Pontydysgu – Bridge to Learning

FSCONS: YaCy Demo from Michael Christen on Vimeo.

OK….this is a techy video. But it is important. In an age when large software companies are increasingly controlling the internet, YaCy has been developed as a free search engine that anyone can use to build a search portal for their intranet or to help search the public internet. YaCy developers say:  “When contributing to the world-wide peer network, the scale of YaCy is limited only by the number of users in the world and can index billions of web pages. It is fully decentralized, all users of the search engine network are equal, the network does not store user search requests and it is not possible for anyone to censor the content of the shared index. We want to achieve freedom of information through a free, distributed web search which is powered by the world’s users.”

What a difference the Creative Commons License makes.

According to the icould web site:  “icould gives you the inside story of how careers work. The icould storytellers relate, in their own words, their real life career journeys. There are over a thousand easy to search,varied and unique career videos as well as hundreds of written articles. From telecoms engineers to police officers, from landscape gardeners to web designers, from engine drivers to zookeepers; they talk about what they do, what it’s like, how they came to be where are and their hopes for the future.”

The service has just celebrated its second birthday. A email from Director, Dave Arnold says:

Happy birthday to icould! We launched icould two years ago this week and although we are still in our infancy, we are growing well and becoming better known. We’ve doubled the visitor numbers to icould.com in the past year and also now have icould content streamed on key sites such as Guardian Careers, Career Wales, Skills Development Scotland, TES and the Frog schools learning platform, extending icould’s reach to millions of young people across the UK.

We’ve continued to add to our career videos and written content, with recent additions featuring advice on student finances and more practical tips for getting a first job. We’ve also created a new ‘Focus On’ area, designed to demystify certain sectors and types of work, exploring all the jobs and career possibilities within that theme.  These Focus On areas consist of around eight to ten new video stories, new written content, competitions and specific guidance on training opportunities and company information.

Focus On Music was the first new area on icould.com sponsored by BlackBerry.  Launched over the Summer, it looks at careers of people behind the stars in the music industry. Focus On Music profiles the unseen heroes behind a music star, for example Jesse J’s choreographer and music video director and Tinnie Tempah’s publicist and photographer. We wanted to show that you don’t have to be behind the microphone to have a successful career in the music industry and hopefully we give young people an insight into the breadth of careers within the industry. This area was launched in July and has attracted considerable media attention as well as several successful partnerships, one with the iconic NME which has resulted in an icould user being offered a work taster experience with the Editor. We have also created some new free teaching resources to complement this new initiative.

……..

We’ve recently launched the next area, a Focus On Finance sponsored by Standard Life, which looks at the range of careers and skills needed in the Financial sector, proving that you don’t have to be an expert with numbers to work in finance!  We have a number of other areas in the pipeline, including a Focus on Media, which will launch in the New Year.

We continue to listen and respond to your feedback and are currently undertaking further research on the usage of icould.com to inform future developments.  We really appreciate your input, so please keep your comments and suggestions coming in.”

Obviously icould is on a roll. But lets use the Wayback machine to take us back to spring, 2009. I don’ t know, but I suspect that at that time iCould was struggling to make much impact. And here is one of the major reasons why. The Terms and Conditions of use at that time stated:

“Use of the icould website

Unless otherwise stated, icould owns the intellectual property rights in the website and material on the website. All these intellectual property rights are reserved.

Unless otherwise stated, you are entitled to use the icould website for personal use in any way, providing you do not reproduce any of the information as your own and/or seek to profit from it. Personal use constitutes viewing the icould website online and printing pages and/or documents for review offline.

If you wish to reproduce any materials accessible on the icould website including information, graphics, images and other design elements in printed or electronic form, you must obtain written permission first. Please use the contact details at the bottom of this page if you need to obtain permission.

Linking to the icould website is permitted, although displaying our pages within a frame of another website is not as this constitutes reproducing our content as your own.”

