hopefully already be familiar to all wordpress users, and if it’s not – hopefully this just saved you a bunch of time. Press This is a wordpress bookmarklet available under the Tools Menu of the Administration screen. Once you drag it to your bookmarklets bar, you can launch a blog post editor for that blog that will populate the post with the URL and whatever copied text from the page you are looking at. If, like me, you often start a post by refering to something you’ve found, this becomes an invaluable part of your workflow.

Readability – http://www.readability.com/

Readability is the bookmarklet that set off this initial post – Rick was mentioning a bookmarklet that helps format pages for print. I took a look and though I should mention Readability to him; Readability takes advantage (as do many bookmarklets) of a fact people often forget about the web – it is the most amazing copying machine ever invented! Often I find people getting caught up on the idea that content is “on a server” when, for much of the ‘traditional’ web, its instead the fact that when you are viewing a web page you are actually looking at a copy that lives on your machine. As such, a copy that can be altered to work better for you.

In the case of Readability, the web page is altered to make it, well, more readable, removing all the cruft and formatting it as clean, legible text. Not only does this mean I can read much longer pieces than I normally would on my screen (and thus save printing them out) it also provides a beautiful form in which to print them out, if I chose to.

SplashURL – http://splashurl.net/

If you present a lot, you’ll like this one, which I have Tony Hirst to thank for (or Tony Hurst, as the site still mistakenly attributes Have you ever been giving a presentation and someone puts up there hands and asks “What’s the URL?” for a page you’re looking at, one that inevitably turns out to be 253 characters long? SplashURL allows you to shorten that URL with one click, and then displays that short URL in EXTRA LARGE BOLD TEXT, perfect for a presentation. This has saved my bacon many times.

LibraryLookup from Wikipedia Article – http://www.slideshare.net/val_forrestal/metr-obookmarklet-preso

This is one that you may have to do a little leg work on your own and will become the source of a longer blog post (eventually, soon as I finish coding up all the variants I want to release), but it’s still one I find handy and is a start to a goal I have of showing folks how Wikipedia can be a gateway drug to further knowledge and learning. The bookmarklet does a search of my local library’s catalogue using the subject of the wikipedia page I am looking at as the search term.

PwnYoutube – http://deturl.com/

Now you know that I would never telling you to do anything that broke copyright law, right? Me? But say you find a video on youtube (or indeed many other media sites) that you want to use in a presentation or class, but are worried that you may lose connectivity and want to have a backup plan. Well this bookmarklet and related site will allow you to grab a local copy of the video (and also points to sites that will just strip the audio track to a soundfile, if that’s what you are after) so that you can use the local copy instead of the network one. If anyone tries to give you grief, just tell them you’re exercising your constitutional fair use rights and the can try to pry that video out of your cold, dead hands. Or something.

Whois Lookup – http://bencollier.net/2010/05/whois-lookup-browser-bookmarklet/

Ok, this might seem arcane and overly techie, but I think it’s actual a basic net literacy skill (of which more to come soon too, another half-written blog post.) This bookmarklet will do a whois search on the domain of whatever page you are looking at. Why is this useful? Well, whois is not the only step you’d want to take in trying to determine the reputability of a web source you were questioning, but it is one of the first and easiest. I often discover SEO ploys hiding behind seemingly ok sites by looking at who has registered domains. Follow the money, folks.

Web XRay Googles – http://hackasaurus.org/goggles/

This last one is more for fun, and heck, I like the name. If you do any serious web development then presumably you already use something like Firebug or the Web Developer add-on, which makes this one kind of superfluous. But for those maybe just testing the waters, or wanting to learn a little bit about how a web page works, this plugin from Mozilla provides a way to see the “bones” under the skin of the page you are looking at, letting you move the mouse around while it highlights the structural elements that make up the page. It was built to teach web development to kids to, but it’s fun for all ages.

Well, that’s it for now. I have about a dozen other bookmarklets installed, but many of them are idiosynctratic, things I’ve hacked together to make my own life easier. But I’m always interested to hear of other useful ones – what bookmarklet do you find indispensible to your workflow? – SWL

Posted in The Rest | 12 Responses

Open Textbook Authoring Tools Part 1 – Mediawiki

Mediawiki and Wikieducator

Trying it out locally

The Moving Target of Open “Textbooks”

An All-eBook Future?

Wither the Web?

The Best of All Worlds?

The Process of Change & Innovation

A Day in the life of an “OER Librarian”

The Request

The Process

What I Found

What I Learned

Your Favourite Open Textbook Examples?

A Short Poem about S.O.P.A

Buddhify

Why I am going to #occupyvictoria on October 15th

SEO as Enclosure – Another Real World Example

Public Apology

Bookmarklets I have Known and Loved

A Little Background (skip this if you already know, love and use bookmarklets)

Bookmarklets I have Known and Loved

Technologies for Learning, Thinking and Collaborating

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