Category: Open Education

Teaching Round the Issues on WriteToReply

No time for blogging properly at the mo – too much crappy crap “work” crappy crap to do – but looking through some recent comments on WriteToReply just now, I saw this one:

a trackback from a blog post – Money Programme – Media Revolution: Tomorrow’s TV – that reviews a recent episode of the Money Programme that “explains the importance of the formula in raising money and the reduced role of direct TV production funding as a proportion of costs”, an issue that is also touched upon in Digital Britain – The Interim Report.

The post links to the actual programme, which you can view (at the moment) on iPlayer: Money Programme – Media_Revolution: Tomorrows TV (on iPlayer)

(I’m not sure if this one is an OU co-pro, too?)

This put me in mind of Trackforward – Following the Consequences with N’th Order Trackbacks and Trackbacks, Tweetbacks and the Conversation Graph, Part I where I’d started thinking about the “link context” around web content.

So I’m wondering – would it make sense to have someone doing some “gardening” around the report, looking to see if there is content – such as the Money Programme episode referred to above – that could be linked to and used to help people make sense of the issues raised by things like the Digital Britain report, or “educate them” in the issues, even?!

That is, as well as using WriteToReply as a place where people can comment back on reports, could we also find ways of using it as a resource that helps people learn about the issues raised by the report, whether or not they want to comment back?

MindMap Navigation for Online Courses

We’re now a couple of weeks in to a new course (T151) and whilst I’m wary of posting too much about it just at the moment, there a some spinoff thoughts I do want to capture here.

The course is, in part, based on a model of weekly Topic Explorations, where I pose four or five questions and then provide a list of resources for the students to explore, as guided by the questions. An 800 word or so piece then captures some of my observations about the topic.

The structure was informed by a model my colleague John Naughton had used on a different course, and also resembles that of David Wiley’s Blogs, Wikis and New Media course.

One of the questions that came up in a course forum a day or two ago was the course legacy, in terms of access to course materials. The resources I link to from each topic exploration are all web based resources, although some of them are authentication required subscription journal articles, with access provided via the OU Library libezproxy service (the links are also constructed around DOIs, wherever possible).

As part of the Week 0 activities for the course, I provided a quick overview of social bookmarking services, suggesting that students could bookmark those resources that were useful to them, with the advantage that these resource links would still be available once the course had finished and access to the course materials on the VLE withdrawn. (Why we can’t provide a Moodle export version of the materials for students to put in their own Moodle installation at the end of a course, I don’t know? Eg I think NineHub lets you import Moodle courses into their 1-click setup hosted Moodle installations?)

One idea I did entertain was just bookmarking and tagging all the resources so that they could be pulled into the course automatically via an appropriate feed, or alternatively pulled by students into their own space, wherever that might be. The feed powered approach would also make a WiggLE possible ;-)

That’s still possibly on the cards, but instead I began considering another possiblity: delivering the course via an interactive mindmap.

One of the advantages that this offers, also picked up in a forum post, is that it addresses the issue of how and where to take notes: you can take them on the Mindmap. That is, the Mindmap becomes a navigation surface, and a note taking service.

So for example, here’s a fragment of David Wiley’s course, mindmap style (created using Freemind) showing in particular the first week’s resources (see the orginal course material here):

The red arrows identify links – click on a link and the corresponding page will open in a web browser. The course can be viewed and navigated in a far more powerful way than a hierarchical website, becuase mulriple nodes at diffferent levels, and mutliple leaves of the tree can be viewed (or collapsed) at once. The mindmap tool also allows the user to rearrange the spatial layout to suit their own needs. And of course, if they are viewing the mindmap in an interactive mindmap editor, they can add notes as subnodes to any of the resources.