Now let’s forward to the present day. Under Terms and Conditions we find the following statement:

“…..we give permission to use the contents of the Site on a creative commons licence which can be found at:

Attribution-Non-commercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported

This licence gives you permission to broadcast icould.com pages over the school network or use them on a whiteboard in a classroom.  You can circulate articles, use the worksheets and so on. This applies in any education or training context.

In simple terms:

• You can copy, distribute, transmit the work and display the material with the exclusion of full length versions[i] of stories.
• You may create derivative works with the exclusion of full length versions of stories.

Under the following conditions:

• Attribution: You must give icould credit and make clear the resources come from icould.com.
• Non-commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes or make any charge for the work.
• Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a licence identical to the Creative Commons licence.

This means you could, for instance, create electronic worksheets or create electronic careers posters or include them in an e-portfolio or personal learning environment.”

Not only that, but icould provides an API key to make it easy for developers to incorporate icould materials in their own sites.

There is a lesson here for developers and content providers and indeed for many education and learning projects. Few of us have the clout to make it on our own. But through allowing use of our materials and projects we can build impact on a vastly greater scale. And whilst going creative commons closes off some business models it opens up others.

Congratulations to icould for opening up their content. And happy birthday. Lets hope they continue building on the success they are presently enjoying.

I am intrigued by this abstract is for a Symposium that will be presented at ALT-C 2011 by Frances Bell, Cristina da Costa, Josie Fraser, Richard Hall and Helen Keegan and is published on Frances Bell’s blog. I am reproducing it in full below.

This symposium will examine the paradoxes of giving and receiving online in education in a changing economic climate.  Each of the panelists will briefly address topic areas within the symposium theme, followed by an opportunity for present and at distance audiences to contribute, concluding with a 25 minute plenary discussion.

Symposium delegates will be provoked to reconsider the costs of participation online by paid and unpaid participants in ‘open’ discussion and sharing of resources.

Open Educational Resources exist within communities that create, use and sustain them (Downes 2007). When ‘communities’ in Higher Education break down due to redundancy and casualisation of labour what happens to OERs? Are they sustained? Can they reach out to other contexts?

All areas of education, including the school sector, currently face significant financial challenges and uncertainties. Institutions are increasingly reviewing the provision of devices and services, and looking at learner owned devices and commercially owned ‘free’ cloud-based services. What is the real price of an education system supported and transformed by embedded learning technologies?

Ownership in the age of openness calls for clarity about mutual expectations between learners, communities and ourselves. Ideas and content are shared easily through open platforms, and yet attributions can be masked in the flow of dissemination: does credit always go where it is due?

Openness in the production, sharing and reuse of education/resources is meaningless in the face of neoliberalism. Where coercive competition forms a treadmill for the production of value, openness/OERs are commodified. Control of the educational means of production determines power to frame how open are the relations for the production or consumption of educational goods or services, in order to realise value. The totality of this need, elicited by the state for capital, rather than the rights of feepayers, parents, communities or academics, shapes how human values like openness are revealed and enabled within HE.

Scarce research monies focus attention on impact factors, arguably stagnating practice. For publications, Open Access can increase wider societal impact but at the expense of career progression.We explore the tensions, paradoxes and professional costs on societal benefits, individual agency and academic progression.

Obviously this is a bit of a mash up proposal but it does raise a lot of questions. I think there is a tension between the idea of communities and institutions. Communities of practice, and for that matter the communities in which Open education Resources are being produced and shared, cross institutional boundaries. Furthermore the use of OERs may be within an institutional setting but may also be outside.

This again is reflected in recognition and reward structures. Whilst reward structures within institutions are based on either monetary compensation or in terms of progression, rewards within the community may reflect a wider understanding of recognition, especially respect or standing within that community. Does credit always go to who it should? Probably not, but this is taking a very individualistic view of research. Surely credit should be shared in the community rather than in the closed door offices of academic researchers.

