Pontydysgu - Bridge to Learning Pontydysgu.org

Last year the Bazaar project held a seminar called Hey Dude - Where’s my Data. The title, somewhat ironically was coined by Dave Tosh. In the run up to the seminar we posed the following issues and questions:

“With Web 2.0, more and more people have their documents, products, personal details and photos stashed all over the internet – what issues does this raise for education?

The rise of commercial services:

With the use of free, commercial, centrally hosted, social software services rising in education some important issues arise; Who controls this data? Do users care that commercial services are mining their usage patterns and selling this to marketing companies? Is the nature of these ‘free’ services understood – yes users can come in and use the base system for free but often, in return, they are bombarded with advertising and their details/usage habits sold. However, does anyone really care? Perhaps convenience of service outweighs the perceived downsides.

As Bill Fitzgerald points out: “This type of commercial activity is sneaky – it is not apparently obvious to the user what is happening to their data and usage patterns, so often they will not thing about this.”

Is it wise to build up learning environments around these free-to-use tools? While it is unlikely some of the bigger services, such as Flickr, will shutdown – the terms of usage could certainly change, what happens if learners suddenly have to pay to access their content?

As Graham Atwell points out: “Yes Web 2 is great for allowing mash ups and integrating services to produce rich and interactive web sites. But the reliance on external services from mostly commercial companies does raise a whole series of issues. Can we trust these people with our data? will we still have access to this data in the future.? What is to stop them data mining for their own purposes?”

Is there an alternative?

Open Standards

Surely the way to approach this is to build educational tools based on open standards, not specific, commercial, services? This will remove any reliance on services like flickr or del.icio.us. Then again, who would be responsible for building and maintaining these tools? Should institutions and perhaps government be responsible?

Open Source

The same issues arise - who is responsible for building, maintaining and paying for the service?

Where to store my data:

With the rise in popularity of ePortfolios many have asked what happens to an ePortfolio after the student has left the institution? What happens to this content – where are learners supposed to store it? Can they still access it?

At least one UK university is considering charging alumni for continued access to their ePortfolio – is this the correct approach?

Starting Points
To get you started here are some rough questions:

• Data mining on commercial services, is this a problem?

• Should institutions using commercial services worry about the user data being sold to advertising and marketing companies?

• Is it not a risky strategy to rely on commercial services keeping their services ‘free’?

• Does anyone really care? Some of these services are excellent so perhaps we should accept that their might be some downsides and instead concentrate on the pedagogical benefit they can offer?

• Who would pay for something if it was not commercial service providers – the government? Would we trust that more? Would the services actually be as good?

• What role should governments play, if any at all?

• What is the role of institutions?

• Security issues?

• Ownership issues?”

The position papers and discussions from the seminar can be found on the project wiki. But whilst we saw the answers largeluy in individual ownership of data with backups etc and interoperability standards we missed teh issue of community. Individuals can transfer their data from Eduspaces with its impending closure. But at a technical level it is tricky to back up and restore comments. Moreover links to individual posts will be lost - as will the community context of the discussion. In other words communities may be more than a blog and whilst back ups and interoperability and standards may allow us to safeguard our individual data it does little for communities.

I have been pondering the implications of the demise of Eduspaces. I am not privy to the thinking or reasons why Curverider decided they could no longer support the service but it is not too difficult to understand some of what has happened. Moreover, the closure raises a number of issues of longer term significance.

Eduspaces was formerly elgg.net. Essentially when Elgg was launched elgg.net was a space for people to try out Elgg. Because the Elgg developers, Ben and Dave, came from a background in education - and the original ideas behind elgg were developed through working on ePortfolios - the major take up was in education.

Elgg took off fast - it is a very good product - and Curverider was in a dilemma. Despite a successful product they had limited infrastructure and little income. Eventually they got organised and whilst remaining committed to supporting Elgg as free Open Source software, they turned their attention to developing commercial services to provide a stable basis for their work. All very sensible. Over time, Eduspaces was floated off as a separate community. Now it appears they feel unable to continue to support what is a very different community from their core development efforts.

The big issue for me is whether when a small company develops such a product and service, it should be supported by the publicly funded education community. Whilst s0me would say this is not a role for education organisations, education does support large vendors through buying their products. Why, just because software is free and open source, should no such support mechanism exist? Of course Curverider can apply for various grant fundings. Pontydysgu works in many funded projects. Yet these projects are short term and it is hard to make enough money to survive.

