A BIG issue in education is the need to interconnect the various data systems used so data can be shared and easily flow within institutions and between them. A large part of that is student record systems and the many statutary returns processes that have to be performed. All the little silos we currently have are making life very difficult and will be a barrier to any lofty ideas for personal portfolios. Open standards with Open Source implementations and reference models will be a viatal part of the solution but so far have not arrived.

I work in a FE College and in addition to our Student Records System (UNIT-e) our MIS Intranet connects to Finance (Aggresso), register scanning (Tokairo) Work force development (WinPics), WestNotts initial assessment, ID card system, the library system, authentication via LDAP etc. etc.. In addition we need to do various statutory returns such as the main LSC ILR for funding and Student Loans for HE courses, plus the odd adhoc imports/exports. All of these these require bespoke integration which are pretty fragile. Currently much of the work is performed using MS SQLServer's DTS to run various SQL processes on the DBs, mostly to pull and warehouse data (don't get me started on how useless a GUI only interface is in managing such complex processes).

We had a brief fling with a regional level sharing project, Shell (based I think on ioNode). It petered out when funding dried up and was to our minds too technology driven, very poorly presented and documented, not to mention having fatal 'schema' problems.

schoolforge.org.uk have been discussing open solutions to integration  for some time on the MIAS mailing list initally for SIMS but more recently with a focus on more general MIS and adminstration system integration. The thoughts are largely based on the existing US SIF system which Becta are now looking at (with a possibility of a UK fork of the European fork). The problems seen with SIF are that it has been created largely by a top down comittee process, is rooted in promoting the proprietary vendor status quo and although it is an 'Open' community and spec it is very expensive to join. However the spec is the result of much technical analysis design and thus provides a reasonable starting point. Larry Fruth is claiming SIF 2.0 has seen a change in process and SIFA is now open in approach.

Apart from banter on the MIAS list FOSS current activity is centred around OpenZIS a FOSS implementation of the Zone Integration Server (ZIS), the central hub of a SIF system. TinyZIS will be an ultra lite ZIS that aims to get something minimal going (in the FOSS/Agile tradition) based on SIF. Tom Hoffman started TinyZIS as he sees the need becoming critical, not least as the SchoolTool project he leads will need to interoperate easily with open educational tools such as moodle and elgg. I agree completely.

The SIF is a solution that uses a message queueing hub with satellite agents that connect programs and transfor their data. Another possible approach is using web service instances. The e-Framework project aims to improve interoperability by specifying a frameowkr ofr web service categorisation and specification. It may thus have an important part to play. The symantic web offers a web based way to relate data from different sources. Web 2.0 technologies, especially RSS and FOAF are providing easy interoperability standards that works and is being used.

A project with an even larger scope is OpenEDS which aims at 'providing open information of all kinds on Educational Data Systems in the K-12 Sector' and aims to actively improve integration starting with getting a community resource going. Perhaps JISC and/or Becta could work with this idea though I expect global standards will be hard to promote.

Whatever the solution it must be possible to interconnect with other systems. This includes a school techys wanting to using a little PHP scripting to create a quick web page report, through to commercial vendors needing to fully intergrate their complex products.

Stephen Downes comments on Tom's Post agreeing with the need for a TinyZIS and also making the good point that we want connectivity not integration.

Scott Wilson, assistant director at cetis has touched on much of this on his work blog.

 

Simply excellent presentation - from Michael Webb, IT and Media Services Head, University of Wales, Newport.

Web 2.0 technologies are changing the way our staff and students (potential, current and past) relate to one another and our Universities. Embracing these technologies provides a great opportunity to enhance the University experience, but also presents a number of risks and challenges.

More from IWMW 2006 on Scott's work blog 

Coming of Age: An introduction to the NEW world wide web is doing really well with approaching 3000 downloads. It's a free booklet of articles by practioners in education encouraging the use of WEb 2.0 social software. The concept, organisation and editing is by Terry Freedman.

Martin Littler MD of Inclusive Technology posted this paper on Every Child Matters in response to the disappearance of Special Needs from the e-learning agenda Becta have disbanded their SEN Team.

Martin suggests work researching Learning Platforms for children with Severe and Complex SEN which is an excellent idea, especially if it also allows all students to interact equally.

www.OATSsoft.org could easily act as the focus for such a project and general AT provision. It can play a part in bringing users and developers together on such a project and also disseminating knowledge gained and artifacts created to other projects. It can help by facilitating both technical innovation and an active community of users and developers. Open Source and Web 2.0 social software both offer the means to allow people with disabilities to be involved as equals. Admittedly AT is only part of the issue and is of less benefit at present to some groups but by ensuring we have good AT tools that are available for use in education e-Learning may be made more inclusive.

