Open Education – Page 4 – OUseful.Info, the blog…

Therapy Time: Networked Personal Learning and a Reflection on the Urban Peasant…

Way back when I was a postgrad, I used to spend a coffee fuelled morning reading in bed, and then get up to eat a cooked breakfast whilst watching the Urban Peasant, a home kitchen chef with a great attitude:

My abiding memory, in part confirmed by several of the asides in the above clip (can you guess which?!), was that of “agile cooking” and flexible recipes. A chicken curry (pork’s fine too, or beef, even fish if you like; or potato if you want a vegetarian version) could be served with rice (or bread, or a baked potato); if you didn’t like curry, you could leave out the spices or curry powder, and just use a stock cube. If a recipe called for chopped vegetables, you could also grate them or slice them or dice them or…”it’s your decision”. Potato and peas could equally well be carrot or parsnip and beans. If you needed to add water to a recipe, you could add wine, or beer, or fruit juice or whatever instead; if you wanted to have scrambled egg on toast, you could also fry it, or poach it, or boil it. And the toast could be a crumpet or a muffin or just use “whatever you’ve got”.

The ethos was very much one of: start with an idea, and/or see what you’ve got, and then work with it – a real hacker ethic. It also encouraged you to try alternative ideas out, to be adaptive. And I’m pretty sure mistakes happened too – but that was fine…

When I play with data, I often have a goal in mind (albeit a loose one), used to provide a focus for exploring a data set I want to explore a little (typically using Schneiderman’s “Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand” approach), to see what potential it might hold, or to act a testbed for a tool or technique I want to try out. The problem then becomes one of coming up with some sort of recipe that works with the data and tools I have to hand, as well as the techniques and processes I’ve used before. Sometimes, a recipe I’m working on requires me to get another ingredient out of the fridge, or another utensil out of the cupboard. Sometimes I use a tea towel as an oven glove, or a fork as a knife. Sometimes I taste the food-in-process to know when it’s done, sometimes I go by the colour, texture, consistency, shape, smell or clouds of smoke that have started to appear.

Because I haven’t had any formal training in any of this “stuff”, using “approved” academic sources (I’ve recently been living by R-Bloggers (which is populated by quite a few academics) and Stack Overflow, for example), I suffer from a lack of confidence in talking about it in an academic way (see for example For My One Thousandth Blogpost: The Un-Academic), and a similar lack of confidence in feeling that I could ever charge anybody a fee for telling them what I (think I) know (leave aside for the moment that I effectively charge the OU my salary, benefits and on-costs… hmmm?!). I used to do the academic thing way back when as a postgrad and early postdoc, but fell out of the habit over the last few years because there seemed to me to be a huge amount of investment of time required for very little impact or consequence of what I was doing. Yes, it’s important for things be “right”, but I’m not sure my maths is up to generating formal proofs of new algorithms. I may be able to do the engineering or technologist thing of getting something working, -ish, good enough “for now”, research-style coding, but it’s always mindful of an engineering style trade-off: that it might not be “right” and is just something I figured out that seems to work, but that it’ll do because it lets me get something done… As Artur Bergman puts it using rather colourful language – “yes, correlation isn’t causation, but…”

(This clip was originally brought to mind by a recent commentary from Stephen Downes on The Internet Blowhard’s Favorite Phrase, and the original post it refers to.)

Also mixed up in the notion of “right” is seeing things as “right” if they are formally recognised or accepted as such, which is where assessment and peer review come in: you let other people you trust make an assessment about whatever it is you do/have done, publicly recognising your achievements which in turn allows you to make a justifiable claim to them. (I am reminded here of the definition of knowledge as justified true belief. That word “justified” is interesting, isn’t it…?)

As well as resisting getting in the whole grant bidding cycle for turnover generating, public money cycling projects that are set up to fail, I’ve also recently started to fall out of OU-style formal teaching roles… again, in part because of the long lead times involved with producing course materials and my preference for network based, rather than teamwork based, working style. (I so need to revisit formal models of teamwork and try to come up with a corresponding formulation for networks rather than teams…Or do a lit review to find one that’s already out there…!) I tend to write in 1 hour chunks based on 3-4 hours work, then post whatever it is I’ve done. One reason for doing this is becuase I figure most people read or do things in 5 to 15 minutes or one to two hour chunks and that in a network-centric, distributed online online educational setting small chunks are more likely to be discoverable and immediately useful (directly and immediately learnable from) chunks. There’s no shame in using a well crafted Wikipedia as a starting point for discovering more detailed – and academic – resources: at least you stand a good chance of finding the Wikipedia page! In the same way, I try to link out out to supporting resources from most of my posts so that readers (including myself as a revisitor to these pages in that set) have some additional context, supporting or conflicting material to help get more value from it. (Related: Why I (Edu)Blog.)

Thinking about my own personal lack of confidence, which in part arises from the way I have informally learned whatever it is that I have actually learned over the last few years and not had it formally validated by anybody else, my interest in espousing an informal style networked learning on others is an odd one… Because based on my own experience, it doesn’t give me the feeling that what I know is valid (justified..?), or even necessarily trustable by anybody other than me (because I know how it’s caveated because of what I have personally learned about it, rather than just being told about it), even if it is pragmatic and at least occasionally appears to be useful. (Hmm… I don’t think an OU editor would let me get away with a sentence like that in a piece of OU course material!) Maybe I need to start keeping a second, formalised reflective learning journal as the OU Skills for OU Study suggests to log what I learn, and provide some sort of indexable and searchable metadata around it? In fact, this approach might be a useful approach if I do another uncourse? (It also brings to mind the word equation: Learning material + metadata = learning object (it was something like that, wasn’t it?!))

To the extent that this blog is an act of informal, open teaching, I think it offers three main things: a) “knowledge transferring” discoverable resources on a variety of specialised topics; b) fragmentary records of created knowledge (I *think* I’ve managed to make up odd bits of new stuff over the last few years…); c) a model of some sort of online distributed network centric learning behaviour (see also the Digital Worlds Uncourse Blog Experiment in this respect).

I guess one of the things I do get to validate against is the real world. When I used to go into schools doing robotics activities*, kids would ask me if their robot or programme was “right”. In many cases, there wasn’t really a notion of “right”, it was more a case of:

were there things that were obviously wrong?
did the thing work as anticipated (or indeed, did any elements of it work at all?!;-)?
were there any bits that could be improved, adapted or done in another more elegant way?