Why should the edcation community support services like Eduspaces? Many would say that it is not for the education community to host and provide such services - better to leave it to the private sector. In my view we should host such services because we need to support and develop communities. Eduspaces is not just Elgg. It is a (almost unique) world community of educators. This in turn raises a new problem. Educational institutions and organisations support students and researchers in their own institution and their own country. The very strength of Eduspaces becomes its weakness. Yet if we believe in learning through communities, through open knowledge exchange, through social networks, this process cannot be left to the private market. This is the learning arena of the future. If nothing else, we need to support communities like Eduspaces as an experiment in knowledge sharing and community development. Not as a subsidy for Elgg but as a service to the education and community. And such communities should not have borders, either institutional or based on nationality.

Neat photo from On-line Educa - thanks to Peter Himsel who took the picture and thanks to Online Educa and to Peter for releasing under a Creative Commons attribution license.

It seems strange to me but I am still finding people who don’t know about next weeks Bazaar event - Show that you Share taking place in Utrecht on Friday 14 December. It is free and there are still places left. If you would like to come just email me or Raymond Elferink. Full details can be found on the Bazaar Web site.

And if you need more details to be convinced here is the draft programme.

The conference is based on five main themes:

• Hey Dude, Where’s my Data? On data security, privacy and sustainability
• Social Software, Tools and Content Creation
• OERs and the Culture of Sharing
• Interoperability and Metadata and OERs
• PLEs, ePortfolio’s and Informal Learning

We were also concerned that the event would be participatory with spaces for participants to present key ideas and work in progress.

Our proposal for the structure of the meeting is as follows:

9:30 Coffee and Registration
10:00 Session 1: Introduction to themes - Graham Attwell, Raymond Elferink, George Bekiaridis and Ineke Lam
11:00 Session 2: Workshops and round tables -

Each session will last 30 minutes with participants rotating between different round table / workshops

12:30 Lunch break (lunch will be provided for participants)

13:30 Session 3: workshops and round tables

Each session will last 30 minutes with participants rotating between different round table / workshops

15:00 Session 4: Open Space - conference participants present their ideas - posters / 5 minute presentations

15:30 Drawing it together - what have we learnt - where do we go next

16:00 Drinks

Creative Commons changed its pictogram for Attribution and adjusted the pictogram for Noncommercial to European needs, so Bazaar has been updating their Bazaar Pins set too! See also: Show that you Share.

For those who are not familiar with these pins: to stimulate the sharing and reuse of content, the Bazaar project supports Creative Commons and came up with the idea to wear pins to Show that we Share to conferences, seminars, our Show-me days and every other (non-)Bazaar event. Pinning the ones we find important on our rugsacks and jackets makes showing that we share an everyday thing. And we wear them proudly.

The old set has now really become a collectors item. The new set will be available at the Bazaar Stand at the Online Educa in Berlin, Germany, next week (November 28-30, 2007).

Every attendee to the free Bazaar Conference on December 14 2007 in Utrecht, the Netherlands, will receive their own Bazaar Pins set, to Show that they Share. For more information on the Bazaar conference, see: Networks, Communities & Learning: Show that you Share!.

We hope to see you there, we hope to see you wear.

Pontydydysu is a partner in the European funded Bazaar project and I will be speaking at the project conference in Utrecht in December. This looks like a great event. I am really happy that people are getting more imaginative in how they organise these type of events. The conference is free. Please do try and come along. The conference flyer is attached with this post.

The conference will take place on 14 December 2007, Utrecht, the Netherlands from 9:30 - 16:00, at Boothzaal, Utrecht University Library on the University Campus de Uithof, Heidelberglaan 3. It is jointly rganised by the Bazaar project and IVLOS, the Institute of Education of Utrecht University

The Conference Objectives are:

• To provide a space for participant-driven discussion and debate
• To promote critical enquiry and discourse
• To allow for the presentation of ideas in progress
• To provide access to peer expertise and opinion

The five main themes are based on key and emergent issues identified by Bazaar:

• Hey Dude, Where’s my Data? On data security, privacy
and sustainability
• Social Software, Tools and Content Creation
• OERs and the Culture of Sharing
• Interoperability and Metadata and OERs
• PLEs, ePortfolio’s and Informal Learning

The major aim of the conference is to promote dialogue and exchange between ‘experts’,researchers, developers, practitioners and learners. We are particularly keen that learners and junior researchers are given an opportunity to discuss and exchange their ideas. We aim that the content of the sessions is driven and created by the participants rather than the traditional ‘presentation and five minutes questions’ format with content determined in advance by a single organiser, or a small group of organisers.

