Technologies for Learning, Thinking and Collaborating
http://scottleslie.ca/free-and-learning/
I leaked this on Friday on twitter, but in case you didn’t see it and have any interest, this is what my trip in Barcelona forced out of me. It is long and messy. But it is also the last thing you’ll see from me for a little while as I sit quietly to decide what the next chapter will be. Peace. – SWL
In an effort to lend support to the upcoming f2f JIBC/VCC Online Course Showcase and make the results of these demos more widely available, we are hoping to capture screencasts of the actual demos to share online.
In order to do this in a way that works cross-platform and doesn’t require an install (it is entirely likely presenters will want to use their own laptops) I did a quick investigation of free web-based tools for doing screencasts. The one other requirement that needed to be met was – no (or little) restriction on the size/length of the screencast. I should also note – I was doing these demos on a Mac. While almost all of these claim to be cross-platform and typically employ a Java or combination Java/Flash applet to do their recording, underlying platform can effect how these allegedly “cross platform” apps work, so you may have different results on PC or Linux.
I was assisted by a few helpful sites in selecting some candidates and settled on the following 4 to quickly try out:
I liked Screencastle for its immediate simplicity – a big red “Record” button on its front page launched a Java-applet with 2 basic commands, record and stop (N.B. pretty much all of these sites.) The recording worked fine enough (though the start/stop bar gets hidden at the top of your screen) and it offers up links to embed, stream or download the video after it has been processed. The embed/stream video worked great and it captures audio off the mic by default too. The problem I ran into was with the downloaded file – an .flv file that when I tried to run or convert on my local machine, proved to have compressed 1 1/2 minutes of video into 1 1/2 seconds! Hopefully this is just a temporary bug, but it won’t suffice for a meeting in a couple of weeks.
Despite its somewhat corny name, this turned out to be the cadillac of the lot. The resizeable recorder also offers audio and video from the webcam included into the end result. It ran flawlessly, and then offered me the option to upload the finished product to either their own site or Youtube, or download a copy in a few different formats. The end results looked beautiful. They do include a watermark which can be removed for $9/year, cheap at twice the price. It does have a 15 minute maximum length (extended to an hour for the upgraded version) but my needs fit into that length – indeed, if your screencast is likely to be longer than 15 minutes, maybe reconsider your script!
I acknowledge that I may be having a problem with my local mic/flash configuration, but I never could get this to work properly on my machine if I asked to record the audio. Worse yet, it froze the entire browser. Looks promising – resizable screen, can include webcam input with the screencast, but the crashes meant it was not a contender.
Possibly not fair to other competitors I haven’t discussed here (e.g. Screenr for one) as it limits the recording to 3 minutes, and so was automatically out of the running for my specific needs, but I’ve included Screenjelly on the list because it is a very sweet user experience. One big red record button, the video it captures is of very high quality and seems to not have the upload/processing lag that some of the others suffer from. It integrates with Twitter and Facebook, which makes sense; I see this as a really handy tool for very quick one-offs, to demonstrate a local problem or fix to a friend on twitter, but the lack of longer time means I’ll look elsewhere for a solution to screencasting the Showcase Demos.
Generally, while there were a few bugs and problems, the technology of web- (well, ok, Java) based screencasting seems to be ready for primetime. I often hear claims about the difficulties faculty will have in using the technology to create a screencast unaided, and my experience with these 4 apps shows me this is mostly bunk. This is now mostly “Mom-proof” technology, especially if you go with the winner, Screencast-o-matic (or for shorter clips, ScreenJelly.)But I guess we will see on the day at the showcase; the big test will be whether we can capture the demos without any disruption to the f2f events.
Happy screencasting! – SWL
UPDATE – to his immense credit, Stefan from Screencastle replied almost immediately to my email about the problem I was having with sped up video in the downloaded file. He indicated this was very likely a problem on my local machine, so don’t count Screencastle out. Try it yourself, it is a nice, simple to use app, that were it working for me right now I may have considered.
https://www.stillnessbuddy.com/
I recently started sitting with a sangha in Victoria. It is a wonderful experience and brings me great joy, to find like-minded people to practice with.
