Meeting with JORUM – Using DSpace as a Learning Content Repository

One of the highlights last week was a trip to Manchester to meet with Gareth Waller and Laura Shaw of the JORUM project. Back when we started our own repository work in BC I liaised with folks from JORUM, setting up a few conference calls to share details on how we were tackling our similar problems, but we’d fallen out of touch, and facilitated through meeting Jackie Carter last January at ELI, this was a chance to renew the connections.

One reason I wanted to meet was that JORUM’s model is very similar to our own, so I wanted to see if my ideas on how to track OERs after they’ve been downloaded from a repository resonated with them, and whether they were already employing some other technique to do so. Turns out they were of interest and to date these are (as I had suspected) numbers they were not currently collecting but eager to have, so that was a useful vote of confidence.

But the other major reason I had for my visit was to learn more about the work they had done on JORUM Open to turn DSpace into a platform for sharing learning resources. It had been almost 4 years since I last concluded that while you could try to jimmy a LOR into DSpace, it wasn’t an ideal fit – DSpace “out of the box” really caters to the deposit and archiving of documents but isn’t optimized to deal with the specialized (read “arcane”) formats of learning content.

Which is why I wanted to see how the JORUM folks were doing it; sure enough, Gareth Waller has coded many new features into the product that make it a much better fit to handle “learning” content. While I’m not yet certain it provides a simple exit strategy out of our existing commercial platform, the work Gareth has done represents a big step towards that, and I would highly recommend any other institutions already involved with using DSpace specifically for learning content to contact him.

Planning for Succession – How to enable what comes after the LMS

The rest of the week was spent with my nose to the grindstone trying to code up the hooks to incorporate piwik tracking codes into resources uploaded to SOL*R. As a treat that weekend, I travelled to Cardiff, Wales, my old stomping grounds from my Graduate degree days, to spend 3 nights with Martin Weller and his family.

We spent most of the weekend biking around the city and a good deal of time in Llandaff Fields, near Martin’s home. On Sunday afternoon we did a large circuit of the park while Martin’s daughter was at riding lessons, and it was one of those settings and strolls that beg for epic conversation. And this did not disappoint. Two ideas in particular resonated with me.

The first was the notion of “succession” of technology, to borrow a metaphor from ecology. Martin has written on this a number of times before, both in articles and in his book on VLEs. But we were discussing it in the context of the recent acquisition of Wimba and Elluminate by Blackboard (as well as in light of my recent reading of Lanier’s “You are not a gadget” in which he discusses the idea of “technological lock-in” and “sedimentation”), so put a slightly new spin on it, I think.

Now metaphors can both enable and obscure, but to follow this one for a bit, one can look at the current institutional ed tech landscape as a maturing landscape where variety is diminishing and certain species becoming dominant. But far from reaching an ultimate stable climax, there are disruptors, the latest and possibly largest being the financial crisis. These disturbances open the opportunity for new species to flourish. But… unless we’re suggesting the disturbances are so large as to restart the entire succession process (which some indeed do suggest) we’re likely instead to see adaptations to this specific force, often in the form of seeking cheaper options.

So far, pretty conventional story – mature open source scoop some existing customers when the pricepoint gets too high. Except this is where I am seeing a real opportunity for the next generation approach to creep in (I’m pretty much going to abandon the metaphor here, as I’m no ecologist, that’s for sure.) Some of us have been enthused by the prospect of Loosely Coupled Gradebooks as a technology that can unseat the dominant, monolithic LMS. But to date, there have been only a few convincing examples, and it seems like a bit of a “can’t get there from here” problem (made worse by Blackboard’s predatory acquisition strategy.) Which is where the bridging strategy comes in – we need to take Moodle (and I guess Sakai though I am lot less keen on that prospect) and focus on isolating and improving its gradebook function; as it is, Moodle already represents a very viable alternative (as the increasing defections to it show), but as it is, it doesn’t represent a Next Step, nor will adopting it “as-is” move online learning in formal contexts further. But adopting it in combination with developing its gradebook functionality to ultimately become the hub for a loosely coupled set of tools. Maybe this isn’t that revelatory, but it became clear to me that a path forward for schools looking to leave not just Blackboard, but LMS/VLEs in general, goes through Moodle as it is transformed into something else. At least that seems doable to me, and something I hope to discuss with folks in BC as a strategy.