So it is with some of my visualisation “experiments” – are they not wrong (is the data right, is there a sensible relationship between the data and the visual mappings)? do they “work” at all (eg in the sense of communicating a particular trend, or revealing a particular anomaly)? could they be improved? By running the robot program, or trying to read the story a data visualisation appears to be telling us, we can get a sense of how “right” it is; but there is often no single “right” for it to be. Which is where doubt can crop in… Because if something is “not right”, then maybe it’s “wrong”…?

In the world of distributed, networked learning, I think one thing we need to work on is developing an appropriate sense of validation and legitimisation of personal learning. Things like badges are weak extrinsic signs that some would claim have a role in this, but I wonder how networks and communities can be shaped and architected, or how their dynamics might work, so that learners develop not only a well-founded intrinsic confidence about what they have self-learned, but also a feeling that what they have self-learned is as legitimate as something they have been formally taught? (I know, I know: “I was at the University of Life, me”… As I am, now… which reminds me, I’ve a Coursera video and Feynman lecture on Youtube to watch, and a couple of code mentor answers to questions I’ve raised on various Stack Exchange sites to read through; and I probably should check to see if there are any questions recently posted to Stack Overflow that I may be able to answer and use to link out to other, more academic “open educational” resources…)

[Rereading this post, I think I am suffering from a lack of formality and the sense of justification that comes with it. Hmmm…]

* This is something I’ve recently been asked to do again for an MK local primary school in the new year; the contact queried how much I might charge and whilst in the past I would have said “no need”, for some reason this time I felt obliged to seek advice about from the Deanery about whether I should charge, and if so how much. This a huge personal cultural shift away from my traditional “of course/pro bono” attitude, and it felt wrong, somehow. To the extent that universities are public bodies, they should work with other public services in their local and extended communities. But of course, I get the sense we’re not really being encouraged to think of ourselves as public bodies very much any more, we’re commercial services… And that feeling affects the personal responsibility I feel when acting for and on behalf of the university. As it turns out, the Deanery seems keen that we participate freely in community events… But I note here that I felt (for the first time) as if I had to check first. So what’s in the air?

See also: Terran Lane’s On Leaving Academia and (via @boyledsweetie) Inspirational teaching: since when did entertainment not matter?

Losing Experimental Edtech Value from IPython Notebooks Because of New Security Policies?

Just like the way VLEs locked down what those who wanted to try to stuff out could do with educational websites, usually on the grounds of “security”, so a chunk of lightweight functionality with possible educational value that I was about to start to exploring inside IPython notebooks has been locked out by the new IPython notebook security policy:

Affected use cases
Some use cases that work in IPython 1.0 will become less convenient in 2.0 as a result of the security changes. We do our best to minimize these annoyance, but security is always at odds with convenience.

Javascript and CSS in Markdown cells
While never officially supported, it had become common practice to put hidden Javascript or CSS styling in Markdown cells, so that they would not be visible on the page. Since Markdown cells are now sanitized (by Google Caja), all Javascript (including click event handlers, etc.) and CSS will be stripped.

Here’s what I’ve been exploring – using a simple button:

to reveal an answer:

It’s a 101 interaction style in “e-learning” (do we still call it that?!) and one that I was hoping to explore more given the interactive richness of the IPython notebook environment.

Here’s how I implemented it – a tiny bit of Javascript hidden in one of the markdown cells:

<script type="text/javascript">
   function showHide(id) {
       var e = document.getElementById(id);
       if(e.style.display == 'block')
          e.style.display = 'none';
       else
          e.style.display = 'block';
   }
</script>

and then a quick call from a button onclick event handler to reveal the answer block:

<input type="button" value="Answer" onclick="showHide('ans2')">

<div id="ans2" style="display:none">I can see several ways of generating common identifiers:

<ul><li>using the **gss** code from the area data, I could generate identifiers of the form `http://http://statistics.data.gov.uk/id/statistical-geography/GSS`</li>
<li>from the housing start data, I could split the *Reference Area* on space characters and then extract the GSS code from the first item in the split list</li>
<li>The *districtname* in the area data looks like it make have "issues" with spacing in area names. If we remove spaces and turn everything to lower case in the area data *districtname* and the *Reference Area* in the housing data, we *may* be able create matching keys. But it could be a risky strategy...</li>
</ul></div>

This won’t work anymore – and I don’t have the time to learn whether custom CSS can do this, and if so, how.

I don’t really want to have to go back to the approach I tried before I demoed the button triggered reveal example to myself…

That is, putting answers into a python library and then using code to pull the text answer in…

Note also the use of colour in the cells – this is something else I wanted to try to explore, the use of styling to prompt interactions; in the case of IPython notebooks, I quite like the idea of students taking ownership of the notebooks and adding content to it, whether by adding commentary text to cells we have written in, adding their own comment cells (perhaps using a different style – so a different cell type?), amending code stubs we have written, adding in their own code, perhaps as code complements to comment prompts we have provided, etc etc.

The quick hack, try and see option that immediately came to mind to support these sorts of interaction seems to have been locked out (or maybe not – rather than spending half an hour on a quick hack I’ll have to spend have an hour reading docs…). This is exactly the sort of thing that cuts down on our ability to mix ideas and solutions picked up from wherever, and just try them out quickly; and whilst I can see the rationale, it’s just another of those things to add to the when the web was more open pile. (I was going to spend half an hour blogging a post to let other members of the course team I’m on know how to add revealed answers to their notebooks, but as I’ve just spent 18 hours trying to build a VM box that supports python3 and the latest IPythion notebook, I’m a bit fed up at the thought of having to stick with the earlier version py’n’notebook VM I built because it’s easier for us to experiment with…)

I have to admit that some of the new notebook features look like they could be interesting from a teaching point of view in certain subject areas – the ability to publish interactive widgets where the controls talk to parameters accessed via the notebook code cells, but that wasn’t on my to do list for the next week…

What I was planning to do was explore what we’d need to do to get elements of the notebook behaving like elements in OU course materials, under the assumption that our online materials have designs that go hand in hand with good pedagogy. (This is a post in part about OU stuff, so necessarily it contains the p-word.)

Something else on the to do list was to explore how to tweak the branding of the notebook, for example to add in an OU logo or (for my other day per week), a School of Data logo. (I need to check the code openness status of IPython notebooks… How bad form would it be to remove the IPy logo for example? And where should a corporate log go? In the toolbar, or at the top of the content part of the notebook? If you just contribute content, I guess the latter; if you add notebook functionality, maybe the topbar is okay?)

There are a few examples of styling notebooks out there, but I wonder – will those recipes still work?

