George Roberts :: Blog

Hallo
I have uploaded on elgg community site new language pack for Georgian language.
Dear Administrators, please look http://community.elgg.org/pg/plugins/highlander/read/9324/georgia
and add it to eduspaces too.
Thank you much in advance!!!

http://www.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott/blogview?entry=2008031414

I've waxed on about fabbers and the like for some time on this blog and elsewhere, so I was suitably impressed by this presentation on open source hardware by Limor Fried and Phillip Torrone. It sets out the various aspects that make up the "source" of an object, from bill of materials to circuit design, and the standards for exchanging them.

Of course this is at the rather more technical end of the fabject continuum. At the other there is the amazing Ponoko site, which enables users to create their designs from regular EPS files, pick the materials, and then have them laser-cut to order. Designers can choose to sell the cut and/or assembled product, or to sell or give away the design as EPS files.

Currently the custom fabjects are a little pricey compared to their mass-produced compatriots, and the processes limited in terms of materials and processes. But add in cheaper 3D printing and other fabbing technologies, and simple programmable wireless platforms like SPOT and Bug, and we'll soon be churning out spimes on demand.

http://www.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott/blogview?entry=2008070401

I'm not sure what I'd use this for, but its certainly cool and very cybernetic. Pachube is a service for tagging objects that share data from their sensors.

Services like Pachube could be useful for some kinds of very high-level business intelligence, particularly analyses that cross organisational or national boundaries.

At the moment, however, it does have the feel of a webcams site with graphs and XML, but as more objects, places and devices get wired (or wireless) then something like Pachube becomes an inevitable evolution.

Perhaps someone will find some interesting way of using some of these sensors in one of the many mashup competitions making the rounds currently.

http://www.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott/blogview?entry=2008060512

I've been talking about oAuth a lot to colleagues recently; I'd had it vaguely on my radar for a while, but a conversation with David Recordon from SixApart at EduServ last year convinced me to take a more serious interest in the specification. oAuth is essentially a user-centric authorization mechanism for enabling services to talk to each other.

Currently some services enable interoperability by getting the user to delegate authority to the service to interact with another, essentially by enabling it to impersonate the user. For example, you give Flickr your LiveJournal account details so it can cross-post your photos.

With oAuth, the same functionality is enabled without the security, trust and privacy compromises: the user talks to both services and explicitly grants permission for the services to talk, but without revealing any account details.

There are a great many service-to-service contracts that could benefit from this user-centric approach: employers and universities, for example. Or between employers and applicant's portfolio services.

But is oAuth actually being adopted? Well, the evidence suggests it is, with Google announcing adoption, and discussing integration with its OpenSocial and Google Gadgets technology. For Google this replaces its proprietary AuthSub mechanism with one that can be shared across providers.

For eLearning, the oAuth spec is an important building block in developing distributed as well as federated elearning architecture. With oAuth, users can choose to connect together services that have no existing relationships using a common authorization method.

Even better, oAuth is completely agnostic with regard to identity and authentication protocols and models - it doesn't need single sign-on or any kind of shared identity or authentication model between service providers.

The bottom line - if you are developing an application that needs to talk to an external service API on behalf of the user, then you may need to start looking into oAuth.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Socialtech/~3/402179481/being-there.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Socialtech/~3/302862833/young-people

http://www.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott/blogview?entry=2008092415

Yesterday I gave a presentation for the Sakai working group on authoring about the work we've been doing on Widgets. I'm including it here as its got some more of the technical details.

I think a major implication of widgets is that it challenges the idea of writing tools as plugins just for one platform (e.g. Moodle, or Sakai) rather than as generic widgets usable in any "container", which can include personal as well as institutionally-offered web spaces. For example, a Moodle course can include things like a chat, voting, and forum widget - which you can then drag off into your personal site.

Perhaps make your own personal "dashboard" out of the widgets you've taken from several different courses you are participating in, originally offered in different LMS's by different organisations.

http://www.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott/blogview?entry=2008111918

What's happening in the UK VLE/LMS world? Some pictures based on survey results from UCISA and others.

http://benwerd.com/2008/11/links-are-context-so-are-link-a

Chris Sessums has written about the educational WordPress Multi-User hosting provider Edublogs’ switch to inline context ads. These turn words within each blog post into ads, without the original author’s knowledge or permission. This is annoying in the wild, but takes on another meaning entirely when the blogging service is marketed for students and teachers:

For example one student mentioned the word “energy” in her blog entry and I found a pop-up link directing me to Exxon/Mobile. Hmmm? I thought and I read on. This same student also mentioned “college” in her entry wherein a hyperlink associated with the University of Phoenix popped up. I found this rather odd, since the student was currently enrolled here at the University of Florida.

