EduGlu Sandbox

First, I need to clarify something. I’m not going to call this “mobile learning” or even the more web2.0 friendly “mLearning.” (although I’ve tagged this post with both monikers, because that’s what everyone else seems to call it). What I’m describing is simply the application of small, portable, personal devices with various features that can be leveraged in interesting ways to support and enhance the activities of teaching and learning. By calling it “mLearning” there is an inordinate emphasis on the shiny technology, and less so on their appropriate pedagogical applications.

Second, the concept of using mobile devices to support teaching and learning is nothing new. The New Media Consortium’s 2008 Horizon Report outlines some of the educational ramifications of mobile broadband. There are several pages on del.icio.us tagged with “mlearning” pointing to much more discussion on the topic.

What is interesting is the rapid pace of development of various network-enabled mobile devices such as the iPod Touch, iPhone, Blackberry, and other sophisticated and convergent smartphones. We are now carrying devices in our pockets which are running modern operating systems, on processors more powerful than were found in high end workstations only a few short years ago. These devices now let anyone access advanced applications, with broadband Internet access and, cameras, and geolocation. We now have devices available that rival or surpass the mythical tricorder in power, mobility and flexibility.

Again, this isn’t new - I was writing term papers, printing, faxing, and accessing the network in the mid 1990s from a handheld Newton Messagepad 120.

Newton MessagePad 120, and three generations of iPods - including an iPod Touch, which finally matched much of the functionality of the MessagePad (but over a decade later).

What has changed is the cost - my MP120 cost nearly a grand, over a decade ago (IIRC, the MP120 cost about $850 back then. after adjusting for inflation that is now equivalent to over $1200). Devices now cost only a couple hundred bucks. These things are now accessible by nearly anyone that wants one.

Which begs the question - what can we do with all of this mobile power suddenly available? How does this change the nature of educational technology? What new activities are now possible, and how can they be applied pedagogically? This is about more than having a bunch of shiny pocket sized devices available. This is about what pervasive, ubiquitous, mobile devices can do to enhance and extend the activities of teaching and learning.

The simplest application is just by allowing access to the Internet - web, email, instant messaging, from anywhere. Students can call up references from the classroom or lab, or even while experiencing activities in the field. This has been possible for awhile, but smaller devices make it easier and more likely to be used (and used effectively).

Geolocation, putting a person on a live map.

Geolocation can be used to place a person on a map, find information about that location, and to find other people who are nearby (or are interested in that region).

Where it gets really interesting is in the intersection of location awareness and augmented reality. Mobile applications they know where a person is, what they’re looking at, where they’ve been.

A student at an ecological field station can call up photographs taken at a given location over the last several years. Someone on a marine research vessel can call up images, audio and video describing the organisms that arebeing retrieved by the trawling nets on the ship. They can post media to document and share the experience. GPS coordinates can be embedded, making the media relevant to other classes and researchers.

Augmented reality - enhancing an experience by drawing on location awareness and networked data to enhance an experience in real time.

It’s not much of a stretch to imagine an application that is able to leverage the location-awareness of the mobile device, accessing information over the network to add layers of additional information based on what a person is doing, where they are looking, and what they need to learn about.

The hype has been heard before. Technology will change everything! All we need is a little more technology! Look! Shiny things!

The production of an early form of mobile device with interesting applications in the practices of teaching and learning.

But, I really believe that there are many extremely interesting, and pedagogically sound, applications of these new devices. We just need to be careful about buying into the hype without thinking about how we should use this stuff. I’m not going to try to catalog a long laundry list of possible applications of mobile devices - I’m quite sure that the most interesting uses can’t even be imagined yet. But we need to start thinking hard about how we will integrate these applications, and how we will adapt our teaching and learning where relevant.

ps. the first draft of this (exceedingly long) blog entry was written on my iPod Touch, using the Notes application. I then emailed this so I could finish the post on my laptop (adding the images and links).

Show ID: 60545


Start at: 3/28/2008 5:06 am PST


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Description: Topics associated with all aspects of Amateur Astronomy,

PREVIOUS SHOW was Sunday 27th January 2008 @ 19-30hrs GMT
Phil Harrington talks live and delivers his presentation, "Urban StarGazer" See first pre-recorded clip to view

LAST SHOW,Was Sat 23r

I love you commenters. You make the blog go round.

Following up on the last “story” post about an old electric guitar, Cole alertly noticed I’ve been playing around with my writing both here and in my flickr stream with some extended personal yarns (David’s Chair. Seeing the Door). Yes, its my blog and I can switch my topics, though I am not sure any more what is on topic or off topics.

Especially in my flickr stuff, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to weaving more thoughtful (or at least intended that way) text than just a caption or, as I remarked in my recent talks, enough of these hastily posted photos where the only context is a title like “IMG10253.JPG”. There is some curiously interesting, for me, energy with not just including a picture as an illustration but weaving words and images into some combination, making the images communicate words and the words maybe communicate pictures.