A new Network Literacy – Sharing Well

Throughout our walk, the second recurring theme was how, for both scholars and students, bloggers and wiki creators, open source software developers and crowdsourcers of many ilk, there is a real talent to sharing in such a way that it catalyzes further action, be it comments, remixes or code contributions.

Howard Rheingold uses the term “Collaboration literacy” as one of the 5 new network literacies he proposes, and I guess, barring any other contender, that it’s not a bad term, but it does strike me that there is a real (and teachable) skill here, one that many of us have experienced; either in the “lazyweb” tweet that is so ill-conceived that it generates no responses at all, or often in envy marvelling at bloggers who manage to generate deep discussion on what seems like the barest of posts, yet one which clearly strikes the right note. “Shareability”? Ugh, right, maybe leave it alone, I mean do we really need another neologism? Still, it does seem worthy of note as a discrete skill that people can increasingly cultivate in our networked, mash-up world.

• how do we get authors to insert these as part of their regular workflow
• how do we make sure they are all unique / at what level do they need to be unique
• how do we easily give the tracking data back to the authors.

My goal was to do all this without really altering the current workflow in SOL*R nor requiring any additional user accounts.

The solution I’ve struck upon (in conversation with folks here at the OU) is to use pwiki an open source analytics package with an extensive API to do the majority of the work, and to then work on how to insert this into the existing SOL*R workflow. So the scenario looks like this:

1a. Content owners are encouraged (as we do now) to use the BC Commons license generator to insert a license tag into their content. As part of the revised license generator, we insert an additional question – “Do you wish to enable tracking for this resource?”

1b. If they answer yes, the license code is ammended with a small html comment -

<!–insert tracking code here–>

1c. The content owner then pastes the license code and tracking placeholder into their content as they normally would. We let them know that the more places they place it into their content, the more detailed the tracking data will be. We also can note that this is *only* for web-based (e.g. html) content.

2. The content owner then uploads the finished product as they normally would.

3a. Each night a script (that I am writing now) runs on the server. It goes through the filesystem, and every time it finds the tracking placeholder:

• based on the files location in the filesystem, it deconstructs the UUID assigned it in SOL*R
• uses the UUID to get the resource name from SOL*R through the Equella web services
• re-constructs the resource home url from its UUID
• sends both of these to the piwik web service, which in return creates a new tracking site as well as the javascript to insert in the resource
• finally writes this javascript where the tracking placeholder was.

4a. Finally, in modifying the SOL*R records, we also include a link to the new tracking results for each record that has it enabled.

4b. For tracking data the main things we will get is:

• what are the new servers this content lives on
• how many time each page of content in the resource (depending on how extensively they have pasted the tracking code) has been viewed, both total and unique views
• other details about the end users of the content, for instance their location and other client details

I ran a test last week. This resource has a tracking code in it.  The “stock” reports for this resource are at http://u.nu/3q66d It should be noted: we are fully able to customize a dashboard that only shows *useful* reports (without all the cruft) as well as potentially incorporate the data from inside Equella on resource views / license acceptances. This is one of the HUGE benefits of using the SOL*R UUID in the tracking is that it is consistent both inside and outside of SOL*R.

I am pretty happy with how this is working so far; while I have expressed numerous times that I think the repository model is flawed for a host of reasons, to the extent to which it can be improved, this starts to provide content owners (and funders) details on how often resources are being used after they are downloaded, and (much like links and trackbacks in blogs) offer content owners a way to follow up with re-users, to start conversations that are currently absent.

But… I can hear the objections already. Some are easy to deal with: we plan to implement this in such a way that it will not be totally dependent on javascript. Others are much more sticky – does this infringe on the idea of “openness”? What level of disclosure is required? (This last especially given that potentially 2nd and 3rd generation re-users will be sending data back to the original server if the license retains intact.)

I do want to respect these concerns, but at the same time, I wonder how valid they are. You are reading this content right now, and it has a number of “web bugs” inserted in it to track usage yet is shared under a license that permits reuse. Even if it is seen as a “cost,” it seems like a small one to pay, with a large potential benefit in terms of reinforcing the motivations of people who have shared. But what do you think – setting aside for a second arguments about “what is OER?” and “the content’s not important,” does this seem like a problem to you? Would you be less likely to use content like this if you knew it sent usage data back? Would anonymizing the data (something piwik can easily do) ease your mind about this?

Community and Open Education

Two examples I came across my second day here really spoke to me about new ways of thinking about OER/Open Education in relationship to people and communities. The first is the iSpot project managed by Doug Clow, one of my colleagues here in the Institute of Educational Technology where the OLNet team from the OU is housed.

