…I love Tony Hirst! And let there be no confusion, the stuff he is doing at OpenLearn makes me giddy with excitement. Case in point, take a look at the latest developments in the OU Course Spamming saga he and his people have whipped up. I really am lucky to be working when I am, and along side the folks that I am. These are exciting times!

In fact, I saw this bit on Slashdot about the Commonwealth of Virginia’s interest in Open Source textbooks for Physics, and the first thing I thought about was Tony’s imaginings for syndicating resource via subjects and mixing and matching along the way. This is the “flexibook” that article is referring to, and the distribution and the platform for mashability should be just as important as the licensing. Moreover, you can invest far more in the content than the distribution because it ain’t that expensive.

Come on people, let’s break this whole thing wide open, the time is upon us now!

Over on his blog, Will Richardson has an interesting post on using the power of cloud computing. The comment thread also gets interesting; some responders conflate the idea of cloud computing with the more general notion of web-based tools and Software as a Service, but one of the other issues that gets either overlooked or undervalued is the issue of student and faculty privacy. It's also clear that in some cases, the terms and conditions of these services remain unread or ignored.

I left a version of this post as a comment on the blog, in addition to an earlier comment. As this comment has been caught in the gaping maw of spam prevention for the last 24-36 hours, I figured I'd post it here as well.

One commenter asks whether Google is liable for any data loss.

RE: "Do they (Google) have any liability for lost documents?"

No. See the Terms of Service

Two relevant sections:

"13. Warranty Disclaimer. CUSTOMER UNDERSTANDS AND AGREES THAT EACH SERVICE MAY CONTAIN BUGS, DEFECTS, ERRORS AND OTHER PROBLEMS THAT COULD CAUSE SYSTEM FAILURES. CONSEQUENTLY, THE SERVICE INCLUDING ALL CONTENT, SOFTWARE (INCLUDING ANY UPDATES OR MODIFICATIONS TO THE SOFTWARE), FUNCTIONS, MATERIALS AND INFORMATION MADE AVAILABLE ON OR ACCESSED THROUGH THE SERVICE, AND ANY ACCOMPANYING DOCUMENTATION ARE PROVIDED “AS IS” AND ANY USE THEREOF SHALL BE AT CUSTOMER'S OWN RISK."

and

"15. Limitation of Liability. IN NO EVENT WILL GOOGLE OR ITS LICENSORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, AND INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, DAMAGES FOR INTERRUPTION OF USE OR FOR LOSS OR INACCURACY OR CORRUPTION OF DATA, LOST PROFITS, OR COSTS OF PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES, HOWEVER CAUSED (INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO USE, MISUSE, INABILITY TO USE, OR INTERRUPTED USE) AND UNDER ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO CONTRACT OR TORT AND WHETHER OR NOT GOOGLE WAS OR SHOULD HAVE BEEN AWARE OR ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE REGARDLESS OF WHETHER ANY REMEDY SET FORTH IN THIS AGREEMENT FAILS OF ITS ESSENTIAL PURPOSE; OR FOR ANY CLAIM ALLEGING INJURY RESULTING FROM ERRORS, OMISSIONS, OR OTHER INACCURACIES IN THE SERVICE OR DESTRUCTIVE PROPERTIES OF THE SERVICE."

The convenience of the service is also mentioned.

RE: "As soon as we go to Google Apps, all our students will have a similar conventional email address so all students will be able to use Docs, Calendar, GTalk, Reader, Sites, etc. in a collaborative way."

This type of comprehensive user experience makes an ideal terrain for data mining. One user ID can be tied to chat content, email content, various documents (both created and read) and links followed from all these documents. Additional mining can include looking at groups of students, and student surfing behavior based on time of day. This is advertising gold, and it gives some amazingly useful information about a coveted advertising demographic.

For a cautionary tale on privacy, see this post that goes over the recent Viacom suit against Google, and lays out some of the privacy implications. Imagine that a media company has detected copyright violations coming from within a district. Then, read the article linked above. Substitute "Google Apps for Education" for "youtube." Then, imagine your district's cost savings vaporizing faster than you can say, "I wish we had invested in our own infrastructure" as gaggles of lawyers flood your district. For extra fun, imagine the lawsuit involves students under the age of 13. Considering that you can sign into YouTube with your Google ID, it's conceivable that many students would use their school account for their personal video use.