Ho hum – this post probably comes across as negative about IPython notebooks, but it shouldn’t because they’re a wonderful environment (for example, Doodling With IPython Notebooks for Education and Time to Drop Calculators in Favour of Notebook Programming?). I’m just a bit fed up that after a couple of days graft I don’t get to have half and hour’s fun messing around with look and feel. Instead, I need to hit the docs to find out what’s possible and what isn’t because the notebooks are no longer an open environment as they were… Bah..:-(

Open Practice Roundup…

Perhaps it’s just because my antennae are sensitised at the moment, post posting Open Practice and My Academic Philosophy, Sort Of… Erm, Maybe… Perhaps..?!, but here are a couple more folk saying much the same thing…

From @Downes getting on for five years ago now (The Role of the Educator), he mentions how several elements of his open practice (hacking useful code, running open online courses (though he just calls them “online courses”; five years ago, remember, before “open” was the money phrase?!;-), sharing through a daily links round up and conference presentations, and thinking about stuff) have led:

to an overall approach not only to learning online but to learning generally. It’s not simply that I’ve adopted this approach; it’s that I and my colleagues have observed this approach emerging in the community generally.

It’s an approach that emphasizes open learning and learner autonomy. It’s an approach that argues that course content is merely a tool employed to stimulate and support learning — a McGuffin, as I’ve called it in various presentations, “a plot element that catches the viewers attention or drives the plot of a work of fiction” — rather than the object of learning itself. It’s an approach that promotes a pedagogy of learning by engagement and activity within an authentic learning community — a community of practitioners, where people practice the discipline, rather than merely just talk about it.

It’s an approach that emphasizes exercises involving those competencies rather than deliberate acts of memorization or rote, an approach that seeks to grow knowledge in a manner analogous to building muscles, rather than to transfer or construct knowledge through some sort of cognitive process.

It’s an approach that fosters a wider and often undefined set of competencies associated with a discipline, a recognition that knowing, say, physics, isn’t just to know the set of facts and theories related to physics, but rather to embody a wider set of values, beliefs, ways of observing and even mannerisms associated with being a physicist (it is the caricature of this wider set of competencies that makes The Big Bang Theory so funny).

Concordant with this approach has been the oft-repeated consensus that the role of the educator will change significantly. Most practitioners in the field are familiar with the admonishment that an educator will no longer be a “sage on the stage”. But that said, many others resist the characterization of an educator as merely a “guide by the side.” We continue to expect educators to play an active role in learning, but it has become more difficult to characterize exactly what that role may be.

In my own work, I have stated that the role of the teacher is to “model and demonstrate.” What I have tried to capture in this is the idea that students need prototypes on which to model their own work. Readers who have learned to program computers by copying and adapting code will know what I mean. But it’s also, I suppose, why I see the footprints of Raymond Chandler all through William Gibson’s writing. We begin by copying successful practice, and then begin to modify that practice to satisfy our own particular circumstances and needs.

In order for this to happen, the instructor must be more than just a presenter or lecturer. The instructor, in order to demonstrate practice, is required to take a more or less active role in the disciplinary or professional community itself, demonstrating by this activity successful tactics and techniques within that community, and modeling the approach, language and world view of a successful practitioner. This is something we see in medicine already, as students learn as interns working alongside doctors or nurse practitioners.

Five years ago…

At the other end of the career spectrum, grad student Sarah Crissinger had to write a “one-page teaching philosophy” as part of a recent job application (Reflections on the Job Hunt: Writing a Teaching Philosophy). Reflecting on two different approaches to teaching she had witnessed from two different yoga classes, one good, one bad, she observed of the effective teacher that:

[h]e starts every class by telling students that the session isn’t about replicating the exact pose he is doing. It’s more about how your individual body feels in the pose. In other words, he empowers students to do what they can without feeling shame about not being as flexible as their neighbor. He also solidifies the expectations of the class by saying upfront what the goals are and then he reiterates those expectations by giving modifications for each pose and talking about how your body should feel instead of how it should look.

..which in part reminded me of cookery style promoted by James Barber, aka the urban peasant…

Sarah Crissinger also made this nice observation:

Teachers reflect on teaching even when we don’t mean to.

That is, effective teachers are also adaptive learning machines… (Reflection is part of the self-correcting feedback path.)

See also: Sheila McNeil on How do you mainstream open education and OERs? A bit of feedback sought for #oer15, and the comments therefrom. Sheila’s approach also brings to mind The Art Of Guerrilla Research, which emphasises the “just do it” attitude of open practice…

Distributing Software to Students in a BYOD Environment

Reading around a variety of articles on the various ways of deploying software in education, it struck me that in traditional institutions a switch is may be taking place between students making use of centrally provided computing services – including physical access to desktop computers – to students bringing their own devices on which they may want to run the course software themselves. In addition, traditional universities are also starting to engage increasingly with their own distance education students; and the rise of the MOOCs are based around the idea of online course provision – that is, distance education.

The switch from centrally provided computers to a BYOD regime contrasts with the traditional approach in distance education in which students traditionally provided their own devices and onto which they installed software packaged and provided by their educational institution. That is, distance education students have traditionally been BYOD users.

However, in much the same way that the library in a distance education institution like the OU could not originally provide physical information (book lending) services to students, instead brokering access agreements with other HE libraries, but now can provide a traditional a traditional library service through access to digital collections, academic computing services are perhaps now more in a position where they can provide central computing services, at scale, to their students. (Contributory factors include: readily available network access for students, cheaper provider infrastructure costs (servers, storage, bandwidth, etc).)

With this in mind, it is perhaps instructive for those of us working in distance education to look at how the traditional providers are coping with an an influx of BYOD users, and how they are managing access to, and the distribution of, software to this newly emerging class of user (for them) whilst at the same time continuing to provide access to managed facilities such as computing labs and student accessed machines.

Notes from: Supporting CS Education via Virtualization and Packages – Tools for Successfully Accommodating “Bring-Your-Own-Device” at Scale, Andy Sayler, Dirk Grunwald, John Black, Elizabeth White, and Matthew Monaco SIGCSE’14, March 5–8, 2014, Atlanta, GA, USA [PDF]

The authors describe “a standardized development environment for all core CS courses across a range of both school-owned and student-owned computing devices”, leveraging “existing off-the-shelf virtualization and software management systems to create a common virtual machine that is used across all of our core computer science courses”. The goal was to “provide students with an easy to install and use development environment that they could use across all their CS courses. The development environment should be available both on department lab machines, and as a VM for use on student-owned machines (e.g. as a ‘lab in a box’).”