The sangha follows the tradition of well known Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh. The other day, while reading up about the community he founded, I stumbled on a link to some software he endorses called Stillness Buddy. I installed the free trial and am really loving the experience.
I am usually pretty skeptical when I hear mention of meditation software; it is not something that needs software, indeed needs anything other than discipline, to practice. This is slightly different.
Once installed, there are 4 simple settings: start and finish time of work day, lunch break time, spacing and duration of Moments of Stillness an Mindfulness Pauses. Once you have set those values, that’s it – the software runs in the background, and at the appointed times pops up a small window, accompanied by a very pleasant sound, which urgese you to take a moment and consider your breathing, or some other mindfulness enhancing step. The “Moments” can be of any duration you choose – I have set mine to the suggested initial values of 30 second breaks every 30 minutes. Similarly, I have the longer Pauses set to 2 minute breaks every hour and a half.
What a difference it makes. It is far to easy for me to get absorbed, either in a single task or flitting between a dozen tasks, and on top of that, it does feel like sitting at a computer can actually effect your regular breathing. This simple app, which I would say was perfectly appropriate for non-meditators and non-Buddhists, goes a long way to the simple act of bring me back into my body and connecting with my breathing, a small but major part of being mindful. I hope you find it helpful too. – SWL
November is turning out to be a pretty stellar month – not only do I have the privilege of attending Open Education 2010 in Barcelona, but by lucky coincidence (and partly by design), that same week the Mozilla foundation is hosting its Drumbeat Learning, Freedom and the Web Festival, also in Barcelona.If you are already attending Open Ed, I strongly urge you to consider extending your stay by a couple of days to participate. (it’s Barcelona for crying out loud – what hardship!) Open Ed attendees can get in for a greatly reduced fee ($65 using the coupon code which you’ll get mailed as an Open Ed attendee).
As much as I have a strong connection with the Open Ed conference, I must admit I’m pretty stoked about the prospects for the Drumbeat Festival, which promises to be a bit more hands-on and more focused on open *learning* – not just OER or Open Education as envisioned by formal institutions. The program already looks fantastic – I am hoping to add a bit about my own passion, using client side/browser-based techniques to augment web experiences with open educational resources, but even without that the program covers many of my interests and approaches to expanding the reach of open education.
So I have had it in mind for a few weeks to do something with all of the various terms around “emergence,” to me the term that has emerged (snort) as the single most important concept that can help us move away from the reductionist thinking that keeps us trapped in our current conditions.
My first attempt was a simple Wordle using a bunch of terms connected to the idea of “emergence.” I liked it, but then I thought, what if I could make the word “Emergence” actually emerge out of the terms that relate to it. Hmm…
I little searching brought me to a service I had not seen before, Tagxedo. Tagxedo is still in Beta, and thus allows you to try all of its functionality (but with the fair warning that the really cool stuff will become a paid-for part of the “Pro” service in the future.) Tagxedo is like Wordle on steroids, because not only does it allow you to do all the basic word cloud things that Wordle does, it alows you to constrain the resulting wordcloud in whatever pattern you choose by providing a source image.
Now that in itself would be cool enough. But in addition to outputting static images, Tagxedo can also export old-fashioned image maps (that can then be hosted locally), locally hostable Silverlight versions of the tagcloud or ones hosted on their server, and (here’s the cool thing) in these dynamic versions, the words that comprise the the tagcloud can be programmatically linked to web URLs. I chose to link the words to Wikipedia pages, and I could do that because Wikipedia, following the pattern of using easily deconstructed URLs (a la RESTful API) returns useful stuff 90% of the time by adding your term to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/_term here_
So, not only is this a very nice visualization tool (see their 101 Ways to use Tagxedo presentation for a truly exhaustive list of ways in which you can use tagclouds to communicate). Sweeet! – SWL
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.
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.
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.
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.
At the rate it seems to be going, my month here in Milton Keynes will be over in the blink of an eye, but my first week is coming to a close and I wanted to reflect on some of the things I’ve learned and experienced so far.