Seriously, folks. Think long term, just for a second. We don't encourage our students to cut corners. We should have the same expectations for our critical infrastructure. Open source virtualization options exist; these options would deliver some of the same advantages of cloud computing, but without selling out student and faculty privacy as the price of convenience.

People love to analogize / equate open education to open source. There are huge problems with this way of thinking… The one that comes first to mind is that many changes to an open source program can be empirically tested to objectively determine whether or not they improve the program (by increasing its speed, decreasing its file size, etc.) at almost no cost (by recompiling the programs and running automated tests), but many changes to an open educational resource cannot be judged objectively (did changing these words really engage learners more? do these new examples communicate the educational content better?) and even when they can be meaningfully tested, this can only happen at rather high costs in time and resources (e.g., setting up and running usability tests or “horse race” research studies involving enough students to produce statistically meaningful results). Of course, this one difference in the community’s ability to judge whether adaptations should be kept or rejected makes a mountain of difference in our ability to collaboratively develop educational resources rationally and objectively. I could go on about the differences, but they aren’t actually the point of the post.

The point of the post is that, because it can be interesting to think about open education in terms of open source (if you’re careful not to push the analogy too far), Tim O’Reilly’s latest bit of writing called Open Source and Cloud Computing about very near future problems for the open source movement should be required reading for open educators. We will face similar problems in the not-too-distant future, and we should be thinking about them now.

As outlined above, I don’t believe we’ve figured out what kinds of licenses will allow forking of Web 2.0 and cloud applications, especially because the lock-in provided by many of these applications is given by their data rather than their code….

But even open data is fundamentally challenged by the idea of utility computing in the cloud. Jesse Vincent, the guy who’s brought out some of the best hacker t-shirts ever (as well as RT) put it succinctly: “Web 2.0 is digital sharecropping.” (Googling, I discover that Nick Carr seems to have coined this meme back in 2006!) If this is true of many Web 2.0 success stories, it’s even more true of cloud computing as infrastructure. I’m ever mindful of Microsoft Windows Live VP Debra Chrapaty’s dictum that “In the future, being a developer on someone’s platform will mean being hosted on their infrastructure.” The New York Times dubbed bandwidth providers OPEC 2.0. How much more will that become true of cloud computing platforms?

That’s why I’m interested in peer-to-peer approaches to delivering internet applications. Jesse Vincent’s talk, Prophet: Your Path Out of the Cloud describes a system for federated sync; Evan Prodromou’s Open Source Microblogging describes identi.ca, a federated open source approach to lifestreaming applications.

We can talk all we like about open data and open services, but frankly, it’s important to realize just how much of what is possible is dictated by the architecture of the systems we use.

There are a number of ways to understand Tim’s point in the context of open education. If we consider the architecture of higher education, for example, the meaning of “lock-in by data” becomes clear. We can easily reconsider “social network fatigue” (which prevents you from joining too many social networks because you can’t stand to type in all your basic personal details for the nth time) in terms of “gen ed fatigue” by which students are prevented from moving from one university to another because they know credits won’t transfer and they can’t bear the thought of taking World Civilization again. A student’s own data - course grades and accumulated credits that belong to them - are not really any more portable across universities than your Facebook profile is across social networking services. Note that this is not a technical problem, it is an policy problem purposely designed to lock a student into a university. While the Bologna Process has certainly been criticized, it is attempting to make it possible for students to move freely between universities. And as my friend Al is so fond of asking, why shouldn’t a student be able to do their physics at UC, their engineering at MIT, their cyberlaw at Stanford, and their religion courses at BYU?

Of course, saying that LMS vendors try to lock our data into their systems would be another reading of this part of Tim’s article, but one that is too obvious because it is too technical; this is more of an open source problem than an open education problem.

Careful reading and thought will show that Tim’s insightful analysis does indeed point toward many of the problems open education will have to face in the near future. Just please don’t take the open source / open education analogy too far.