From the student perspective, our solution had to: a) Run on a range of host systems; b) Be easy to install; c) Be easy to use and maintain; d) Minimize side-effects on the host system; e) Provide a stable experience throughout the semester.

From the instructor perspective, our solution had to: a) Keep the students happy; b) Minimize instructor IT overhead; c) Provide consistent results across student, grader, and instructor machines; d) Provide all necessary software for the course; e) Provide the ability to update software as the course progresses.

Virtualbox was adopted on the grounds that it runs cross-platform, is free, open source software, and has good support for running Linux guest machines. The VM was based on Ubuntu 12.04 (presumably the long term edition available at the time) and distributed as an .ova image.

To support the distribution of software packages for a particular course, Debian metapackages (that simply list dependencies; in passing, I note that the Anaconda python distribution supports the notion of python (conda) metapackages, but pip does not, specifically?) were created on a per course basis that could be used via apt-get to install all the necessary packages required for a particular course (example package files).

In terms of student support, the team published “a central web-page that provides information about the VM, download links, installation instructions, common troubleshooting steps, and related self-help information” along with “YouTube videos describing the installation and usage of the VM”. Initial distribution is provided using BitTorrent. Where face-to-face help sessions are required, VM images are provided on USB memory sticks to avoid download time delays. Backups are handled by bundling Dropbox into the VM and encouraging students to place their files there. (Github is also used.)

The following observation is useful in respect of student experience of VM performance:

“Modern CPUs provide extensions that enable a fast, smooth and enjoyable VM experience (i.e. VT-x). Unfortunately, many non-Apple PC manufacturers ship their machines with these extension disabled in the BIOS. Getting students to enable these extensions can be a challenge, but makes a big difference in their overall impression of VM usability. One way to force students to enable these extensions is to use a 64-bit and/or multi-core VM, which VirtualBox will not start without virtualization extensions enabled.”

The open issues identified by the team are the issue of virtualisation support; corrupted downloads of the VM (mitigation includes publishing a checksum for the VM and verifying against this); and the lack of a computer capable of running the VM (ARM devices, low specification Intel Atom computers). [On this latter point, it may be worth highlighting the distinction between hardware that cannot cope with running computationally intensive applications, hardware that has storage limitations, and hardware that cannot run particular virtualisation services (for example, that cannot run x86 virtualisation). See also: What Happens When “Computers” Are Replaced by Tablets and Phones?]

The idea of using package management is attractive, and contrasts with the approach I took when hacking together the TM351 VM using vagrant and puppet scripts. It might make sense to further abstract the machine components into a Debian metapackage and a simple python/pip “meta” package (i.e. one that simply lists dependencies). The result would be an installation reduced to a couple of lines of the form:

apt-get install ou_tm351=15J.0 pip install ou_tm351==15J.0

where packages are versioned to a particular presentation of an OU course, with a minor version number to accommodate any updates/patches. One downside to this approach is that it splits co-dependency relationships between python and Debian packages relative to a particular application. In the current puppet build files for the monolithic VM build, each application has its own puppet file that installs the additional libraries over base libraries required for a particular application. (In addition, particular applications can specify dependencies on base libraries.) For the dockerised VM build, each container image has it’s own Dockerfile that identifies the dependencies for that image.

Tracing its history (and reflecting the accumulated clutter of my personal VM learning journey!) the draft TM351 VM is currently launched and provisioned using vagrant, partly because I can’t seem to start the IPython Notebook reliably from a startup script:-( Distributing the machine as a start/stoppable appliance (i.e. as an Open Virtualization Format/.ova package) might be more convenient, if we could guarantee that file sharing with host works as required (sharing against a specific folder on host) and any port collisions experienced by the provided services can be managed and worked around?

Port collisions are less of an issue for Sayler et al. because their model is that students will be working within the VM context – a “desktop as a local service” (or “platform as a local service” model); the TM351 VM model provides services that run within the VM, some of which are exposed via http to the host – more of a “software as a local service” model. In the cloud, software-as-a-service and desktop-as-a-service models are end-user delivery models, where users access services through a browser or lightweight desktop client, compared with “platform-as-a-service” offerings where applications can be developed and delivered within a managed development environment offering high level support services, or “infrastructure as a service” offerings, which provide access to base computing components (computational processing, storage, networking, etc.)

Note that what interests me particularly are delivery models that support all three of the following models: BYOD, campus lab, and cloud/remotely hosted offerings (as a crude shorthand, I use ‘cloud’ to mean environments that are responsive in terms of firing up servers to meet demand). The notions of personal computing environments, course computing environments and personal course computing environments might also be useful, (for example, a course computing environment might be a generic container populated with course software, a personal course computing container might then be a container linked to a student’s identity, with persisted state and linked storage, or a course container running on a students own device) alongside research computing environments and personal research computing environments.

How Much Time Should an Online Course Take?

Five years or so ago, when MOOCs were still a new thing, I commented on what seemed to be the emerging typical duration of open online courses: Open Courses: About 10 Weeks Seems To Be It, Then?

For the OU’s 10 week short courses, which nominally required up to 10 hours study a week (the courses were rated at 10 CAT points), this meant a duration of 100 hours. The cost (at the time) of those courses was about £150, I think. So about £1.50 an hour purchase cost.

Looking at the upcoming OU FutureLearn course Learn to code for data analysis, the time commitment is 4 weeks at 3-4 hours per week, so about 15 hours. If you don’t want to pay anything, you don’t have to.

Although I can’t offhand find any previous OUseful.info blog posts comparing courses to things like books or games (and I guess, DVD/streamed TV “box sets”), as “cultural content consumption items”, it’s one of the reference points I often think about when it comes to trying to imagining how a course – formal (for credit), or informal – fits into the life of the student amongst other competing demands on the their time, attention and finances. If someone is going to take a course for the first time and spend time/attention/cash on it, does the study pattern neatly replace or substitute a previous pattern of activity, or does it require a more significant change in a learners daily or weekly habits. In other words, what are the attention economics associated with taking a course?

This was all brought to mind again lately when I spotted this post – Forty Hours – which opens with the observation that “the majority of videogames were made on the assumption that they would be played for forty hours. Now, games are being made to be played for longer and longer. (I’ve no idea if this is true or not; I don’t really follow game culture. Maybe the longer games are ones where there is an element of social (especially 2-way audio) enhanced gameplay?)

