Kenneth Newquist :: Feeds

Custom scales displaying as site-wide scales when creating Grade Items

By default, individual course scales should not be accessible to other users on the site unless they’ve been designated a site-wide “standard” scale, which is something only admins can do.

However, we’ve discovered that if you create a Grade Item (via Grades > Choose an Action > Categories & Items > Add Grade Item) and click on the “Scale” drop down menu, you see all the custom scales available on the site.

• Tracker: http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-16431

Update 12/2/2008

It turns this is a duplicate of an existing bug, which will be fixed in Moodle 1.9.4:

• Tracker: http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-15926

How can institutional processes better support flexible learning?

This was the topic of a session I ran at the JISC CETIS conference; focussing on the agendas of work-based learning and other policy initiatives, the question for institutions is what would need to change, and what areas are actually ready. We had groups develop ideas and pitch them to video.

I had participants consider the drivers and influences on the process, the potential impact, the readiness for change, and the types of interventions that would be useful.

Briefly, the ideas presented were:

Validation processes that are agile and proportionate, enabling smaller courses and courses on demand. The recommendation is that pilots are developed with the regulatory agencies involved so that institutions can try out more flexible approaches to designing, validating and offering courses.

Enabling the use of net resources in education, supporting teachers and students in making effective use of resources and exercising appropriate discrimination. Recommendation is for materials supporting teacher education and student skills.

Marking processes that supports personalised coursework, where the submissions are less media-specific, enabling students to submit work in media they are confident in (e.g. video, text, audio) without causing problems for markers and institutions. The recommendation is to support a toolkit for "social marking" that involves students as well as staff in holistic rather than atomic assessment of student work.

Recognising prior experience in formal education, developing support for Accreditation of Prior Experiential Learning, and associated information, advice and guidance, particularly to support workforce development and linking education with employment. The recommendation is to support process modelling to better understand how APEL and similar processes fit today, and can be enhanced in the future.

Making the VLE flexible to handle new ways of learning, decoupling the processes of planning, engagement, and assessment in the VLE and reconnecting them more flexibly through a coordination mechanism, supporting, for example, engaging in academic planning and assessment in one organisation, but engagement in another - such as in a work-based system.

In their own words, here they are:

More information on the wiki

Dispatches from the (Family) Front Lines

So just a couple of quick education centered observations about this past weekend, spent with various family members from both sides:

First, one of my tribe is a teacher at one of the top 15 high schools as listed in the current version of Connecticut Magazine. It’s a very well off district that sends a high number of it’s graduates to college, a good number of them to the “best” schools in the world. Over the years, he’s been hearing my spiel about technology and the Web, and he and a couple of his colleagues have been dipping their toes into the social tools waters with varying degrees of success with one very notable, very positive exception. So here’s the news: almost all of it is being done pretty much under the radar with very little discussion, investment or support of technology of any kind in the classroom. Most of the professional development is centered around the learning theory author du jour, and the focus of all of it is maintaining or increasing test scores. In other words, it’s pretty much all about trying to do better what we’ve been doing all along, assessing it all the same way, and hoping for the same result. There is little or no talk of “21st Century” (or whatever you want to call them) skills or literacies in terms of global collaboration, networking, connecting and problem solving.

My other story deals with a third grader on Wendy’s side of the family. She came to visit over the weekend and at one point she pulled out a little red workbook and started doing problems in it. “It’s homework,” she said, adding that she had six pages to do over the weekend. Later, when she was done and had left it open on the dining room table, I flipped through it a bit and saw page after page of pretty basic math and word problems and (fill in the blank). When I closed it, I finally noticed the title: “Preparation for the 3rd Grade New Jersey ASK Assessment.”

Oy.

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iTunes U and Open University

Open University has deployed iTunes U, Apple’s free education version of its popular iTunes Store. This post talks about the OU’s adoption of the service as well as some of its early experiences with it.

