http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000815.html

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

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

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

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

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

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000807.html

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=923465

This is an important new paper by William McGeveran and William Fisher from the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. It's not exactly earth shattering content for people regularly working on the issue of sharing and reusing digital resources for education, but it is fairly comprehensive (from a US perspective at least) and done by lawyers, the type of document that can potentially have some legitimacy with politicians and other decision makers (and yes, I believe in faeries too!) The Mellon Foundation is to be commended for funding it. I loved their case studies, especially the one that has a media prof cracking DRM controls with freely available tools so as to be able to create a clips reel for his class. That would never happen ;-) - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000806.html

CIPO - Patent - 2535407

Thanks to Barry Dahl and his Desire2Blog for pointing out that the Canadian patent office is apparently as uninformed as the US one. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000801.html

Off to the beach until August 8 for 3 weeks holidays (hooray!) See y'all soon, Scott

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000809.html

This is a temporary post that was not deleted. Please delete this manually. (0df3b1e3-63dd-4c12-8efa-834dba1001d8)

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000808.html

http://gong.ust.hk/index.html

During my holidays I received an email from Dr David Rossiter and Gibson Lam from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology inviting me to try out some software they had developed called Gong. I am often hesitant about blogging such invitations and didn't even manage to get around to trying it until today because of the backlog of email etc., from my holiday. But after trying it out I am glad I did.

Free voice recording might not seem like much in the age of Odeo and the like, but this is, to my eye, much more. The Java-based client-server program has been built very much with an eye to teaching languages but looks like it could be useful for anyone wanting to include voice in their online clases. It supports the creation of voice-based message boards and forums, and the client allows users to index their recordings to text, meaning subsequent viewers can see the text 'read' while they hear the message, and jump to specific parts of the message by clicking on that word (for instance on a particularly confusing spelling, as often happens with English). Recorders of messages can also edit the message directly in the client after the fact, easily removing awkward pauses and silences. Additionally, listeners can slow down aqnd speed up the playback of messages on demand.

And if all that isn't enough, it can support synchronous audio chat sessions as well. Did I mention that there is also an existing Moodle module that allows creation of Gong 'boards' directly in Moodle. And that it has an API. Oh, and it's free too (but not 'yet' open source.) Well worth a look for language teachers or for anyone wanting to incorporate voice recording into their online classes for free. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000816.html

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

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

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

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

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000817.html

http://metasolutions.us/resources/moodle/mods/

ocw_metamod.php

So I usually don't "blog on demand" but when Michael Penney emails me stuff it's almost always worth a post, and this time is no exception (and totally by chance it turns out I have the pleasure of sharing the stage with the developers in November). As it says on the site, "OCW MetaMod for Moodle provides instructors and designers with the ability to mark individual resources or activities in a Moodle course as 'shared' (allowing guest viewing) or 'private' (only visible for registered students). Additionally, the MetaMod tags resources and activities as 'C' (copyright) or 'CC' (Creative Commons/Copyright Cleared)." This is a great step forward in enabling easy sharing of resources, allowing instructors to do it right from where the resource has been used.

As Michael wrote "Despite Mr. Small, the beat goes on...:-)" speaking of whom, the next chapter is slowly unfolding. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000812.html

http://www.sakaiproject.org/media2/2006/

altidemo06/altidemo06.htm

If you've ever tried to export a course from an existing CMS in a 'specifications-'compliant format you'll know that currently the best you can likely do is get the content as IMS Content Packages and hopefully the quizzes separately in IMS QTI format. Leaving the rest of the course (discussion forums, assignments, etc) embedded in the original location and needing to be recreated from scratch.

IMS COmmon Cartridge, recently demonstrated in action between Angel, Sakai, Blackboard and WebCT at the Alt-i-lab 2006 sessions, is the attempt to remedy this problem, to create a common standard for full course import and export between CMS and useful to publishers.

Above you can see a short video describing its promise and the effort that went in around it, and you can find out more about it on the IMS Working Group page. It is a worthy problem to solve because IMS CP just doesn't do the full job. Let's hope some lessons have been learned over the subsequent years since its advent and the support for Common Cartridge is more, let's say, even, than it has been for IMS CP. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000811.html

http://www.jorum.ac.uk/docs/pdf/

automated_metadata_report.pdf

If you don't have the pleasure of being a metadata geek in your day job then, move along folks, nothing to see here.

For the 9 and 3/4 people still reading this post, this report from Jorum is worth a read, though not the magic bullet you'd hoped for from the title. The report mainly looks at Jorum's own practices in regards to automating metadata collection for learning resources (sensible enough too, mostly all ones we practice in SOL*R) and near the end surveys 5 other systems out there to consider what lessons are to be learned. Another that could have been included here as potentially useful is Yahoo's Term Extraction Service, but as is the case of the others they look at, it holds no magic solution.