Over the next few days, I think I’ll do T151 in mindmap form, and maybe offer it up as a resource. After all, the course is going out in pilot form, so it’d be foolish not to… ;-)

Appropriating Technology

Watching Scott Leslie’s The Open Educator as DJ – Towards a Practice of Remix keynote from TTIX 2009, I tweeted*:

[* Note that I was watching a recording, but it would have been useful to be able to participate (at least in an asymmetric way (asymmetric participation?!) in the tweet stream by watching replayed tweets from the actual presentation (or other people’s recorded viewing ‘as live’ tweets). I’ve pondered this before, e.g. in the sense of Twitter subtitles or anytime commenting (will Wave be able to do that, I wonder?!;-)]

Anyway – back to the tweet, and on second thoughts I wonder whether appropriating technology might actually be a better phrase to riff on, in at least two senses:

Firstly, in the sense of us appropriating technologies that might have been designed for other purposes in order to use them in an educational context.

Secondly, in the sense of using appropriating technologies to sample, sequence and deliver education related performances, in the way Scott demonstrates as part of his ‘Educator as DJ’ workflow.

Open University Podcasts on Your TV – Boxee App

Over the weekend, a submission went in from The Open University (in particular, from Liam GreenHughes (dev) and some of the OU Comms team Dave Winter in Online Services (design)), to the Boxee application competition (UK’s Open University on boxee).

For those of you who haven’t com across Boxee, it’s an easy to use video on demand aggregator that turns your computer into a video appliance and lets you watch video content from a wide range of providers (including BBC iPlayer) on your TV. Liam’s been evangelising it for some time, as well as exploring how to get OU Podcasts into it via RSS’n’OPML feeds (An OU Podcast RSS feed for Boxee).

(For those of you who prefer to just stick with the Beeb, then the BBC iPlayer big screen version provides an interface optimised for use on your telly.)

As well as channeling online video services, and allowing users to wire in their own video and audio content via a feed feed, Boxee also provides a plugin architecture for adding additional services to your Boxee setup. The recent Boxee competition promoted this facility by encouraging developers to create new applications for it.

So what does the OU Podcasts Boxee app over and above a simple subscription to an OU podcasts feed?

A pleasing, branded experience, that’s what.

So for example, on installing the OU podcasts app (available from the Boxee App Box), an icon for it is added to your Internet Services applications.

Launching the application takes you to an OU podcasts browser that is organised along similar lines to the OU’s Youtube presence, that is, in terms of OU Learn, OU Research and OU Life content. The Featured content area also provides a mechanism for pushing editorially selected content to higher prominence. (Should this be the left-most, default option, I wonder, rather than the OU Learn channel?)

In the Research area, a single level of navigation exists, listing the various episodes available:

OU Boxee app

Th more comprehensive Learn area organises content into topic basic based themes/episode collections (listed in the right hand panel) with the episodes associated with a particular selected theme or collection displayed in the left hand panel. Selecting an episode in the left hand panel then reveals its description in the right hand panel (as in the screenshot above).

So for example, when we go to the OU Learn area, the Arts and Humanities episodes are listed in the left hand area (by default), and available collections in the right.

We can scroll down the collections and select one, Engineering for example:

Episodes in this collection are listed in the left hand panel, and further subcollections in the right hand panel (it all seems a little confusing to describe, but it actually seems to work okay… maybe?!;-)

Highlighting an actual episode then displays a description of it.

Selecting a program to play pops up a confirmation “play this” overlay, along with a link to further information for the episode:

Both audio and video content can be channeled to the service – selecting a video programme provides a full screen view of the episode, whilst audio is played within a player

The “Read More” option provides a description of the episode, as well as social rating and recommendation options:

Finally, a search tool allows for content to be discovered using user selected search terms,

If you search with an OU course code, and there is video on the OU podcasts site from the course, the search may turn that course related video up…

This wouldn’t be a OUseful post if I didn’t add my own 2p’s worth, of course, so what else would I have liked to have seen in this app. One thing that comes to mind is a seven day catch-up of OU co-pro content that has been broadcast on the BBC (or more generally, the ability to watch all OU co-pro content that is currntly available on the BBC iPlayer). I developed a proof-of-concept demonstrator of how such a service might work on the web, or for the iPhone/iPod Touch (iPhone 7 Day OU Programme CatchUp, via BBC iPlayer), so under the assumption that the Boxee API can provide the hooks you need to be able to play iPlayer content, I’d guess adding this sort of functionality shouldn’t take Liam much more than half-an-hour?!;-)

I also wonder if the application can be used to preserve local state in the form of personalisation information? For example, could a user create their own saved searches – and by default their own topic themed channels? Items in such a feed could also be nominally tagged with that search term back on a central server, if, for example, if a user watched an episode that had been retrieved using a particular search term all the way through?