I’ll be curious to see what impact this has on iTunes U/Moodle integration. OU is a huge Moodle school, and I have to think that they would want seamless integration between the two services.

W3C releases working drafts for Widgets 1.0 specification

This week sees another milestone in W3C's effort to standardize the use of Widgets across platforms with the release of the Widgets v1.0 working draft documents. The specification aims to offer a single way of creating and distributing widgets on a range of platforms.

The current scope of the W3C work is set out in the Requirements document. W3C defines Widgets simply as:

mall client-side Web applications for displaying and updating remote data, that are packaged in a way to allow a single download and installation on a client machine, mobile phone, or mobile Internet device. Typical examples of widgets include clocks, CPU gauges, sticky notes, battery-life indicators, games, and those that make use of Web services, like weather forecasters, news readers, email checkers, photo albums and currency converters.

Another document, the Widget Landscape sets out the lay of the land in terms of what Widget platforms are out there, and how they approach the different aspects of Widget functionality.

The specification is targeting platforms such as Apple Dashboard, Microsoft Sidebar, Yahoo! Konfabulator, and mobile platforms such as WidSets. Web widgets, such as Google Gadgets, are not currently in scope, although when you dig into the details of the specification, its obvious that web widgets can potentially be developed in a similar manner.

After requirements, the first specification document is Packaging and Configuration which defines the zip-based format used to package the content of a Widget, the structure of the XML configuration document that goes inside it, and other aspects such as discovery and internationalization.

A surprising omission at this stage is the API specification. All Widget container platforms supply an API, typically accessed via JavaScript, that offers the Widget a way of storing and retrieving preferences, calling remote services, and executing various kinds of commands. Presumably this will be released next; currently there is only an Editor's Draft of "APIs and Events". Currently a developer of a Widget needs to make different API calls based on where the Widget is deployed to do very basic things like save and retrieve user settings.

Another aspect of a Widget API is extended features, especially in the case of web Widgets. The Google OpenSocial API is an example of an extended Widget API - in this case to enable Widgets to access things like friends lists and status information. Another is the widget collaboration API we developed here as part of our EU TenCompetence project, that enable things like activity-based chat and voting widgets to be developed using the draft W3C specification. (More on that in another post sometime).

Overall I think there is some great work going on in this W3C group, with a very practical focus that is based on taking a consensus view of "what is" rather than a more purist "what should be" approach (which has characterised some of the W3C's other recent work). I hope that once this spec is finalized the focus will move onto taking a similar approach to web widgets, for which there is an even more pressing need for interoperability. Our own work has shown that, with a few minor modifications (e.g. the addition to the API of a proxy method for safe tunneling of external Web API calls around cross-site script access restrictions), exactly the same model of packaging, manifest and API can also work within a web framework.

For more information on this and related activities, also check out the rest of the Web Application Formats Working Group pages.

More Social Metadata: APML and ULML

While a lot of recent attention has focussed on the issue of social graph portability, there are a couple of other interesting developments in social metadata I've come across lately.

APML (Attention Profile Markup Language) is a means of sharing an individual attention profile. While other specs (such as the seemingly-dead AttentionXML) have focussed on the tracking of attention in terms of individual clicks, APML is concerned with the mobility of a more coarse-grained profile, consisting of a collection of weighted concepts, either self-asserted or aggregated from services.

The spec is generally simple enough to implement, despite a few odd design choices, consisting basically of a list of "concepts" (keywords or labels) and "sources" (URLs) that are of interest to the subject, all of which have a weighting from 0 to 1 and some additional metadata about where the weightings come from.

APML is currently undergoing revision to reach 1.0 status, and so we can see quite a few possible changes, but its worth having a look at if you're thinking of developing applications that make use of individual interest profiles for personalisation. It should be fairly trivial to support users exporting or importing such a profile.