Are OERs being commodified? Presumably the term “coercive competition” refers to the growing practice to require academics and researchers to publish their work as OERs. I don’t really understand what the authors mean in saying “The totality of this need, elicited by the state for capital, rather than the rights of feepayers, parents, communities or academics, shapes how human values like openness are revealed and enabled within HE.” Of course the idea of openness is being hijacked by institutions. But at the same time the movement towards openness is contradictory and I am not sure this is reflected in the abstract. Especially missing is a discussion of the nature of OERs in allowing reuse and modification and the impact this has on (commodified) relations of production and intellectual property. And at the same time, the spread of OERs is allowing new open forms of learning and knowledge production outside the confines of the institution. thus whilst the movement towards OERs may be becoming commodified the use of OERs is challenging traditional understandings of those very commodities.

I don’t think this reveals a paradox but a dialectical contradiction. Present schooling models of education are being found to be wanting. The discussion about open education is important in that it could provide an alternative to privatisation. The discussion over OERs forms an important part of this debate and to this extent the debate over this symposium is extremely interesting.

More on that research and learning infrastructure question. Online meetings are becoming ever more important and at least in theory, are a good idea because they cut down on traveling time, cost and harm to the environment. I say in theory, because at the moment we seem to be having meetings just because we can but no doubt we will grow out of that.

Last year I wrote about the different online platforms available, bemoaning the quality of the audio on many of the Flash based systems. At that time I was recommending two platforms – Elluminate – which despite problems of firewalling (and also all too often audio quality) was a fully functional working space and reasonably reliable – and Flash meeting – a free service provided by the UK Open University.

One of the drawbacks to Elluminate is that it is a paid for product although I have always found the Elluminate staff to be very generous in ‘lending’ online space if needed. Whether that will continue since they have been taken over by Blackboard remains to be seen.

Flash meeting is a great service, but is limited in terms of functionality. it works best for meetings of up to about 20 or so people – more that this and the interface becomes a little tricky.

Last year I looked at the open source Big Blue Button project. whilst promising it was not quite at a real use stage then. But since then it has come of age. The web page describes their  vision to be “that starting a web conference should be as easy as clicking a single metaphorical big blue button. As an open source project, we believe it should be easy for others to embrace and extend. And while web conferencing means many things to many people — our focus is to make the best web conferencing system for distance education.”

BigBlueButton is increasingly being integrated in other Open Source applications such as Moodle, Drupal and WordPress. And there are a number of commercial hosting providers. Now the UK Jisc has just announced an online video and audio conferencing service powered by BigBlueButton. As yet it has to be booked by email, but I have no doubts that Jisc will develop an online booking system. Sadly the service is limited to ‘UK academia’, based on having a .ac.uk email address. Brut hopefully Jisc will consider extending this in the future.

This seems a good example of how a public sector educational infrastructure provider, Jisc, can use Open Source Software to provide services to support a research and learning infrastructure. Another reason to support Open Source and defend public services.

Stephen Downes wrote last night that national programs supporting open educational resources (OERs) are springing up. He noted the publication of a Green Paper describing and making recommendations for OER initiatives in Brazil. Also, in Holland, he said, the government has launched the Wikiwijs project (literally: Wiki Wise), which “is an open, internet-based platform, where teachers can find, download, (further) develop and share educational resources. The whole project is based on open source software, open content and open standards.” Meanwhile the Washington State colleges board has passed a resolution saying “All digital software, educational resources and knowledge produced through competitive grants, offered through and/or managed by the SBCTC, will carry a Creative Commons Attribution License.”

To these initiatives can be added the launch of JISC OER Infokit (interestingly developed on a PBWorks wiki site) aiming to explore a range of considerations from specific technical issues to barriers and enablers to institutional adoption. They say “This infoKit aims to both inform and explain OERs and the issues surrounding them for managers, academics and those in learning support. It is aimed at senior managers, learning technologists, technical staff and educators with an interest in releasing OERs to the educational community.”