To vote for the OU Boxee app, please go to: vote for your favorite apps, RSVP for the boxee event in SF.

PS the OU Podcasts app is not the only education related submission to the competition. There’s also OpenCourseWare on boxee, which porvides a single point of entry to several video collections from some of the major US OCW projects.

PPS it also turns out that KMi have a developer who’s currently working on a range of mobile apps for the iPhone/iPod Touch, Android phones and so on. If any OU readers have ideas for compelling OU related mobile apps, you just may get lucky in getting it built, so post the idea as a comment to this post, or contact, err, erm, @stuartbrown, maybe?

PPPS Now I’m not sure how much time was spent on the app, but as the competition was only launched on May 5th, with a closing date of June 14th, it can’t have been that long, putting things like even the JISC Rapid Innovation (JISCRI) process to shame…?!;-)

Single Page RSS Feeds – So What? So this…

Having posted about Single Item RSS Feeds on WordPress blogs: RSS For the Content of This Page, it struck me that whilst this facility might be of interest to a very, very select few, most people would probably have the response: so what?

To answer that question, it might help if I let you into a little secret: I’m not really that into content, open educational or otherwise. What I am interested in is how content can flow around the web, and how it can be re-presented in different ways and different places around the web by different people, all pulling on the same source.

So if we consider single page RSS feeds, what this means is that I can re-present the content of any of my WordPress blogged posts anywhere that accepts RSS. So for example, I could view just that post as a Wordle generated word cloud, or subscribe to the RSS version of single blog post on a Netvibes page (maybe along with other related posts):

and view the post in that location:

(At the moment not many other platforms appear to offer single page RSS feeds. I was hopeful that the Guardian might, because they have quite a well developed feed platform, but I couldn’t find a way to grab a single page feed trivially from a page URI:-(

To see why that might be useful, you need to know another of my little secrets. I don’t really think of RSS feeds being used to transport new content, such as the latest posts from the many blogs I still subscribe to. For sure, they can be used for that purpose, and a great many RSS readers are set up to accommodate that sort of use (only showing you feed items you haven’t already read, for example), but that is a special case. The more general case is simply that feeds are used to transport content that has quite a simple structure around the web. And this content might be fixed, static, immutable. That is, the content of the feed might never change once the feed has been created, as in the case of OpenLearn course unit full content RSS feeds.

AS AN ASIDE… I generally think of RSS feeds as providing a way of transporting simple content “items” around where each item has a quite simple structure:

If you think of a blog post or news article as an item, the title is hopefully obvious (the title of the post/article), the description is the content “body” of the item (e.g. the text content of the news article) and the link is the URL of where that post or article can be found on the web. The other elements are optional: what I refer to as annotations correspond to things like latitude and longitude co-ordinates that can be used add geographical information to the item so that it can b plotted on a map for example; and what I term a payload would be something like an audio file that gets delivered when you subscribe to an RSS podcast feed from somewhere like iTunes or IT Conversations.

Once you start viewing RSS feeds as a general transport mechanism, then you start to see the world in a slightly different way… So for example: the a href=”https://ouseful.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/single-item-rss-feeds-on-wordpress-blogs-rss-for-the-content-of-this-page/”>Single Item RSS Feeds post reveals how to create single item RSS feeds from the URL of a blog post hosted on WordPress. Now if I bookmark a series of WordPress hosted blog posts to somewhere like the delicious.com social bookmarking site, and tag them all in the same way, I can get an RSS feed out that contains a list of posts that can be obtained in XML form (that is, as single item RSS feeds).

Hmmm….