Two examples I came across my second day here really spoke to me about new ways of thinking about OER/Open Education in relationship to people and communities. The first is the iSpot project managed by Doug Clow, one of my colleagues here in the Institute of Educational Technology where the OLNet team from the OU is housed.
As Doug explained, the site allows people to post photos of they’ve taken of local species, and crowdsources their identification. The site has a sophisticated reputation system that awards participants and also identifies those with formal expertise in different fields and weighs their input accordingly. The OU have partnered with a number of BBC Television nature shows and radio programmes to popularize the site, so they are attracting an audience who then participate out of and existing passion and interest. The genius is To *then* weave OU courses into/around this community site and content, using it both as potential course content but also as a conduit for interested informal learners to find formal learning opportunities if they chose, and also interact and be supported in their informal learning community by discipline experts. When Doug described this to me my jaw dropped; it is so obvious yet really a brilliant turn. Too often in formal higher ed we have had the “build it and they will come” belief about our OER efforts, and when that hasn’t happened we’ve then shifted our focus to “building communities” around our content. But that is so wrongheaded. Communities exist already, and where they don’t, it’s not simply a matter of them forming around content, per se. By leading with a site that helped users scratch an itch they already had, however small, (“I keep spotting this bird in my back yard but I don’t know what it is”) and then building tools to support peer engagement and discussion, as well as personal identity and reputation, they’ve set the stage for community to form and share knowledge and only THEN weave formal offerings in and around this. It’s probably not perfect, but I think it offers strong suggestions as to how institutions can engage civil society in a way that leads to a permeable boundary between existing informal learning communities and formal learning institutions/scholars.
The second example was a bit different yet still inspiring. Another researcher on the OLNet project, Andreia Santos, gave a short talk on an initiative at the Brazilian university Unisul to experiment with ways to attract new learners through a mixture of Open Education, peer support and social networking. If I understood correctly (and I’m not sure I completely did, so I hope Andreia will see this and chime in with a correction or pointer to a longer write up), the university has begun offering access to a block of 10 courses, a mixture of open resources from the OU and themselves, within their own learning environment (so not just ‘content’ but a full VLE experience…). The part that tickled my fancy was that they do so during one of their “breaks” (in their case the Winter break that happens in June/July) and are in part marketing it to friends and families of existing students. This seems like a smart idea in that not only do they have stronger ties and so their message is much more convincing, but they themselves end up taking some of these courses to and because of their familiarity with the environment end up becoming a form of peer support. I understand that this year they have introduced a nominal fee but that students can take as many of the courses as they want and get a form of certificate at the end. Like I said, different than iSpot but still I think a strong example of interacting with community and existing ‘social networks.’
Another part of my experience so far has been to listen to talks on a few different repository projects that shall remain nameless. The learning here wasn’t particularly new for me, but it did continue to confirm beliefs I’ve long held about the weak points of this approach: that they typically do not tap in or reinforce individual motivations for sharing; that their model of ripping content out of its original context for download goes against the grain of the web (more on this soon, as part of my Fellowship work on “OER Tracking”); and that they are a solution begged by the questions of VLEs/LMS silos, sharing modeled on “publishing” and that is ony half-heartedly committed to sharing. But… the one good thing I guess is that it made me feel slightly better about my own work, that I’m not the only one who’d hit these problems nor had to learn the hard way that content doesn’t build networks that share, people do.
If I haven’t already made it clear, it is a HUGE honour for me to be a visiting academic with the OU through the OLNet Fellowship program. This institution has been (and still is) a global leader in the field of distance learning and open education, and there is a tangible passion here for the belief that education can radically improve people’s lives for the better. The opportunity to be physically here for a month is even more special to me because on a day to day basis I work from my home office, and while I am surrounded by a global network of peers who I talk with daily, the chance to be surrounded by so many smart people passionate about open learning, as well as have access to some fantastic services on this lovely campus is one I will never forget. I’d be remiss if I did not extend a special thanks to Karen Cropper and Janet Dyson for helping me find my way in the first few days and make me feel really at home, and a special thanks to “Liam and the librarians” for broadening my social horizons.
