OpenLearn2007 Animoto video

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Animoto – trying the end of the slideshow

I came across Animoto twice in the last two days – once in .Net magazine and the second time when Brian Kelly used it to summarise a workshop session in the CETIS conference. This seemed to be enough for me to have a go. The approach is to provide a series of images and some music and let their software do its job. I think we are going to see a lot of these in the next few months. Here is my attempt using OpenLearn2007 images and some Creative Commons licenced music. Hmm – embedding does not work at the moment, I need to find out what the trick is to do that. In the meantime here is a link to the video.

Update: I have now fixed the embedding using the video embedding tool provided at http://vodpod.com/wordpress – I have put the resulting embedded video in a separate post.

OpenLearn2007 presentations and audio recordings

We have now gathered together the presentations from the conference and audio recordings for many of the sessions. These are available through the conference support site from the programme for each day.

Thanks to contributing reporters!

Yes it is nice to have the conference over – but it is also great to find out even more about the presentations I missed by reading these blog entries. Thank you very much to those who have blogged here (and elsewhere – pipes might be letting us down but technorati and flickr can now kick in). Thanks in particular to the core blogging team of Gill, Anesa and Rebecca and the extra blogs and pictures from Ale, Andreia, Steve, Andreas and Alex.

End of Conference

Well, the conference is now over and I imagine Patrick and the rest of the team who organised it and made sure that things ran smoothly are putting their feet up, or fending off trick-or-treaters depending. The Yahoo Pipe was a bit of a disappointment as it only seemed to work periodically. They’re obviously having problems with their pipe engine. It is working now, and I’ve just been looking at the collected blog entries which is quite interesting. You can find it here but try again later if it won’t run first time. 

Research Panel Team for the second day

Research Panel Theme for the second dayOriginally uploaded by openlearn2007

The panel has changed slightly … Josie isn’t here … and there is a promise of no ppts 🙂

Erik is starting: He thinks of openness as being removing barriers and he is afraid that he cannot ideologically can stick or he doesn’t care about things he has to pay for it (i.e. happy for his university to pay for it), for it just needs to be there when he wants it there – he just wants convenience. He wants to remove the barriers (he is just repeating what he said earlier). He thinks we often worry too much in advance about the barriers when these barriers are only in our heads. He is talking about if a few years ago if we talked about putting out our content a committee would have been set up to decide if they wanted to put out these content and how to do it … he is saying with google and yahoo doing it – we are all too happy to get it indexed right away now …

Robin: Implications of the OER is quite vast in particular at the OU, where content has always been highly prized, then the role of the tutor in the OU becomes vague and it needs to be rethought about. Some people at the OU are quite wedded to their content and can’t see themselves without it. She is seeing scope for having institutions for accreditation etc. but she doesn’t see it happening … because there have been lots of technology new dawns (cites the examples of tv showing the best lecture) – and this never happened. She thinks that OER should become part of our scholarly activity. Libraries have been around for 150 years and it has not dented university roles – content is not everything … content is NOT king, whoever said it was king … it is so ISN’T. OER is just a modern version of a library – the OU has gone a bit further by providing tools – we therefore need some more support … gives an example of some guy who learned and became an expert on Turkish carpets through reading books. Talks about some other guy who failed to get into medical school in because he didn’t know Botecelli (?) painted the Venus.

John (?American guy ?): Talks about the OU degrees being accepted as being perfectly accepted degrees here in the UK. His job is to be the director of the OpenContent Consortium at MIT. He is wondering if people putting up more course materials up would make any significant difference. Mentions creative commons, wikiversity etc – things he picked up from the last 2 years. He is thinking we have the raw materials (nails, hammer and board) but we’re not sure what we’re building or rather to what end are we doing this for. He is thinking that we should consider how all how individual little projects fall into the grander scheme. He is thinking at some point we should get something call a “Open degree” but this does not replace the formal education … He likes the idea of that big goal, although it is controversial and may cause fear in people’s hearts.

Terry (American? Canadian?): We are not culturally equipped for rapid change … there is a crisis coming into higher education as the entry class is declining whilst life-long learning is increasing … the reason we have been doing so well, is because the university people have connections in the elite and the cabinets .. and he thinks until there is a cultural crisis there isn’t going to be any change to use these in any big way … Athabasca is planning to start accreditation these courses and have applied to the Hewlett foundation to do this. What are we assessing and how do we assess? Especially with the plagiarism issues and especially with the life-long issues.

Andrew: We are in a state of crisis … and what is going to follow on … he cannot separate digital revolution with the OER. With the context of this, he winces when he hear contents too much. He would like a change in educational practices, new epistemology … He is saying phase 1 has been the technology as we’ve developed enough content to last out a life time … and should enter phase 2 (not sure what this is) … he is thinking we should look at tools instead … in particular use and reuse of tools. If things are going to be used it should address a problem or do something interesting and we’ve been commodifying things. We need to form social relationships and do interesting things together – and we can have a bigger landscape in which to do these things as we become more fluent in these digital technologies. If we stop being in those old-fashion models then things become more interesting and fun.

