OLNet Fellowship – Week 2 Reflections

So I’m a little behind on this (since I’m now in Week 3) but still wanted to jot a few notes down, as I had some fantastic discussions last week.

Meeting with JORUM – Using DSpace as a Learning Content Repository

One of the highlights last week was a trip to Manchester to meet with Gareth Waller and Laura Shaw of the JORUM project. Back when we started our own repository work in BC I liaised with folks from JORUM, setting up a few conference calls to share details on how we were tackling our similar problems, but we’d fallen out of touch, and facilitated through meeting Jackie Carter last January at ELI, this was a chance to renew the connections.

One reason I wanted to meet was that JORUM’s model is very similar to our own, so I wanted to see if my ideas on how to track OERs after they’ve been downloaded from a repository resonated with them, and whether they were already employing some other technique to do so. Turns out they were of interest and to date these are (as I had suspected) numbers they were not currently collecting but eager to have, so that was a useful vote of confidence.

But the other major reason I had for my visit was to learn more about the work they had done on JORUM Open to turn DSpace into a platform for sharing learning resources. It had been almost 4 years since I last concluded that while you could try to jimmy a LOR into DSpace, it wasn’t an ideal fit – DSpace “out of the box” really caters to the deposit and archiving of documents but isn’t optimized to deal with the specialized (read “arcane”) formats of learning content.

Which is why I wanted to see how the JORUM folks were doing it; sure enough, Gareth Waller has coded many new features into the product that make it a much better fit to handle “learning” content. While I’m not yet certain it provides a simple exit strategy out of our existing commercial platform, the work Gareth has done represents a big step towards that, and I would highly recommend any other institutions already involved with using DSpace specifically for learning content to contact him.

Planning for Succession – How to enable what comes after the LMS

The rest of the week was spent with my nose to the grindstone trying to code up the hooks to incorporate piwik tracking codes into resources uploaded to SOL*R. As a treat that weekend, I travelled to Cardiff, Wales, my old stomping grounds from my Graduate degree days, to spend 3 nights with Martin Weller and his family.

We spent most of the weekend biking around the city and a good deal of time in Llandaff Fields, near Martin’s home. On Sunday afternoon we did a large circuit of the park while Martin’s daughter was at riding lessons, and it was one of those settings and strolls that beg for epic conversation. And this did not disappoint. Two ideas in particular resonated with me.

The first was the notion of “succession” of technology, to borrow a metaphor from ecology. Martin has written on this a number of times before, both in articles and in his book on VLEs. But we were discussing it in the context of the recent acquisition of Wimba and Elluminate by Blackboard (as well as in light of my recent reading of Lanier’s “You are not a gadget” in which he discusses the idea of “technological lock-in” and “sedimentation”), so put a slightly new spin on it, I think.

Now metaphors can both enable and obscure, but to follow this one for a bit, one can look at the current institutional ed tech landscape as a maturing landscape where variety is diminishing and certain species becoming dominant. But far from reaching an ultimate stable climax, there are disruptors, the latest and possibly largest being the financial crisis. These disturbances open the opportunity for new species to flourish. But… unless we’re suggesting the disturbances are so large as to restart the entire succession process (which some indeed do suggest) we’re likely instead to see adaptations to this specific force, often in the form of seeking cheaper options.

So far, pretty conventional story – mature open source scoop some existing customers when the pricepoint gets too high. Except this is where I am seeing a real opportunity for the next generation approach to creep in (I’m pretty much going to abandon the metaphor here, as I’m no ecologist, that’s for sure.) Some of us have been enthused by the prospect of Loosely Coupled Gradebooks as a technology that can unseat the dominant, monolithic LMS. But to date, there have been only a few convincing examples, and it seems like a bit of a “can’t get there from here” problem (made worse by Blackboard’s predatory acquisition strategy.) Which is where the bridging strategy comes in – we need to take Moodle (and I guess Sakai though I am lot less keen on that prospect) and focus on isolating and improving its gradebook function; as it is, Moodle already represents a very viable alternative (as the increasing defections to it show), but as it is, it doesn’t represent a Next Step, nor will adopting it “as-is” move online learning in formal contexts further. But adopting it in combination with developing its gradebook functionality to ultimately become the hub for a loosely coupled set of tools. Maybe this isn’t that revelatory, but it became clear to me that a path forward for schools looking to leave not just Blackboard, but LMS/VLEs in general, goes through Moodle as it is transformed into something else. At least that seems doable to me, and something I hope to discuss with folks in BC as a strategy.

A new Network Literacy – Sharing Well

Throughout our walk, the second recurring theme was how, for both scholars and students, bloggers and wiki creators, open source software developers and crowdsourcers of many ilk, there is a real talent to sharing in such a way that it catalyzes further action, be it comments, remixes or code contributions.