As Doug explained, the site allows people to post photos of they’ve taken of local species, and crowdsources their identification. The site has a sophisticated reputation system that awards participants and also identifies those with formal expertise in different fields and weighs their input accordingly. The OU have partnered with a number of BBC Television nature shows and radio programmes to popularize the site, so they are attracting an audience who then participate out of and existing passion and interest. The genius is To *then* weave OU courses into/around this community site and content, using it both as potential course content but also as a conduit for interested informal learners to find formal learning opportunities if they chose, and also interact and be supported in their informal learning community by discipline experts. When Doug described this to me my jaw dropped; it is so obvious yet really a brilliant turn. Too often in formal higher ed we have had the “build it and they will come” belief about our OER efforts, and when that hasn’t happened we’ve then shifted our focus to “building communities” around our content. But that is so wrongheaded. Communities exist already, and where they don’t, it’s not simply a matter of them forming around content, per se. By leading with a site that helped users scratch an itch they already had, however small, (“I keep spotting this bird in my back yard but I don’t know what it is”) and then building tools to support peer engagement and discussion, as well as personal identity and reputation, they’ve set the stage for community to form and share knowledge and only THEN weave formal offerings in and around this. It’s probably not perfect, but I think it offers strong suggestions as to how institutions can engage civil society in a way that leads to a permeable boundary between existing informal learning communities and formal learning institutions/scholars.

The second example was a bit different yet still inspiring. Another researcher on the OLNet project, Andreia Santos, gave a short talk on an initiative at the Brazilian university Unisul to experiment with ways to attract new learners through a mixture of Open Education, peer support and social networking. If I understood correctly (and I’m not sure I completely did, so I hope Andreia will see this and chime in with a correction or pointer to a longer write up), the university has begun offering access to a block of 10 courses, a mixture of open resources from the OU and themselves, within their own learning environment (so not just ‘content’ but a full VLE experience…). The part that tickled my fancy was that they do so during one of their “breaks” (in their case the Winter break that happens in June/July) and are in part marketing it to friends and families of existing students. This seems like a smart idea in that not only do they have stronger ties and so their message is much more convincing, but they themselves end up taking some of these courses to and because of their familiarity with the environment end up becoming a form of peer support. I understand that this year they have introduced a nominal fee but that students can take as many of the courses as they want and get a form of certificate at the end. Like I said, different than iSpot but still I think a strong example of interacting with community and existing ’social networks.’

Repositories – some mothers do ‘ave ‘em

Another part of my experience so far has been to listen to talks on a few different repository projects that shall remain nameless. The learning here wasn’t particularly new for me, but it did continue to confirm beliefs I’ve long held about the weak points of this approach: that they typically do not tap in or reinforce individual motivations for sharing; that their model of ripping content out of its original context for download goes against the grain of the web (more on this soon, as part of my Fellowship work on “OER Tracking”); and that they are a solution begged by the questions of VLEs/LMS silos, sharing modeled on “publishing” and that is ony half-heartedly committed to sharing. But… the one good thing I guess is that it made me feel slightly better about my own work, that I’m not the only one who’d hit these problems nor had to learn the hard way that content doesn’t build networks that share, people do.

On being at the OU

If I haven’t already made it clear, it is a HUGE honour for me to be a visiting academic with the OU through the OLNet Fellowship program. This institution has been (and still is) a global leader in the field of distance learning and open education, and there is a tangible passion here for the belief that education can radically improve people’s lives for the better. The opportunity to be physically here for a month is even more special to me because on a day to day basis I work from my home office, and while I am surrounded by a global network of peers who I talk with daily, the chance to be surrounded by so many smart people passionate about open learning, as well as have access to some fantastic services on this lovely campus is one I will never forget. I’d be remiss if I did not extend a special thanks to Karen Cropper and Janet Dyson for helping me find my way in the first few days and make me feel really at home, and a special thanks to “Liam and the librarians” for broadening my social horizons.

There’s lots more to tell, especially around my specific project of tracking OERs outside of the bounds of the repository (which I think we’ve now got a plausible model of how to do) but I’ll leave that for another post. For now I’ll leave it that it is good to be back in the land of great cheese and delicious warm beer with so many rich opportunities to learn ahead of me.

