Monthly Archive for April, 2007

Ok, I expect this is one to be put in the “see what you get when you leave it to the last minute” file, but the internet gods are conspiring against me (and I expect hundreds of others) today as we try to get our taxes in on time.

As if it wasn’t bad enough that Revenue Canada, in their inimitable and unassailable way, lied on their web pages when they said that operators were available on the weekend to answer questions (they are not, at all, for individual run businesses, and if they are for private individuals I’d love to hear from someone who got through, it rang busy for 2 days straight for me).

No, that clearly wasn’t enough hassle. Now Quicktax, my former online tax preparation service of choice, goes down on April 29th, the day before taxes are due in Canada. Uggghhh!!!! I can just see the conversation now - “whaddya mean I was supposed to be keeping track of disk space; that’s your job!”

What was that about the only other certain thing in life besides taxes - oh yeah, the intransigence of IT departments everywhere

http://www2007.redlog.net/

Last week during the “digital content strategy” roundtable I sat on at UBC, one of the things I urged was for the librarians there to take tagging seriously (to which I actually got a partially affirmative response). I am not sure if this is a case of “be careful what you wish for” but not long after urging this I see notice of this upcoming workshop, titled “Tagging and Metadata for Social Information Organization” being held at my old stomping ground in Banff. Assuming for a second that it can be studied without having all the dynamism that makes it work sucked out of it, here’s hoping I don’t have to make pleas like that for too many more years. - SWL

http://www.getdemocracy.com/

The other night at dinner, I was reflecting on the somewhat disappointing results to date of my family’s experiment to create a PC-based home media centre upstairs in our living room. So far we’ve mostly been plagued by hardware problems, network connectivity problems, TV resolution problems, yada yada. The whole goal of the exercise had been to give my family internet access upstairs in the house without having to have an additional computer station setup, and in so doing introduce them to the joys of user generated content. But since the experiment started after Christmas it has mostly been Dad, me, diddling around with cables and replacement parts.

This started to change recently - now my wife has a queue of requests for, ahem, Bittorrent, and for my birthday on Monday I entertained the crowd with some amusing clips from Youtube. But we really turned the corner last night with Democracy, an open source vodcast player by the brilliant folks at the Participatory Culture Foundation.

In brief, Democracy does for vodcasts what GReader does for blogs - makes it dead simple to subscribe and consume RSS fed video clips, and downloads them in the background so that if you set up the feeds correctly and leave it running, you can have a TV-like experience (except without all the crappy channels and the advertising.) Which I did last night, watching a bunch of episodes from the Jetset show (wow, do I feel old) MediaBerkman and Awakened Voice Learning Centre, who produce a series of screencasts on using various social software tools.

Yeah, I know, nothing that revolutionary here; the Mac guys are all scratching their heads and wondering “iTunes?” I hate iTunes, refuse to use it. So for me, this is the first time a really usable interface for finding and consuming vodcasts on a consumer device has presented itself to me. It’s free. It’s cross platform. It allows you to search Google video, Youtube, Blip.tv and revver directly from the interface, and, if you swing that way, will handle your torrents for you as well. Looks like the dream of tuning out the mass media without totally forsaking the upstairs TV may not be as dead as it first seemed. - SWL

Last night I had dinner at Brian and Keira’s house with David Wiley and Brandon Muramatsu. It’s hard to express what an honour this was for me, not just to hang out with some of my truly favourite people, but to be able to quiz David and Brandon for a few hours even after David’s marathon travels. You have to understand - I have never been in doubt about the social nature of learning, as I’ve long recognized that personally I learn best through conversation and inquiry. Yet I’ve always been a “difficult student,” sometimes my honest effort to comprehend through questioning is taken, unintentionally, as criticism, and so it’s even more amazing to be able to engage in such questioning dialogue with people whose wisdom and compassion leave them not just unfazed, but able to offer me gifts I’m needing, especially the ones I didn’t know I needed. I think that’s what’s also known as a “teacher.”