If true, this seems to contrast with the shortening of courses that is perhaps taking place on FutureLearn (again, I don’t have the data to back this up; it’s just an impression; nor do I have the data about evolving course length more widely in MOOC space. Presumably, the Open Education Research Hub is the sort of place where I should be able to find this sort of data?)

If that is the case, then why are games getting longer and online open courses shorter (if, indeed, they are? And in formal ed, where does semesterisation sit in all this?). As the Forty Hours post goes on:

[E]very major commercial game now attempts to ‘capture’ its audience for at least 200 hours, with multiplayer modes being the core method of retention. The forty hour model was a consequence of selling games-as-products, as boxed content that would be played then thrown onto a pile of completed games (although it turns out that the minority of players finish games). The 200 hour model is a consequence of selling games-as-services, with monetization now an on-going process throughout the time the players are engaged with the title in question. …

The big money is no longer out to hold a player’s attention for forty hours, but to hold a player’s attention long enough to get the next game out, or to hold on to groups of players in the hope to pull in a few big spenders, or to hold the player’s attention throughout the year with events crafted to maintain appeal and bring back those who are slipping away into other games. Hobby players – those who commit to a game service over the long term – often play other games on the side, which is a tiny crumb of good news for indies making smaller games. …

The game-as-product approach where the forty hour model had dominated still survives, but only where it has proved difficult or impossible to tie players down for longer lengths of time. The market for videogames is ceasing to be one of packaged experience (like movies and novels) and becoming a fight for retention, as more and more games in the upper market shift their design towards training new hobby players in a ongoing economy.

In other words, why are we looking to shorten the relationship someone has with a course? Is this so we can extend the relationship the platform has with the learner by getting them to take more, shorter courses rather than fewer longer courses? (UPDATE: Or as Helen Noble points out in a comment, is it because the MOOC is actually a loss leading tease intended to draw students into a longer formal commitment? As opposed to being an alumni touch point, encouraging a graduate to maintain some sort of content with their alma mater in the hope getting a donation or bequest out of them later in life?!)

In terms of the completion commitment pitch (that is, what sort of commitment is required of folk to complete a course, or a game), what do the attention spending, cultural content consumers respond to? And how do the economics of competing concerns play out?

(That sounds like a marketing concern, doesn’t it? But it presumably also impacts on learning design within and across courses?)

Running Executable Jupyter/IPython Notebooks Directly from Github With Binder

It’s taken me way too long to get round to posting this, but it’s a compelling idea that I think more notice should be taken of… binder ([code]).

The idea is quite simple – specify a public github project (username/repo) that contains one or more Jupyter (IPython) notebooks, hit “go”, and the service will automatically create a docker container image that includes a Jupyter notebook server and a copy of the files contained in the repository.

(Note that you can specify any public Github repository – it doesn’t have to be one you have control over at all.)

Once the container image is created, visiting mybinder.org/repo/gitusername/gitrepo will launch a new container based on that image and display a Jupyter notebook interface at the redirected to URL. Any Jupyter notebooks contained within the original repository can then be opened, edited and executed as an active notebook document.

What this means is we could pop a set of course related notebooks into a repository, and share a link to mybinder.org/repo/gitusername/gitrepo. Whenever the link is visited, a container is fired up from the image and the user is redirected to that container. If I go to the URL again, another container is fired up. Within the container, a Jupyter notebook server is running, which means you can access the notebooks that were hosted in the Github repo as interactive, “live” (that is, executable) notebooks.

Alternatively, a user could clone the original repository, and then create a container image based on their copy of the repository, and then launch live notebooks from their own repository.

I’m still trying to find out what’s exactly going on under the covers of the binder service. In particular, a couple of questions came immediately to mind:

how long do containers persist? For example, at the moment we’re running a FutureLearn course (Learn to Code for Data Analysis) that makes use of IPython/Jupyter notebooks (https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/learn-to-code), but it requires learners to install Anaconda (which has caused a few issues). The course lasts 4 weeks, with learners studying a couple of hours a day maybe two days a week. Presumably, the binder containers are destroyed as a matter of course according to some schedule or rule – but what rule? I guess learners could always save and download their notebooks to the desktop and then upload them to a running server, but it would be more convenient if they could bookmark their container and return to it over the life of the course? (So for example, if Futurelearn was operating a binder service, joining the course could provide authenticated access to a container at http://www.futurelearn.com/courses/learn-to-code/USERID/notebook for the duration of the course, and maybe a week or two after? Following ResBaz Cloud – Containerised Research Apps as a Service, it might also allow for a user to export a copy of their container?)
how does the system scale? The FutureLearn course has several thousand students registered to it. To use the binder approach towards providing any student who wants one with a web-accessible, containerised version of the notebook application so they don’t have to insall one of their own, how easily would it scale? eg how easy is it to give a credit card to some back-end hosting company, get some keys, plug them in as binder settings and just expect it to work? (You can probably guess at my level devops/sysadmin ability/knowledge!;-)

Along with those immediate questions, a handful of more roadmap style questions also came to mind:

how easy would it be to set up the Jupyter notebook system to use an alternative kernel? e.g. to support a Ruby or R course? (I notice that tmpnb.org offers a variety of kernels, for example?)
how easy would it be to provide alternative services to the binder model? eg something like RStudio, for example, or OpenRefine? I notice that the binder repository initialisation allows you to declare the presence of a custom Dockerfile within the repo that can be used to fire up the container – so maybe binder is not so far off a general purpose docker-container-from-online-Dockerfile launcher? Which could be really handy?
does binder make use of Docker Compose to tie multiple applications together, as for example in the way it allows you to link in a Postgres server? How extensible is this? Could linkages of a similar form to arbitrary applications be configured via a custom Dockerfile?
is closer integration with github on the way? For example, if a user logged in to binder with github credentials, could files then saved or synched back from the notebook to that user’s corresponding repository?

Whatever – will be interesting to see what other universities may do with this, if anything…

PS I just noticed an interesting looking post from @KinLane on API business models: I Have A Bunch Of API Resources, Now I Need A Plan, Or Potentially Several Plans. This has got me wondering: what sort of business plan might support a “Studyapp” – applications on demand, as a service – form of hosting?