ULML (User Labor Markup Language) is a specification for tracking the metrics of user participation in social web services. A ULML document provides statistics on a user's interactions with the service; as the developers put it:

"User labor is the work that people put in to create, improve, and maintain their existence in social web"

ULML provides a way of presenting the volume of user activities such as generating content, tagging, voting and commenting. It also allows for the sharing of metrics concerning reactions to their participation - incoming views, comments, bookmarks and so on. Overall the intent is to quantify in some fashion the economic value of social participation, potentially to enable greater transparency about how user's participation with a service is valued to advertisers and other services that support (typically free) social web applications and to power things like meta-markets.

Some rather simple metrics are already used on forums to rank the value of contributors and encourage more participation - typically based on the number of posts alone. Using the more comprehensive - yet still quite simple - metrics available in ULML may allow better comparisons of relative levels of commitment, engagement, and value generation with multiple social web services.

Its an interesting concept, and could possibly have some use in evaluating engagement and participation in more general terms for services without such an economic rationale such as elearning applications. For example, to quantitatively compare the relative commitment of students to VLEs versus Facebook, or to measure the value generated by staff in shared services. It may also be possible to find a way of using it to quantize the work of researchers who share their work by blogging and using social networks as well as by traditional academic publishing.

I think its fair to say neither APML or ULML is going mainstream anytime soon, but are sufficiently simple to implement that they may be worth exploring if you're developing applications that have a social angle.

Reading to Find: Rip-Mix Classrooms

Ok, so humor me for a minute here…

Here’s what I LOVE about reading on the Web, when I get into a link flow that dances me from blog to blog, post to connected post and comments, and after about 20 minutes of just letting myself be carried away by the threads of conversations I land on something that makes a small part of my brain blow up in wonder. (This is also, by the way, something that I think too many of us fight when we read online, this idea that if we just let ourselves get caught up in the link trip, reading snippets here and there, scanning there and here, that we’re not really reading deeply somehow. Like my seventh grade English teacher Mrs. Tharp is on my shoulder shaking her head in disdain. It’s just a different depth, I think.)

So bear with me as I try to capture this: somehow I got to Sarah Stewart’s post on the Connectivism course and hopped from there over to this mind-bending post at Mike Bogle’s blog which led me to graze around his site a bit to find this post which sent me to this conversation about Open Educational Resources on Brian Lamb’s site which led me to this comment by Mike Caulfield which provoked me to search for and find this very cool concept of Rip-Mix Learners. Setting aside the beauty of that idea, let’s reflect for a second on that process, one that I’d bet most teachers would dissuade their students from practicing. At every point, my decision to click was motivated by an interest for context, for moving more deeply into the one idea in the maze of stuff that was pulling me most at the moment. I didn’t read half of these posts in their entirety, nor do I feel the need to go back and do so. If I had, I most certainly would not have ended up where I did. And while I know that I just as easily could have ended up someplace even better, I let my interest drive the narrative, not the expectations.

While I’m not suggesting I understand fully the implications of reading in this way, I do know that these flow moments are, on balance, a good thing. I love being lost in it. And it’s almost as if I’ve done this enough to know that if I just give myself to it, the thing I’m supposed to find and learn will eventually make itself known, like it’s finding me somehow. Ok, that may be a bit over the top; suffice to say it’s Zen in a way that I wish all of my moments were.

So anyway…

…this concept of Rip-Mix Learners has my brain taking off in all different directions.:

Rip Mix Learners is a student-run Open Courseware project, in which students make audio recordings of the lectures, compile class notes, and other materials and share them with their peers online.

I’m thinking “Rip-Mix Classrooms” or “Rip-Mix Workshops” or heck, “Rip-Mix Conferences.” I’ve been railing of late at all the paper note talking conference attendees whose observations and reflections and experiences will never be connected after the conference ends. And I know that we’re already doing this to some extent on the conference level and the classroom level (i.e. Darren’s scribes and others.) Problem is, most schools would probably attempt to shut this down and call it cheating, especially if, as this group is doing, they are collecting and adding tests and quizzes to the mix.