So maybe if I find a series of posts from WordPress blogs all over the world on a particular topic, I can create my own custom RSS feed of those posts that I can use as the basis of a reading list, for example, or to feed a Netvibes page on a particular topic, or even to feed an RSS2PDF service*?

* these needn’t be really horrible and divisive… For example, the Feedjournal service will take in an RSS feed and produce a rather nice looking newspaper version of your feed… ;-)

Now it just so happens, I’ve prepared one of these earlier. In particular, I’ve posted a small collection of blog posts on the topic of WordPress from a variety of (WordPress) blogs at http://delicious.com/psychemedia/singlefeeddemo:

You’ll notice that I can get an RSS feed of this list out too: from http://delicious.com/rss/psychemedia/singlefeeddemo in fact.

Now the links I’ve bookmarked are links to the original HTML page version of each blog post; but all it takes is the simple matter of rewriting those URLs by adding ?feed=rss2&withoutcomments=1 on to the end of them to get the RSS version of each post.

Hmm… Yahoo Pipes, where are you? Let’s just pull in the RSS feed of those WordPress hosted blog post bookmarks, and rewrite the URLs to their single item RSS feed equivalent:

Now we can loop through each of those items, and replace it with the actual content of those single item RSS feeds:

The output of the pipe is then a real RSS feed that contains items that correspond to the content of WordPress blog posts that I have bookmarked on delicious.

Now just think about this for a moment: most RSS feeds are transitory – the content that appears in the feed on a blog post is a reverse chronological list of the 10 or 20 most recent items on the blog (or in a particular category on a particular blog). The feed we are pulling in to this pipe may be fixed (e.g. if we create a list of bookmarks tagged in a particular way, and then don’t tag any more bookmarks in that way) and used to create a very specific a list of blog posts from all over the web. By rewriting the URLs to get the RSS version of each bookmarked post, we can create our own full RSS feed of those list items. (Actually, that isn’t quite true – if the blog is configured to only emit partial RSS feeds, we’ll only get a partial version of a post, typically the first sentence or two.)

(Pipes’ homepages only show preview versions of a feed description, even if the full description is available.)

Just to recap, here’s the whole pipe:

We take in a list of bookmarked URLs that correspond to bookmarked WordPress blog posts, and generate the single item RSS feed URL for each post. We then use these URLs to pull in the content for each post, and this create out own, full content custom RSS feed. The pipe itself emits RSS, so w can take the RSS feed from the pipe and feed it into any service that consumes RSS, such as Feedjournal:

Alternatively, I could subscribe to the pipe’s output feed in somewhere like Netvibes (or even a VLE) and then view the contents of my customised feed in that location. Or I could import that feed into a new WordPress blog. And so on…

Now of course I appreciate that many people will still say: so what? But it’s a start… a small step towards a world in which I can declare an arbitrary list of links to content spread all over the web and then pull it into a single location where I can consume it, or process it further, such as converting it into a PDF (which is a preferred way of consuming large chunks of content for many people) or even delivering it in drip feed fashion over an extended period of time as a serialised RSS feed, for example.

An exercise for the interested reader: clone the pipe and modify it so that it will accept as user input an RSS URL so that the pipe can be used to consume any social bookmarking service RSS feed.

Note: as the pipe stands, the order of items in the feed will correspond to the order in which they were bookmarked. It is possible to tag each bookmark with its desired position in the RSS feed, but that is a rather more advanced topic. (See a soon to be(?!)* deprecated solution to that problem here: Ordered Lists of Links from delicious Using Yahoo Pipes.

* If @hapdaniel hasn’t already published a more elegant solution to this problem using YQL Execute somewhere, I’ll try to do so when I get a chance…

PS ho hum, maybe we don’t need RSS after all: Instapaper, Del.icio.us, Yahoo! Pipes and being Slack (via @mediaczar)

Open Educational Resources and the University Library Website

Being a Bear of Very Little Brain, I find it convenient to think of the users of academic library websites falling into one of three ‘deliberate’ and one ‘by chance’ categories:

– students (i.e. people taking at course);
– lecturers (i.e. people creating or supporting a course);
– researchers;
– folk off the web (i.e. people who Googled in who are none of the above).