There’s lots more to tell, especially around my specific project of tracking OERs outside of the bounds of the repository (which I think we’ve now got a plausible model of how to do) but I’ll leave that for another post. For now I’ll leave it that it is good to be back in the land of great cheese and delicious warm beer with so many rich opportunities to learn ahead of me.
So in the airport waiting for my flight to the UK I tried to bang out some quick thoughts upon finishing DIY U, only to retract them within minutes of publishing them (though apparently not before Google managed to catch a copy of it).
I retracted the first draft because I realized how important the issues are and I wanted to be clear, for my own sake, if not for yours.
My first reaction, which I largely covered in my initial retracted draft, is that Kamenetz’s book is not a bad one at all taken as a piece of popular journalism aimed at documenting a specific crisis in American higher ed and three different emerging responses to it, variously “artisans” (those working on systemic transformation of higher ed), “monks” (edupunks and open ed types who, whilst often still inside the very institutions they are critical of, are portrayed as promoting education outside the confines of the institution) and “merchants” (those looking to privatize and profit from the crises of cost and quality facing higher ed). I think critics who have chastised for citation errors and the like are basically nit picking, and I honestly believe (based partly on the focus of Kamenetz’s first book) that her desire to raise a clarion call about cost and “quality” issues in American post-secondary education is sincere, and that she is not a particular booster of the privatization of learning. But…
I want to go further with my reservations than I did in the first draft. And while I enumerated them as two in that first draft (that the book was too American in focus and that it only pays lip service to it’s title “DIY U”) these are really two aspects of the same concern.
A first take on this concern would be that while I respect the analysis focuses on cost (and to a lesser extent “quality”) as legitimate concerns, especially from the student or “consumer” perspective, that the role of higher education, it’s value and placement in society, is too complex to be reduced to these few considerations or to be approached from only those perspectives. This is not a particularly damning of Kamenetz, though – we live in a world surrounded by reductive analyses, always collapsing distinctions and differences in order to “get to THE point,” “get things done” etc.
And some will claim that’s just the way the world is, and that resisting this is just more evidence of my “monkish” nature. Maybe. But therein lies my larger take on my concern, and again, it is unfair to unload this on Kamenetz’s work specifically, because it is no more guilty of this (and possibly even less) than most analyses; but the concern is this, that while we can and do make these kind of global analyses of problems and solutions (because indeed, there are no private language games, we can and do recognize commonalities), we need (indeed I’d say MUST, but I step back) to resist the urge to collapse any of our own specific contexts into these global analyses and solutions. And this is why I think the rather short-shrift given to “edupunk” belies a misunderstanding of the profundity of its origins; because, just like it’s predecessor “punk,” edupunk must kill itself off; it is ALWAYS local, ALWAYS specific, contextual, grassroots, emerging. “EDUPUNK” IS DEAD. LONG LIVE EDUPUNK! It is an urging towards a relationship of learner, teacher and knowledge that is NOT simply instrumental, a constant examining of “relating” itself.
In a discussion on twitter, Mikhail Gershovich and I described Jim Groom as “an American Pragmatist” which he took really badly. But I believe this (and Jim, PLEASE correct me, as this is really new thinking for me, and I know I am positing a lot) is because he understood us to be meaning the colloquial sense of the word, often taken to mean “utilitarian,” which is almost the exact opposite of what we (and I believe he) intended. No, I think both Mikhail and I were talk philosophic Pragmatism that refuses to collapse contextual specifics into meta-narratives. Now inasmuch as this approach still holds on to Ends, albeit the Ends specified by the specific context, I can see a tension between this and my above description of edupunk. And if I haven’t totally lost the plot, then hopefully this is something Jim and others can help me work through, but again, I think, always resisting the urge to meta-narrative, to resurrecting “Edupunk.”