So in the airport waiting for my flight to the UK I tried to bang out some quick thoughts upon finishing DIY U, only to retract them within minutes of publishing them (though apparently not before Google managed to catch a copy of it).

I retracted the first draft because I realized how important the issues are and I wanted to be clear, for my own sake, if not for yours.

My first reaction, which I largely covered in my initial retracted draft, is that Kamenetz’s book is not a bad one at all taken as a piece of popular journalism aimed at documenting a specific crisis in American higher ed and three different emerging responses to it, variously “artisans” (those working on systemic transformation of higher ed), “monks” (edupunks and open ed types who, whilst often still inside the very institutions they are critical of, are portrayed as promoting education outside the confines of the institution) and “merchants” (those looking to privatize and profit from the crises of cost and quality facing higher ed). I think critics who have chastised for citation errors and the like are basically nit picking, and I honestly believe (based partly on the focus of Kamenetz’s first book) that her desire to raise a clarion call about cost and “quality” issues in American post-secondary education is sincere, and that she is not a particular booster of the privatization of learning. But…

A first take on this concern would be that while I respect the analysis focuses on cost (and to a lesser extent “quality”) as legitimate concerns, especially from the student or “consumer” perspective, that the role of higher education, it’s value and placement in society, is too complex to be reduced to these few considerations or to be approached from only those perspectives. This is not a particularly damning of Kamenetz, though – we live in a world surrounded by reductive analyses, always collapsing distinctions and differences in order to “get to THE point,” “get things done” etc.

And some will claim that’s just the way the world is, and that resisting this is just more evidence of my “monkish” nature. Maybe. But therein lies my larger take on my concern, and again, it is unfair to unload this on Kamenetz’s work specifically, because it is no more guilty of this (and possibly even less) than most analyses; but the concern is this, that while we can and do make these kind of global analyses of problems and solutions (because indeed, there are no private language games, we can and do recognize commonalities), we need (indeed I’d say MUST, but I step back) to resist the urge to collapse any of our own specific contexts into these global analyses and solutions. And this is why I think the rather short-shrift given to “edupunk” belies a misunderstanding of the profundity of its origins; because, just like it’s predecessor “punk,” edupunk must kill itself off; it is ALWAYS local, ALWAYS specific, contextual, grassroots, emerging. “EDUPUNK” IS DEAD. LONG LIVE EDUPUNK! It is an urging towards a relationship of learner, teacher and knowledge that is NOT simply instrumental, a constant examining of “relating” itself.

In a discussion on twitter, Mikhail Gershovich and I described Jim Groom as “an American Pragmatist” which he took really badly. But I believe this (and Jim, PLEASE correct me, as this is really new thinking for me, and I know I am positing a lot) is because he understood us to be meaning the colloquial sense of the word, often taken to mean “utilitarian,” which is almost the exact opposite of what we (and I believe he) intended. No, I think both Mikhail and I were talk philosophic Pragmatism that refuses to collapse contextual specifics into meta-narratives. Now inasmuch as this approach still holds on to Ends, albeit the Ends specified by the specific context, I can see a tension between this and my above description of edupunk. And if I haven’t totally lost the plot, then hopefully this is something Jim and others can help me work through, but again, I think, always resisting the urge to meta-narrative, to resurrecting “Edupunk.”

So, monkish? Well, at least, if not totally barmy! I mean, how do you implement a plan of national reform on the back of this? Well, you don’t. Not that it’s not needed, but if you take seriously the ideas of autonomy, of nodes, of emergence, then at best you figure out how to un-bundle while not falling prey to the conservative lie, the myth of the individual. And this is where I think we progressives, if I may, need to take seriously the charge that network learning panders to autodidacts; not because it must be true, but because for it not to be true means accepting that some learners may want to simply get a credential, just “get the job,” and that if we are to contract for their teaching, it needs to be a negotiation, one that includes informing them of the possibilities but actually listening to what they want, and finding the agreement in between. That, it would seem to me, would be truly edupunk. – SWL

• the public library
• UMW blogs
• Smarthistory
• TED or Sputnik observatory
• Khan Academy

I don’t think there is one “right” answer, but I do think it is a useful question to ask; firstly because it asks us to dig into the assumptions behind each of the terms I scare-quoted. By “successful” do you mean: most accessed/viewed? most re-used? increased the profile of the institution the most? provided the best return on investment? improved student learning the most? decreased some of the crises facing the world the most? All of the above? (good luck with that!) And what’s meant by “formal”? Or “OER” for that matter?