So I am wondering its fine and self-fulfilling to do these personal stories, how do I extend this writing style (if there is really one) into other topics? This remains to be seen.

Or maybe I am just bored about writing things about spammers, ed tech, WordPress, or PHP.

Nope. Those are still topics I like.

But a bloggers writing ought to be always evolving unless one begins to drink to much of their own self hype.

And even more, as my own sister comments (which is both weird and neat to have family members reading my rants), I completely forgot a side segment of the Telecaster story. Having given up my one true love guitar, I did purchase a cheapie, a Fender Mustang:

photo credit: jensonbigcat

Mine was uglier, black with some candy-ass starburst pattern. The tremolo bar was funky.

But it was no blonde Telecaster.

Anyhow, before I left Baltimore for by big western journey to Arizona (yet another series of stories), my last night was a party with the old friends, steamed crabs and beer of course.. and I decided to do my own Pete Townsend and smash that crummy guitar on a rock in my back yard.

Somewhere there are analog photos of this, some mullet head kid smashing a guitar. It was a moment indeed, thanks sis for pulling it out of the dust bin.

LiveBlog of Matt Mullenweg's Keynote --

Streamed at http://ustream.tv/channel/nv08 (at least some of it)

Note: This liveblog is rough -- just notes, no editing

Beginning blog platforms --
Open Diary -- 1998
LiveJournal -- 1999

5 years ago -- based on B2

Over 7 million downloads

MM on what Bloggers want -- "Bloggers hierarchy of needs"

1. Expression
The most important tab on the WP blog is the Presentation tab -- allows people to change the theme

A lot of successful web 2.0 companies are successful because they protect users from spam communication

2. Public -- privacy is important, but publically available should be the default -- things that make it easier to connect/follow can have an exponential effect on growth/readership

3. Validation -- check stats to get a sense of readership

4. Form Dictates Writing wrt blogs

Exhortations:
1. Remove the Friction -- make the software 100% invisible
Prediction: volume of posting will blow away all predictions --

4 million pages created on WP.com every month

Wikipedia has 2.1 million pages

Not a shortage of information -- need to filter --

"Two Public Service Announcements"

Achilles Heel of Web 2.0 is spam

FaceBook spam

Content used to be most valuable thing -- attention now the most valuable thing

Exhortation #3 (I missed 2 -- whoops) -- Kill the megabrands

"Matt's Third Law of Social Media -- Unfiltered interaction is worthless at scale -- ie, it doesn't work

Used YouTube example of recommended content

1st generation social networks about creating connections

2nd generation (Web 2.0): people congregating around social objects: Youtube -- Videos; Flickr -- Photos; etc.

Data needs to be filtered to add value to the experience of social networking/social media

Transition to Open Source

Ask Not What Your Software Can Do For You

How to impact OS without coding:
Documentation
Taste of Freedom -- the tools we use in our lives are better than "enterprise" solutions --

Mentions 4 freedoms of social software: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

What matters is that we get the data architectures running systems running on open standards

A wiki for every bill: see who made what changes, and when

Create Open Source alternatives that are better

It all started with a post on Stephen’s blog about WordPress.Com As OpenCourseWare. That took me to EduGlu, with a very nice diagram of an Open Content and Open Learning environment (seems to be a good diagram of a PLE as well).
Joining EduGlu was fine, trying to add my blog and then to make a comment on the feedback page was a bit more fiddly - and I made a bit of a mess. It’s useful having lots of shared editing buttons. Until drongoes like me make a mistake. (You can’t see it without logging in!)
What had really interested me, though, was the idea of using WordPress for OpenCourseware (or, indeed, any form of Courseware!) Stephen’s post, and the subsequent links to Jim Grooms BavaTuesday (at least, I think it’s his; hard to tell!) answered a question I’ve had for ages. How to use RSS to create posts in a WordPress blog as you can with Elgg. (It was one of the selling points of Elgg for me). I’d not realised that I need to have a spammers mentality. I rather liked Stephen’s reworking of Spam …

Self Propelled Academic Messages

Oh, and David Wiley’s course looks pretty useful too! (I think that it’s a rework of the material on Utah State’s Open Courseware that I pointed students to before)

Listen to this podcast

Introductory Notes

These are some thoughts in progress -- I’ve been thinking these things through for probably the last few years, but things have been getting more interesting of late.

Some of the blog posts that have helped shape my thinking here include:
http://bavatuesdays.com/proud-spammer-of-open-university-courses/
http://weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca/brian/archives/044998.php
http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/464
http://www.chrislott.org/2008/02/17/confused-about-the-blog-uproar/
http://weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca/brian/archives/044813.php
http://www.funnymonkey.com/mini-edu-rss
http://www.darcynorman.net/2008/02/16/on-eduglu-part-1-background/
http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/010236.html -- this is from Tony Hirst, who has an almost overwhelming amount of great information regarding remixing content on his blog.
I've also been thinking about the work Scott Wilson has been doing with FeedForward.

