Jorum Report on Automated Metadata

http://www.jorum.ac.uk/docs/pdf/
automated_metadata_report.pdf

If you don’t have the pleasure of being a metadata geek in your day job then, move along folks, nothing to see here.

For the 9 and 3/4 people still reading this post, this report from Jorum is worth a read, though not the magic bullet you’d hoped for from the title. The report mainly looks at Jorum’s own practices in regards to automating metadata collection for learning resources (sensible enough too, mostly all ones we practice in SOL*R) and near the end surveys 5 other systems out there to consider what lessons are to be learned. Another that could have been included here as potentially useful is Yahoo’s Term Extraction Service, but as is the case of the others they look at, it holds no magic solution.

The report ends with a list of recommendations for the Jorum service, all of which seem very sensible as an approach to incremental improvements. I wish I could say more, but I am in such the same boat that I won’t. Suffice to say the ‘Survivors of LOR’ support group is meeting at my house on Wednesday, new members always welcome. And bring beer, it’s that kind of support group. – SWL

The Gong Project – Free Voice boards, voice chat and language tool

http://gong.ust.hk/index.html

During my holidays I received an email from Dr David Rossiter and Gibson Lam from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology inviting me to try out some software they had developed called Gong. I am often hesitant about blogging such invitations and didn’t even manage to get around to trying it until today because of the backlog of email etc., from my holiday. But after trying it out I am glad I did.

Free voice recording might not seem like much in the age of Odeo and the like, but this is, to my eye, much more. The Java-based client-server program has been built very much with an eye to teaching languages but looks like it could be useful for anyone wanting to include voice in their online clases. It supports the creation of voice-based message boards and forums, and the client allows users to index their recordings to text, meaning subsequent viewers can see the text ‘read’ while they hear the message, and jump to specific parts of the message by clicking on that word (for instance on a particularly confusing spelling, as often happens with English). Recorders of messages can also edit the message directly in the client after the fact, easily removing awkward pauses and silences. Additionally, listeners can slow down aqnd speed up the playback of messages on demand.

And if all that isn’t enough, it can support synchronous audio chat sessions as well. Did I mention that there is also an existing Moodle module that allows creation of Gong ‘boards’ directly in Moodle. And that it has an API. Oh, and it’s free too (but not ‘yet’ open source.) Well worth a look for language teachers or for anyone wanting to incorporate voice recording into their online classes for free. – SWL

Paper – The Digital Learning Challenge: Obstacles to Educational Uses of Copyrighted Material in the Digital Age

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=923465

This is an important new paper by William McGeveran and William Fisher from the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. It’s not exactly earth shattering content for people regularly working on the issue of sharing and reusing digital resources for education, but it is fairly comprehensive (from a US perspective at least) and done by lawyers, the type of document that can potentially have some legitimacy with politicians and other decision makers (and yes, I believe in faeries too!) The Mellon Foundation is to be commended for funding it. I loved their case studies, especially the one that has a media prof cracking DRM controls with freely available tools so as to be able to create a clips reel for his class. That would never happen 😉 – SWL

stu.dicio.us – what a student-developed, student-focused learning/study tool looks like

http://stu.dicio.us/

Thought I’ve been away I did try to catch up in Bloglines the last 2 days and I didn’t see this making the rounds so hopefully of interest – stu.dicio.us, while still in beta, is an incredibly simple student-focused tool that currently supports note taking and scheduling, with file storage and self grade-tracking coming soon. There are three things about it that are really beautiful:

– it is REALLY simple, and yet quite useful. Try the note creation facility; it’s a very nice web-based outliner that uses keyboard commands (more below)

– all class notes are shared (you have to agree to this to use the system). So not only does this create an ecology of class notes for individual classes (with basic ‘tagging’ principles in play as to how to identify a class, no heavyweight SIS-integration here) but by searching on certain terms you may find class notes from other classes, even from other institutions, around specific keywords (which does raise quality issues, but one assumes the developers could bring practices from other social softwares to bear here).

– based on the amazingly simple interface, I assume (though I couldn’t find such an announcement on their site) that a prime target for the app will be cell phones/PDAs and other mobile devices.

So… a web-based, mobile-accessible site for students to store THEIR notes/information about THEIR studies, which simultaneously gives them access to other students’ notes as well. So cool. – SWL

“The Future of…” – Three Contrasting Views

http://www.kineo.co.uk/ideas/
future-of-e-learning-in-universities.html

http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm06/erm0648.asp

At some point in the fall I have to dust off my crystal ball for a presentation on ‘the future of LMS’ (yikes!) so I’ve been keeping my eye on various ‘Future of…’ presentations of late, and recently came across these two.

The first, a report by Kineo and Intel, promises to be on the “Future of E-learning in Universities.” While it looked promising, I found it ultimately pretty disappointing; fairly safe predictions on a very near future in which universities plod down the same CMS/VLE path of elearning with a little wireless thrown in for good measure. It’s likely pretty accurate in the 2-3 year range, but uninspiring at best.