Stephen Downes quotes the Brazil Green Paper saying: “Education policy and projects that combine infrastructure investment with a coherent ‘network’ approach to content are the most likely to have significant positive impact and realize the goals of the policy. The ability of the Internet to create radical increases in innovation is not an accident – but it is also not guaranteed to happen simply through putting computers and courses onto the network. This ‘generative’ effect of networks comes from the combination of open technologies, software platforms that allow creative programming, the right to make creative and experimental re-use of content, and the widespread democratization of the skills and tools required to exercise all of those rights.”

The issue of democratisation is taken up in an excellent blog post entitled “Open Education: the need for critique” by Richard Hall. Richard says ” democratic practices in education are critical in enhancing our broader socio-educational life, and underpin radical re-conceptualisations of educational practice, for example mass intellectuality, a pedagogy of excess and student-as-producer.” He goes on to say: “To use the term learning revolution demands a critique of the political economics of education, and the social relations that exist therein. This cannot be done in terms of OERs without an engagement with critical pedagogy.”

Richard points to risks in present discussions about PLEs, OERs and informal learning.

That the role/importance of individual rather than social empowerment is laid bare, and that within a libertarian educational structure, the focus becomes techno-determinist. The risk here is that, accepting the position of others in meaningful, socially-constructed tasks, technology is the driver for individual emancipation [although we rarely ask “emancipation for or from what?”]. Moreover, we believe that without constant innovation in technology and technological practices we cannot emancipate/empower ever more diverse groups of learners.

That we deliver practices that we claim are radical, but which simply replicate or re-produce a dominant political economy, in-line with the ideology of accepted business models. So that which we claim as innovatory becomes subservient to a dominant mode of production and merely enables institutions to have power-over our products and labour, rather than it being a shared project [witness the desire for HE to become more business-like].

That we fetishise the outcomes/products of our labour as a form of currency. This is especially true in the case of open educations resources, which risk being disconnected from a critique of open education or critical pedagogy, and PLEs which risk being disconnected from a critique of their relationship to our wider social relations.

That we fetishise the learner as an autonomous agent, able to engage in an environment, using specific tools and interacting with specific OERs, so that she becomes an economic actor, rather than seeing her engagement as socially emergent and negotiated.

He puts forward a number of questions around iopen education and OERs.

How do we prioritise engagement with the broader, open context of learning and education, with trusted peers? How do we raise our own literacy around openness, in order to legitimise sharing as social practice and as social process, and not as a response to a target of OER-production-as-SMART-objective?

Is the production of OERs a means of furthering control over our means of production and our labour? Is there a risk that the alleged transparency of production of OERs is used to further control and power-over, for example, teachers and teaching by impacting contracts of employment?

Though education, how do we enable the types of participatory engagement and re-production of groups like the Autonomous Geographies Collective or Trapese, where the production of OERs is a secondary outcome to the re-fashioning of social relationships that it enables? By so doing, we might just enable groups to engage with the activity-areas that Harvey highlights as a process of production, rather than fetishising the production of things.

How do we resist the increasing discourse of cost-effectiveness, monetisation, economic value, efficiency that afflicts our discussion of open education? How do we move the argument around sustainability and open education away from a focus on economic value? Too often our discussion of open education is reduced to a discussion of OERs and this, in turn, is reduced to a discourse of cost and consumption. As a result, our role in education is commodified and objectified.

Do we ask who is margnalised in the production of OERs or in open education? Are non-Western cultures engaging in open education and the production of OERs through the languages of colonialism or by focusing on native socio-cultural forms? At what point do OERs and open education become part of a post-colonial discourse focused upon new markets?

How do we utilise OERs to open-up trans-disciplinary approaches to global crises, like peak oil and climate change? How do we enable the emerging array of open subject resources to be utilised across boundaries (be they personal, subject, programme, course, institutional or national), in order to challenge sites of power in the University and beyond? These resources enable ways of challenging hegemonic, mental conceptions of the world and framing new social relations. This requires curriculum leadership. These crises require socio-educational leadership.