The list of things I learned over the evening is too long to really enumerate, but there is one piece I will share with you, and if I get it wrong it’s entirely my fault. Many of us are trying to innovate social software, open education and the like inside of institutions that aren’t doing either at all currently. And it is attractive to imagine that there are “baby steps” we can take “inside” the institutional silos to get them used to the ideas before proceeding to more full fledged implementations. But the real danger with this approach is that in taking these “baby steps,” we miss out on the power of the “network effects” that are in fact integral to the positive feedback loops of succesful social software. And in so doing, we end up potentially discrediting technologies and approaches that are absoolutely valid because the implementation details DO matter. Which is not to say we should start off small, but that we must start off in a way that right from the beginning we enable to power of the network effect to take hold. If you want to hear what I think is much the same message stated much better, please go listen to David’s talk yesterday at BCNet. Openness is a necessary condition for reuse. It took me a while, but I do get it now. Thanks for your patience. - SWL

And by that I mean more so than you usually think. 

Brian found it kind of rich that not 2 days after publicly dissing twitter on his blog, an email showed up in his inbox with my twitter friend request. But when pretty well everyone you read and respect tells you there’s something worth seeing, even if your initial reaction tells you otherwise, an open mind insists on further investigation, which is what I did.

And Brian and others are right, there is something new and different going on in twitter, some new “space” between blogs and IM. And while it is entirely possible for twitter to descend even below the level of “cat diaries,” just as with blogs, it’s the attention to the fact that it is social writing, if of a different type, that ultimately leads to it rising above pedestrian posts about lunch and laundry.

Time will tell if I stick with it; I am somewhat skeptical, as between their blog feeds and their various social bookmark feeds I feel already pretty well connected to my friends online, and yet there has been something of interest each time I’ve checked in, and a different kind of conversation emerging. So yes, I am a twit. - SWL

Google Docs & Spreadsheets - Learning Impact 2007 - Tuesday Strands

I am in Vancouver attending the IMS Learning Impact (formerly Alt-i Lab) conference until Wednesday. The conference goes until Thursday but I am giving a talk at the BCLA conference as well as visiting with Brian at UBC so will miss the last day.

So far it has been about par for the course for a ‘biggish’ educational technology conference. Stunningly dull keynotes but lots of great conversations with some very smart people, in truth really the reason I am here.

Yet what’s frustrating to me is that for a group dedicated to using networks and computers for learning, there is no innovation going on in how the conference itself is conducted. There is no online directory of attendees (at least not one I can find), no apparent backchannnel or other ways for attendees to network digitally. Which is why I am posting this here. Above is a link to a reworked schedule for today, done in Google docs, which shows the parallel strands as, well, parallel strands, not spearated on individual pages like on the website. Uggh! There are actually quite a few sessions of interest, but instead of having to flip back and forth, you can just see the strands side-by-side and decide where you want to be. Hardly innovative, but apparently nobody thought to do it. I used Excel’s “import data from the web” capabilities (which if you’ve never tried, provides another great way to scavange data for mashups) and then simply imported that doc into Google docs. Easy peasy. Here’s hoping foor some good sessions for the rest of the day! - SWL

I was remiss yesterday for not posting what is perhaps the biggest story in our personal lives, the success of the efforts by my wife and other parents to keep my son’s school open.

The Victoria School Board had decided that 2 schools needed to be closed because of declining enrollments, or what they called “structural deficits” to their budget (oh how I HATE that term, ever since I started hearing the bureaucrats use it in Alberta in the early 90’s to justify 30% and more cuts to education budgets). Our son’s school, Cloverdale, was one of the two slated for closure. And if that wasn’t frustrating enough, what really ticked people off was that not 2 months prior to this decision, the same school board had voted to allow the school to pursue its goal of becoming a “traditional school,” in no small part as an effort to become a “school of choice” and therefor stave off declining enrollment numbers. But because of some very suspect math on the part of school board researchers, this decision was being reversed without even seeing if it would succeed.