Several FutureLearn courses, for all their web first rhetoric, require ~~students~~learners to install software onto their own computers. (From what I can tell, FutureLearn aren’t interested in helping “partners” do anything that takes eyeballs away from FutureLearn.com. So I don’t understand why they seem reluctant to explore ways of using tech to provide interactive experiences within the FutureLearn context, like using embedded IPython notebooks, for example. (Trying to innovate around workflow is also a joke.) And IMVHO, the lack of innovation foresight within the OU itself (FutureLearn’s parent…) seems just as bad at the moment… As I’ve commented elsewhere, “[m]y attitude is that folk will increasingly have access to the web, but not necessarily access to a computer onto which they can install software applications. … IMHO, we are now in a position where we can offer students access to “computer lab” machines, variously flavoured, that can run either on a student’s own machine (if it can cope with it) or remotely (and then either on OU mediated services or via a commercial third party on which students independently run the software). But the lack of imagination and support for trying to innovate in our production processes and delivery models means it might make more sense to look to working with third parties to try to find ways of (self-)supporting our students.”. (See also: What Happens When “Computers” Are Replaced by Tablets and Phones?) But I’m not sure anyone else agrees… (So maybe I’m just wrong!;-)

That said, it’s got me properly wondering – what would it take for me to set up a service that provides access to MOOC or university course software, as a service, at least, for uncustomised, open source software, accessible via a browser? And would anybody pay to cover the server costs? How about if web hosting and a domain was bundled up with it, that could also be used to store copies of the software based activities once the course had finished? A “personal, persistent, customised, computer lab machine”, essentially?

Possibly related to this thought, Jim Groom’s reflections on The Indie EdTech Movement, although I’m thinking more of educators doing the institution stuff for themselves as a way of helping the students-do-it-for-themselves. (Which in turn reminds me of this hack around the idea of THEY STOLE OUR ~~REVOLUTION~~ LEARNING ENVIRONMENT. NOW WE’RE STEALING IT BACK !)

PS see also this by C. Titus Brown on Is mybinder 95% of the way to next-gen computational science publishing, or only 90%?

Tinkering With MOOC Data – Rebasing Time

[I’ve been asked to take this post down because it somehow goes against, I dunno, something, but as a stop gap I’ll try to just remove the charts and leave the text, to see if I get another telling off…]

As a member of an organisation where academics tend to be course designers and course producers, and kept as far away from students as possible (Associate Lecturers handle delivery as personal tutors and personal points of contact), I’ve never really got my head around what “learning analytics” is supposed to deliver: it always seemed far more useful to me to think about course analytics as way of tracking how the course materials are working and whether they seem to be being used as intended. Rather than being interested in particular students, the emphasis would be more on how a set of online course materials work in much the same way as tracking how any website works. Which is to say, are folk going to the pages you expect, spending the time on them you expect, reaching goal pages as and when you expect, and so on.

Having just helped out on a MOOC, I was allowed to have a copy of the course related data files the provider makes available to partners:

I'm not allowed to show you this, apparently...

The course was on learning to code for data analysis using the Python pandas library, so I thought I’d try to apply what was covered in the course (perhaps with a couple of extra tricks…) to the data that flowed from the course…

And here’s one of the tricks… rebasing (normalising) time.

For example, one of the things I was interested in was how long learners were spending on particular steps and particular weeks on the one hand, and how long their typical study sessions were on the other. This could then all be aggregated to provide some course stats about loading which could feed back into possible revisions of the course material, activity design (and redesign) etc.

Here’s an example of how a randomly picked learner progressed through the course:

I'm not allowed to show you this, apparently...

The horizontal x-axis is datetime, the vertical y axis is an encoding of the week and step number, with clear separation between the weeks and steps within a week incrementally ordered. The points show the datetime at which the learner first visited the step. The points are coloured by “stint”, a trick I borrowed from my F1 data wrangling stuff: during the course of a race, cars complete several “stints”, where a stint corresponds to a set laps completed on a particular set of tyres; analysing races based on stints can often turn up interesting stories…

To identify separate study session (“stints”) I used a simple heuristic – if the gap between start-times of consecutively studied stints exceeded a certain threshold (55 minutes, say), then I assumed that the steps were considered in separate study sessions. This needs a bit of tweaking, possibly, perhaps including timestamps from comments or question responses that can intrude on long gaps to flag them as not being breaks in study, or perhaps making the decision about whether the gap between two steps is actually a long one compared to a typically short median time for that step? (There are similar issues in the F1 data, for example when trying to work out whether a pit stop may actually be a drive-through penalty rather than an actual stop.)

In the next example, I rebased the time for two learners based on the time they first encountered the first step of the course. That is, the “learner time” (in hours) is the time between them first seeing a particular step, and the time they first saw their first step. The colour field distiguishes between the two learners.

I'm not allowed to show you this, apparently...

We can draw on the idea of “stints”, or learner sessions further, and use the earliest time within a stint to act as the origin. So for example, for another random learner, here we see an incremental encoding on of the step number on the y-axis, with the weeks clearly separated, the “elapsed study session time” along the horizontal y-axis, and the colour mapping out the different study sessions.

I'm not allowed to show you this, apparently...

The spacing on the y-axis needs sorting out a bit more so that it shows clearer progression through steps, perhaps by using an ordered categorical axis with a faint horizontal rule separator to distinguish the separate weeks. (Having an interactive pop-up that contains some information the particular step each mark refers to, as well as information about how much time was spent on it, whether there was commenting activity, etc, what the mean and median study time for the step is, etc etc, could also be useful.) However, I have to admit that I find charting in pandas/matplotlib really tricky, and only seem to have slightly more success with seaborn; I think I may need to move this stuff over to R so that I can make use of ggplot, which I find far more intuitive…

Finally, whilst the above charts are at the individual learner level, my motivation for creating them was to better understand how the course materials were working, and to try to get my eye in to some numbers that I could start to track as aggregate numbers (means, medians, etc) over the course as a whole. (Trying to find ways of representing learner activity so that we could start to try to identify clusters or particular common patterns of activity / signatures of different ways of studying the course, is then another whole other problem – though visual insights may also prove helpful there.)

Want to Get Started With Open Data? Looking for an Introductory Programming Course?

Want to learn to code but never got round to it? The next presentation of OUr FutureLearn course Learn to Code for Data Analysis will teach you how to write you own programme code, a line a time, to analyse real open data datasets. The next presentation starts on 6 June, 2016, and runs for 4 weeks, and takes about 5 hrs per week.

I’ve often thought that there are several obstacles to getting started with programming. Firstly, there’s the rationale or context: why bother/what could I possibly use programming for? Secondly, there are the practical difficulties: to write and execute programmes, you need to get an programming environment set up. Thirdly, there’s the so what: “okay, so I can programme now, but how do I use this in the real world?”