This from HigherEd.com:

Blackboard, the dominant player in course management software, has the ability to inspire devotion and, for the more fervid open-source adherents, not a little contempt. So today’s announcement may cause a stir among those more apt to liken Blackboard to the devil than a gentle giant: The company is partnering with Syracuse University to develop a way to integrate Blackboard with Sakai, one of the primary open-source alternatives.

The whole story

Life is physically and mentally too cramped for me to write the posts I’ve been planning about Pink’s Whole New Mind and Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody.  I’m tutoring three days a week, finishing up my change of visa status (I never thought I’d need a Green Card, but there it is), and moving into our new apartment on Tuesday - after which I hope to be able to think clearly.

In the meantime, I’m enjoying simply sharing some of the amazing free resources I’m discovering these days. Today’s offering:  Celtx (click screenshot for full view).

From the Celtx site, a partial overview of the scriptwriting, storyboarding, collaborating, production scheduling, and on-and-on-ing it performs:

Celtx is the world’s first all-in-one media pre-production software. It has everything you need to take your story from concept to production. Celtx replaces ‘paper, pen & binder’ pre-production with a digital approach that’s more complete, simpler to work with, and easier to share.

Multi-Media Friendly: Celtx helps you pre-produce all types of media - film, video, documentary, theater, machinima, comics, advertising, gaming, music video, radio, podcasts, videocasts, and however else you choose to tell your story.

All-In-One: Unlike scriptwriting software, you can use Celtx for the entire pre-production process - write scripts, storyboard scenes and sequences, develop characters, breakdown & tag elements, schedule production, and prepare detailed and informative production reports for cast and crew.

Fully Integrated: Celtx is designed to help your entire production team work together on a single, easy to share project file - eliminating the confusion of multiple project files, and the need for ‘paper and binder’.

There’s more, too: a Project Central community site for global Celtx users, and more beyond that. Check out the site for the goodness - and don’t miss the screencast tutorials to get the full effect.  Just wonderful - hats off to Celtx.

It’s cross-platform, by the way, so goodness for all, PC, Mac, and otherwise. (h/t to Ostatic for the excellent Six Essential Open Source Apps for Mac Videographers post. Go there for five more goodies beside!)

---

1 Comments

• At July 2, 2008, Paul C wrote:

  Hi Clay,

  Celtx sounds something like Animoto, a video production site which enables you to storyboard graphics and script to create your own MTV style video. The ease of use has great educational, hands on value for students.

  See my video I had so much fun creating at:

  http://quoteflections.blogspot.com/2008/06/animoto-rocks.html

  Paul Cs last blog post..Encyclopedia Dilemma

Just spreading the love to my fellow Mac users by sharing Monolingual, a free open source program that saved me 4Gb of hard drive by removing the hundreds of languages localized on all my software, and by stripping the PowerPC files from my Intel MacBook.  (If you have Adobe Creative Suite, you’ll easily save 2 or 3 gigs with a single click. Bloated with languages. Sorry, Cyrillic, you had to go.)

Be sure to run both the “Languages” and the “Architecture” programs.  And buy me a beverage the next time you see me.  Better still, donate a few bucks (or Yuan, or Quid ((what the hell is a quid?)) ) to the folks who created this useful tool on the Sourceforge site.

---

5 Comments

• At June 19, 2008, Wesley Fryer wrote:

  Excellent Clay, thanks for the recommendation and link-- I think I read Miguel write about this awhile back but I've never tried it, and definitely should. I have made a switch from a 120 GB to 250 GB hard drive, but it's always good to not waste good hard drive sectors, right?

  I wish software installers would easily let people opt out of these unnecessary extra language installations from the start!

• At June 20, 2008, Jason Priem wrote:

  Quid = Pounds. It's less formal, like Americans would say "bucks" for Dollars.

  The tools looks interesting; I'll check it out.

  Jason Priems last blog post..New job!

• At June 20, 2008, Hannah wrote:

  Is it possible to keep one or two extra languages?

  Hannahs last blog post..Confirmation is.....uhh....what?