Howard Rheingold uses the term “Collaboration literacy” as one of the 5 new network literacies he proposes, and I guess, barring any other contender, that it’s not a bad term, but it does strike me that there is a real (and teachable) skill here, one that many of us have experienced; either in the “lazyweb” tweet that is so ill-conceived that it generates no responses at all, or often in envy marvelling at bloggers who manage to generate deep discussion on what seems like the barest of posts, yet one which clearly strikes the right note. “Shareability”? Ugh, right, maybe leave it alone, I mean do we really need another neologism? Still, it does seem worthy of note as a discrete skill that people can increasingly cultivate in our networked, mash-up world.

LMS Usage Transparency

http://connect.educause.edu/Library/Abstract/AStudentFeedbackToolThatL/48087.

I was pretty conflicted whether to post this at all – you may have noted the frequency of posting on anything LMS-related is WAY down on edtechpost, ever since I got born-again, and the vision of learning here seems, well, problematic at least (which is why I removed the title “A Student Feedback Tool That Links CMS Use with Good Grades” from the original link).

But…this is interesting and does deserve some attention both for its steps towards transparency and some of the ways in which transparency is being used to engender positive faculty peer pressure. I can already hear all sorts of howls from every direction – about faculty rights and independence, about the shallowness of this as a ‘ratings’ scheme, of students gaming the system, of… Yeah, I get it.

But if you find yourself charged with supporting and promoting a campus system (and don’t actually feel like answering for yourself the soul destroying question of why you have to sell something if it is actually as valuable as it’s supposed to be) then maybe this will jog some ideas loose. While I will continue to suggest that simply being fully open is ultimately a better way to address many of these issues, until that ideal situation pertains, sometimes we gotta take our ‘openings’ where we can find them. “There is a crack in everything…” – SWL

BC “Learning Content Strategies” meeting

http://tinyurl.com/5tqmz8 

Most of you will know one of my long term projects has been to help share online learning resources across BC and beyond. One of the main stumbling blocks to effective sharing has been the diverse (divisive?) environments in which the material are produced/housed/assembled (at last count there are at least 5 major flavours of LMS in our 26 institutions, as well as sundry other ones and non-LMS approaches as well).

I’ve always held that a top-down “standards” approach isn’t the answer; not only is my project not big enough to compell that kind of change, I am thoroughly sceptical of any of the current standards-based approaches to actually work across all of these LMS. Plus for any “solution” to be adopted, it needs to reflect local realities and priorities at institutions, and be seen to solve local problems before it (or at least, as it) solves the ones of sharing outside the institution.

Add to this the fact that I am loathe to highlight only solutions that would simply further entrench LMS-based solutions or that don’t take into account the learning we’ve all been doing about the role of openness, or the new approaches which social software and other loosely-coupled technologies can offer, and we faced a quandry. How to frame a meeting that brought up the issues, highlighted the common pain points, and ALSO presented both LMS-oriented and other approaches to learning content/learning environments?

Thanks to a suggestion from Michelle Lamberson, we decided that framing the day around the conceit of “Learning Content Strategies” was the perfect way to bring all of this together (seems obvious now, but we struggled for a while for the right frame.)

After a very brief intro from me, we kicked off the day with an hour long discussion of common problems and challenges around learning content. I facilitated this, getting the discussion going with a set of questions that people answered using iClickers. (As an aside, while I recognize lots of potential problems with clickers, I was frankly blown away by how well the iClicker technology itself worked. Truly simple to use and functioned flawlessly.) It felt to me like a good start to highlighting some of the common problems people are facing and laid the groundwork for the rest of the day.
The next step was to showcase work of a few institutions around the province who, in my experience, have developed different approaches to developing content indepedant of their LMS environments. Katy Chan from UVic, Enid McCauley from Thompson Rivers and Rob Peregoodoff from Vancouver Island University all graciously shared with us some insight into their content development processes and the factors that shaped their choices. The important thing that came out of this for me is that none of these approaches is the “right” one, just the “right” one for their context – they ranged from standalone HTML development, to industrial XML production, to Macromedia Contribute, and each had its strengths but also possibly its complications. It’s a tradeoff, you see, like any choice. But they certainly gave their peers in the audience lots to think about.

After lunch I trotted out my dog and pony show, highlighting some of our offerings from BCcampus as well as launching the new Free leaning site. I still live in hope that some of these offerings will resonate with our system partners (a boy can dream) and already there seems to be some renewed interest, which is heartening.