The horror!

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Banner/Luminis Message Broker Plugin for Moodle

This Moodle plugin uses a heavily modified version of the IMS Enterprise plugin to integrate Moodle with Banner. I haven’t tried it yet, but one of my goals for the spring semester is to get exactly this sort of integration up and running so I plan on trying it soon.

• Banner/Luminis Message Broker Plugin for Moodle

Writing to Connect

So a number of different threads are congealing in my tired brain regarding writing and blogging and why we do all of this stuff. The post that finally led me to try to get this down was Bud’s Brain Dump on NCTE where he quotes council president Kathleen Blake Yancey as saying this:

If you are writing for the screen, you are writing for the network.

Oh. Yeah. How nice that is to hear, isn’t it? Not “global audience,” but “network”. And as Bud unpacks his conference experience, you get the sense that this whole blogging thing may finally, finally, finally be tipping over the edge in terms not just of a tool to publish but of a tool to connect.

And that is a crucial distinction, I think. Yes, we write to communicate. But now that we are writing in hypertext, in social spaces, in “networked publics,” there’s a whole ‘nother side of it. For as much as I am writing this right now to articulate my thoughts clearly and cogently to anyone who chooses to read it, what I am also attempting to do is connect these ideas to others’ ideas, both in support and in opposition, around this topic. Without rehashing all of those posts about Donald Murray and Jay David Bolter, I’m trying to engage you in some way other than just a nod of the head or a sigh of exasperation. I’m trying to connect you to other ideas, other minds. I want a conversation, and that changes the way I write. And it changes the way we think about teaching writing. This is not simply about publishing, about taking what we did on paper and throwing it up on a blog and patting ourselves on the back.

This after-the-publishing part is difficult because we are forced to attempt to do it in filtered, restricted, contrived spaces for learning, spaces that are not conducive to this type of writing or learning.  Barbara Ganley (who was featured last week in the Times as a “slow blogger”) is consdering this as well.

As a college teacher, I thought I was all about collaborative learning, about students taking responsibility for their learning and their lives–together–but how can you do that within an artificial environment? Within a closed environment?…Teaching and collaborating and learning and working inside an academic institution have absolutely nothing to do with how to do those things out in the world.

And I continue to wonder if the two are even possible to combine. Those of us who write to connect and who live our learning lives in these spaces feel the dissonance all the time. We go where we want, identify our own teachers, find what we need, share as much as we can, engage in dialogue, direct our own learning as it meets our needs and desires. That does not feel like what’s happening to my own children or most others in the “system.”

Barbara’s post is worth reading not just for her own reflections but for the connections she creates in the writing process. She took me to Scott Leslie, whose post “planning to share versus just sharing” is as one of the commentors called it, “another doozy.” Scott writes about how frustrating this dissonance is, how difficult institutions make it from a tradition and culture standpoint to make this kind of learning happen.

In all of this lies the tension of the world “out there,” outside the walls, this great unknown, or more likely, this great potential wrench in ointment to what we’ve been so darn good at doing for all of these years. I can’t tell you how many “why me?” looks I get from people who listen politely to my presentations but then probably want to go home and throw up. And I think it’s because they’re not writing for the network. They’re not connecting, seeing the value, feeling the network love. Scott nails it:

Now I contrast that with the learning networks which I inhabit, and in which every single day I share my learning and have knowledge and learning shared back with me. I know it works. I literally don’t think I could do my job any longer without it - the pace of change is too rapid, the number of developments I need to follow and master too great, and without my network I would drown. But I am not drowning, indeed I feel regularly that I am enjoying surfing these waves and glance over to see other surfers right there beside me, silly grins on all of our faces. So it feels to me like it’s working, like we ARE sharing, and thriving because of it.

Oh. Yeah.

(Photo “A fractal night on my street” by kevindooley.)