Question time:

Simon: Is saying that academics don’t creative content but rather narrative as everything they do is free and is out there … if that is what academics have always done then people will continue to do that as people are lazy.

Steve: How do you acquire a skill … as these are usually acquired through practice? This sometimes get missed …

Andrew: He thinks it is absolutely true but cannot be change, becoming competent in these new digital literacies is not going to happen in a one-day training course but being committed to engaging with it. Mentions Imagine a programme on BBC that shows web 2.0 stuff – asks if anyone watches it – as it turns out nobody does.

Denise: What does the panel think about heading up a mix-and-match university of the future? How can you accredit me in some way when we do taster courses?

Terry: Athabasca has been doing that with $100 to challenge the exams and something etc. He is saying that his students would do things for marks but wouldn’t do things without the incentive marks. He is saying he doesn’t agree with Simon, as he thinks the narrative can be spun by other students and other people in general.

Erik: He doesn’t agree with the marking thing – the only reason why the students are so focused on marking is because they show up after 12 years of being conditioned to marking and also most of the things we teach have no relationship to their lives so unless we have the marks they won’t care about it. He mentions his 85 yr old father who goes to classes to enjoy it (makes a joke – which we heartily laugh at – that his father alone raises the average age of the class).

UNICEF guy (Mike?) – He is referring back to John’s speech. He’s talking about a book “White man’s burning” (?) – he is saying he works at the UN and he knows that big ideas don’t work. He is saying historically that it mightn’t work. He is saying let’s use the survival of the fitness format, in that if we continue in the small projects that we do, then the best one will eventually succeed. He is saying that the content we need is probably no longer quantitative but qualitative since in the 3rd world country that the content is quite archaic. He is thinking that this will be a great thing for the African continent. There is a real hunger for knowledge by the young people – so more knowledge available – all the better.

Robin: Is giving an example about Nepal that money was given to build a library but no money for books. And she now understands why they use an instructivist approach but it is because they don’t have the resources and hence everything has to come from the teacher.

Some guy: How does OER links to research?

Robin: Is talking about an European project which she has funding for in writing course materials and checking to see how easy they’re able to write them … talking about a participant in her project said that it might be easier to start from scratch rather than reuse materials.

Erik: Saying there is a lot of irrelevant research occurring as well as in teaching … and by making things more transparent or in a metadata style then it can become better.

Terry: I think there is a huge opportunity for research … (but there is little funding for it in comparison to health research) but does thinks it is a good idea.

Andrew: Thinks are changing quickly so we need to ask the right research questions and be quite agile in the way we do things so it can feed into it quickly … so we have to change our research methods.

John: He is commented on big ideas being impossible (UNICEF guy) – and he is saying call me an idealist (?) but he just look at Google and Wikipedia they’ve done well, but he takes the point that most big ideas fail … but that we shouldn’t lose the spark that a big idea might just break through. And that we can have a lot of fun doing it.

Robin: Was Web 2.0 a big idea … no it just grew suddenly

Andrew: Is saying that lots of things weren’t considered as a big idea such as the internet.

UNICEF guy: Says that one thing we’re missing that the biggest motivator was profit (in reference to Google) whilst we don’t have that in the OER.

Giovanni’s Open Learning Objects

Giovanni’s OpenLO lifecycle

Originally uploaded by openlearn2007

Talking about the SLOOP project which is part of the Leornado da Vinci programme and it is an European project.

It aims to promote a community of teachers whose main interest is the production of learning materials (?) in a collaborative way to be digital educational resources (i.e. searchable, customizable, interoperable and something else).

The needed to define a model for free/open learning object and a LO management system (not sure what a LO is – oh learning objects … duh!)

They wanted to use SCORM (I think) for their standards to have educational resources that were easy and also be reusable, searchable, adaptable and interoperable.

There is a problem of contextualized Los and makes it impossible to be used in a constructivist model (but do we actually want this?) and the technical standards makes it difficult for teachers to develop their own educational resources.

They need to move to an Open Learning Object (OpenLO) in particular when thinking of reusability issues – he is not interested in a black-box LO but something in which they can change inside (so my black-box research even turns up here!).

He is referring to open learning object as “any open digital resource that can be reused to support learning” (he is getting this from Wiley)

He is saying that the OpenLO life cycle should change from the traditional water-fall model to a more agile model where agile practices should be applied at all levels …. He is showing us a graph of the OpenLO life cycle now … where the blue line shows it going steadily upwards which is theoretical and a red line showing it actually having a decline.

He is talking about the metadata feed and the OpenLO now as the metadata could evn support the users in evolving LOs …

There has to be a learning object management system (FreeLOMS – http://www.freeloms.org) – and this should provide an environment to share resources and they should provide the tools to support collaborative activities. Should also permit the development of learning resources following an open licence (e.g. creative commons). He is saying that the LOMS should not replace the LMS/VLE, the teacher just has to learn different tools but the LOMS should provide an easy mechanism for integration with the LMS.