Workshops and Round Tables include:

- Social networking services & social search – led by Josie Fraser, EdTechUK, UK
- THINKing and UNDERSTANDing the internet – led by Helen Keegan, Salford University, UK
- Building an infrastructure for lifelong competence development – led by Wolgang Greller, Open University, NL
- Developing Open Educational Resources – led by Marco Kalz, Open University, NL
- The use of wikis and open architecture spaces to promote a culture of sharing – led by Steve Wheeler, University of Plymouth, UK
- Creating and sharing Open Educational resources – led by Veronika Hornung, Salzburg Research, AT
- Personal Learning Environments – led by Graham Attwell, Pontydysgu, UK
- How can we use IMS Learning Design? – led by Raymond Elferink, RayCom BV, NL
- The future of Learning Management Systems – led by Geoge Bekiaridis, Ergon KEK, GR

The Conference is free but we would ask you to inform Raymond Elferink if you intend coming (not least of all because we are providing a free lunch).

Details of accommodation in Utrecht etc will be posted on the Bazaar Web site.

Networks, Communities & Learning: Show that you Share!

I am in Houston, Texas for the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation 2007 Open Educational resources Grantees meeting.

Central to the event is a presentation by Daniel Atkins, John Seely Brown, and Allen Hammond, of their 

Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges, and New Opportunities.

It is a substantial report with many interesting asides and well worth a read.

They identify the following ‘key enablers’ as driving the OER movement:

• “open source code, open multimedia content and the community or institutional structures that produce or enable them;
• the growth of what we are calling participatory systems architecture; Our notion of architecture includes both technical and social dimensions.
• the continuing improvement in performance and access to the underlying information and communication technology (ICT);
• increasing availability and use of rich media, virtual environments, and gaming; and
• the emerging deeper basic insights into human learning (both individual and community) that can informed and validated by pilot projects and action-based research.”

Central to the report is the call for the development of an Open Participatory Learning Infrastructure (OPLI) (which is not a long way form what Ray Elferink and I have been advocating in the form of an Architecture of Participation. The authors “believe that the Hewlett Foundation can play a leadership role in weaving the threads of an expanded OER movement; the e-science movement; the e-humanities movement; new forms of participation around Web 2.0; social software; virtualization; and multimode, multimedia documents into a transformative open participatory learning infrastructure—the platform for a culture of learning.”

They go on to say that “the proposed OPLI seeks to enable a decentralized learning environment that:  (1) permits distributed participatory learning; (2) provides incentives for participation (provisioning of open resources, creating specific learning environments, evaluation) at all levels; and (3) encourages cross-boundary and cross cultural learning.” The OPLI can be envisaged as “a dream space for participatory learning that enables students anywhere to engage in experimenting, exploring, building, tinkering and reflecting in a way that makes learning by doing and productive inquiry a seamless process.”

This is good stuff indeed - visionary but not beyond the realms of what can be achieved. Particularly welcome is the weving together of technical and social objectives. My only reservation is the continued stress on the role of higher education institutions - but maybe this is a reflection of the objectives of the Hewlett Foundation.

More tomorrow - I’ll try and post a couple of live blogs from the conference. In the meantime I’m off to the Longneck Reception and the Good Company Barbecue Dinner.

I’m trying to write a funding bid but keep getting diverted by the discussions going on on the blogs. Anyway I will write a quick entry now and then get my head down to business.

Dave has written a sad tale on the problems of open source business models. I don’t agree with him that open source is broken - far from it. I have little problem in persuading potential clients to use open source (in my experience they really don’t understand or care).

But I used to work for Knownet, and know from my bitter experience the problems of developing an income stream for a company developing open source applications for education.

Our business model was based on developing instances on use in mainly European funded projects. It worked - to an extent. But we still ended up working way to many hours and with recurrent cash flow problems. It was essentially a voluntarist model.

And of course there is money to be made out of customisation, support, training etc. But this does not fund mainstream development. The open source model is based on the benefit form many developers working together around the same code. But - in reality there needs to be someone organising, driving and inspiring such an effort. ELGG would not exist without the vision and drive form Ben and Dave.

Education is (or should be) a public good. I have written before about how the development and use of proprietory e-learning applications is effectively privatising education and is crippling innovation in pedagogy - in developing new ways and understandings of teaching and learning.

If we value open source in education - not just because it is better code - but because of the values it brings to education and learning - and if education is a public good - then open source development in education should be supported by those who support (ie fund) education. In the UK there is a great deal of money beings pent of educational technology. At least some of that money should be ring-fenced for open source development. This could be through an agency or might involve the creation of a trust or foundation to manage the development.