More interesting to me is the piece by Morton Egol in the latest Educause Review titled “The Future of Higher Education.” While comparing these two articles is maybe a bit of apples-to-oranges, the vision he presents of “Community Learning Centres” is for me a far more interesting one to contemplate and seems to fit much better with some of the dissatisfactions with current models that I regularly hear grumbled in the edublogosphere. Undoubtedly many will be troubled with the vision of corporate entities entering the formerly public space of education, but (at least in the US and perhaps elsewhere) this burgeoning reality does need to be engaged with, as does the notion that K-12 represents a competitive threat to higher education. What!?! The argument goes that in the new model, “that with self-paced learning, thirteen years (K-12), including internships, provide ample learning to qualify for entry-level positions.” If it seems unlikely, maybe contemplate the phenomenom of kids jumping from high school directly into professional athletics, which 25 years ago was unheard of. I heard a similar notion almost 10 years ago by the president of Mount Royal College who described the greatest threat to the College as not the neighboring colleges and universities but large corporate entities and commercial certification bodies that would take students direclty from high school and train them in the workforce.

Which brings me finally to the prognostication which I’ve recently enjoyed most, John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid’s Social Life of Information which I revisted over my holiday. I wanted to go back to the final chapter on ‘Re-Education’ (an earlier version of which can be found on the web in this paper titled ‘Universities in the Digital Age.‘) While the book is now 6 years old, I think much of it holds up well, and the message (summed up by one reviewer as “it’s the people, stupid”), especially in the education chapter, challenges the predominant “informational” picture of learning with a social one, tries to preserve the positive aspects of the university while asking what new forms ‘degree granting bodies’ could take, and I think also resonates really well with many of the dissatisfactions with the status quo apparent in the edublogosphere.

The caveats at the end of the chapter are well worth noting – it is entirely possible that higher ed institutions will prove to have more staying power than any of us could predict and survive the current digital revolution largely intact. But somehow this seems unlikely. For a while I’ve been carrying around the question of “what would a post-secondary institution that took seriously the disruptions poised by social software and emerging visions of learning (and the mass amaturization of everything) look like?” But after re-reading this book I’m wondering if I’ve framed that wrong; maybe the question is “how can we preserve the positive aspects of how higher education currently creates and shares knowledge while designing learning technologies that compliment, improve and expand that social formation?” – SWL

And the winner is….’Course Management Systems’?

http://www.educause.edu/2006/10958

From the “that’s not a zeitgeist, just a bump in the road” department comes this news, that the inaugural winner of the new Educause ‘Catalyst’ award is “Course Management Systems” (yes, the entire field of them, not just a signle one, competing claims to the contrary notwithstanding). What’s so interesting, though, in light of those recent claims, is to read the text of the award which talks about CMS being “developed among faculty in pockets of innovation throughout the world” and that the “developers of these systems pulled together many strands of technology.” [empasis mine] Indeed! – SWL

Blackboard Patent and Prior Art

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.ctt.bc.ca/landonline/

I am officially still on holidays until next Tuesday but made the mistake of checking my email (I have managed to abstain from my bloglines account though!) and through a mailing list I subscribe to saw a post on the nastiness that is Blackboard’s patent application. If you can beat them, sue them, eh?

The ensuing effort to create a history of LMS/VLEs through Wikipedia is great and to be applauded. When I saw the posts about Blackboard’s patent I immediately thought of our Edutools site, actually its predecessor, Landonline, developed by my colleague Dr. Bruce Landon and hosted by my former employers, the now defunct Centre for Curriculum, Transfer and Technology (C2T2).

Bruce originally created that site in 1996 (pre-Blackboard, in fact the early version was pre-WebCT as well.) I checked the Internet Archives, and while they don’t have a copy from 1996, they do have ones from 1997, 1998 and 1999. If you have a look at the copies on the Wayback machine. The copies on the Wayback machine aren’t pretty (lots of broken images) but you can see, for instance in this comparison from 1998, that Blackboard (here called Courseinfo) and WebCT show up in this apples to apples comparison with 4 other systems at the time.

It’s not like Landonline/Edutools is the only example you can point to that was comparing Blackboard and WebCT to competing offerings – Marshall University’s Center for Instructional Technology’s comparison of LMS/CMS tools from 1999 is still available online, as is Virginia Tech’s from 1998. What I do think is significant, however, is that at Edutools we can actually show a continuous development of the feature set that we use to compare these products from 1996 until our current one – certainly with changes and modifications over time, but it has been a relatively consistent point of comparison for almost 10 years now.

I am not a lwayer and don’t play one on TV, and I am sure there is enough weasily language included in the patent that Blackboard will have some success using it to bludgeon competitors and customers alike. But if the creation of this behemoth didn’t light a fire under your ass to do something different, maybe consider this a second opportunity to change course. – SWL

Article – “A Graduate’s View of the Course Management System”

http://www.campus-technology.com/
news_article.asp?id=18864&typeid=155

This article is a follow up to one written 2 years ago by Frank Tansey’s son, now a recent graduate of the University of Puget Sound. It is of course purely anecdotal so its unfair to draw broad conclusions from it, but for me it provides a refreshing perspective on the issue.

The situation described seems to be very much a ‘blended learning’ or ‘classroom augmented’ use of a CMS (in this case Blackboard). The advantages seem to be along the lines that regular use of the CMS by instructors makes for more efficient, effective and engaged classroom work, and the biggest danger seems to be uneven use by faculty.

The recommendations reflect, unsurprisingly, an ‘outsiders’ view of how post-secondary institutions should work, giving far too much credit to the power of central authority and far too little responsibility on the shoulders of individual faculty (but then the decision making and management itself of the CMSes often naively perpetuates this mis-casting, as the LMS governance report I pointed to last week made clear.) Still well worth the quick read. – SWL