Category: The Rest

Library Mashup Competition Winners

http://www.talis.com/tdn/forum/84

I am currently participating in a cool exercise in prognostication on emerging technologies and learning and one of my votes/pleas for a disruptive technology in the academy is “mashups” (which I realize aren’t properly a specific “technology” so much as a technique, but whatever.)

So it was with great pleasure that I stumbled on Jenny Levine’s post on the Talis Library Mashup competition. The full list of entries is here, and while it feels a bit tame, it is definitely a start. The library seems definitely like one of the potential on-campus sources to be mashed up. What are the others? Well, to serve as the basis for a mashup, on my read at least, you need to be providing 2 things; some data and a way to get at it (an API, web service/XML feeds, screenscraping, or other mechanism for access, the more public the better). And there’s the rub, it seems. While more and more Web2.0 companies (holy cow – 291 on this list) are offering APIs that are being mashed up (arguably often with a still-unknown value proposition) is your IS department publishing the API for your SIS on your campus website? You CMS? Why would they do this? Well, that’s the other side of the mashup phenomenom – often-times the companies making their data available don’t yet know all the ways it could be used, but appear to be correct in the belief that if you publish it, it will get used, often in unexpected or improved ways.

It’s likely the sources on campus that will serve mashups anytime soon aren’t the “enterprise” systems but departmental or discipline-based ones (various GIS-based systems seem ripe to combine the Google and Yahoo maps of the world; text collections with things like Yahoo’s term extraction service, etc). And I don’t want to trivialize the challenges to security and privacy in accessing some of the enterprise data. But right now it feels like a brick wall – ask and you’ll get a strong ‘No’; not a considered one but the idea just rejected out of hand. But you know the trick; keep asking, eventually you’ll wear them down (or they’ll retire 😉 – SWL

Creative Commons Images and Watermarks

Mark at eClippings recently re-posted this image from Dion Hinchcliffe. The image itself is interesting, but what struck me was that it had the Creative Commons condition icons and the source URL embedded in the image itself at the bottom. I’m calling this a watermark but I may be using the term incorrectly.

When I saw this I was torn. On the one hand my first reaction was – hey, that’s a great idea, remove any ambiguity about the rights associated with the image regardless of where it ends up, and also clear up how it is to be attributed by including it’s original URL. If you buy into the argument that lack of clarity about rights and the hardship of clearing rights is a major inhibitor to the reuse of digital resources then it seems to make sense, right?

On the other hand, I can see arguments to the effect that such marks could be a hinderance to reuse (if done in an ugly way that mars the original image or if they take away from the re-users contribution to the remix). And if they are such a great idea, why aren’t we seeing this more often. There are already lots of scripts out there to automate watermarking of images, and it would be simple to offer these as a service that people could tie into. But is this a good idea?

I have self-interested reasons for asking this question. Within my work on SOL*R I have to advise content authors on how to display either a Creative Commons or BC Commons license in their work. My reply has always been “Hey, they’re your rights and it’s your content, so if you feel strongly about people respecting these, assert them as often as you like.” The funny thing is the issue isn’t people wanting to use license tags excessively, its people not wanting to use them at all because they haven’t included them up front on a template or the like.

So, is this practice one to encourage? Should we instead use XMP for this (and build apps that automatically just add it in without extra work from the user)? Or leave well enough alone? Feedback (through email, as my overworked butt has still not migrated this to WordPress as promised) always appreciated. – SWL

CCMixter Radio – Rockin’ the airwaves with Creative Commons music, 24 hours a day!

http://ccmixter.org/media/view/media/extras

Kind of a non-sequitar, but I have been working away listening to streams of fully CC-licensed remixes and tracks from the awesome CCMixter site all day, and just wanted to tell someone. What brought me there was the announcement that my old favourite, Freesound, is now integrated into ccMixter via the Sample Pool API. Ahh, CreativeCommons content – think “Organic,” but for your brain 😉 – 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

Google TechTalk Videos

http://video.google.com/
videosearch?q=type%3Agoogle%20engEDU
&page=1&lv=0&so=1

Bruce pointed me to a video of a talk by Barry Schwartz to staff at Google on “The Paradox of Choice – Why More is Less.” (Worth a view – examines the idea that facing a plethora of choices, people act less, not more, that more choices has the paradoxical effect of inducing paralysis).

This led me to realize that Google is filming all of the talks of invited guest experts to their staff and posting them on Google Video for all to share. The topics range from the technically daunting (for me at least – “Multiview Geometry for Texture Mapping 2D Images onto 3D Range Data” oh my!) to the enlightening (“Impact of Technology on Reducing Poverty and Alleviating Social Issues in India”). Though I truly still hate this as a way to learn things, hard not to say “Good on ya” Google! – SWL

YourSpins.Com – Online Music Remixxing Tool

http://www.yourspins.com/

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