• At June 20, 2008, Talia Carbis wrote:

  Serious about the quid?? I am agreeing with Jason. I'm thinking that is a quid as in a pound from the UK.

  And thanks so much for this. Can't wait to use it!!

  Talia Carbiss last blog post..Planning A Wedding

• At June 20, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  @Hannah - Yes, you select the languages you want to keep by unchecking them. Cool.

  @Talia and Jason - Yep, funny - I'm a pretty well-traveled guy, but have never spent any time in the UK, outside of a layover at Heathrow once. So I'm pretty clueless about UK culture beyond what I've read. (Hey Talia, you going to Ustream your wedding? If so, let me know. Doing it for my own was a wonderful experience.)

  @Wes - Now that you mention it, it _is_ funny that software developers don't include the option upon install!

Firefox 3 has just been released to a massive wave of early adopters, and, based on my experience with the betas and now the production version, I can attest to its performance improvements and cool new interface. However, I ran into a problem when installing Firefox 3, wherein all of my Firefox 2 bookmarks were lost. For all the open source folks here, I thought I'd post a link to mozillaZine's solution to the bookmark problem.

read more

So, to pick up on parts 1 and 2, part 3 is an examination of some of the uses and possibilities of feed-driven architecture for dealing with the varying ways we might understand a portfolio, which—as Stephen Downes notes here—is in the midst of a pretty significant transformation. A change premised on re-imagining the portfolio as not so much a static receptacle for work completed, but a dynamic space for both reflection and presentation of an on-going development, or “portfolio-ing” as Alan Levine’s comment points out. This shift parallels the way many are approaching their actual work in this field  (and many others, something Jon Udell calls professional blogging) as part of an ongoing, networked conversation about process and collaboration, rather than some isolated, fixed product.

An RSS-Driven Departmental Portfolio Review Project

All of which makes me think about the project Professor Sarah Allen and I have been working on for her Writing Process course. Each member of the class was asked to create their own blog and post various papers and revisions to the blog as a kind of digital notebook in which they would publish the work for peer review and feedback (all of which fed back into the course blog, a now “classic” course aggregated model for using blogs at UMW). The class was focused on process, and part of the approach was to understand writing as a dynamic, unfolding art form that must be labored over with numerous revisions, iterations and approaches.

During this year’s Tech Fellows program Sarah and I came up with an RSS-driven framework for delivering the “final” version of a English majors essays to a secure space so that faculty could conduct a blind review for assessment purposes. The samples would come from a select group of English courses (Sarah’s Writing Process course being the test case). Traditionally this was handled through a BlackBoard drop box, wherein the essays were uploaded without students names and then reviewed by faculty. To do this they would have to download the papers, print them out, comment on them, than convene with other members of the review committee to discuss the them.

The thought Sarah and I had was there’s has gotta be a better way to streamline this portfolio review process. So, what we did was rather simple, Sarah had all her students writing in their own blog throughout the course of the semester, and publish their revised essays as they finished them. Once a student considered an essay to be a final version, they tagged it with “final paper.” We got the sitewide RSS feed for every post tagged with “final version” and fed them into a blog called ELC Assessment.† The assessment blog is now populated with final, anonymous essays that the department review committee can comment upon from anywhere and have a distributed discussion about the writing, better yet it is all easily protected so that only English, Linguistics and Communication faculty can access it (we left the example open, because it’s a proof of concept).

UMW Lablogs

UMW Biology professor Steve Gallik provides yet another example of how an RSS-driven infrastructure can make things a whole lot easier, and provide students with a practical portfolio of their lab work. I posted about this project earlier this academic year and Steve and I will be presenting it at the EDUCAUSE Southeast Regional Conference. This was a grand experiment, and I think it has some serious possibilities for thinking about managing a scientific portfolio of experimentations and labs.

In short, Steve Gallik developed an entire suite of online laboratory resources wherein students can record the results of their experiments, something he terms an Online Laboratory Suite. Well, if that’s not impressive enough, Andy Rush and Steve Gallik conceptualized a way to take the experiment results for each student and create a RSS feed for it. When each student signs up for an account on Steve’s Online laboratory Suite, they are immediately sent an RSS feed that they place within a spam-blog plugin like FeedWordPress on their own blog, choose the category to publish it to, and before you know it they have an aggregated, feed-driven lab notebook (or a LabLog) of their work that automatically updates as they complete their online labs.