The afternoon was given over to a completely different set of approaches to the problem. Like I said, while the vast majority of our institutions use LMS as their primary online learning platform, that is not the future, or at least, not the future I hope for, so we wanted to expose people to some approaches already happening in the province that are outside the LMS, ones that used loosely-coupled approaches or “openness” as an enabler.

First up was Brian Lamb and Novak Rogic from UBC, and I’m pretty sure their demos of moving content to and fro using WordPress, Mediawiki, their fabulous “JSON includes” and “Mediawiki embeds” techniques left some jaws dropped on the floor. A hard act to follow indeed, but Grant Potter from UNBC did a great job, showing off their own work with blogs and wikis for shared and distributed content development.

Finally, since all the presentations to date had been from a somewhat “institutional” perspective, I thought it important to get an instructor up there to show what a single person can do with the current technologies, and who better to do so than Richard Smith from SFU. Worried though he claimed to be about following @brlamb and co. on stage, he needn’t have – his session was a blast, showing off many web 2.0 tools that he uses with his students. I think some of the biggest value from that session was challenging the notions of the handhel instructor, of the assumption that media must have high production values to be useful, and that this tech is just for “distance” learners. Richard basically made the case that he is able to offer more than 100% seats in his class by always having remote and archived materials for the students. I’m pretty sure this turned more than a few heads.

In the end, my nicely laid plans for orderly rountable discussions were thrown out the window, and I tried as best I could to facilitate a whole room discussion on the fly. I think it went pretty well;  we tore through many of the real challenges people face, from single sign-on to copyright, offering some new ways to think about these and identifying what I hope are some things we can keep working on together as a province.

In all honesty, this meeting went as well, even better, than I had hoped. My goal was not to propose a single solution (as I do not believe there is just one solution) but to bring the problems to light, to get people to acknowledge they exist, and to give them a chance to see some different ways to deal with them, and talk amongst themselves. My experience with this group and with the ed tech professionals in BC in general is, give them a chance to talk and share and don’t be surprised at the number of collaborations and shared solutions that emerge. I have great hope that this is just the start of the conversation and of renewed efforts. – SWL

Journal of Online Learning and Teaching Special Issue on Next Generation Learning Systems

http://jolt.merlot.org/vol4no2/abstracts.htm

Maybe I follow the wrong crowd, or maybe it’s just a case of journals becoming increasingly marginal as a way to disseminate work, but I’m surprised, especially given the crowd I do follow, that I hadn’t heard a peep about the latest issue of JOLT dedicated to “Next Generation Learning/Course Management Systems.”

While I found the opening piece quite painful (and a pretty surprising way to lead off an issue on ‘next generation’ systems, if you ask me), if you dig in there is much goodness here. Patricia McGee and Marybeth Green’s piece on “Lifelong Learning and Systems: A Post-Fordist Analysis” is very good, and Gary Brown and Nils Peterson’s article on “The LMS Mirror” is well worth the read, if only for the anecdote of the custodian, something that deserves to be enshrined in ed tech folklore like the story of the perennially shortened roast. And there’s more. Do yourself a favour, have a look, I promise there’s at least one article there you’ll cite in the next year. – SWL

Widgitized LaTeX Equation Editor

http://www.sitmo.com/latex/

Another sweet little hack to throw into your small pieces loosely joined toolkit – this little widget (which you can add to any webpage) allows users to create LaTeX math equations that they can either paste into any LaTeX enabled app or else use the image file that it also helpfully generates. While there are more and more editors that support math equations, the ability to use a widget like this anywhere means this needn’t become a “blocker” requirement that ends up deciding the game in favour of a monolithic system simply because of it’s editor. – SWL

New Round of BC’s Online Program Development Fund

http://www.bccampus.ca/EducatorServices/CourseDevelopment/
OPDF/CallForProposals.htm

So while this may be of interest mostly to local readers, I thought I’d post on it because I think there’s a few things we are doing in this round that may be of wider interest.

This is the 5th round of BC’s Online Program Development Fund (OPDF), a province-wide fund that BCcampus (my employers) administer on behalf of the provincial Ministry of Advanced Education.

This year’s $750K call is notable, I think, first off for it’s inclusion of “Co-created Content” as one of the funding categories. This is an effort to acknowledge this phenomenom and support the co-creation of learning resources by students and faculty under a license that seeks to offer these for successive groups of students to build on.

The second thing possibly of more general interest is a new inclusion which asks the proponents to describe their strategy for seeking out existing freely reusable learning resources that could be leveraged in their project. This is an effort to promote one of the values underlying the fund, that good, free content should be reused where appropriate. The call does not dictate that existing content must be reused, but instead simply asks proponents what efforts they have made in this direction. It also does not stipulate where this content might come from – sure, we’d love people to look in SOL*R for suitable reusable content, but we hope they’ll bring in pieces from the thousands of other places you can find free learninng resources online.