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The Next Open Frontier: Hardware

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.

oAuth: Putting users in control of service-to-service communications

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.

Pachube: Connecting things that sense things

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.

New MacArthur Study: Must Read for Educators

So here is the money quote from the just released study from the MacArthur Foundation titled “Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project” (pdf):

New media allow for a degree of freedom and autonomy for youth that is less apparent in  classroom setting. Youth respect one another’s authority online, and they are often more motivated to learn from peers than from adults. Their efforts are also largely self-directed, and  the outcome emerges through exploration, in contrast to classroom learning that is oriented toward set, predefined goals.

I would take a few thousand words to unpack just that paragraph in terms of what the implications are for schools, and if we read that without some sense of both fear and excitement, I just don’t think we’re paying attention.

And please, send your administrators and IT folks this message in 42-point bold type:

Social and recreational new media use as a site of learning. Contrary to adult perceptions, while hanging out online, youth are picking up basic social and technological skills they   need to fully participate in contemporary society. Erecting barriers to participation deprives teens of access to these forms of learning. Participation in the digital age means more than being able to access “serious” online information and culture. Youth could benefit from educators being more open to forms of experimentation and social exploration that are generally not characteristic of educational institutions. (Emphasis mine.)

Finally, sit down, and mull this concept over:

Youth using new media often learn from their peers, not teachers or adults, and notions of expertise and authority have been turned on their heads. Such learning differs fundamentally from traditional instruction and is often framed negatively by adults as a means of “peer pressure.” Yet adults can still have tremendous influence in setting “learning goals,” particularly on the interest-driven side, where adult hobbyists function as role models and more experienced peers.

Let me try to make a few points that come quickly to mind.

• Kids respect other’s knowledge online because their knowledge and expertise is transparent in ways they haven’t been in the past. The study says that kids “geek out” by finding those who share their interests both inside and outside of their face to face groups. What a surprise.
• They are more motivated to learn from their peers because they can connect around their shared passions, most of which the adults in the room don’t share.
• They are self-directed because they can be. They can get what they need when they need it.
• Their learning is “knowmadic”, as is most learning in the real world outside of school. We’re not linear, test assessed learners once we leave the system, are we?
• We have to be more willing to support this type of learning rather than prevent it, but, as always, we have to understand it for ourselves as well.

So stop reading this and go read the report, and let these questions hang:

New role for education? Youths’ participation in this networked world suggests new ways of thinking about the role of education. What would it mean to really exploit the potential of the learning opportunities available through online resources and networks? Rather than assuming that education is primarily about preparing for jobs and careers, what would it mean to think of it as a process guiding youths’ participation in public life more generally? Finally, what would it mean to enlist help in this endeavor from engaged and diverse publics that are broader than what we traditionally think of as educational and civic institutions?

What do you think?

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Widgets at Sakai

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.

Big Picture

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

CEN endorses European Metadata for Learning Opportunities

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.

Online seminar on PLEs

Yesterday I presented at an online seminar on Personal Learning Environments. The organisers - the Evolve project - also made a recording of the session so you can see how it went.

Thanks to everyone who took part and asked lots of difficult questions!

To download the recording, you need to click this link and let the Java weirdness happen. I guess a regular movie wouldn't have captured the chat backchannel, which is nice as I missed some of the comments while busy talking.

MDL-17237: Can’t edit a wiki with a # (hash, number sign, pound sign) in it’s name.

This bug drove me (and the instructional technologists I work with) more than a little crazy.

If you create a page in the Moodle wiki that includes a pound (#) sign, and then edit that page, Moodle truncates the page name, forking it and creating a new page.

The original page continues to display, but when you go to edit it, the new page appears. If you then save changes and return to the initial wiki page, the changes do not appear (because they were made to the truncated page, not the original one).

Add groups into the mix, and it gets even more fun. We spent a good amount of time chasing our tails before we realized what the problem was.

