In some ways this seems like a bit of a kludge, but I’m interested to hear if anyone is seriously investigating using biometric USBs on their campus as a combined way of providing authentication to network resources, secure data storage for personal files, and customized ‘thicker’ clients for end users. Given how low some of these prices are getting (see here, and here and here, and those are for buying them one at a time!) and the fact that some campuses seemed willing to give away an ipod at the start of term, it seems to me that it could be a worthwhile short-term (2-3 year) approach that could enable some interesting things at reasonably low cost. Or not. Just thinking out loud here. It’ll all make sense some day 
(Apologies for not having comments enabled. The spammers brought that down almost a year ago and instead of trying to get MoveableType spam-proofed, which proved difficult, I am moving to WordPress in the new year. ‘Til then, email will have to do.) - SWL
Monthly Archive for November, 2005
http://www.unisa.edu.au/odlaaconference/
PPDF2s/13%20odlaa%20-%20Anderson.pdf
I’ve had a few people come up to me at conferences recently and ask me to compare ELGG and Moodle, and choose between them as if they were somehow mutually exclusive. Indeed, even within the Moodle community itself there seems to be a bit of dismissiveness about what ELGG does, and the notion that with just a couple of twists of code Moddle can easily replicate its functionality.
Well maybe, but this is what excited me so much about the paper linked to above by Terry Anderson and the work he describes taking place at Athabasca University. I had the pleasure of seeing Terry present on this recently and wish I could link to those powerpoints as I think the illustrate the point I’m trying to make better than the article does, but what is exciting for me is that Terry and Athabasca are putting together a large, production environment in which Moodle and ELGG will seemingly co-exist quite nicely, thank you very much, and take care of different problems. Hopefully I am not going to mangle this too much, but as I understood it, Moodle was being positioned to handle conventional ‘course management’ problems like the delivery of content, assessments, discussions. In Athabasca’s case (and I’d argue in all of our cases, but that’s another post) they also have to deal with a continuous uptake model, where instead of cohort-based programs they also have very much self-paced programs with differing start times. Thus they are using ELGG as one of the ways to build community “between” the space of courses, community that is formed not because of one’s membership in a pre-ordained group or cohort but out of your interests. Sounds to me like a job for social software!
Can Moodle support similar ad-hoc community formation across course (and even institutional) boundaries? Maybe, and it sounds like we will find out fairly soon through upcoming releases. And bully for them if they can. But what I love about ELGG is that it is built from the groud up around the user and their connections as they key focus, rather than on ‘courses’ or ‘content’ (I’m not trying to levy a criticism at Moodle here as I like it very much as well). Far from being only a ‘blogging’ tool or a ‘eportfolio’ tool, what excites me about ELGG is that it is becoming a social networking ‘framework’ (o.k. you can dispute that term as much as you like) that while it has initially focused on tools to create blog posts and share files, isn’t interested in restricting you to only its blogging tool (and why would it? RSS anyone?) and is looking at a whole set of other interesting apps (Calendaring? Synchronous tools?) that are also of intrinsic value but become even more useful if people can use them with other semantically related users.
Should elearning providers be looking to one single tool to provide all of these aspects and more? Maybe. Right now though, the best bet seems like trying to get the best solution possible through a set of provisional measures. Personally, I’m more interested in making these and others co-exist, and seeing if we can get the integration between them to be more than lame-ass ‘pointing to their URLS’ or simple single sign-on; if instead we see if we can get shared identity happening across a number of these services in a way that takes identity mean more than your username and password. - SWL
So my last rant reflected my unhappiness at being inundated with crappy powerpointings, but that’s not the only dissatisfaction I’ve had with presentations I’ve sat through in conferences over the last few weeks.
In addition to the dull quality of the ‘lecture’ experience, I’ve been really disappointed with the vision of learning that’s been in the background of some of the presentations, e.g. too many talks on eportfolios that see them solely as a way to create a resume, or just another way to squish students into an artificial assessment framework, too many talks on more and better ways to generate reams of metadata and remove the humans from that sticky operation of sharing and reusing learning resources.
But the good thing about all of these is that I’ve had a series of small epiphanies that have made me a true believer in social software. What’s that brother’s and sisters, can you say it, I BULEAVE! Say it again, I BULEAVE!
Which may sound strange to some, but none who know me well. Yes, I’ve been a blogger for almost 3 years now. Yes, I use flickr, I use furl, yada yada yada. But I was always looking for holes and just a little bit sceptical. No longer. We need software that is obvious in the value it offers its end users so we aren’t forcing them to do things they don’t want to already do. We need software that recognizes users not just as the ‘operators’ of software, but as having identities that are important, identities that are the basis for rich connections and enabling possibilities. We need software that notices and records these conections and interactions in order to add even more value to those users and to other people trying to do similar things. Hallelujah!
And for all my past (and present and current) sins against this, mea cupla. Like Thomas Pynchon once wrote, I’m a slow learner. - SWL
Today’s my last day at the LORNet conference in Vancouver, as I have to miss the Friday sessions to attend the fall session of the BC Ed Tech Users Group workshops.