I’m not hoping to spark a definitional skirmish – lord knows we’ve all seen enough of those. But I am sincere in wanting examples, however you choose to define the terms. Because from where I’m sitting, the projects that fulfill the criteria of “successful” “formal” “OER” projects are few and far between, yet I remain absolutely personally committed to the causes of education and open sharing. The tension between these two seemingly contradictory statements (plus the fact that I derive my livelihood working on “formal” “OER” projects) should be plain, and seeking some examples is in a way asking for help both in how I’m approaching my work but also where I am choosing to put my efforts in this life. As The Reverend constantly reminds me, “you can’t live wrong rightly,” and I’m feeling pretty tired of struggling with round holes and square pegs, trying to convince people to let go of The Fear. – SWL

I’m still not 100% clear on whether I can tell anybody about this, but… too late now. Earlier this year I took a bit of a flyer and submitted an application for an OLNet Fellowship, which offered the chance to work with the folks at the renowned Open University in the UK on issues around Open Education. I am not a full-time Academic and don’t have an enormous publication record, but I’d like to think I’ve paid some dues in the trenches working on, and thinking and writing about, Open Education. Apparently so did they, because much to my pleasant surprise I was awarded an “Expert Fellowship,” a category seemingly designed to suit odd-balls like myself that work in the lofty heights of Academia but ain’t got no papers

But there’s a point to this post apart from saying “wohoo Scott” (wohoo!) Actually 2 points. The first is a shout out to colleagues in the UK that I will be in Milton Keynes from June 23 until July 24th. I am not clear yet the extent of my mobility will be, but I’m certainly hoping that the month offers some opportunities to visit and learn with colleagues in the UK. If you are interested, please do let me know and we’ll try to make it happen.

The second point of the post is to share a bit of what I am going to be working on. As many of you know, I run an “open educational resource” repository (cue loud groan.) In our model, and it seems far from unique, teaching resources aimed primarily at instructors are typically downloaded and reused in some other context. While it is possible to ‘point’ to content hosted in our system, in most cases this is not how it is used.

One of the problems with this model (and sheesh, don’t I wish there were only one) is that the content owners don’t get a good sense of the popularity of their resources and where else they are being used. As a blogger and long time creator of web content that has been reused, I know that getting feedback on how often your stuff is viewed and from where, whether it be in the form of Trackbacks, or services like Google Analytics, can be a big shot in the arm. Sure, it is hopefully not the only thing that motivates you, but it doesn’t hurt.

So my proposal is to research the myriad different ways this kind of usage tracking can be implemented specifically in the context of OER (with a high sensitivity to finding approaches conducive to freedom and not any sense of ‘restriction’), select one and implement it in my real world repository. It is a big fish to fry and I do not think the problem is exclusive to OERs but in general applies to digital media. While I do hope to report on general approaches I also know that having a specific context to work in will be helpful. So expect to hear more (and get more pleas of “help!”) in the coming months.

Anyways, hope I do end up getting to meet some of you conspirators who ’til now have been just URLs or avatars. And I hear the English countryside is lovely that time of year… – SWL

Abstraction, Embeddedness, Critique, Analysis and Discourse

I have been reading Jaron Lanier’s “You are not a Gadget” over the past 2 weeks with great gusto. It is a wonderful humanist critique of the de-humanizing dangers of Web 2.0 by someone with hard-core technological cred. It is not scaremongering, and it is not reductive, but a subtle reading by someone who truly gets what we do when we “program” something. It resonates with me because my technophilia and post-modernist tendencies have always been tempered with heavy doses of humanism. A tricky balance indeed.

I don’t want to put words into Jon Beasley-Murray’s mouth, but I felt like his talk (which was slotted in my mind quite nicely along with @davecormier’s) had a similar feel; I took it not as a condemnation of all things network, open or technological, but as a caution against naive technological utopianism and an urging to situate our analyses within the multiple dimensions that “technology” “knowledge” “the University” etc. exist. This caused me to reference (and indeed come to understand even more deeply than I had) the term “Power/Knowledge” which many will know from Foucault. And he’s right – if we don’t actively engage this, either someone else will (quite possibly someone of an unpalatable political bent) or changes will take place that needlessly disrupt aspects of our society we’ll wish hadn’t vanished. Simply wishing won’t make it so.