This bug is already documented in tracker by Dean Thayer:

• MDL-17237: Can’t edit a wiki with a # (hash, number sign, pound sign) in it’s name

Our exact case was a little more involved than this. We had people creating new pages that some how got the original text into the new page, which isn’t behavior I saw in my tests. Yet if I look at the initial page for these wiki pages, I can see that they started with the same text as the initial page, and I don’t think the students or instructor copied text over into the new page.

It’s very odd, but I think it all comes back to that blasted # sign.

“The Less You Share, the Less Power You Have”

My friend Bruce Dixon pointed out to me a few weeks ago that if you do a search for “lesson plans” in Google you get almost 9 million hits, which, when you think about it, is a pretty amazing number. Not saying that they are all great plans, mind you, but when you think about the scope and variety of classroom related content that we can mine these days as opposed to just a few years ago.

Yet this concept of sharing content online still seems problematic for a lot of educators. As I travel around talking to teachers, very few of them argue when I suggest that this is still an isolated profession, and I get the strong sense that there is very little articulation around plans, practice or classroom experiences using online tools much less any local digital databases of documents or what have you. When I ask teachers to talk even in general terms about the experiences their students have had previous to arriving in their classes, most sit quietly and scrunch their shoulders. I know, I know…there is a time factor involved in doing this, or least a perception of one. But it just seems amazing to me that at this point there is no real shift towards publishing more of what we do, more of what our kids do, not only to expand our own knowledge base but to model for our students that potentials of sharing.

All of this was brought to mind, once again, in an by Issac Mao titled “Sharism: A Mind Revolution.” While I think the ideas may wax a bit too poetic at times, the thesis is powerful: in this world, the less we share, the less power we have. It’s an interesting discussion of the challenges to intellectual property and copyright and to the still ingrained perspective that to own and keep private our own best thinking is in some way protective and sustaining of our cultures.

Non-sharing culture misleads us with its absolute separation of Private and Public space. It makes creative action a binary choice between public and private, open and closed. This creates a gap in the spectrum of knowledge. Although this gap has the potential to become a valuable creative space, concerns about privacy make this gap hard to fill. We shouldn’t be surprised that, to be safe, most people keep their sharing private and stay “closed.” They may fear the Internet creates a potential for abuse that they can’t fight alone. However, the paradox is: The less you share, the less power you have.

Mao discusses a lot of the benefits to blogging and sharing, the rewards we can potentially reap, and the positive consequences for the world. And he touches on the implications for education in terms of at least giving our students a leg up in “communication, collaboration and mutual understanding.” Not to mention the idea of helping our students to create a digital portfolio that can not only serve to help their teachers get to know them and their passions more effectively but that can connect them to other teachers and mentors who share those passions. And that is power, not only in the knowledge that we gain but in the learning relationships we foster.

(Photo “Sharing” by Kymberly Janisch)

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oAuth heading for IETF standardisation

oAuth is a mechanism by which users can authorize websites to grant third party applications access to user's information without sharing their credentials. This is increasingly important for things like iPhone applications, widgets, and other applications that connect to online services. oAuth itself isn't new, but moving towards IETF standardisation is a significant step.

The announcement was very brief; there isn't even any mention of it on the actual oAuth website, just a thread on the discussion forum, but in October a draft of the oAuth core specification was submitted to IETF as an Internet Draft for development into an Internet Standard.

This is one of the first steps in what can be a long process; however, oAuth Core 1.0 is now a mature community specification, with a large number of implementations now available, which should make the process much easier than with a relatively untested concept.

oAuth solves a common problem in mashups and services, which is that in order to perform a service for the user, you require access to something of theirs on another site - their photos on Flickr, or their buddy list on AOL, or some other set of privileged access.

