‘Blog Uses in Education’ Drag and Drop Exercise

http://www.ldu.leeds.ac.uk/dragndrop/bloguse/

Back in 2003 I created what’s become one of the more popular things on the EdTechPost site, the ‘matrix of blog uses in education.’ For whatever reason it’s gotten lots of links and traffic over the last 3 years, but what has been especially gratifying is when people have picked it up and actually done something new with it (like, you know, re-used/re-mixed it!)

The first example I found a year or so ago was the Dutch site Frankwatching, which took the original sketchy document and translated it into Dutch, along the way making it much more fetching to the eye.

But I was really blown away by a recent example emailed to me by its creator, Tony Lowe. Tony, through a company called Webducate, has developed a number of flash-based tools for creating learning content. Using one of those tools, Dragster, he created an interactive version of the ‘matrix of blog uses in education’ with a cool innovation – in addition to a pre-existing list of “uses,” which the user can drag and drop into their chosen quadrant of the matrix, it allows you to create new ones on the fly to then be placed there.

In an email Tony writes that in future versions people will be able to save completed exercises and look at a gallery of others’ work, but even as it is now I can see this being a useful tool to use with faculty or others in workshops to brainstorm different uses they can make of blogs and blogging and help them see it as an activity and process, not an end product (which was a main goal of the ‘matrix’). – SWL

University of Washington’s Catalyst team releases Solstice Perl Framework

http://solstice.eplt.washington.edu/Say_Hello_to_Solstice

Oren Sreeby wrote me today to let me know about the recent open sourcing of Solstice, a Web application development framework for Perl which the University of Washington has developed to power their suite of Catalyst tools. Solstice itself is just the framework used in the development, but the team is also apparently at work to open source the actual web tools themselves. This is exciting news as people who have seen the Catalyst tools will know that they represented an early and quite innovative approach to providing teaching and learning tools (including a much lauded eportfolio tool) that wasn’t simply replicating the same CMS over and over again. Ed Tech Perl developers, are you listening? – SWL

Plex project beta

http://www.reload.ac.uk/plex/index.html

Exciting stuff, the first beta of the Plex tool is available for download now. The Plex tool is being developed at the University of Bolton by Phillip Beauvoir, Mark Johnson, Oleg Liber, Colin Milligan, Paul Sharples and Scott Wilson and is the output of the JISC-funded Personal Learning Environments project. Scott Wilson has also posted a powerpoint presentation on the new tool as well. – SWL

El Guapo’s EdTech Trading Card

I’m feeling kind of silly today, so… via a chock-a-block wiki page from the always fabulous Jenny Levine came a link to the great community building exercise, the Librarian Trading Cards flickr pool (collect them all!), which in turn led to the amazing set of flickr toys and specifically the trading card maker that’s been used to create all these nifty cards (you know, my english profs used to just slam me for run on sentences, but I don’t care, it’s more fun this way!) And I just couldn’t help myself,, so here’s El Guapo‘s card (the photo for which was taken by my 6 year old son, it’s amazing how few photos of myself I actually have on my computer, oh yeah, those run on sentences again…) – SWL

RepoMMan Project

http://www.hull.ac.uk/esig/repomman/index.html

To keep going on the apparent ‘open source repository’ theme today, this JISC-funded project appears to be using Fedora and Sakai to investigate automated population of metadata based on contextual information provided by the portal environment, to examine the boundaries of personal versus institutional digital resource management, and to develop some workflow aroud common repository tasks based around Service Oriented Architecture. Phew. Fedora is a different approach than DSpace, though both originated from the library/institutional repository world, and yet in my earlier investigations it too seemed to also have some limitations to its effectiveness as a LOR. Early days yet for this project, but maybe some promise in moving it closer to serve those (and other) needs better. And you just gotta love the name. – SWL

Presentation on Archiving Course Websites to DSpace, Using a Content Packaging Profile & Web Services

http://cwspace.mit.edu/docs/ProjectMgt/Reports/
DLF-Spring2006/MIT-CWSpace-DLF-Spring2006.ppt.htm

For a long time I’ve been asked about available open source learning object repositories, and specifically about whether DSpace could work as a LOR. My answer regarding DSpace, up to now, has always been – well it depends on what your use cases are. If you didn’t care about things like IMS Content Packages and learning object metadata, then sure, maybe it could work, but it always seemed like a stretch, that those asking the question were looking to adopt a system because of its license but not because of its functionality.