Many introductory programming courses reuse educational methods and motivational techniques or contexts developed to teach children (and often very young children) the basics of computer programming to set the scene: programming a “turtle” that can drive around the screen, for example, or garishly coloured visual programming environments that let you plug logical blocks together as if they were computational Lego. Great fun, and one way of demonstrating some of the programming principles common to all programming languages, but they don’t necessarily set you up for seeing how such techniques might be directly relevant to an IT problem or issue you face in your daily life. And it can be hard to see how you might use such environments or techniques at work to help you get perform real tasks… (Because programmes can actually be good at that – automating the repetitive and working through large amounts of stuff on your behalf.) At the other extreme are professional programming environments, like geekily bloated versions of Microsoft Word or Excel, with confusing preference setups and menus and settings all over the place. And designed by hardcore programmers for hardcore programmers.

So the approach we’ve taken in the OU FutureLearn course Learn to Code for Data Analysis is slightly different to that.

The course uses a notebook style programming environment that blends text, programme code, and the outputs of running that code (such as charts and tables) in a single, editable web page accessed via your web browser.

Learn_to_Code_-_SageMathCloud

To motivate your learning, we use real world, openly licensed data sets from organisations such as the World Bank and the United Nations – data you can download and access for yourself – that you can analyse and chart using your own programme code. A line at a time. Because each line does it’s own thing, each line is useful, and you can see what each line does to your dataset directly.

So that’s the rationale: learn to code so you can work with data (and that includes datasets much larger than you can load into Excel…)

The practicalities of setting up the notebook environment still have to be negotiated, of course. But we try to help you there too. If you want to download and install the programming environment on your computer, you can do, in the form of the freely available Anaconda Scientific Computing Python Distribution. Or you can access an online versions of the notebook based programming environment via SageMathCloud and do all your programming online, through your browser.

So that’s the practical issues hopefully sorted.

But what about the “so what”? Well, the language you’ll be learning is Python, a widely used language programming language that makes it ridiculously easy to do powerful things.

But not that easy, perhaps..?!

The environment you’ll be using – Jupyter notebooks – is also a “real world” technology, inspired as an open source platform for scientific computing but increasingly being used by journalists (data journalism, anyone?) and educators. It’s also attracted the attention of business, with companies such as IBM supporting the development of a range of interactive dashboard tools and backend service hooks that allow programmes written using the notebooks to be deployed as standalone online interactive dashboards.

The course won’t take you quite that far, but it will get you started, and safe in the knowledge that whatever you learn, as well as the environment you’re learning in, can be used directly to support your own data analysis activities at work, or at home as a civically minded open data armchair analyst.

So what are you waiting for? Sign up now and I’ll see you in the comments:-)

Open Education Versions of Open Source Software: Adding Lightness and Accessibility to User Interfaces?

In a meeting a couple of days ago discussing some of the issues around what sort of resources we might want to provide students to support GIS (geographical information system) related activities, I started chasing the following idea…

The OU has, for a long time, developed software application in-house that is provided to students to support one or more courses. More often than not, the code is devloped and maintained in-house, and not released / published as open source software.

There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, the applications typically offer a clean, custom UI that minimises clutter and is designed in order to support usability for learners learning about a particular topic. Secondly, we require software provided by students to be accessible.

For example, the RobotLab software, originally developed, an still maintained, by my colleague Jon Rosewell was created to support a first year undergrad short course, T184 Robotics and the Meaning of Life, elements of which are still used in one of our level 1 courses today. The simulator was also used for many years to support first year undergrad residential schools, as well as a short “build a robot fairground” activity in the masters level team engineering course.

As well as the clean design, and features that support learning (such as a code stepper button in RobotLab that lets students step through code a line at a time), the interfaces also pay great attention to accessibility requirements. Whilst these features are essential for students with particular accessibility needs, they also benefit all out students by adding to the improved usability of the software as a whole.

So those are two, very good reasons, for developing software in-house. But as a downside, it means that we limit the exposure of students to “real” software.

That’s not to say all our courses use in-house software: many courses also provide industry standard software as part of the course offering. But this can present problems too: third party software may come with complex user interfaces, or interfaces that suffer from accessibility issues. And software versions used in the course may drift from latest releases if the software version is fixed for the life of the course. (In fact, the software version may be adopted a year before the start of the course and then expected to last for 5 years of course presentation). Or if software is updated, this may cause significant updates to be made to the course material wrapping the software.

Another issue with professional software is that much of it is mature, and has added features over its life. This is fine for early adopters: the initial versions of the software are probably feature light, and add features slowly over time, allowing the user to grow with them. Indeed, many latterly added features may have been introduced to address issues surrounding a lack of functionality, power or “expressiveness” in use identfied by, and frustrating to, the early users, particularly as they became more expert in using the application.

For a novice coming to the fully featured application, however, the wide range of features of varying levels of sophistication, from elementary, to super-power user, can be bewildering.

So what can be done about this, particularly if we want to avail ourselves of some of the powerful (and perhaps, hard to develop) features of a third party application?

To steal from a motorsport engineering design principle, maybe we can add lightness?

For example, QGIS is a powerful, cross-platform GIS application. (We have a requirement for platfrom neutrality; some of us also think we should be browser first, but let’s for now accept the use of an application that needs to be run on a computer with a “desktop” applciation system (Windows, OS/X, Linux) rather than one running a mobile operating system (iOS, Android) or eveloped for use by a netbook (Chrome OS).)

The interface is quite busy, and arguably hard to quickly teach around from a standing start:

However, as well as being cross-platform, QGIS also happens to be open source.

That is, the source code is available [github: qgis/QGIS].

Which means that as well as the code that does all the clever geo-number crunching stuff, we have access to the code that defines the user interface.

*[UPDATE: in this case, we don’t need to customise the UI by forking the code and changing the UI definition files – QGIS provides a user interface configuration / customisation tool.]

For example, if we look for some menu labels in he UI:

we can then search the source code to find the files that contribute to building the UI:

In turn, this means we can take that code, strip out all the menu options and buttons we don’t need for a particular course, and rebuild QGIS with the simplified UI. Simples. (Or maybe not that simples when you actually start getting into the detail, depending on how the software is designed!)

And if the user interface isn’t as accessible as we’d like it, we can try to improve that, and contribute the imporvements back the to parent project. The advantage there is that if students go on to use the full QGIS application outside of the course, they can continue to benefit from the accessiblity improvements. As can every other user, whether they have accessibility needs or not.

So here’s what I’m wondering: if we’re faced with the decision between wanting to use an open source, third party “real” application with usability and access issues, why build the custom learning app, especially if we’re going to keep the code closed and have to maintain it ourselves? Why not join the developer community and produce a simplified, accessible skin for the “real” application, and feed accessibility improvements at least back to the core?