Moodle is Open Source and is a very popular VLE with educationalists, having good pedagogical underpinnings so is ideally placed to be the foundation for such a platform. As a popular VLE it would be inclusive as all students could interact through it. Obviously a fuller analysis would be required and there are a few obvious architectureal questions but a Moodle based prototype would be great for research and user testing. Developing AT tools that work with web services is needed now anyway and could be a useful spin off. Adding Elgg's social 'Personal Learning Landscape' web 2.0 features will be of interest too. 

Ironically the Ace Centre who are the leaders of the consortium that developed www.OATSsoft.org will be hard hit by the funding cuts and will have to curtial much of their software development activity. This is particularly serious as the Ace Centre are a highly experienced assessment service with a focus on children's educational needs and thus are perfectly placed to understand what features are needed in Assistive Technology software. I expect ACE are perfectly placed to manage such a project and perhaps it would get some funding their way again.

There's no substitute for commitment and leadership from Becta who advise the DfES on ICT use but open source social practices can help at a grass roots level. I guess as with getting fair treatment for Open Source in education BECTa need to be lobbied long and hard.

Did anyone review the Becta specifications Learning platform functional requirements and Learning platform technical specifications from a SEN perspective? Phil Driscoll, Miles Berry and others at Moodle and Schoolforge did so from a Moodle/FOSS perspective.

Or is anyone lookingat them now as:

"Both the learning platform functional requirements and technical specifications will be subject to regular review and update, as requirements, technologies and specifications develop and change.

Although supposedly open for review many include Miles Berry and Martin Littler feel that Becta have made little effort to ask schools, teachers and pupils what they want from a learning platform. 

Martin says: 

"Needless to say the Assistive Technology industry was not involved in the Learning Platform consultation at all and nobody at the DfES or Becta (I’ve asked them) has any notion of what benefits a Learning Platform can offer a learner with Severe and Complex SEN – even though all learners must have them by March 2008. Every child matters?"

 Becta need address this.

Here's some further thoughts on Martin Littler's ideas for Learning Platforms for learners with Severe and Complex SEN as described in my earlier post.

This is obviously more than just ensuring LPs are accessible and are fully supported by Assistive Technology and Accessibility tools, though that is an important part of the requirements.

In his Every Child Matters? paper Martin suggests: 

They could, for the first time ever choose and load the resources they use. The complex set-ups they each need (e.g: post acceptance switch delay or font size and colour) could be communicated to each programme to so the teacher or speech therapists expertise would follow them, through the ether, when they used the same resources at home. The most used aspect of LPs, the calendar, plays a huge part in the lives of many learners with SEN from CP to Autism as they plan their day and think ahead.

This seemsto boil down to having user centred personalisation of the user interface that roams with the user and providing tools that are learner needs focussed and of use outside the class room. 

In the case of a heterogenus collection of applications making a LP that is quite a tall order but will be mitigated by Open Standards for accessibility interfaces and operating system support. An approach like to have more immediate success would be to concentrate on adding features to one system, 'start small' especially as an large element of research and exploration is needed. One part of such a Learning platform could be a standard interface for other tools to hook into to exchange AT information and communicate application state and user preferences. Asa vital parto of all LP perhaps a VLE could provide that service, though on fist thoughts it should be seperate.

SchoolTools Calendar may be useful as a calender in this case. It has many compex features for shared calendars but may be lacking in simplicity need for users planning their day.

I would like to see a Learning platform that  is an exemplar in this area and leads the way. My current thinking is that it will be best done as a Open Source community project and that leads to something based on Moodle. Should it be part of the main Moodle project or a seperate project? It could even be a temporary fork.

As mentioned before the new www.oatsoft.org  is perfectly place to act as a centre for this including input from researchers, users, volunterrs and other projects.

As usually any features added for 'accessibility' will actually improve the utility and usablility for all users.

A number of project ideas have been proposed to help improve provision for both users and developers. These are in addition to project/desktop/distro specific accessibility activities and are collated from:

www.oatsoft.org - a community bringing users, develeopers and others together. Program search and download, discussion and project hosting.

www.schoolforge.org.uk - a community promoting open source and open resources in education.

SEN learning platform - LP designed for students with severe and profound SEN, perhaps Moodle, elgg and LAMS based.

Switch Controlled Paint/Draw program

Using Mozilla technologies as a AT platform

Ensuring AT tools work with Terminal Services - standard interfaces, also Web clients

Standard component for adding switch scannning (idea from ACE south)

Using Google Maps mashups etc.

Web 2.0 - using social software for inclusion and giving voice.