In this regards, I had always held out some hope on the CWSpace project. As I have mentioned before, CWSpace is a project looking to archive the educational materials found in MIT OpenCourseWare using DSpace technology, and in so doing provide a valueable extension in functionality to DSpace itself.

With the presentation above it looks like they are making some progress – it details how they plan to deal with two major issues, mapping OCW’s object model to DSpace’s object model, and improving the interfaces to DSpace to make them more conducive to working with living (not archived) materials. NOTE: this presentation really only useful for standards geeks and other interoperability weenies (like myself, I guess). Not for the faint of heart.

It’s unclear to me whether they are shipping code yet for this, but it is still encouraging to see some progress, and for me really encouraging to see the library/institutional repository crowd take seriously the differences between their standard use cases and the ones from the LOR world; a big step forward from the red flag that’s been waving from the DSpace site for years claiming it can accomodate ‘learning objects’ (whatever that meant). – SWL

Presentations from OSS Watch’s Open Source and Sustainability Conference

http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/events/2006-04-10-12/

Lots of value here for decision makers and others struggling to make arguments for the adoption of open source in higher ed (and lots of ‘Stevenote’ inspired presentations for those tired of reading lots of text on slides). Too many to really go into detail, but I quite liked “Your Open Source Strategy Sucks!” (catchy title!) and really appreciated the honesty that was apparent in James Dalziel’s Lessons from LAMS: The highs and lows of going open source. – SWL

ECAR Report – Identity Management in Higher Education

http://www.educause.edu/LibraryDetailPage/666?ID=ERS0602

Being just a pleeb who doesn’t work for anyone with an EACR membership, I’ve only been able to read the public ‘key findings’ document from this recent ECAR study, “Identity Management in Higher Education: A Baseline Study” (and hey, I’m not really complaining that much, it is nice that they make the highlights available for free). So maybe the fuller report speaks to some of my concerns, but what I found striking about this report was the apparent disregard in the institutions surveyed for many of the internet-wide identity projects currently struggling to be borne (e.g. sxip, openID, etc.) Actually, that’s not surprising at all, we’ve longed seemed to prefer to invent (or at times re-invent) our own wheels in higher education, thinking our situations to be so different or needing to ‘own’ the results for academic or political reasons. Where this gets interesting for me, though, is the whole push within what I call the ‘loosely-coupled learning tools’ camps for instructors and students to simply adopt free or centrally provided services that exist out on the internet already (e.g. flickr, blogger, etc.) This push is not going away, nor should it, but it currently drives many IT directors and other campus service providers nuts.

It was about 2 months ago now, during the course of a private conversation about ‘loosely coupled or openly integratable leearning management systems,’ that I half-jokingly threw out the intellectual stink bomb that campuses could in the future easily turn to service providers like Google or Yahoo or Microsoft for their central identity services. It was literally a few days later that announcements about Gmail offering domain-wide hosting services (and I thought Microsoft too, but maybe this was old news, I can’t find the reference). Don’t get me wrong, I am not ADVOCATING this as a solution, only saying that a) you will see more offers like this from big ‘free’ players outside your organization to start coming ‘inside’ your organization, and along with the free services come implications of who owns what and where should it reside, so you had better already thought through how to talk to your CIO/CEO/President about this, because on a sheer cost basis it is going to be hard to justify why not and b) it is a GOOD thing for institutions to start to consider that their students have lives and identities that preceed and extend far beyond the time they attend their institutions, and that being able to easily fit into that student’s online identity (rather than the other way around) is going to be an increasing expectation.

So, good overview of the state of affairs in higher ed, and maybe the full report touches on some of these issues, but it didn’t read like a vision for the future for me. – SWL

Comparison of content policies for institutional repositories in Australia

http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_4/sale/

“This short paper analyses their content and shows that a requirement to deposit research output into a repository coupled with effective author support policies works in Australia and delivers high levels of content. Voluntary deposit policies do not, regardless of any author support by the university.”

Kind of says it all. Or does it? A lot of people interpret the lessons of Web 2.0 to be “only services which allow people to do what they already want to do (and don’t make them do stuff they don’t want to do) will be successful.” This seems fine to a point, but isn’t it possible that sometimes there do need to be behaviour changes? Or is it that any solution that requires coercion to get behaviour changes hasn’t found the right value proposition for its users? – SWL