The following Library website homepage (in this case, from Leicester) is typical:

…and the following options on the Library catalogue are also typical:

So what’s missing…?

How about a link to “Teaching materials”, or “open educational resources”?

After all, if you’re a lecturer looking to pull a new course together, or a student who’s struggling to make head or tail of the way one of your particular lecturers is approaching a particular topic, or a researcher who needs a crash course in a particular method or technique, maybe some lecture notes or course materials are exactly the sort of resource you need?

Trying to kickstart the uptake of open educational materials has not be as easy as might be imagined (e.g. On the Lack of Reuse of OER), but maybe this is because OERs aren’t as ‘legitimately discoverable’ as other academic resources.

If anyone using an academic library website can’t easily search educational resources in that context, what does that say about the status of those resources in the eyes of the Library?

Bearing in mind my crude list of user classes, and comparing them to the sorts of resources that academic libraries do try to support the discovery of, what do we find?

– the library catalogue returns information about books (though full text search is not available) and the titles of journals; it might also tap into course reading lists.
– the e-resources search provides full text search over e-book and journal content.

One of the nice features of the OU wesbite search (not working for me at the moment: “Our servers are busy”, apparently…) is that it is possible to search OU course materials for the course you are currently on (if you’re a student) or across all courses if you are staff. A search over OpenLearn materials is also provided. However, I don’t think these course material searches are available from the Library website?

So here’s a suggestion for the #UKOER folk – see if you can persuade your library to start offering a search over OERs from their website (Scott Wilson at CETIS is building an OER aggregator that might help in this respect, and there are also initiativs like OER Commons).

And, err, as a tip: when they say they already do, a link to the OER Commons site on a page full of links to random resources, buried someowhre deep within the browsable bowels of the library website doesn’t count. It has to be at least as obvious(?!), easy to use(?!) and prominent(?!?) as the current Library catalogue and journal/database searches…

Open Training Resources

Some disconnected thoughts about who gives a whatever about OERs, brought on in part by @liamgh’s Why remix an Open Educational Resource? (see also this 2 year old post: So What Exactly Is An OpenLearn Content Remix?). A couple of other bits of context too, to to situate HE in a wider context of educational broadcasting:

– Trust partially upholds fair trading complaints against the BBC: “BESA appealed to the Trust regarding three of the BBC’s formal learning offerings on bbc.co.uk between 1997 and 2009. … the Trust considers it is necessary for the Trust to conduct an assessment of the potential competitive impacts of Bitesize, Learning Zone Broadband and the Learning Portal, covering developments to these offerings since June 2007, and the way in which they deliver against the BBC’s Public Purposes. This will enable the Trust to determine whether the BBC Executive’s failure to conduct its own competitive impact assessment since 2007 had any substantive effect. … No further increases in investment levels for Bitesize, Learning Zone Broadband and the Learning Portal will be considered until the Trust has completed its competitive impact assessment on developments since 2007”

– Getting nearer day by day: “We launched a BBC College of Journalism intranet site back in January 2007 … aimed at the 7,500 journalists in the BBC … A handful of us put together about 1200 pages of learning – guides, tips, advice – and about 250 bits of video; a blog, podcasts, interactive tests and quizzes and built the tools to deliver them. A lot of late nights and a lot of really satisfying work. Satisfying, too, because we put into effect some really cool ideas about informal learning and were able to find out how early and mid career journalists learn best. … The plan always was to share this content with the people who’d paid for it – UK licence fee payers. And to make it available for BBC journalists to work on at home or in parts of the world where a www connection was more reliable than an intranet link. Which is where we more or less are now.” [my emphasis; see also BBC Training and Development]

And this: Towards Vendor Certification on the Open Web? Google Training Resources

So why my jaded attitude? Because I wonder (again) what it is we actually expect to happen to these OERs (how many OER projects re-use other peoples’ bids to get funding? How many reuse each others ‘what are OERs stuff’? How many OER projects ever demonstrate a remix of their content, or a compelling reuse of it? How many publish their sites as a wiki so other people can correct errors? How many are open to public comments, ffs? How many give a worked example of any of the twenty items on Liam’s list with their content, and how many of them mix in other people’s OER content if they ever do so? How many attempt to publish running stats on how their content is being reused, and how many demonstrate showcase examples of content remix and reuse.