In both of these and a number of other interactions throughout the 4 days, I came to see the “embedded” (or “embodied” – I know it’s different but it comes up later too) nature of knowledge, institutions, communities, and that analysis that tries to reduce them to just one or a few key variables is, well, reductive. To which some will simply reply “duh!” But we do not *have* to settle for that (and herein lies my complaint of the larger “naive empiricism” approach, though not a claim that every empiricist is naive). Part of “not settling” is realizing it’s not a finite conversation but an ongoing one, always already ongoing, that we join in, it proceeds us, will carry on after us, and yet *doesn’t happen without us.* Part of “not settling” is developing new ways of understanding/inhabiting complex contexts that work with multiple dimensions/variables/polarities at once.

“Healthy” Communities, Boundaries, Adjacencies and Non-reductive Analysis

Now before you start your chorus of “Kumbaya,” let me tell you about an analyses/process that I think does just that. On my way over a day before Northern Voice to a gathering of Online Community Enthusiasts, I was re-reading the new book “Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for community” by Etienne Wenger, John D. Smith, and that most chocolatey goddess of the chalk drawing, Nancy White. I cannot recommend it highly enough to you – if you work with communities, if you work in online learning, or even if you are simple interested in the practice of technology assessment, this is for me a groundbreaking work.

Recall – I spent 7 years working on Edutools, a site that allowed people to perform a features-based side-by-side comparison of Learning Management Systems. So I have struggled with the question of how to help people make technology choice in a “rational” way, a way “that scales” (by definition, reductive). As I read this new book, which describes a process of community self-identification of “orientations” that can then help guide (but not determine) the choice of specific tools, features or platforms (a seemingly obvious yet often overlooked distinction made in the book as well), it was like the scales fell from my eyes. One can argue with the number of “orientations” or the specific ones (though these are borne out of these three wise people’s long experience working with actual communities.) But the approach strongly resists a de-contextualized, one size fits all approach in favour of one that starts from the primary importance of specific, not abstract, context. (And note to Nancy – I will never stop apologizing for using the term “community in a box” and see how, not only being wrong and offensive, it is deeply mis-leading and underlies the whole approach I’m decrying here. Forgive me, please!). Does it scale? MU! Ask the question again.

During a break on the Thursday I took the chance to ask Nancy a question – “What is a ‘healthy’ community?” In looking at these various orientations it struck me that there must be recognizable ‘patterns,’ say, of a “successful open source community,” that could help us recognize others when we see them. This is exactly right and exactly wrong; as Nancy helped me understand, exactly wrong because it locates the notion of health in some abstract standard outside the community, when the notion of health being put out here is about internal coherence and accord – is the community becoming (or at least striving to be) what it wants to be.

Before we fall headlong into absolute relativism, I think for the “exactly right” (more like “kind of right”) part of the above, the reason we can use the words “community” or “healthy” *at all*, we need to look towards Wittgenstein’s notion “family resemblance” – we can recognize them as “healthy” because of many overlaps, not one single one, and we recognizers can do so precisely because of our embeddedness in the practices of looking at these things.

Which explains, for me at least, why I was reluctant to comment on the “success” of #altmoosecamp other than to say “well it seemed to go ok, lots of people showed up and shared which was *my* hope for it.” I am a part of that community. According to Dave Cormier, I “stopped acting like a hippy and stepped up” by helping to organize it, take a “leadership” role, but it was (I think a new term Dave and I coined on the walk to dinner that night) “rhizomatic leadership” – leadership that isn’t afraid to inherit a model or to lead in a way that helps others similarly copy from it, learn from it, or indeed insert themselves into it (like @nancywhite exhibited so superbly when, after seeing me lament “oh how is poor old *me* supposed to organize the schedule for #altmoosecamp without being all sorts of dictatorial” she simply placed her name beside a time slot – uh, duh, Scott, build an empty schedule and then invite *the community* to chose and discuss their slots. Lead by creating space for others, not by doing it for them. #slowlearner).