After the initial stages of grief the Parents Advisory Committee, along with some dedicated parents (including my wife Sian) jumped into action. The adopted an absolutely impeccable tone, one of strong certainty without negativity or defensiveness, and built up a strong case for keeping the school open. And 2 nights ago, after almost 3 months of making the case, the Board voted, somewhat miraculously in my mind, to keep the school open.

I know there is a lot of problems with our education system, but my experience with this school and with the teachers who work there has so far been very positive. They identified early on that my son was having some trouble reading, and he got extra attention on this, and is now mostly caught up with his peers. They have a fantastic after-school program which isn’t just a place to dump your kids, but instead someplace where they get both intellectual stimulation and lots of physical activity. And if there was anything positive that came out of the School Board’s stupid initial choice to close the school, it was that the community around the school is much stronger now. Never let it be said that a bunch of individuals can’t make a difference. - SWL (edited for spelling; sorry)

ttp://psiphon.civisec.org/

I remember, I think it was Northern Voice 2006, talking with Brian, D’Arcy and Alan about the “Google filtering Chinese search results” and “China banning wikipedia” stories. While I was just as willing as the next to shake my fist at the injustice of it all, at the time I also argued that if you understand networks and the technology of proxy servers, that this approach was doomed to fail, that the great firewall of China (or wherever) becomes just more damage to route around. Whether it be via mesh networks via radio or good old fashioned fidonet, there are many ways to get past this kind of control.

Here’s a new one you can participate in. Psiphon, developed by the Citizen’s Lab at U of T, allows individuals to form social networks that proxy web traffic in a way that no central censor will ever keep up with. See an illustration here that helps explain it. Instead of just a few central proxy server sites that authorities can block themselves, this turns any machine with an IP address into a potential proxy, but unlike more anonymous p2p approaches this works through the idea of small trusted networks. Have a friend in China, Saudi Arabia, or Iran, give them the gift of a free internet by running psiphon and providing them with a URL to start their anonymous surfing. No software, just a unique URL. Since I don’t know people in those nations, please let me know if you do. I’d like to help.

And as Quentin D’Souza noted, it’s not just big bad repressive governments who run firewalls that you might want to get around. He he.

And finally, props to CBC’s The Hour for apparently covering the story way back in December. - SWL

http://its.unc.edu/tl/tli/bFree/

Another useful pointer from Michael Roy at Wesleyan’s Academic Commons, bFree is a tool built by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It allows you to open a Blackboard course export or archive file, select the files you want and then export these as an independent website.

This might not seem like a lot to some, especially with supposedly mature content interoperability specifications to ease the movement of content between CMS, but frankly I did a little dance when I saw this.

My issue hasn’t actually been with Blackboard’s CMS (no one in B.C. runs it) but with the product they acquired, WebCT. Specifically CE6 and Vista. I run a repository service for the province. We have funded both individual resources as well as full courses to be shared through this service. In CE6, there is currently no way to get a full course worth of content out of the system at one time in a way that works with any other systems. You can take a ‘module’ at a time as an IMS Content Package, but not the whole course. It’s not that this wouldn’t be feasible; the exact same state of affairs reigned over CE4 until it came time to get everyone off that platform when suddenly a tool that could export the entire course as an IMS package was created (the administrative Content Migration Utility). And it’s not like I am waiting around for WebCT/Blackboard to fix this; I was willing to develop a powerlink that extracted the entire set of content modules at once in a format that could be used in other systems. Except, much to my chagrin, I learned that WebCT/Blackboard had systematically left out the module export functionality from their API, and there are no plans to ever include it. Meaning there is no programmatic access to export content packages out of WebCT CE6. If you want to move an entire course worth of content, do it one module at a time.

This is probably enough that they can claim to not be playing the content lock-in game, but if I were at an institution that had recently adopted WebCT CE6, I’d be asking what the exit strategy from the product was (you do have one, right? because it won’t be long before you’ll have to have one) and shudder to think it amounts to “we’ll wait until WebCT offers us a good solution.” - SWL