Toward the end of this post, I fall short of the needed conversation when I talk about the Course and Learner sections. There’s more to be said here -- a lot more -- but the poor souls who actually persevere to that point in the post will probably agree that I’ve said enough by then already.

An Open Content and Open Learning environment

External Repository -- in this context, an external repository is a place where content is stored. In many ways, the external repository is an artificial construct that doesn’t need to exist. The single most important argument in favor of the external repository is that the external repo can provide a level of credibility that less “official” sources of information lack. For example, a piece of information coming from the MIT’s OpenCourseware will have more credibility than a YouTube video.

These external repositories, however, need to expose their content via rss/atom, or web services, something that many of them do not do. With that said, it would also be nice to see the major OCW repositories use less pdf’s to allow for easier modification.

On a technical note, Tony Hirst pointed to a Mediawiki plugin that exposes full Mediawiki articles as rss feeds. This extends Mediawiki’s flexibility by allowing Mediawiki content to be imported via rss feeds.

Planning Repository -- the planning repos are the staging grounds of course preparation. Planning repositories will import selected courses from a variety of external repositories. While a limited number of people might have access to an external repository, more people can have access to a planning repository. Within the planning repository, users can edit existing courses, add links, text, images, etc. Then, users can select individual pieces of different courses, and re-organize them into a new course. By definition, planning repositories should be messy. They are workspaces, and should be viewed as a place where people go from draft versions to more polished versions of course materials.

For example: a history department creates an departmental planning repository. Initially, they import a variety of courses from different external repositories. Then, instructors add content as needed. Once they have finished adding content, they select the lessons/material they want for their course. So, an instructor teaching a course on the Rise of Modernism could incorporate material from a course on WWI. Once the instructors have selected and organized their lessons, they export them into their courses.

On the technical side, the planning repository could be a Drupal site built using the FeedAPI. I described how to do this here, and revisited the idea here. Alan Levine (in the comments here) and Jared Stein and Patrick Gosetti-Murrayjohn (in the comments here ) ask about how to select individual pieces of content for inclusion in a course. Once you have imported content into a Drupal site, you can use Views Bookmarks, Nodequeue, or node references (part of CCK) for doing exactly that.

Once the individual lessons have been selected and organized into a course, they can be exposed via an rss feed.

Mediawiki would also make an excellent planning repository by using XFeed to aggregate external content and the WikiArticle Feeds Extension (linked to above) to generate rss feeds for curriculum.

However, here is another wrinkle: every school is already producing curriculum. Teachers generate curriculum for all of their classes. If a school used a planning repository to coordinate curriculum planning, they could export the polished curriculum to a web site that could become an external repository. In this way, schools generate their curriculum maps and provide open content as part of their ongoing course planning and development process.These planning repositories becoming external repositories would have one enormous advantage over existing content repositories: they would be fully open, with all content within them accessible via rss feeds. For all schools currently undergoing accreditation reviews, how much time are you spending collecting up curricular materials? If you build your curriculum as described in this post, you have all your curriculum ready to hand, and categorized via tags.

It’s worth noting that the technology to do this exists now, and can be built entirely using open source tools.

It’s also worth noting that, using Drupal, you can clone an entire site -- configuration, content, and even user accounts -- and move that site with minimal effort. It’s what we’ve been doing with DrupalEd for nearly a year, and with less sophisticated class sites since September of 2005.

Courses -- In this context, courses are blog based tools, and could be delivered via a tool like Wordpressor Drupal. Curricular material could be imported; Jim has shown how to do this, D’Arcy has shown how to do this , and the aggregation examples I linked to earlier show how to do this.

The feeds of learners taking the course could be added to a blogroll, or, in the case of Drupal, could be imported directly into the site. With OpenID becoming more prevalent, students could either be site members, or be granted access via their OpenID. This flexibility would allow learners to interact with the course using their preferred tools, and, if they wanted, using their pre-established online identity.

Learners -- In this context, learners are just about anyone. You don’t need to be a student to be a learner, although, for obvious reasons, most schools probably wouldn’t allow open enrollment in their courses.

For me, the interesting piece of this has to with the potential for a true PLE. While I’m not particularly enamored of the whole notion of the PLE (I see it as more of a construct than a piece of technology, and something that is better achieved via innate curiosity than lines of code, but that’s another conversation), this system of open learning solves one of the main problems inherent in most PLE implementations: how to get course content out of the course and into the PLE. In this situation, that’s not an issue, as learners use their chosen tools to contribute in their courses. As they are doing the work from their platform, they retain control of their work in a way that just isn’t possible using proprietary LMS’s, or even open source LMS’s like Moodle.