These questions challenge us to reconceptualise what we mean by open education. More than that they force us to start exploring a critical pedagogy and what that implies in terms of meanings and our actions as educators and educational researchers and developers I hope Richards blog post gets the attention from the community it deserves. I will be trying to answer some of the questions on this blog in the next few days.

The UK based Jisc published an interesting report yesterday. The Researchers of Tomorrow study presents emerging findings from the first annual report of a major three-year study into the information seeking behaviour of Generation Y doctoral students. According to Jisc “the research shows that there are striking similarities between students born between 1982 and 1994 and older age groups.” As such it represents yet another blow to Prensky’s idea of Digital Natives.

The first annual report of the longitudinal study includes evidence-gathering from three groups of doctoral students in the UK, including: a cohort of 60 Generation Y doctoral students from 36 universities; responses to a national context-setting survey returned by over 2,000 Generation Y scholars and responses to the same national context-setting survey returned by 3,000 older doctoral students.

Generation Y students and older students concur on a number of areas:

-    Open access and open source – like students of other ages, Generation Y researchers express a desire for an all-embracing, seamless accessible research information network in which restrictions to access do not restrain them.  However, the annual report demonstrates that most Generation Y students do not have a clear understanding of what open access means and this negatively impacts their use of open access resources, so this is an area to be followed up in the next year.

-    Networked research environment – both Generation Y and older students express exasperation regarding restricted access to research resources due to the limitations of institutional licenses.  This is born from a sophisticated knowledge of the networked information environment and students regularly speak favourably about sector-wide shared services and resource sharing.

The research indicates, however, potentially interesting and important divergences between Generation Y and older doctoral students; for example, where students turn for help, advice and support and attitudes to their research environment.

-    Supervisor and librarian support – Generation Y scholars are more likely to turn to their supervisors for research resource recommendations than older doctoral students.  Also, 33% of Generation Y students say they have never used library staff for their support in finding difficult to source material.

-    Using library collections and services – Library collections are used heavily by students in their own institutions, but only 36% of Generation Y students have used inter-library loan services compared to 25% of older students, with 42% of arts and humanities students using these services regularly compared to 13% among science students.

The full report can be downloaded at http://www.researchersoftomorrow.net.

Yesterday saw the expected announcement by the UK DemCon Coalition government of the closure of Becta, the British Educational Communication and Technology Agency, as part of a massive cut back in public services.

In many ways this was an easy hit for the government. Becta has always had a mixed reputation in the educational technology community; although much of its work was respected, particularly the research, other policies especially around procurement and its alleged bias against open source were less popular.

However, there is no doubt that the closure signals the end of an era in technology development and implementation in UK education. Educational technologists in many European countries have long looked at the UK in envy. Reliant on either centralised government led initiatives, or local support and projects, there has been far less opportunities for developing and implementing effective programmes and strategies for technology in learning. Germany today continues to languish far behind many other counties in the use of technology in schools. Arguably one of the reasons for this is the lack of ability of the regional Lander governments who are responsible for education to develop coherent programmes to support educational technology development. There are of course exceptions, often driven by innovative regional governments, including the Extramadura programme around open source software. But nevertheless, and despite the dubious obsession of the previous UK Labour government with output driven targets, the last ten years has seen sustained support for developing educational technology in schools which has enabled a movement beyond isolated islands of effective practice to the more mainstream adoption of education technology for learning. Becta has played an important part in this.

As Becta themselves have pointed out, the closure may well not save money with the ending of the technology procurement support for schools.

The closure  probably reflects wider ConDem policies. One is the conservative myth that somehow if we return to old fashioned rote learning and traditional pedagogies allied to stronger school discipline, rigid school uniform policies etc. then somehow school standards will improve. Naturally technology plays no part in a chalk and talk view of learning. And the end result of such policies will be the further alienation of many students from the schooling system, an increase in the already growing class nature of the educational system and a widening of the reality gap between the way young learn and the practice of schools.

