So this is pretty nifty, both because of the tool and because of the apparent business model. YouSpins.com allows you to remix tracks from 40 or so artists with a simple to use Flash-based interface. Once remixed, the new track can be saved back into the community space (which is very much ‘social software’) potentially serving as remix fodder for other users, posted on your blog or saved as a ringtone (which is where the business model seems to come in). The artists retain the copyright to the original songs AND the remix. It doesn’t seem to be a service that you could just upload any track to and start remixing – the remix tool appears to have access to the original unmixed tracks and so it works only with the artists who are in partnership with the site, but it is an interesting app and an interesting attempt to marketize the remix/ringtone culture. – SWL
Author: sleslie
Must Read – LMS Governance Project Report
http://www.infodiv.unimelb.edu.au/
telars/talmet/melbmonash/
media/LMSGovernanceFinalReport.pdf
Stephen’s already recommended it, but I’ll second that recommendation – this is an “interesting and well-informed” report and another one you should try to get in front of as many decision makers’ faces as possible. I’m really grateful to have read it, if only for the references to Paul Pangaro and M.C. Geoghegan that I am looking forward to following up.
It’s not meant as a technical paper so it can’t be faulted for not providing a solution to this:
“the trick for universities may not be to try to create the same spaces within the confines of the university computer network, but rather to make sure that members of the university are able to forge links between their university identity and their other online learning communities.”
Easier said than done.
I do think the section on “Reviewing the business case for LMS” could be strengthened, there’s some straw men there, but that’s nit picking. The biggest missing piece for me concerns acknowledging the key role in institutional learning of ‘credentialing’ – not to reduce it to that, but to acknowledge that in the nirvana of self-forming online learning communities and self-directed learners someone is going to have to start talking about the relationship between that learning and the powerful role of credentialling (and to be fair, this isn’t just the institutions of higher ed involved in this, it’s governments, accrediting bodies, professional organizations, etc.). If you don’t think it’s an issue though, I can point you to 1000 cabbies with medical and law degrees from other nations who would beg to differ. – SWL
“A House Half Built” – Happy Canada Day
http://www.walrusmagazine.com/
article.pl?sid=06/05/16/0247214
If you’ve never read it before, I highly recommend The Walrus as one of the best Canadian “general interest” print mags out there (they post back issues online). In the June issue they published a piece by former Saskatchewan premier Roy Romanow titled “A House Half Built” on the shaky future of Canadian federalism that I thought to point to, in part because of our national holiday tomorrow, and in part because I was reminded of it again by this recent discussion on Ulises Mejias blog Ideant about “Socialist Software”.
The part of Romanov’s piece that stuck in my mind was actually not by him, but a quote by former Saskatchewan deputy Attorney General, John Whyte:
“A nation is built when the communities that comprise it make commitments to it, when they forego choices and opportunities on behalf of a nation…when the communities that comprise it make compromises, when they offer each other guarantees, when they make transfers, and perhaps most pointedly, when they receive from others the benefits of national solidarity. The threads of a thousand acts of accommodation are the fabric of a nation….”
Now if I was really smart I would somehow connect this back to the great discussion that unfolded on Ideant, but I’m not, and I have to go enjoy my July long weekend (plus our washer just exploded and we’ve water all over the basement, oy vey!). But I am left with a nagging feeling that the social interactions fostered by ‘social software’ are all too solipsistic, or at best are an “echo chamber,” and that the way in which we interface with them, sitting in front of screens typing away, allows us a safety that one does not get when there is real territory, real resources, real people involved, staring you in the face. But then I’m also someone who always thought Samuel Johnson’s refutation of Berkely was pretty good too. – SWL
Map of Sakai Stakeholders
http://www.dr-chuck.com/sakai-map/index.php
Want to know where Sakai is in production and who the other partners are? Check out this map from Chuck Severance, recently named the head of the Sakai Foundation. An interesting point that Dr. Severance points out in this short video is that 46% of people paying into the Sakai foundation are not in fact implementing it at all yet, either as a pilot or in production; he explains this as being about people paying to “make the market a better place.” Here’s hoping it does. Would love to see a similar map of Moodle adoption throughout the world! – SWL
Futurelab paper on Social software and learning
http://www.futurelab.org.uk/research/
opening_education/social_software_01.htm
I wanted to like this paper but was frustrated with the first 12 pages or so, mostly because it is just review of the ‘social software’ field and forrays into how knowledge and learning are changing à la Downes and Siemens. Nothing particularly wrong with it, just nothing that new.
But it was worth sticking with for the practical suggestions in section 4, “How Do We Move Towards ‘C-LearningÂ’?” especially the section on what educators can do…
“You can plan your curriculum as though education does not stop at the classroom walls.”
Doesn’t get much more succinct than that! Or this line – “In particular, schools should not expect students to leave the 21st century in the cloakroom.”