Typically applications have handled this by getting the user to share their login information, and have then acted as the user. For example, if you wanted to have Flickr announce your photos on your LiveJournal, you did this by telling Flickr your LiveJournal username and password.

oAuth replaces this with a process whereby the application directs you to your account and lets you login there, granting a "valet key" to the application that lets it access particular services or information. Importantly. this "valet key" enables the application to act as itself, distinguishing its actions on your behalf from your own use of the service.

oAuth is already implemented in a surprising number of places; its a testimony to its effectiveness that for the most part users are completely unaware of it. For an example of how it works, take a look at how Pownce on iPhone uses oAuth. Developers may also be interested in Google's oAuth Playground for using oAuth support in GData applications.

A Ray of Hope?

So, I’m thinking it’s got to be a good sign when one of the people Obama has picked to head up the FCC review team has been quoted as saying this:

“We’re not doing at all well for reasons that mostly have to do with the fact that we failed to have a US industrial policy pushing forward high-speed internet access penetration, and there’s been completely inadequate competition in this country for high speed internet access,” she said.

And in a final introductory statement during her talk (that’s likely to send shivers down the spines of telecom company executives) she said that she believes internet access is a “utility.”

“This is like water, electricity, sewage systems: Something that each and all Americans need to succeed in the modern era. We’re doing very badly, and we’re in a dismal state,” she said at the time.

What a concept.

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Open Web Foundation

I think this one has been brewing for quite some time - the Open Web Foundation is pulling together a number of specifications under the umbrella of a single foundation.

The Open Web Foundation was announced by David Recordon of SixApart at OSCON yesterday.

The new foundation is to "create a home for community-driven specifications" such as oAuth and OpenID as well -if the slides are anything to go by - as the currently very proprietary Google Gadgets.

On the one hand I think this is certainly a step in the right direction for getting these specifications onto a stable footing. On the other hand, what about IETF? What about W3C? What about ISO? What about UN/CEFACT? I'd like to see a good rationale for why none of these existing organisations are unsuitable for the kind of work being discussed. Do they take too long? Are they full of your competitors? Are they too undemocratic? Too democratic? This is a very serious issue, especially as in the Google case, W3C have been working on non-proprietary open specifications in the same areas.

One argument is that the new body should purely focus on IPR management. This is certainly one area of concern with community specifications, and tackling it would be very useful. However, this would then require a very hands-off approach by the organisation, which is maintained without the urge to control the direction of the specifications themselves. Already discussions are taking place about what criteria the organisation would set up as to what projects it would accept, and what processes it will have to develop.

For example, would the OWF incubate a competitor to oAuth? If not, why not, and how would it make that decision?

If the OWF really can pull off a lightweight approach to IPR management for specifications then this could be a useful initiative, but the relationship with, in particular, the W3C and IETF needs to be explained much more clearly, and the role corporate interests are playing (Google, Yahoo!) in its development made explicit, before we know if the OWF is a good place to work on interoperability issues.

If Atom (or Pie as it used to be called) was being developed now, would it now join OWF, or would it still offer its spec to IETF to become an open standard? What would be the difference?

More coverage over at TechCrunch

Looking for best practices on password recovery

Inevitably, when we discuss “loosely coupled” approaches with educational institutions, the conversation inevitably turns to “security and authentication” issues. But really, often what is meant is “those nasty web 2.0 tools won’t single sign-on to my [monolithic, obscure] campus login system, so what are we to do?”

The last time I was in this conversation, Brian Lamb made the simple but inspired observation that a huge portion of the problems single sign-on “solves” could be more easily handled with just a simple password recovery process, and challenged the educators in the room to think about how easy it was to retrieve a lost password on their current institutionally provisioned systems (any misstatement here is my own, Brian please correct me if I got this wrong). There was widespread murmuring to the effect that he had a point.

But which raised this question - can someone point me to what the best practice is for recovering a password? Asking for username comes with one set of problems, asking for email address another. I’m sure someone’s already looked at this extensively - lazyweb, help me out! - SWL

Beginning of the next memory S-curve?