The second is a movement towards privatising education. According to the Guardian newspaper, the government will announce tomorrow their intention to allow “500 secondary schools and 1,700 primary schools have the freedom of city academy status by the summer.” The Guardian explains “Academies have greater freedom to set their curriculum, pay rates and admissions policies.” Such a move heralds selective admission policies which are set to benefit students from richer families and the breaking up of collective pay bargaining for teachers. But central to the policy of City Academies, which were introduced by the previous Labour Government, was the desire to introduce private funding for schools. Academies  receive state funds but are privately sponsored and run independently of local authorities. As Fiona Miller explains they are “independently owned, run by sponsors and loosely governed by “funding agreements” – confidential commercial contracts that don’t necessarily give pupils and parents the same protection under the law in areas like admissions, special needs and exclusions.Their governing bodies are controlled by the sponsors, who are often based miles away from where the school is situated. In the Conservative free schools model, private sector companies based in other parts of the world are being groomed to take over English schools.”

Such a policy is hidden behind an rhetoric of protecting direct services. In other words money is taken from an agency such as Becta with a remit to support learning for all students and given to private organisations to spend as they wish, all under the guise of greater accountability and democracy.

The problem with Becta was not that its policy on this or that was right or wrong, or even its perceived lack of support for open source. The issue was that as a government controlled agency, or quango, it often seemed to remote from the practice and everyday experience of teachers and learners. Whilst schools in the UK have traditionally been run by elected local governments, the previous Labour government set about a policy of centralisation, introducing a relatively rigid national curriculum, setting endless performance targets and national testing and giving increased powers to central agencies. The ConDem government is set to build on that beginning by the progressive and creeping privatisation of education. Becta is but one victim of that process. Of course there will be continued development of educational technology. But expect to see less emphasis on research. Expect to see less concern over the learner experience. Expect to see less concern over support for lower achieving students.  Expect to see contracts placed with the friends of Academy directors in this brave new free world. And expect to see a widening of the class division in the provision of education.

Interview with WordPress founder, Matt Mullenweg

I am in Bremen all week for the annual review meeting for the European Commission funded Mature project. More about the review in the next day or so.

Today, another quick post about WordPress and Buddypress. As I guess most of you realise this web site is powered by WordPress. However, when we first developed the web site only the Single User version was available. And although there were websites using WordPress as a Content management System, WordPress was seen primarily as a blogging system. Dirk Stieglitz, who runs the site, originally based the site on an exiting theme but quickly customised it to suit our needs. And, in general it works very well. the only problem is that with 110 categories or so, some controlling the CMS and some the tagging of posts, it is easy to make mistakes! Of course later versions of WordPress introduced a distinction between categories and tags but we are now faced with converting legacy posts to a new system.

More recently we have been excited the development of BuddyPress and have two sites underdevelopment. BuddyPress extends WordPress into a fully fledged social networking application. Matt Mullenweg’s interview is interesting in that he focuses on Buddypress and the use of WordPress as a CMS. But -at least to a non coder – there seems to be some interesting changes in the way that BuddyPress is evolving. Whilst there have always been many plug-ins to extend WordPress and also multiple themes, many of which were available for free, there is now a growing market for premium BuddyPress themes. Perhaps, that is a reflection of the idea of the app store and the growing willingness of users to pay modest fees for applications which extend Open Source Software. But it may also reflect changes in the WordPress architecture (not sure that is the right word).  Themes now do much.much more than just change the appearance of a blog. New BuddyPress themes come complete with CSS and AJAX which can change the functionality and design of a web site. Ultimately this may put considerable capacity in the hands of local developers and increase the ability for co-design of sites between users and developers. And that can be no bad thing.

One of the big stories in educational technology over the last few days has been the decision of Ning to cease providing free network sites. Many educationalists have been attracted to Ning by the ease of setting up and customising community sites and the use friendliness of the application.