The rest of Chris’s post is understandably angry. Links in blog posts are part of the flow of the text; they provide context. The link above allows you to read Chris’s blog so you know I’m not misrepresenting him. The following sentence in isolation:

I hope the criminals in our society receive the sentences that they deserve.

Is different to this one:

I hope the criminals in our society receive the sentences that they deserve.

By auto-linking words to sites for money, a new thrust or subtext can be added to the post. In other words, with this kind of advertising - even when it’s been marked out in the user agreement and everyone knows it’s there - advertisers are buying a little bit of your intention. (Users may not always understand the full scope of what they’re agreeing to, as they don’t see the ads themselves.)

Print publications often have very separate advertising and editorial departments, for similar reasons. Ads on pages should be clearly marked out as being such, and they should never, ever, ever infringe on the actual content itself. This on any site is bad; on a site for use in education is clearly immoral.

As a footnote, one of the user forum posts Chris highlights says this:

Content Links in the middle of my posts which include unauthorized advertisements is unacceptable. One of the reasons I moved my blog to Edublogs was to avoid ads in my blog, and this is even worse than Adsense found off to the side which people can easily ignore.

There is a very simple consumer protection maxim that it’s worth remembering for any product: if it seems too good to be true, it is. Everyone needs to make money; if you’re using a commercial product with no clear business model, ask yourself how they’re going to claw back their investment - it’s not always going to be in the ways you’d like.

http://www.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott/blogview?entry=2008102114

It was a great week for course advertising in Europe last week as CEN (Comite Europeen de Normalisation - European Committee for Standardization) endorsed both a Workshop Agreement and a commitment to develop it into a European Norm (EN) for Metadata for Learning Opportunities (MLO). MLO defines a common model for expressing information about learning opportunities such as the courses available at a university such that they can be aggregated by other services such as advice centres, search engines, or brokerages.

An EN is a formal European Standard, whereas the CEN Workshop Agreement (CWA) agreed on 13th October represents an interim specification that can be referenced immediately by implementers while the formal standardisation process - which may take up to two years - goes ahead. Once a European Norm (EN) is agreed, it becomes a de jure standard throughout the community, replacing any similar standards in place in member states.

So what is MLO? MLO is a standard model and vocabulary that represents the common subset of several existing specifications used for advertising courses. This includes XCRI from the UK, CDM from Norway, CDM-FR from France, EMIL from Sweden, and PAS1068 from Germany. The common subset consists of four classes and 13 properties that are common to all or most of these existing specifications, plus references to other properties commonly used from Dublin Core (see below).

Rather than replacing the existing specifications, MLO standardises a common model that is then implemented by specifications as a conformant binding. This means that, in practice, each specification has to be slightly modified to conform to the same common core, but retains its local extended properties and implementation architecture. So developers already using these specifications can become MLO-conformant very easily by adopting the updated version when it becomes available, which should itself be a very minor update as the standard is based on the existing commonalities. It also opens the door to other communities or consortia developing their own bindings for different applications or markets - for example using a different base technology specification such as RDF, JSON or Atom Syndication Format. Any specifications, though they may have a very different technical implementation, will still share common concepts and properties that developers can use to make transforms between them.

Why did MLO take this approach rather than standardise a binding? Well, one of the key considerations is the lifetime of standards. A standard has to stand for a much longer period of time than a specification, enough time for new technologies to come into play and become the preferred implementation approach.

Another consideration is the need for different kinds of implementations in different situations - for example, mobile applications, distributed applications, centralized systems, REST, SOAP and so on. Again, architectures also have trends that evolve over time, and can easily overtake a standard.

Finally, there is the need for communities to define their own vocabularies, extensions, and conventions. One approach to this is to define a very large standard of what is hoped to be all possible properties and classes and to then constrain this model in application profiles. Another approach is to define a common core and then allow communities to extend this common core in any way they wish. This largely maps to the difference between the approaches taken by Learning Object Metadata and Dublin Core; MLO takes the latter approach.

So what impact will MLO have? The initial impact is to some extent psychological - implementers can go ahead and commit to using specifications that are going to conform to MLO with greater confidence, as they are based on a standard that is going to be around for a long time. We will also see transforms and crosswalks becoming available between the existing course advertising specifications, and this may lead to new opportunities for services that operate across European countries such as Ploteus. As more learning opportunities are advertised in MLO-conformant formats new services that aggregate this information for different purposes become viable.

In the longer term there is a commitment from all the specification communities involved in MLO to continue to work together and seek further opportunities to adopt common models. However the preferred approach is to see what emerges as common use in implementation communities rather than to design new models from first principles.

The MLO document is still awaiting editorial comments before being prepared for formal publication by CEN; however a draft is currently also available here.