“Rhizomatic” came up a lot this weekend (and not just because Dave Cormier was there.) Indeed if I had to pick a “theme” for the conference, it would be “Rhizomatic” (though I am still struggling through the metaphor – I think I now “get” it, just not sure it properly reflects the permeable “entities” that “family resemblance” is getting at above.) Perhaps it was just that I was listening with these ears (perhaps? ha!) but the solutions I was seeing that really turned me on, and they were everywhere, were “rhizomatic” – authentic, lived in, organically grown, and done in such a way that as long as a seed gets carried by the wind somewhere “else,” a “new” rhizome can start – a different one? yes. ex nihilo? no. The medium IS the message, or impacts the message because the message should not, can not, be abstracted out of it. Not only do you not need 1 million people consuming the same single source, the uniform audience, the “mass,” (even if you could get this to happen anymore in our rapidly fragmenting world,) but we should not aim for it. Aim instead for 100 people, all of whom, precisely in part because of the intimacy of the connection, will in turn aim at a 100 people. Aim your message as a form of rhizomatic leadership, a message that leaves space for others. Not just with words. With actions. Kurt, you might have felt “stupid and contagious” but I don’t and won’t wait around for anyone to “entertain us.” And I know a hell of a lot of people who feel the same way.

This post is getting ridiculously long, and I doubt anyone is still reading it (really? thanks for sticking with it), so one last point before the finale. During the Online Community Enthusiasts gathering on Thursday we spent the afternoon doing a session on “Boundaries” led by Alice MacGillvary. I only “kindof” got it during the day; it took the rest of the weekend for it to fully percolate through how profoundly this topic of boundaries is to all of this work and thinking on networks, learning and communities. It relates to the above topic of “family resemblance” – the ability to recognize something without having to reify it as *only* that thing, that set of limited values. And it relates to Northern Voice as a whole, a “social media” conference (how much more nebulous can you get), the value of which is often in the intermixing of communities, disciplines, practices, the crossing of boundaries. This came up again in the #altmoosecamp session led (surprise surprise) by Nancy White (really, I’m a fanboy but not a rabid one, promise!) and was captured in the wonderful expression “Unexpected Adjacencies.” One follow up I hope to do (and others hopefully will join in) is to share those outliers, those “unexpected adjacencies” from our RSS readers, those people who inform our practice, inform our personhood, but who are not immediate peers, who come from some different discipline or practice. It can only make us richer.

…and several small furry bloggers gathered together in a cave grooving with a giant

Huh? Well, how else to describe an event that capped off all the above richness with two tremendous gatherings at Casa Lamb y Mcphee with some of the people I love most in the world, taking our thinking and bonds even further in a 100 mini-jams throughout the evening, even managing to invoke the spectres of those who couldn’t be there. The EduGlu singers were most DEFINITELY in the house.

And “The Giant?” Well, none other than Bryan Alexander – a “giant” to me, someone I have hoped to meet for a long time, and who did not disappoint. His keynote was funny and insightful, managing to cross the uncanny valley of academia and social media denizens, and his presence (which, sadly, I did not get enough time to spend in) warm, smart, funny. It is amazingly gratifying those times you get to meet your intellectual pacesetters and they turn out to be all you’d hoped for (Bryan – should I have left the title intact and referred to you as a “Pict?” Wasn’t sure – not everyone takes well to being referred to as a “Pict”

The End

Anyways, if you made it this far, please leave a comment, if only to let me know someone read all this (and I may even create a new Nessie Award for “Reader who persisted the furthest through one of my overwordy posts” in your honour!) Hats off to all of the Northern Voice organizers – you have done a great service not just to Vancouver but to far further flung reaches in helping to foster community and lead rhizomatically. Here’s to many more to come. Northern Voice is Dead. Long Live Northern Voice.

Those of you who have followed me for a while or know me personally will know that working alongside my friends and colleagues Brian Lamb, Chris Lott and David Wiley last year to help organize Open Education 2009 in Vancouver was a real peak experience for me, both because of the joy of working with the folks but also because it’s a special conference that draws some extraordinary people together from across the globe.

This year’s conference, the 7th annual one, moves to Europe, to Barcelona. The Call for Papers closes on May 15 and I would urge you to submit a paper (or at least consider attending). This is, in my experience, a “welcoming” community, open to all, and this meeting face to face with others active in Open Education has had real positive effects on shifting the focus and execution of the emerging practice.

I know I will be there, and I expect that, similarly to the last 3 I have attended, I will come away with renewed energy and new ideas on how we can make educational opportunities and resources available to more people (while also helping our educational organizations adapt to the new realities of the network – I do not see these as mutually exclusive.) Hope I will see you there! – SWL

So I dusted off my “Becoming a Network Learner: Towards a Practice of Freedom” talk that I originally delivered in December 2008 during my trip to Colombia.

Still, I did try to introduce some new material, which you can see in slides 53-59. The first two new slides simply tried to explain my “Open Educator as DJ” as another form of PLE workflow, but one which sees teaching others as one of the goals of learning on the network.