Ning says the reason behind the decision is business: “Our Premium Ning Networks like Friends or Enemies, Linkin Park, Shred or Die, Pickens Plan, and tens of thousands of others both drive 75% of our monthly US traffic, and those Network Creators need and will pay for many more services and features from us.

So, we are going to change our strategy to devote 100% of our resources to building the winning product to capture this big opportunity. We will phase out our free service.”

OK, it is sad and traumatic for those who have invested heavily in building communities based on Ning and cannot afford to apy for the premium service. But is it surprising?

We have all become used to using free social software services. But, at the end of the day we live in a capitalist society. Yes, the software industry is evolving new business models. But are they in the long term sustainable. Ning, like many other services such as PBwiki, has based its economic model on providing a free ‘basic’ service and an enhanced premium service. Providing free services for education could be seen as having two benefits. the first is in publicising and popularising a particular service in the hope it will then attract sufficient premium business customers to justify the cost of the free service. The second is to hope that sufficient education customers will see the benefit of upgrading to the free service. I suspect there are three problems with this. The first is that in the present economic climate educational institutions and projects are looking to reduce expenditure on technology. The second is the increasing availability of competing services, making it difficult for any one company to dominate a market (unless the name is Google). And then there is the long tail – as the Ning press statements suggest, many of these network sites drive very little traffic. I myself have 43 PBwiki sites – many of them created for a short period of interaction with a limited number of colleagues.

The main model to support free services is advertising. Advertising is what drives Facebook’s relentless, aggressive and often unpopular innovations in their site design and functionality (and associated reduction in rights to privacy). I am not an economist but cannot understand how this market can continue to expand indefinitely. Surely there is a finite limit to the amount fo advertising the web market can absorb. Of course, it can continue to expand rapidly as long as web traffic continues to grow at a fast rate, but one day it must and will tail off. And as more players enter the market and attempt to challenge Google’s domination (Google is above all, an advertising company) the cost of advertising and therefore the returns will fall. Apple are set to enter the mobile advertising market with the release of version 4 of the iPhone software. Will companies invest yet more in advertising or will Apple’s share of the market be at the expense of someone else. In the long run this cannot be a sustainable business model.

Of course there are other ways of sustaining development. I am particularly impressed with Forio, an online application for creating simulations. Forio is free to use and the company encourages users to share their code under a Creative Commons license. The business appears to be supported by offering a service creating simulations for those without the time of ability and by providing training in how to use their application.

For education this raises issues – besides the long running issue of whether it is appropriate to provide educational sites carrying prominent advertising. Is it wise to rely on services which can be withdrawn at any time. Of course it is possible to undertake a risk assessment and I guess many large institutions do this. But for many of us working in teh long tail of education, even this may be beyond our knowledge and resources.

A major issue for me, and one which influenced me against using Ning, is that there was no obvious way of extracting my data from the site. It is good to see that Ning have said they will work to help users extract their data if they choose not to upgrade to the premium service. But surely this service should have been provided all along.

Somewhere in all this there is some kind of ethical issue. Readers with long memories may remember my posts protesting at Elgg’s proposed closure of the Eduspaces blog site, something over two years ago. I do not feel so bitter about Ning;s decision. Elgg was part of our community, Ning has never pretended to be anything other than a commercial service. And yet, in offering a free service for education and for the community, should nt there be some element fo ethical responsibility. Should companies offer a service they are unlikely to be able to sustain. And can we afford to be reliant on business’s from outside our community, with no ethical attachment to our aims and purposes?