I think we should start a campaigning and lobbying for this. Because without such a fund I fear the issues Dave talks about will not go away.

I/ve never really got on with feed readers. Yes, I know, everyone says that on the Mac Net Newswire is brilliant. Well, I will accept its a very fine piece of software. But to me the user interface looks like an old email client and I never really got the hang of managing my feeds. They ended up a total mess with too many duplications and dead feeds et.

I had a go at using Flock but it really is too slow. I bought an account for Shrook. Oh and `I even started aggregating feeds in my ELGG account. So you see I have been trying.

For the last four weeks I have been thinking about sorting out all these feeds. then three days ago Mike sent me a link to Vienna. Man - this rocks. It looks good, it is intuitive to use and best of all is Open Source. Sadly it is only available for the Mac at the moment.

Wow - this is brilliant.

From a press release from JISC:

Worldwide call for free and open access to European research results

Over 10,000 individuals sign petition to European Commission to guarantee public access to publicly funded research

January 29th 2007. Nobel laureates Harold Varmus and Rich Roberts are among the more than ten thousand concerned researchers, senior academics, lecturers, librarians, and citizens from across Europe and around the world who are signing an internet petition calling on the European Commission to adopt polices to guarantee free public access to research results and maximise the worldwide visibility of European research.

Organisations too are lending their support, with the most senior representatives from over 500 education, research and cultural organisations in the world adding their weight to the petition, including CERN, the UK’s Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, the Italian Rector’s Conference, the Royal Netherlands Academy for Arts & Sciences (KNAW) and the Swiss Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences (SAGW), alongside the petition’s sponsors, SPARC Europe, JISC, the SURF Foundation, the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Danish Electronic Research Library (DEFF).

The petition calls on the EC to formally endorse the recommendations outlined in the EC-commissioned Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets of Europe.  Published in early 2006, the study made a number of important recommendations to help ensure the widest possible readership for scholarly articles.  In particular, the first recommendation called for ‘Guaranteed public access to publicly-funded research results shortly after publication’.

The EC will host a meeting in Brussels in February to discuss its position regarding widening access and the petition is intended to convey the overwhelming level of public support for the recommendations of the EC study.Â

JISC Executive Secretary Dr Malcolm Read, said: ‘Maximising public investment in European research and making more widely available its outputs are key priorities for the European Union as it seeks to enhance the global standing of European research and compete in a global market. JISC is proud to be sponsoring a petition which seeks these vital goals and which has already attracted such widespread support.’Â

One of the petition’s signatories, Richard J Roberts, Nobel Prize winner for Physiology or Medicine in 1993, said: “Open access to the published scientific literature is one of the most desirable goals of our current scientific enterprise. Since most science is supported by taxpayers it is unreasonable that they should not have immediate and free access to the results of that research. Furthermore, for the research community the literature is our lifeblood. By impeding access through subscriptions and then fragmenting the literature among many different publishers, with no central source, we have allowed the commercial sector to impede progress. It is high time that we rethought the model and made sure that everyone had equal and unimpeded access to the whole literature. How can we do cutting edge research if we don’t know where the cutting edge is?”

The petition is available at: www.ec-petition.eu/

Before Christmas I wrote a couple of posts which were raising doubts about the use of Second Life in education.

Git lots of comments - mainly adverse. I thought this was a bit unfair because the reason I had written the posts was just because I do find the SL environment interesting and think it may have great potential in the future. (Tomorrow I will write another article on why the development of games and immersive environments in education is so slow).

However, getting back to the point, one of those replying to my original mail claimed that Linden Labs was planning to make the SL software available as Open source. I was sceptical but it is true. The client end software is now available under the GPL license.

Its an interesting move. The client is not the easiest interface to use and there can be little doubt Linden will benefit greatly from having OS programmers work on the software.

But it also opens up some intriguing alternatives with even Linden talking of parallel virtual worlds. According to a CNN story, IBM Vice President for Technical Strategy Irving Wladawsky-Berger, a close student of Second Life, heard about the impending move toward open source from a Linden employee.

“They have the right thought,” he says, “which is that open source things work with the marketplace. But this is a field in its infancy that will be very competitive. Linden Lab might end up with a huge leadership position in a certain class of tools for virtual worlds, but those might not be the right tools for, let’s say, a surgeon learning a new procedure in an immersive online environment. Second Life can be wildly successful, but so can others.”

The point here is that although Linden Labs are providing access to a test server grid, they are not Open Sourcing the server end. But then again in may be possible to develop alternative server end applications fro sat a surgeon learning a new procedure using the OS SL client software.

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