The report ends with a list of recommendations for the Jorum service, all of which seem very sensible as an approach to incremental improvements. I wish I could say more, but I am in such the same boat that I won't. Suffice to say the 'Survivors of LOR' support group is meeting at my house on Wednesday, new members always welcome. And bring beer, it's that kind of support group. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000813.html

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

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

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000802.html

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.ctt.bc.ca/landonline/

I am officially still on holidays until next Tuesday but made the mistake of checking my email (I have managed to abstain from my bloglines account though!) and through a mailing list I subscribe to saw a post on the nastiness that is Blackboard's patent application. If you can beat them, sue them, eh?

The ensuing effort to create a history of LMS/VLEs through Wikipedia is great and to be applauded. When I saw the posts about Blackboard's patent I immediately thought of our Edutools site, actually its predecessor, Landonline, developed by my colleague Dr. Bruce Landon and hosted by my former employers, the now defunct Centre for Curriculum, Transfer and Technology (C2T2).

Bruce originally created that site in 1996 (pre-Blackboard, in fact the early version was pre-WebCT as well.) I checked the Internet Archives, and while they don't have a copy from 1996, they do have ones from 1997, 1998 and 1999. If you have a look at the copies on the Wayback machine. The copies on the Wayback machine aren't pretty (lots of broken images) but you can see, for instance in this comparison from 1998, that Blackboard (here called Courseinfo) and WebCT show up in this apples to apples comparison with 4 other systems at the time.

It's not like Landonline/Edutools is the only example you can point to that was comparing Blackboard and WebCT to competing offerings - Marshall University's Center for Instructional Technology's comparison of LMS/CMS tools from 1999 is still available online, as is Virginia Tech's from 1998. What I do think is significant, however, is that at Edutools we can actually show a continuous development of the feature set that we use to compare these products from 1996 until our current one - certainly with changes and modifications over time, but it has been a relatively consistent point of comparison for almost 10 years now.

I am not a lwayer and don't play one on TV, and I am sure there is enough weasily language included in the patent that Blackboard will have some success using it to bludgeon competitors and customers alike. But if the creation of this behemoth didn't light a fire under your ass to do something different, maybe consider this a second opportunity to change course. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000821.html

http://www.notemesh.com/?a=home

Along the same lines as stud.icio.us, which I wrote about last month, NoteMesh is driven by students and creates wikispaces for an entire class to take notes in. I actually much prefer the stu.dicio.us model, in which each student is taking their own notes but the class 'tags' create a collective note space, over this one, where instead students collaborate on one set of notes for the entire class. If I'm understanding correctly, this is partly the distinction Stephen was getting at in his recent whiteboard drawing. Still, encouraging to see the being aimed directly at the student taking control over their own knowledge creation processes rather than having to be always mediated through instituional infrastructure. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000820.html

http://www.ithaka.org/strategic-services/oss

This extensive paper funded by the Mellon and Hewlitt foundations (amongst others) is an important read. It looks at the adoption of open source in higher education (in the US) and the need for an organizing body that could address "uncertainty about future support for and improvements in the software" and supply coordination to prevent "wasteful duplication both of development efforts and of governance structures." Sounds sensible enough, right?

The case made here for adoption of open source in higher ed seems strong and unassailable, and the scope is not just 'educational' software like LMS but all aspects of higher ed infrastructure, things like SIS, Library OPACs and Financial Aid systems.

Here's where my wordy wrestling with the issues would usually go. Too busy. Suffice to say - the issue of 'freedom' is as tantamount here as it's been recently noted elsewhwere, and while my first reaction is to bristle against some of the seemingly artificial constructs these organizations would engender, those might be small concessions compared to the freedoms from commercial licensing fees, patents and the like that I think honestly motivate initiatives like this. - SWL

Note: The original reference was from Lorcan Dempsey's always insightful blog. Read his original post for a much better synopsis and questions about the report.

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000819.html

http://www.campus2020.ca/EN/411/

It's pretty easy as a Canadian to become jaded about the various reports, commisions and inquiries that our various levels of government sponsor. We've had no end of profound studies and reports that seemed to accurately identify both the ills and possible solutions on things like Aboriginal Self-Government or the Concentration of Media Ownership and yet years later see no real improvement on these matters (and yes, to be fair, those are both Federal examples).

So you'll be excused if you look on this exercise sponsored by the B.C. government to help "shape the vision, mission, goals and objectives of B.C.’s post-secondary system for the next 10 to 20 years" with some skepticism. I know it's my first inclination.

And yet I am encouraged in reading some of the first things to come out of the initiative, the Think Pieces on topics like "E-Learning and Beyond" and the truncation found in our institutional landscapes between types of knowing.

The e-learning piece is the one I paid closest attention to so far, and it at least hits all the right notes, urging a move towards 'elearning 2.0,' which they characterize as having an "architecture of participation." I'm sure someone will find fault with this paper, but it seems to me that if we don't move in that direction as a provincial system, it won't be because a picture of what could be wasn't painted, by people officially asked to do so. They even go further than I think many 'think pieces' would in offering a set of 'internal review questions' in Appendix 2 for educators and administrators to use examine their current technology implementation and adoption practices. It's a good read. Let's hope we can all make the follow on a reality. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000814.html

http://www.educateinnovate.com/

OK, so at least they did post something back on August 7 about the patent (a staff member posting a letter on behalf of Michael Chasen, the CEO), but otherwise, the Blackboard "blog" has been thunderously silent given the amount of hoopla in the blogosphere over the last month directly concerning them.