The other new stuff, which is more important, but MUCH more raw, has been prompted by concerns that have been niggling me for years. I am not sure if these are “essential” effects of using the net, but I have experienced, and others have noted, that the net can lead us to pay possibly too much attention to the immediate, and not enough reflecting on what has happened or where we want to go. I take the emergence of the GTD movement to be very much an early reaction to this by people deeply immersed in learning/working with technology. I also worry about the phenomenon of the “echo chamber,” that diversity in our networks doesn’t just magically “happen.”

So I tried to suggest that “on top” or “alongside” or “as part of” our PLE we need to incorporate techniques, practices (and tools) to help counterbalance the tyranny of “now” and “me”, to help learners realize that part of learning is looking at where you’ve been which helps with pattern recognition, reflection, and building an awareness of how we learn (meta-cognition.) And similarly, that we need to adopt practices to help us focus, build attention, stay on track amidst the the myriad distractions whose existence is part of the value of the network! (I think this is similar, though maybe not identical, to what Pat Parslow is getting at in this post on “Navigating your personal learning seascape.”) The solutions I seek aren’t about closing your laptops or turning off your cellphones, but instead are ways of inserting some meta- activities or tools into your regular activities in the hope of improving attention, reflection, pattern recognition, diversity.

So, “examining where we’ve already been” might take the form of a plug-in like Wikipedia Diver that records and visualizes your wikipedia sessions, to simple suggestions like one Mike Caulfield made a few weeks back to make reviewing your browser history a regular activity. Using your blog as a constrained search engine, or even just searching your “outboard brain” are other examples of  simple practices we can insert into our existing network flows that I think will increase reflection, help us learn what we know, know what we’ve learned.

And what about moving forward – how to do this in a way that doesn’t fall prey to either the tyranny of the now (helps us know and follow through on our intent) but also isn’t just an echo chamber. I have few answers here – I DO think the whole GTD-type movements, Inbox Zero, etc, are speaking to this and skills we can help network learners adopt. Similarly the idea that people need to become personal project managers. Counter-balancing the “echo chamber”? I am leery to suggest that this is solely a network problem – we see this in many aspects of life. And just like there, I think there is no substitute for choosing to engage The Other, to listen to those you don’t agree with or identify with, in order to build understanding and empathy. Can we technologize such a thing. I don’t know.

As I said, very raw, but I put them out here, raw as they are, in case they resonate with others and they can start to build on them. So what do you think – are their techniques, practices or technologies that you can suggest to insert into a network learner’s workflow that will help counterbalance these effects and help cultivate attention, meta-cognition, reflection, intent? Is this even a problem, or if so, is it perhaps not specific to network learning but just learning in general? Please help me clarify my own thoughts on this. I am a slow learner, and am intuiting more than I can effectively communicate or prove here. – SWL

If you haven’t seen Google Moderator, it is a fantastic system that you can use to gather and vote on questions before (or during) a meeting or class. Unfortunately, using this US-based app for an upcoming meeting will likely land me in crap, so I set out trying to find alternatives.

There are definitely a number of similarly hosted alternatives; Uservoice, GetSatisfaction, while not identical, can facilitate this sort of thing, as could Ideascale and YouSuggest. Problem is, they run afoul of the same set of alleged privacy bugaboos that means I can’t use Google Moderator (and frankly none of them are quite so sweet as it). (N.B. I say “alleged” because the irony is that the meeting I want to elicit questions for is precisely on this question of BC institutions abilities to use 3rd PArty US-based software!)

So I kept looking for Open Source or at least locally-hostable options and found the following ones too:

• Question2Answer – http://question2answer.org/
• OSQA – http://www.osqa.net/
• Stacked – http://code.google.com/p/stacked/ an Open Source clone of the Stack Overflow site)
• Idea Torrent – http://www.ideatorrent.org/
• Berkman’s Live Question Tool (which, while allegedly Open Sourced, does not appear to have source code available, too bad)
• Backchan.nl from MIT – https://launchpad.net/backchan.nl (again, promising, but where’s the code?)

None of these are perfect replacements for what Google Moderator does – the ones focused on customer feedback/software development tend to be overly busy and not clearly dedicated to the issue of crowdsourcing questions to be answered live during a meeting/class. So I will keep looking. But I thought I would share what I found in case it was helpful. If you know of a good alternative please let me know! – SWL