Next Steps

The next steps could include any/all of the following:

• A school, or a group of teachers, banding together to create course materials in a planning repository. Dan Meyer has called for something along these lines a while back.
• More teachers using a blog-based approach to delivering content. The WPMU work that Jim helped spearhead shows one way of doing this; and the folks at BYU have illustrated another way of doing this.
• Existing Open Content repositories could actually expose their content via rss feeds. If this happened, one of the enornous barriers to actually using the open content that has been published to date would be removed.

These thoughts are incomplete -- what's missing? What needs closer examination? What else needs to be considered here?

My oft repeated line this year is something about most enjoying the net based things that happen totally without provocation, plan, just spontaneous connectedness. I am sure that its maybe 3% of the general population that can really experience this with wide eyed excited wonder, and I am fortunate to know some of the best among that percentage.

I was setting down to shoot down some emals, perhaps edit those audios I need to publish soon, like yesterday, and as the habit goes, I said, “I’ll just check twitter quickly, just a minute to scroll.” And there, in the 5 seconds ago, I saw Jen was linking to a ustream.tv channel she was broadcasting on. I’d not done hardly any ustreaming since my trip to Australia, and said, hey, I wonder how it works if you have multiple people broadcasting?

So I flipped on my channel and we could pretty much talk back and forth, and she was relaying chats from ?? Alec Couros and/or Rob Wall?? So without knowing what else to do on camera, I reached for my prop, and brought Fresa on screen:

(more…)

Let me join the Jim Groom Kum-Ba-Ya I Love WordPress Chorus. In this least year, I’ve rolled out 3 NMC web sites that are published via WordPress, with each one going deeper into the bowels of the templates and just more jazzed how I can bend them to my will, casting CSS, PHP, plugins, MySQL to do my bidding. This is unlike drupal, where after a year I am still trying to figure out just how the heck it works and manages information. Its still a grey murky, opaque blue gumdrop box. I am trying to summon the drupal love, and it aint happening.

But WordPress, you make me sing. In this blog post that portends to be a monster one of length, I am going to dissect a new site I worked in gory technical detail.

On each of these sites, I have started with a standard template and slowly ripped the guts apart. So far, in the stable, is the NMC Campus Observer which began as the Blix template. Then there is NMC Virtual Worlds a child of the Orange 2.0 Theme, and one where I learned to create multiple page templates, use custom fields to spawn content specific sidebars, and rolling my own database queries to get posts I really wanted. Our podcast site, NMC Conversations is probably the least modded, a few tweaks of the redoable theme.

Now the thing I also love about WordPress is there are many levels of creativity you can operate at. You can simply blog, never tinker with the templates, and easily switch out themes like a new pair of socks. That’s great; it means you are focused on the content. Or you can get way down into the guts of the engine. Now I don’t do much with widgets- I think the concept is great for many bloggers as it offers a nice amount of flexibility on what you slap on your sidebar… but in my case, I find them horribly limited and boxed in.. cause I know I can easily script my way to something better. Or you can somewhere in between- add your own graphics header, toss some specific text or web javascript code in the sidebar.

So as I get closer to the details, I remind you the stuff I am talking about is what you can do with your own code on a hosted server; while the WordPress.com service is fabulous (I used it myself this year), its simplicity comes at a price of severe lack of template tinkering. You really cannot do much there.

BEFORE:

The site I am going to talk about is the NMC Pachyderm Services web site, which replaces a static HTML tabled encrusted, hand code the navigation links” Pachyderm.org web site, which was not all that bad, but once you go to database driven template sites, it just hurts to hand code an HTML site.

AFTER:

So I am going to talk alot about the mangling I did in the templates along with some plugins I deploy (and tweak too). I should say I go about waist deep into the CSS and full body dive into the PHP code of the templates. And for some of these sites, I make a bend away from the standard format of blog as reverse chronological series of “posts”. I make web sites, not blogs.

Some of this stuff may get nitty gritty in detail, but I am intrigued to see if I can document all the little pieces that came together for this site. To be honest, these really develop organically, and sometimes change/evolve with more content dumped in.

(more…)

This mockup site is working pretty well, but there are a few minor-ish issues remaining before it's ready for prime time (i.e., Northern Voice)

• tags in aggregated items need to be honoured - it's not cool for the Yahoo! autotagging to clobber tags, as that makes things like class- or project-based tagging of blog posts impossible
• better, and more refined Views for workflow management - just the newest stuff in my group(s), etc...
• a date-based interface to allow refinement of views based on day/week/month/year. Is a calendar overkill?
• expose OPML export of feeds for a group
• expose OPML import of feeds for a user
• streamline the blocks more - it's pretty cluttered and noisy now
• make it purty

this is talking about "social media" but is not a bad diagram of a really messy PLE