Not really surprising, but also not what I'd call an "authentic" engagement with the concerns of their readers/customers. (And my reaction to the notes from their conference call with ALT in the UK is the same as Stephen's - apparently I've found another use for our stockpiled baby wipes now that our kids are out of diapers).

I did say that I was reserving judgement on the BB 'blog' until there was more to judge. Looks like the evidence is in, though, and on the charge of "falsely impersonating a blog" the evidence is based on the omissions as much as what is there. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000805.html

http://stu.dicio.us/

Thought I've been away I did try to catch up in Bloglines the last 2 days and I didn't see this making the rounds so hopefully of interest - stu.dicio.us, while still in beta, is an incredibly simple student-focused tool that currently supports note taking and scheduling, with file storage and self grade-tracking coming soon. There are three things about it that are really beautiful:

- it is REALLY simple, and yet quite useful. Try the note creation facility; it's a very nice web-based outliner that uses keyboard commands (more below)

- all class notes are shared (you have to agree to this to use the system). So not only does this create an ecology of class notes for individual classes (with basic 'tagging' principles in play as to how to identify a class, no heavyweight SIS-integration here) but by searching on certain terms you may find class notes from other classes, even from other institutions, around specific keywords (which does raise quality issues, but one assumes the developers could bring practices from other social softwares to bear here).

- based on the amazingly simple interface, I assume (though I couldn't find such an announcement on their site) that a prime target for the app will be cell phones/PDAs and other mobile devices.

So... a web-based, mobile-accessible site for students to store THEIR notes/information about THEIR studies, which simultaneously gives them access to other students' notes as well. So cool. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000804.html

http://www.kineo.co.uk/ideas/

future-of-e-learning-in-universities.html

http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm06/erm0648.asp

At some point in the fall I have to dust off my crystal ball for a presentation on 'the future of LMS' (yikes!) so I've been keeping my eye on various 'Future of...' presentations of late, and recently came across these two.

The first, a report by Kineo and Intel, promises to be on the "Future of E-learning in Universities." While it looked promising, I found it ultimately pretty disappointing; fairly safe predictions on a very near future in which universities plod down the same CMS/VLE path of elearning with a little wireless thrown in for good measure. It's likely pretty accurate in the 2-3 year range, but uninspiring at best.

More interesting to me is the piece by Morton Egol in the latest Educause Review titled "The Future of Higher Education." While comparing these two articles is maybe a bit of apples-to-oranges, the vision he presents of "Community Learning Centres" is for me a far more interesting one to contemplate and seems to fit much better with some of the dissatisfactions with current models that I regularly hear grumbled in the edublogosphere. Undoubtedly many will be troubled with the vision of corporate entities entering the formerly public space of education, but (at least in the US and perhaps elsewhere) this burgeoning reality does need to be engaged with, as does the notion that K-12 represents a competitive threat to higher education. What!?! The argument goes that in the new model, "that with self-paced learning, thirteen years (K-12), including internships, provide ample learning to qualify for entry-level positions." If it seems unlikely, maybe contemplate the phenomenom of kids jumping from high school directly into professional athletics, which 25 years ago was unheard of. I heard a similar notion almost 10 years ago by the president of Mount Royal College who described the greatest threat to the College as not the neighboring colleges and universities but large corporate entities and commercial certification bodies that would take students direclty from high school and train them in the workforce.

Which brings me finally to the prognostication which I've recently enjoyed most, John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid's Social Life of Information which I revisted over my holiday. I wanted to go back to the final chapter on 'Re-Education' (an earlier version of which can be found on the web in this paper titled 'Universities in the Digital Age.') While the book is now 6 years old, I think much of it holds up well, and the message (summed up by one reviewer as "it's the people, stupid"), especially in the education chapter, challenges the predominant "informational" picture of learning with a social one, tries to preserve the positive aspects of the university while asking what new forms 'degree granting bodies' could take, and I think also resonates really well with many of the dissatisfactions with the status quo apparent in the edublogosphere.

The caveats at the end of the chapter are well worth noting - it is entirely possible that higher ed institutions will prove to have more staying power than any of us could predict and survive the current digital revolution largely intact. But somehow this seems unlikely. For a while I've been carrying around the question of "what would a post-secondary institution that took seriously the disruptions poised by social software and emerging visions of learning (and the mass amaturization of everything) look like?" But after re-reading this book I'm wondering if I've framed that wrong; maybe the question is "how can we preserve the positive aspects of how higher education currently creates and shares knowledge while designing learning technologies that compliment, improve and expand that social formation?" - SWL