Finally, another small innovation in the call is around how to promote interoperability practices. Like it or not, the majority of the content that’s been produced through past funds has been done in one of the course management systems supported in our province (WebCT 4, 6 and Vista, Blackboard, Desire2Learn and Moodle and a few home-grown ones are the current crop). While it is seductive to think one could simply specify a “standard” for content, this is for me problematic because a) it would be a top down approach that would likely not reflect the actual practices in the province and b) almost certainly wouldn’t simply “just work” anyways because of the uneven support across the CMS for even basic specs like Content Packaging. Instead, this call is an attempt to get people to at least factor the issue into their planning and describe how they plan to address it. From my perspective there is not ONE way to get content to work across these systems, nor does it have to even be in any of these systems at all. What it does need to be is as useful as possible to other faculty in the province (and ideally out of it too, but the funds’ mandate is specifically to foster content development in the province) regardless of the choices they make on their own, and the call simply asks people to describe their strategy to achieve this.

Blogging about “official” work stuff always makes me uncomfortable – not only have I been known to cock up before, it’s not an “official” part of my job. As is always the case, the words here represent my personal views and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer. If you want to know more about the OPDF, then read the call directly, don’t just take my word on it! – SWL

bfree – export courses from Blackboard

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

Martin Weller on Tony Hirst’s Stringle

http://nogoodreason.typepad.co.uk/no_good_reason/
2007/02/stringle_almost.html
and http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/stringle2.php

Martin Weller and Tony Hirst have joined Marc Eisenstadt as bloggers from the UK’s Open University whose posts I now eagerly await, so it’s a distinct pleasure to find Martin posting about Tony’s project, Stringle.

I can almost hear the chorus now about how “a PLE is not an application” and yes, but whatever. Tony has assembled a really useful demonstration of how, using feeds, services like grazer and OPML manager and many of the free web 2.0 applications out there (this demonstration uses Google docs, PBWiki, ELGG and Gliffy to name a few), a fairly comprehensive environment can be aggregated together for learners. I don’t think this precludes all of the great learning resources out on the open web at all, in fact it rather welcomes them, and tools and services like Dappit, OpenKapow and ScreenScrapper are now making it easy for anyone to create RSS feeds for web content where previously there were none. It’s not hard for me to see how with something like OpenID implemented on many of these services all of a sudden you can have your safe password protected areas for student work and eat your open web 2.0 cake too. Take some time and play around with what Tony has assembled and see if it doesn’t jog your imagination. Is it going to replace your CMS tomorrow. Probably not if you are wedded to how that’s working for you. But darn if it doesn’t beckon to a day when making use of a new Web 2,0 app in your course in a way that works for you, for students AND your administration isn’t as easy as … rip, mix, feed. – SWL
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First Canadian Moodle Moot

http://moodlemoot.ca/moodle/index.php

Hopefully all the Moodlers out there will already know about this through their regular Moodle forums, but I thought I’d give a shout out to the upcoming Canadian Moodle Moot being hosted May 3 – 5, 2007 in Edmonton, Alberta by Athabasca University and my own organization, BCcampus, amongst others. There looks to be still time to submit both F2F and Online presentation proposals (the Moot will have both a f2f and online component) and early bird registration ends in April. While I’d love to attend I regret this may not be in the cards, though hopefully I can still sign up for the virtual component. – SWL

Effects of Information Distributions Strategies on Student Performance in a CMS

http://www.georgiasouthern.edu/ijsotl/v1n1/
lohman/IJ_%20Lohman.pdf

This is one of those papers where I find myself thinking “freakin’ amazing, I can’t believe it” (yes, I really think like that) but by the end I’ve been reduced to, “ok, but a sample of 50 students? And all of them graduate students of education from 3 courses?” I’m not saying that invalidates the results, and the paper itself actually seems well written. But if you do buy into its arguments, then this SHOULD be sending shockwaves (at least shivers) through ed tech departments (and the people who fund them) across the world. Why? Because it throws into serious doubt the value of course management systems when used (predominantly, as other studies, like Morgan’s, have shown) as really expensive web filing or content management systems in support of face to face courses. This doesn’t necessarily sound the death knell for CMS; as the study concludes, instead one could draw the conclusion that if you want to see positive effects on pedagogy by using a CMS then use them, well, pedagogically, not as a glorified filing cabinet. But still, it does start to put to the test the conventional wisdom that simply giving people access to reading materials ahead of time will inevitably increase their learning. (First seen in Distance Educator.) – SWL