It is also good to see the discussion within the community on different options to Ning – see for example Seven Sexiest Alternatives to Ning. Many of these are smaller companies, offering much the same service as Ning has in the past and hoping to casg in on Ning’s withdrawal of free services. It is particularly heartening to see that Buddypress rates highly in many of the discussions (as also does Elgg). Buddypress, a social networking plug in for WordPress MultiUser is Open Source Software. Buddypress is not a hosted service, although there are some companies now offering hosted sites. This means it is not free. It requires a server to run it on and expertise and knowledge in configuring and maintaining the application. But firstly the data is your own and you can archive and export the data. Secondly you are free to extend or modify your site in any way you wish. And thirdly the costs incurred tend to go into local and community employment – to provide more technicians in educational establishments or to support local software administrators – many of them working in small or medium enterprises – rather than to large international companies, even if these costs are hidden through advertising or premium services.

This, in turn, builds the pool of skill and competences in our communities, be it educational or the wider geographically based community. And research suggest that small and community based enterprises are the major driving fore for innovation, rather than the large companies that dominate so much of our economies.

I am truly appalled at the digital economy bill now being rushed through the UK parliament.

The bill includes a three strikes rule to cut off internet access for alleged file sharers – which according the Guardian newspaper “could suspend the broadband connections used by anybody accused of file sharing three times whether or not they are convicted of copyright infringement.”

The Guardian also reports that “the notorious Clause 17 – which has now had its scope diminished – had proposed to give the secretary of state the power to update copyright law without parliamentary assent.”

They go on to say “the Liberal Democrats caused uproar when they proposed an amendment to the bill apparently aimed at bringing more judicial oversight into the system – but that critics could end up shutting down major websites such as YouTube.”

“The change – which gives the high court the power to shut down entire websites if they host “substantial” amounts of copyright infringing material – came in for strong criticism, particularly after it emerged that the language used was identical to a proposal by British music industry body the BPI.”

In a blog entitled “The Day Democracy Died“, Lilian Edwards, a specialist in online law said:

This is simply disgraceful. It is law making by industry, for industry, on the nod of all three major political parties (and against the grassroots sentiment of at least one of them). This is no longer just about copyright, or downloading, or even freedom of speeech and due process. It is about democracy, and whether this country is run by MPs or by lobbyists and Big Capital. It is a day when as a democrat, and a lawyer, (and not as a “copyright activist” as one commenter wrongly called me – I believe in copyright, I just don’t believe in destroying the legal system to enforce it) ) I am deeply , deeply disappointed.

This law raises series issues for education. In a paper entitled “What is the significance of Open Source Software for the education and training community?” and written in 2005 (I think) i said the issue of sharing raises important social issues over ownership and content. I quoted Dai Griffith who addressed some of these issues at the open session of the June 2004 SIGOSSEE project meeting in Limerick on Open Source software in education.

He argued that the Web has changed the technology for publishing and that the publishing industry and legal framework is responding by seeking to reinforce the existing structures. The way they are doing this is by promoting the metaphor of ideas as property as ‘Intellectual property’. This metaphor says:

• An idea is an object
• Copyright is property
• Reuse of an idea is theft

Dai Griffiths rejected this metaphor. He asked how do you know if someone “steals” your copyright materials? Copyright infringement is illegal, he said, but it is not theft, pointing out there was art, music and literature before copyright. Copyright is a limited monopoly granted by the state. It is important, but it is not an inalienable right.

Copyright is a body of inconsistent, ad-hoc arrangements to regulate markets. Dai Griffiths argued that copyright should benefit the citizen, not the author or the publisher. He quoted the US House of Representatives report on the Berne Convention:

“The constitutional purpose of copyright is to facilitate the flow of ideas in the interest of learning.”… The primary objective of our copyright laws is not to reward the author, but rather to secure for the public the benefits from the creations of authors”

(Implementation Act of 1988, cited in LR Patterson & SW Lindberg, The Nature of Copyright 1991).

I would argue that the primary objective of the digital economy bill is not to reward the author, nor to secure for the public the benefits from the creations of authors, but to secure the interests of an outdated, self seeking and degenerate industry. They are not interested in music, they are not interested in film, they are not interested in literature, the are not interested in art, they are not interested in learning, they only care for their profits. This bill has nothing to do with the digital economy – it is about reinforcing copyright. Shame on our politicians for supporting them.