On reflection, I realised we do, of course, do the first part of this already (forking and customising), but we’re perhaps not so good at the latter (contributing accessibility or alt-UI patterns back to the community).

For operational systems, OU developers have worked extensively on Moodle, for example (and I think, committed to the parent project)… And in courses, the recent level 1 computing course uses an OU fork of Scratch called OUBuild, a cross-platform Adobe Air application (as is the original), to teach basic programming, but I’m not sure if any of the code changes have been openly published anywhere, or design notes on why the original was not appropriate as a direct/redistributed download?

Looking at the Scratch open source repos, Scratch looks to be licensed under BSD 3-clause “New” or “Revised” License (“a permissive license similar to the BSD 2-Clause License, but with a 3rd clause that prohibits others from using the name of the project or its contributors to promote derived products without written consent”). Although it doesn’t have to be, I’m not sure the OUBuild source code has been released anywhere or whether commits were made back to the original project? (If you know differently, please let me know:-)) At the very least, it’d be really handy if there was a public document somewhere that identifies the changes that were made to the original and why, which could be useful from a “design learning” perspective. (Maybe there is a paper being worked up somewhere about the software development for the course?) By sharing this information, we could perhaps influence future software design, for example by encouraging developers to produce UIs that are defined from configuration files that can be easily customised and selected from, in that that users can often select language packs).

I can think of a handful of flippant, really negative reasons why we might not want to release code, but they’re rather churlish… So they’re hopefully not the reasons…

But there are good reasons too (for some definition of “good”..): getting code into a state that is of “public release quality”; the overheads of having to support an open code repository (though there are benefits: other people adding suggestions, finding bugs, maybe even suggesting fixes). And legal copyright and licensing issues. Plus the ever present: if we give X away, we’re giving part of the value of doing our courses away.

At the end of the day, seeing open education in part as open and shared practice, I wonder what the real challenges are to working on custom educational software in a more open and collaborative way?

Maybe Programming Isn’t What You Think It Is? Creating Repurposable & Modifiable OERs

With all the “everyone needs to learn programming” hype around, I am trying to be charitable when it comes to what I think folk might mean by this.

For example, whilst trying to get some IPython magic working, I started having a look at TikZ, a LaTex extension that supports the generation of scientific and mathematical diagrams (and which has been around for decades…).

Getting LaTeX environments up and running can be a bit of a pain, but several of the Binderhub builds I’ve been putting together include LateX, and TikZ, which means I have an install-free route trying snippets of TikZ code out.

As an example, in my showntell/maths demo includes an OpenLearn_Geometry.ipynb notebook that includes a few worked examples of how to “write” some of the figures that appear in an OpenLearn module on geometry.

From the notebook:

The notebook includes several hidden code cells that generate the a range of geometric figures. To render the images, go to the Cell menu and select Run All.

To view/hide the code used to generate the figures, click on the Hide/Reveal Code Cell Inputs button in the notebook toolbar.

To make changes to the diagrams, click in the appropriate code input cell, make your change, and then run the cell using the Run Cell (“Play”) button in the toolbar or via the keyboard shortcut SHIFT-ENTER.

Entering Ctrl-Z (or CMD-Z) in the code cell will undo your edits…

Launch the demo notebook server on Binder here.

Here’s an example of one of the written diagrams (there may be better ways; I only started learning how to write this stuff a couple of days ago!)

Whilst tinkering with this, a couple of things came to mind.

Firstly, this is programming, but perhaps not as you might have thought of it. If we taught adult novices some of the basic programming and coding skills using Tikz rather than turtle, they’d at least be able to create professional looking diagrams. (Okay, so the syntax is admittedly probably a bit scary and confusing to start with… But it could be simplified with some higher level, more abstracted, custom defined macros that learners could then peek inside.)

So when folk talk about teaching programming, maybe we need to think about this sort of thing as well as enterprise Java. (I spent plenty of time last night on the Stack Exchange TEX site!)

Secondly, the availability of things like Binderhub make it easier to build preloaded distributions that can be run by anyone, from anywhere (or at least, for as long as public Binderhub services exist). Simply by sharing a link, I can point you to a runnable notebook, in this case, the OpenLearn geometry demo notebook mentioned above.

One of the things that excites me, but I can’t seem to convince others about, is the desirability of constructing documents in the way the OpenLearn geometry demo notebook is constructed: all the assets displayed in the document are generated by the document. What this means is that if I want to tweak an image asset, I can do. The means of production – in the example, the TikZ code – is provide; it’s also editable and executable within the Binder Jupyter environment.

When HTML first appeared, web pages were shonky as anything, but there were a couple of buts…: the HTML parsers were forgiving, and would do their best to whatever corruption of HTML was thrown at them; and the browsers supported the ability to View Source (which still exists today; for example, in Chrome, go to the View menu then select Developer -> View Source).

Taken together, this meant that: a) folk could copy and paste other people’s HTML and try out tweaks to “cool stuff” they’d seen on other pages; b) if you got it wrong, the browser would have a go at rendering it anyway; you also wouldn’t feel as if you’d break anything serious by trying things out yourself.

So with things like Binder, where we can build disposable “computerless computing environments” (which is to say, pre-configured computing environments that you can run from anywhere, with just a browser to hand), there are now lots of opportunities to do powerful computer-ingy things (technical term…) from a simple, line at a time notebook interface, where you (or others) can blend notes and/or instruction text along with code – and code outputs.

For things like the OpenLearn demo notebook, we can see how the notebook environment provides a means by which educators can produce repurposeable documents, sharing not only educational materials for use by learners, or appropriation and reuse by other educators, but also the raw ingredients for producing customised forms of the sorts of diagrams contained in the materials: if the figure doesn’t have the labels you want, you can change them and re-render the diagram.

In a sense, sharing repurposeable, “reproducible” documents that contain the means to generate their own media assets (at least, when run in an appropriate environment: which is why Binderhub is such a big thing…) is a way of sharing your working. That is, it encourages open practice, and the sharing of how you’ve created something (perhaps even with comments in the “code” explaining why you’ve done something in a particular way, or where the inspiration/prior art came from), as well as the what of the things you have produced.

That’s it, for now… I’m pretty much burned out on trying to persuade folk of the benefits of any of this any more…

PS TikZ and PGF TikZ and PGF: TeX packages for creating graphics programmatically. Far more useful than turtle and Scratch?