That said, there are signs of some sort of use: ‘Self-learners’ creating university of online; maybe the open courseware is providing a discovery context for learners looking for specific learning aids (or educators looking for specific teaching aids)? That is, while use might be most likely at the disaggregated level, discovery will be mediated through course level aggregations (the wider course context providing the SEO, or discovery metadata, that leads to particular items being discovered? Maybe Google turns up the course, and local navigation helps (expert) users browse to the resource they were hoping to discover?)

Early days yet, I know, but how much of the #ukoer content currently being produced will be remixed with, or reused alongside, content from other parts of that project as part of end-of-project demos? (Of course, if reuse/remix isn’t really what you expect, then fine… and, err, what are you claiming, exactly? Simple consumption? That’s fine, but say it; limit yourself to that…)

Ok, rant part over. Deep breath. Here comes another… as academics, we like to think we do the education thing, not the training thing. But for those of you who do learn new stuff, maybe every day, what do you find most useful to support that presumably self-motivated learning? For my own part, I tend to search for tutorials, and maybe even use How Do I?. That is, I look for training materials. A need or a question frames the search, and then being able to do something, make something, get my head round something enough to be able to make use of it, or teach it on, frames the admittedly utilitarian goal. Maybe that ability to look for those materials is a graduate level information skill, so it’s something we teach, right…? (Err… but that would be training…?!)

So here’s where I’m at – OERs are probably [possibly?] not that useful. But open training materials potentially are. (Or maybe not..?;-) Here are some more: UNESCO Training Platform

And so is open documentation.

They probably all could come under the banner of open information resources, but thy are differently useful, and differently likely to be reused/reusable, remixed/remixable, maintained/maintainable or repurposed/repurposeable. Of them all, I suspect that the opencourseware subset of OERs is the least re* of them all.

That is all…

Discuss…

Will Digital Scholarship be Reflected in the New World University Rankings?

In what looks like quite a lazily produced article (isn’t cut and paste wonderful?;-), Firm foundations for global comparisons, the THES has reported that Thomson Reuters are to start working on a new global database to underpin international university ranking tables.

An Open Letter to Administrators from Thomson Reuters states:

Our aim with the GLOBAL INSTITUTIONAL PROFILES PROJECT [no need to SHOUT;-) – Ed.] … is to develop a data source that provides the best informed and most effective resource to build profiles of universities and research-based institutions around the world.

As someone “quoted” in the THES article Thomson Reuters press release put it:

“There is a need for robust, dynamic, and above all transparent and verifiable data on scholarly performance to reshape how administrators approach institutional comparisons.”

So, I wonder… are the new rankings going to include factors at an institutional level that reflect on the digital scholarly activity of a university, such as the blogging activity of its researchers (JISC projects increasingly expect project blogs to report regularly on project activity, for example), or things like traffic numbers for institutional Youtube or iTunes channels?

And will the rankings reflect teaching and student support activity, as well as research? Will having vibrant online communities or institution related Facebook apps with thousands of installs be recognised (not that anyone liked Course Profiles, though that’s presumably because we didn’t have a budget holder spend a huge amount on it and then have to chase internal glory payback to justify the expense…;-), or its engagement with publishing others form of open educational resources (OERs)?

If you want to participate in the GIPP (isn’t that slang for vomit? Or maybe that’s gip..?;-), you may be able to find a way here: GIPP; after all, they do say:

Researcher engagement is critical to ensuring this new initiative delivers what the industry has long been asking for—an accurate representation of the institutional landscape, from the source. … [T]he need for researcher participation and completed surveys remains constant.

PS Martin – has any of your digital scholarship (prezi seasick…bleurghhh) work considered metrics at the institutional level, as well as the personal level?