I’ve enjoyed meeting the people at the conference and seeing their work at the poster sessions, but I have really not been enjoying the actual plenary sessions at all. Too much “death-by-powerpoint-no-demos-talk-and-no-show” which anyone who attends academic conferences, especially research-focused academic conferences, has experienced to no end.
It’s pretty easy to complain about this. I won’t go on much more. Alan pretty much has the market cornered on indignation at what a waste most of these sessions are, and I agree. But like Alan, I long to figure out a better model, one which could still preserve all of the good things we like about conferences, and re-invent or do away the bad.
So, here’s my modest proposal. Do away with the formal scheduling of presenting papers altogether. I’m not saying do away with presenting your ideas, but do away with the formal schedule that says “at 2 o’clock everyone should assemble in Room 1400 to hear what’s-his-name drone on about whatever” (sorry, I know I’m sounding dismissive, but there are many hours of my life that I will never get back due to such presentations).
Instead, book spaces with large rooms/halls, and make everyone who wants to present their work do it as a poster session over the course of 1 or 2 days. Offer seating in front of the poster areas if you like, and then let the wisdom of crowds decide which presentations to attend. Make it like the agora in days of yore, with the sages holding forth and the ‘learners’ wandering around till they found the conversation they wanted. See a big group forming and want to find out what the buzz is about - go and find out. Want to stay with that group discussion for the remainder of the conference - great, stay there. No one is coming to your presentation, fine, go to someone else’s, presuade others you have somthing to say, bring them back to your conversation or join the existing one and make it something bigger. Create ways in which people can also connect to these self-forming ‘groups’ via social software - different sessions could have different tags, different chat channels, whatever. Or else pre-create the groups via social software and then have meetups in real space around them. Take the whole conference concept a step futher and adopt a practice like “Open Spaces” whose explicit goal is “to create time and space for people to engage deeply and creatively around issues of concern to them.” Novel idea, eh?
But like I said, a ‘modest proposal’ - what would we list on our resumes as a result of such metings? How would we get publication credits? Right, right, I forgot, the reason for conferences is publishing opportunities, not learning and professional development. And you want me to pay me registration fee why exactly? - SWL
Note to self: The start of November is a bad time to launch a new system if you also want to attend conferences
So while I have no time to be away right now, I am lucky to be spending this week in downtown Vancouver with a good portion of the academic world’s best minds in the field of learning object networks research.
I am not going to even try blogging the conference. My boat anchor of a laptop’s wireless doesn’t work (2 weeks and counting until brand-spanking new laptop arrives!) and I’m a lousy typist to begin with. Instead, here’s a brain dump of questions the first few sessions triggered for me or quotes that roused me enough to write them down:
- if the metadata field isn’t mandatory, don’t even ask for it
- what is the equivalent of a ‘playlist’ for learning objects? Is it the re-aggregated form (lesson, course) or something else? (and how do we get the information? how do we build the last.fm of learning objects)
- handles/unique IDs *are* in fact an important issue (and URLs aren’t the solution for them, but neither is any system that requires manual work to create the handle).
- need to find out how people (mainly instructors at this point) make evaluative judgements on the potential usefulness of a learning resource? what do they base it on? how long do they actually take in making these judgements?
- identity management is *the* major nut to crack for the next tsunami of innovation to break (web 3.doh?!)
Sorry if these don’t make any sense to anyone but me (do they make sense to me?) Wish you were here - SWL
The folks at Connexions have released the software that powers that site as open source code, so presumably you can now run your own instance if you wanted. Connexions is neat in that it shows a working example of learning content as XML being re-aggregated and re-skinned. For me the challenge with its particular implementation is in how the content is created - the Word-to-CXML convertor has got to be a great improvement over asking faculty to hand-code XML (where but at a Science and Engineering school could you even begin to get away with this), but it still strikes me as a barrier to the approach. That said, 115 courses/2000+ modules is nothing to sneer at, so clearly some users are willing to use the current set of tools on offer through Connexions. It should be noted too that the paradigm for reusable content has always been more reusers than original authors, and in this regard, reusing content in other contexts once created in Connexions seems reasonably straightforward.
Tools like eXe offer some glimmer of what an easier to use tool to author learning content that was also XML might look like, but I’m not sure I’m convinced yet. Some will no doubt rejoin about the virtues of RSS in this regard; again, I remain interested but unconvinced. Not of the virtues of XML or of the traction of RSS for syndication of content, but unconvinced that it represents the solution of how to easily author learning content in a format that is then easily findable, re-aggregatable or re-presentable (which I take to be the problem at hand, but maybe I’ve misunderstood). Structured blogging? Again, maybe.
I know that in my own project, our first attempt to get an approach working that made use of an XML database as a backend failed. Our second attempt, which went into pilot last week, uses The Learning Edge. It doesn’t deal with XML-native content at all, mostly because no one has any for us to deal with. It focuses on dealing with what people do have - all sorts of HTML, Word docs, powerpoints, PDFs, Flash movies. It tries to assist with re-use (the ‘re-aggregating and re-presenting’ above) by integrating a WYSIWYG authoring environment directly with the repository that allows people to drag and drop existing content into new collections. We will see how it works. I am definitely not holding it up as the way to do this either; in general I remain unconvinced (and exhausted) by the entire enterprise, and mostly just want to go off and play my bass. - SWL
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