This is an important paper. It is both academically respectable, readable (though a little longish for time constrained Deputy Ministers and the like) and ‘gets it’ without being fanatical or evangelical. Send it on to those who can help affect this change. – SWL
PROWE (Personal Repositories Online Wiki Environment) Project
http://www.prowe.ac.uk/index.htm
JISC-funded project that sets out to examine “in what ways could wiki and wiki-type environments be useful and useable as personal and informal repositories to support professional development within part-time tutor communities of practice?” While I think a lot of us already participating in the edublogosphere might think the answers self-evident, I am definitely looking forward to the results when they come out latter this year, especially if they come up with any useful insight into fostering adoption that isn’t to simply “wait for older faculty to retire” or “give faculty more PD time and training.” – SWL
alt-i-lab 2006 presentations available
http://www.imsglobal.org/altilab/index.cfm
If you’re an elearning standards geek then there’s lots to sift through in this collection of presentations from the recent Alt-i-lab 2006 sessions in Indiana. And if you’re not, then be warned that forcing yourself to go through these is likely to aggrevate any masochistic tendencies you may already harbour.
Part of me really wants some of these developments to come true, to deliver the promised ‘plug and play’ elearning environments described herein, and in my rational moments I know that 10 years really isn’t that long for a field like this to coalesce around an open set of interoperability specs. And yet it would be hard to fault a newcomer looking at these presentations for wondering if this represents what is still to be done, how anyone manages to develop quality online learning experiences now (and how many PhDs will be required to operate the CMS of the future)? SWL
Update – Septmeber 15, 2006 Don’t you just hate it when people reorganize their websites and don’t use mod_rewrite and other tricks to make the old URLS work. Note the new URL for the presentation, AND the requirement to sign up for a free account to get at it. Ickk!
Happy Solstice!
Photo by inkognitoh.
Worth Reading – The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism and its Discussions
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier06/
lanier06_index.html
Apologies if you’ve seen this too many times now, but it is really worth the read. Actually, the important bit is not just the initial article by Jaron Lanier (“DIGITAL MAOISM:
The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism“, though you do have to read it for the rest to make sense) but more the ensuing discussion by the likes of Yochai Benkler, Clay Shirky, Esther Dyson, Jimmy Wales, George Dyson, and Howard Rheingold.
I especially liked Benkler’s, Shirky’s and Dyson’s responses. Lanier’s piece seems shaky, and, as a number of commentators point out, over-generalizes and actually mis-characterizes Wikipedia’s processes. And yet his piece still resonates with many of the commentators because it picks up on both over-hyped terms (the “hive mind”) and some real phenomenom of both the web and user generated content and challenges us to think about them. What emerges is some really interesting commentary on the individual in the networked world, collective action, collectivism, voting versus persuasion and bottom up versus top-down systems that is incredibly pertinent to those of us trying to envision and build new technologies for learning, thinking and collaborating. – SWL
Dynamically Wikipedia-fying Text: Drawdoc and Wikiproxy Greasemonkey script
http://nagle.u1i.net/drawdoc/autolinker.php and http://wikiproxy.whitelabel.org/greasemonkey.html
Both of these accomplish pretty similar things – take an existing web page, and turn proper nouns/key terms into links to wikipedia automatically.
Drawdoc is currently a web-based app (but not hard to see how it could be a service instead) that employs Yahoo’s term extraction service to identify the salient terms in a document, and then offers possible image matches from Yahoo images, and annotates those terms with links to either Wikipedia, Google or Yahoo to the selected terms.
The Wikiproxy Greasemonkey script works slightly differently, as a Greasemonkey script that appears to just look for ‘Proper Nouns’ on a page and then annotate them as the page is rendered with links to wikipedia. So works on the client side, but the effect is similar, a text automatically annotated with key words to wikipedia.
In both cases what seems lacking is a connection to wikipedia that actually confirms there is something to link to before creating the link. Not surprising. That’s not how they are intended to work, they are lightweight mashups. But the IDEA here is important – start thinking about collections you have on your campus that are pedagogically significant to your students – how tough would it be to code a greasemonkey script that then rendered key terms in your online course as a link to that collection.. of anatomical images? of learning objects? …you get the idea. Why do this? Well, in the case of an approach like drawdoc, it could become an automated annotator for your CMS-based courses, saving time and effort. With a greasemonkey-type approach, it could potentially become a tool that augmented the students experience of materials you didn’t create and don’t control with links to content in collections you trust.
Mashups are here. They’re even commonplace, almost. But just wait until they start invading the academy. You can already get a list of the available ‘web 2.0 APIs’ (that is almost inevitably incomplete) – do you know what’s available inside your own institution? …you’re either on the bus, or it’s running over you… exciting times indeed. – SWL