How about an iPod that holds millions of songs. In fact, why not all of them? Want to replace that hard drive with a solid state one with 1000 times the capacity? Oh, and everything stays nice and stable when the power goes off, for far longer than today's flash memory. Like to guess how far away this is?

Technology development often exhibits an S-Curve pattern; first you get the slow buildup as it takes time to get an idea of the ground, then increasing growth, and finally a slowdown of diminishing returns. Then eventually you hit the start of the next "S" and you're soon back into exponential growth. Sometimes you're lucky enough to spot the next "S" starting, and I think recent developments are pointing to a new "S" in computer memory.

(S-Curve diagram by Laird Close, University of Arizona)

The last few weeks saw three major announcements on the development of memory and solid-state storage.

First of all, IBM Research announced it was close to cracking 'Racetrack' nano-magnetic memory. This proof-of-concept technology would eventually replace flash memory and hard drives, with vastly greater capacity.

Next up, researchers from Daresbury and Glasgow have announced developments that could increase memory capacity even further, to "hundreds of thousands of times more capacity" using innovative nanotechnology (Nature Nanotechnology, 3, 289 - 233 (2008) ).

Finally, HP Labs have added the "memristor" to the basic building blocks of electronics. Memristors are resitstors that store information even after losing power, and do so for longer than conventional flash memory. Whats more, memristors are in principle far simpler and easier to make than flash memory, which could also accelerate the trend towards ubiquitous solid-state memory.

Now, whats our plan for when students start turning up with something the size of today's Google sat in their pocket?

Get. Off. Paper.

The other day I was talking to a school administrator about an upcoming hands-on workshop and she asked if I could e-mail her the schedule to handout the morning of the event. For some strange reason I just said “Nope. No paper.”

After a short silence, she said, “Oh…ok.”

“No, I mean it,” I said. “We’re going to be spending the whole day online; there is no reason to bring paper.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“No paper,” she said, thinking, finally adding “How exciting!”

Now I don’t know that I’ve ever thought of no paper as exciting, necessarily, but I continue to find myself more and more eschewing paper of just about any kind in my life. My newspaper/magazine intake is down to nearly zero, every note I take is stored somewhere in the cloud via my computer or iPhone, I rarely write checks, pay paper bills or even carry cash money any longer, and I swear I could live without a printer except for the times when someone demands a signed copy of something or other. (Admittedly, I still read lots of paper books, but I’m working on that.)

Yet just about everywhere I go where groups of educators are in the room, paper abounds. Notebooks, legal pads, sticky notes, index cards…it’s everywhere. We are, as Alan November so often says, “paper trained,” and the worst part is it shows no signs of abating.

At one planning session I was in a few weeks ago, twenty people were all furiously scribbling down notes on their pads, filling page after page after page. The same notes, 20 times. (I’d love to know where those notes are now.) At the end of the session, I gave everyone a TinyUrl to a wiki page where I had stowed my observations and asked them to come in and add anything I missed. Two people have.

At the end of a presentation a few days ago with a couple of hundred pen and paper note taking attendees (and the odd laptop user sprinkled here and there) I answered a question about “What do we do now?” by saying “Well, first off, it’s a shame that the collective experience of the people in this room is about to walk off in two hundred different directions without any way to share and reflect on the thinking they’ve been doing all day. Next year, no paper.”

I don’t think most were excited.

It all reminds me of the time last year when I got to an event and the person in charge had copied, collated, stapled and distributed six paper pages that she had printed of my link-filled wiki online to 50 or so participants.

“It’s a wiki,” I said. “You can’t click the links on paper!”

“I know,” she replied. “I just need to have paper.”

Um, no. You don’t.

Does anyone think most of the kids in our classes are going to be printing a bunch of paper in their grown up worlds? If you do, fine; keep servicing the Xerox machine. But if you don’t, which I hope is most of you, are you doing as much as you can to get off paper?

(Photo “Magnus Christensson’s notes” by Jacob Botter.)

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