What I like about this project is how clearly it suggest that whether or not you can program your own laboratory software like Steve Gallik, having a publishing platform that is framed around syndication effects everyone. If we do have online lab software being used by a department, isn’t it about time we expected to have an RSS feed for student work? Steve’s LabLogs represents a powerful model for thinking about how students can easily re-publish their own labs into a format they can control, re-publish, and re-purpose as they see fit.

The Macaulay Honors College E-Portfolios Using WPMu

Joe Ugoretz, who is the Director of Technology and Learning at The Macaulay Honors College (part of the CUNY system), has been pushing the envelope in terms of the small pieces loosely joined approach to integrating technology into teaching and learning. Joe, with the agile help of Jeff Drouin, has been using open source CMSs, wikis, and blogs to great effect during his first yearat Macaulay. After a few brief e-mail exchanges with Joe about using WPMu as an e-portfolio system, he invited me up to talk his crack cadre of graduate student Tech Fellows about the small pieces loosely joined approach to educational technology.  And as always, I focused on the work UMW has been doing with WPMu in particular.

It was great fun for me, in particular because I started out in this field as a tech fellow at the CUNY Honors College almost four years ago. So going back talking about this stuff was pretty cool, and I could warn them to resist getting too deep into blogs and wikis lest they get hooked and never finish their dissertation, only to find they have become a fanatical, raving EdTech lunatic

So I recently discovered that Joe has decided to pull the trigger on a WPMu driven portfolio project, and it is alrady up and running, you can read more about it on his blog here and see the actual site here. How cool! Joe is an impressive guy, and he is not afraid to experiment with these powerful, open source publishing platforms, which at CUNY means a lot. To quote Jon Udell talking about UMW two years ago, Joe has really put the Macauly Honors College in the catbird seat when it comes to instructional technologies. He is not afraid to experiment with a wide array of open web and open source tools, and he understands the importance of deploying them rapidly and always already as beta to see how they will fare. That is the pace you need to keep currently, and it is why most of the rest of CUNY is screeching to a devastating standstill when it comes to instructional technologies (Baruch being the other brilliant exception, thanks to Mikhail Gershovich and Luke Waltzer).

Moreover, Macaulay has a manageable incoming class of 300 students every year, all of which are distributed amongst seven different senior colleges of CUNY (I think it’s seven?). A small college loosely joined that may prove an extremely powerful example of how these tools might bring a de-centralized learning community into some kind of online focus. Needless to say, I love Joe’s style and I’ll be watching the Macauly Eportfolio project closely over the next year.

OK, that’s enough about e-portfolios, now it’s time to get ready for Faculty Academy, miles to go before I sleep.

---

† We got the feed for this tag by first using sitewide categories feeds for WPMu where all the posts were categorized as “final paper,” but the MuTags RSS feed extension—which you have to pay $50 for—will prove the better option, for students can just tag their posts as final paper (or what ever) and you get a sitewide feed for the tag without the sitewide categories feed hack which can get ugly. Once you have the sitewide RSS feed for this tag, just activate the FeedWordPress plugin and it will automatically re-publish any post within the WPMu environment tagged “final paper.” What’s nice about the FeedWordPress plugin is that it will sync all changes to a previously published post. Also, you have options to not include post author, you can prevent a linkback to original post, as well as the ability to place all feeds for a certain tag into a specific category of the assessment blog (so all of Sarah’s class papers will be placed in the category “Writing Process”). Groovy! —or should I say Groomy?

Share This

OpenOffice.org has released public beta 3.0, which includes native OS X support (previous betas required an X11 installation). The beta is intel only. It may be downloaded from the snapshots section.

OK, so I admit that I am baiting Charlie with that title, but I would like to ask a few questions to get a sense of everyone's investment in open source vs. proprietary file formats. For those who haven't followed it, here's the backstory (as I understand it):

read more