I recently read futurelabs discussion paper 'Social software and learning' from their Opening Education series. That lead me to an interesting, if sometimes obscure, paper by Alan Kay on the Early History of Smalltalk. Since reading various Byte magazine articles on smalltalk in the 80's I've long admired Kay's ideas and his work with Adele Goldberg and many others that had an early influence on modern computing and education. Smalltalk crystalised many concepts of Object Oriented programming (it is pure OO) and Alan's Dynabook concept for computing device for 'giving children unlimited expression opportunities with all digital media imaginable' and other early seminary work at Xerox PARC has influenced most of modern computer interaction thru GUI 1st realised in the the Alto in 1972.

... one would computer with a handheld "Dynabook" in a way that would not be possible on a shared mainframe; millions of potential users meant that the user interface would have to become a learning environment along the lines of Montessori and Bruner; and needs for large scope, reduction in complexity, and end-user literacy would require that data and control structures be done away with in favor of a more biological scheme of protected universal cells interacting only through messages that could mimic any desired behavior."

His work continues at Squeakland which provides the wonderful e-toy plugin for educational fun based on the open source squeak version of Smalltalk. Smalltalk is a serious tool with many developers and not just a computer science or educational tool. For example Tim Anderson, R&D manger of the Drake Music Project used smalltalk to create the unique E-Scape music performance system for musicians with disabilities.

Many of Kay's ideas built on those of Jerome Bruner, Marvin Minsky, Seymour Papert and Jean Piaget. These influentual technologists and psychologists wanted in the 60/70s to revolutionise learning, dragging it into the 20th century. At one point in the 80's Papert's Logo Turtles seemed to be in every schoolbut perhaps where only used at a quite superficial level. That level of interest in learning ideas using technoloogy seems to have largely faded, with more isolated exceptions such as of Futurelabs explorations using mobiles and games, Tim Rylands' use of the Myst computer games, and Miles Berry's uses of moodle and elgg.

I heard the ideas of Piaget and Papert for the first time. Marvin's talk was about how we think about complex situations and why schools are really bad places to learn these skills. He didn't have to make any claims about computer+kids to make his point. It was clear that education and learning had to be rethought in the light of 20th century cognitive psychology and how good thinkers really think. Computing enters as a new representation system with new and useful metaphors for dealing with complexity, especially of system

I'm wondering if these many ideas which are now bearing fruit in the application of some of Papert's constructivist ideas in Moodle and Elgg are also behind the Social Software and Web 2.0 revolution? If so then it is perhaps more ad hoc and grass roots than those thinkers expected. Has Kay's Dynabook concept developed to embrace the web as platform? Her certainly conceived it as both locally powerful and networked for sharing. The popularity of services such as MySpace indicates children are fully technology confident and the explosion in Ajax based web applications means the need for raw processing power and storage are removed. Web based Open Standards are helping to build new applications based on others and knowledge based on other. Web services show some indications of being object-like (interface and implementation) and Kay wrote about pervaisive networks allowing agent object that do perform work on behalf of their managers.

Nicloas Negroponte is a friend and college of Kay's and his recent Linux based One Laptop per Child initiative, while not exactly a Dynabook has some common features and meats some of the ideas. papert is also part of the team behind OLPC.

One thing that occurs though is that Papert's constructionist LOGO ideas revolved round the Logo turtle which acts as a physical focus for social interaction. That seems to be missing from current activity. Working together as social activity might be improved by sharing a PC (rather like XP pair programming)?

I recently re-read Papert's Mindstorms, the classic book that introduced Logo and the ideas it made concrete. Paperts ideas on Learning Society in Chapter 8 are particulay interesting and germane, particulary his description of how Samba Schools operate as 'communities of practice'.

I love the Salsa Schools as described by Papert as a social learning Society fcoused on a shared goal and sharing technical and artistic skills.  It would be excellent to develop something along those lines to create an environment that encourages all including girls, elderly and people with disabilities to develop ICT learning skills together. Perhaps something could be developed for Futurelabs funding?

Papert also says

Powerful new social forms must have their roots in the culture, not be the creatures of bureaucrats.

That seems to be the way Moodle and elgg are gaining ground and reminds me of the past activities of the large European Telco bureaucracy trying to specify communications standards, with a focus on maximising their revenue streams. Meanwhile a social group of engineers in the States just got TCP/IP working at grass roots, and, the rest, as they say, is history.

I mean this in the most general of terms, but it does seem that a revolution is happening from below. Whether it promotes deep thinking or just quoting and commenting remains to be seen.

Here's a neat idea for blogging product feedback from bloglines,

Users blog 'freedback <product>' and the product teams subscribe to a bloglines search (which search rss too).

so...... I say freedback bloglines - neat idea.

A nice social software idea if it catches on like searching for '<product> sucks', and more positive too.