So, monkish? Well, at least, if not totally barmy! I mean, how do you implement a plan of national reform on the back of this? Well, you don’t. Not that it’s not needed, but if you take seriously the ideas of autonomy, of nodes, of emergence, then at best you figure out how to un-bundle while not falling prey to the conservative lie, the myth of the individual. And this is where I think we progressives, if I may, need to take seriously the charge that network learning panders to autodidacts; not because it must be true, but because for it not to be true means accepting that some learners may want to simply get a credential, just “get the job,” and that if we are to contract for their teaching, it needs to be a negotiation, one that includes informing them of the possibilities but actually listening to what they want, and finding the agreement in between. That, it would seem to me, would be truly edupunk. – SWL
Simple question, right – what is the most “successful” “formal” “OER” project? Except, not so simple, which is why the scare quotes. I asked the question on twitter, and got some interesting answers so far:
I don’t think there is one “right” answer, but I do think it is a useful question to ask; firstly because it asks us to dig into the assumptions behind each of the terms I scare-quoted. By “successful” do you mean: most accessed/viewed? most re-used? increased the profile of the institution the most? provided the best return on investment? improved student learning the most? decreased some of the crises facing the world the most? All of the above? (good luck with that!) And what’s meant by “formal”? Or “OER” for that matter?
I’m not hoping to spark a definitional skirmish – lord knows we’ve all seen enough of those. But I am sincere in wanting examples, however you choose to define the terms. Because from where I’m sitting, the projects that fulfill the criteria of “successful” “formal” “OER” projects are few and far between, yet I remain absolutely personally committed to the causes of education and open sharing. The tension between these two seemingly contradictory statements (plus the fact that I derive my livelihood working on “formal” “OER” projects) should be plain, and seeking some examples is in a way asking for help both in how I’m approaching my work but also where I am choosing to put my efforts in this life. As The Reverend constantly reminds me, “you can’t live wrong rightly,” and I’m feeling pretty tired of struggling with round holes and square pegs, trying to convince people to let go of The Fear. – SWL
I’m still not 100% clear on whether I can tell anybody about this, but… too late now. Earlier this year I took a bit of a flyer and submitted an application for an OLNet Fellowship, which offered the chance to work with the folks at the renowned Open University in the UK on issues around Open Education. I am not a full-time Academic and don’t have an enormous publication record, but I’d like to think I’ve paid some dues in the trenches working on, and thinking and writing about, Open Education. Apparently so did they, because much to my pleasant surprise I was awarded an “Expert Fellowship,” a category seemingly designed to suit odd-balls like myself that work in the lofty heights of Academia but ain’t got no papers 😉
But there’s a point to this post apart from saying “wohoo Scott” (wohoo!) Actually 2 points. The first is a shout out to colleagues in the UK that I will be in Milton Keynes from June 23 until July 24th. I am not clear yet the extent of my mobility will be, but I’m certainly hoping that the month offers some opportunities to visit and learn with colleagues in the UK. If you are interested, please do let me know and we’ll try to make it happen.
The second point of the post is to share a bit of what I am going to be working on. As many of you know, I run an “open educational resource” repository (cue loud groan.) In our model, and it seems far from unique, teaching resources aimed primarily at instructors are typically downloaded and reused in some other context. While it is possible to ‘point’ to content hosted in our system, in most cases this is not how it is used.
One of the problems with this model (and sheesh, don’t I wish there were only one) is that the content owners don’t get a good sense of the popularity of their resources and where else they are being used. As a blogger and long time creator of web content that has been reused, I know that getting feedback on how often your stuff is viewed and from where, whether it be in the form of Trackbacks, or services like Google Analytics, can be a big shot in the arm. Sure, it is hopefully not the only thing that motivates you, but it doesn’t hurt.
So my proposal is to research the myriad different ways this kind of usage tracking can be implemented specifically in the context of OER (with a high sensitivity to finding approaches conducive to freedom and not any sense of ‘restriction’), select one and implement it in my real world repository. It is a big fish to fry and I do not think the problem is exclusive to OERs but in general applies to digital media. While I do hope to report on general approaches I also know that having a specific context to work in will be helpful. So expect to hear more (and get more pleas of “help!”) in the coming months.
Anyways, hope I do end up getting to meet some of you conspirators who ’til now have been just URLs or avatars. And I hear the English countryside is lovely that time of year… – SWL