He’s talking about the way they have converted the materials into metadata … guess Erik Duval would be glad about this! Their specified metadata is based on a 3-level model from IEEE LOM.

They’ve made a one click function for ppt files as the teachers have most of their files in that format and weren’t too concerned about pdf files. They’ve also included RSS into the FreeLOMs (I always like RSS feeds … great stuff) and they’ve also able to have direct access from Moodle to FreeLoms (well not quite – still has to be released – but wonder how that actually works).

The Sloop site is in several languages, they have 436 students from around the world (is that a lot? Not sure …).

He agrees with Erik that all materials on the web should be free of use for educational purposes … gave an example of some professor who was fined $6000 because he uploaded pictures (probably painting?) of Monet rather than Picasso.

The benefits of the OpenLO model:
1) Teachers acquire an active role in developing their educational resources
2) Developing a community of teachers around the idea of OER used and produced by them
3) Collaborative processes in the development and modifications of LOs
4) Students can be involved I the production of LOs, thus education strategies based on knowledge building can be put in practice (even with LOs)

Now he is moving onto Learning Objects in the Web 2.0.

(Don’t think I’ve done justice to this post as I think my brain is heading to shut down … even the boost of a chocolate biscuit at tea-time didn’t seem to help … maybe should have two instead :D).

Right question time and he has a quote by Walt Disney … “Our heritage and ideals, our codes and standard – the things we live by and teach our children – are preserved or diminished by how freely we exchange ideas and feelings”.

Chris was busy reading the Walt Disney quote and forgot to stand up and say question time :).

Question: Can you easily integrate this system into blackboards?

Giovanni: Yes, but he is not sure that is the right way – the way to go is to try and integrate them with different platforms and freeLOMS is an opensource software so there isn’t much support for integration.

Graveyard slot

Judging by his Powerpoint, Seb’s taking his graveyard slot very literally 😉

Erik’s Metadata talk

Erik’s starting slideOriginally uploaded by openlearn2007

Erik is up and mentioning the number of times he has mentioned open on his title of his paper but thinks it balances it out with the number of authors he has.

He’s talking about open learn materials is a big thing in Latin America, China and Korea and that in Chile there were two conferences on it recently.

This is the philosophy of most people:
Open = removing barriers

He thinks we should refrain from thinking what people should do with these materials and feels as it should have a “build it and they’ll come” kind of flavour as he is concerned right now of removing the barriers.

Problem of removing barriers:
Someone says time (sounds like Steve), Grainne says it is difficult, Andrew says the language issues, some guy said about the legal issues.

So, Erik is talking about the legal (can’t change it), findability ( don’t know it exists and can’t find it .. or find it back), can’t keep up (too much hassle, not part of my workflow)

He’s onto the legal stuff now … and he says most people are thinking that creative commons is the solution to this …

Creative commons is simple, good enough but also works in court … and better yet if you use his slides without attributing it to him he could see you in court … probably in Dutch :).

He thinks us as educators are way too passive we should be more aggressive assertive – he doesn’t think he shouldn’t ask any permission to use anything if it is for an education purpose. He is giving an example of showing the Eiffel tower is no problem if he takes the students to see it … and should be the same for using a poem (I think he was saying Baudelair ??) …

We should be stronger in the position and should be continued to be allowed to use these materials for education.

He’s moving onto findability now: … for example never using SCORM material because never heard of it or never been able to find it … and he thinks the answer has to be metadata!!!

There is 1484.12.1 IEEE standard for learning object metadata – he is saying that people might hate him for it for making sure there is metadata since he reads our blogs! (That’s openness for you).

He is talking about the Ariadne foundation (http://www.ariadne-eu.org) and is talking about globe now which is a network of repositories … http://globe-info.org which includes Ariadne, edna.edu.au, LORNET, MERLOT, LACL, KERIS, COSL etc., Europen School Network.

He’s moving onto his open metadata and open services … he thinks that every piece of metadata is precious … he thinks it would be better if there was one standard of metadata – but having several is better than none

Not sure what the metadata standard are but he is mentioning something called LOM, DC, MPEG, METS and VCARD …

He’s mentioning something about youtube and slideshare – perhaps how to metadata these things – he is saying that the highest amount of metadata is probably from Google – he is saying that Google thrives on metadata (he is explaining this because someone says that Google doesn’t use metadata – but is saying that it does – but has a wider range of metadata than most people).

He is calling himself a meta-person who lives in meta-universe.

Ok … he’s looking at protocols now: SQL, SRW, PLQL, CQL, OAI-PMH (have no idea what these are – he just checked to see how many people knew like more than one – and there were hardly anyone!).

He says he also does screen-scraping and sometimes they are pushed out because people think they are spybots – but he said someone was telling him over lunch he should try servers over in Russia since they’re able to this better (??).

He is talking about a project called MACE and the architectural infrastructure to harvest the metadata through ariadne. He is looking at harvested, attention, context, user management, domain and competence metadata – this helps in web services, federated search and user management … he thinks that these metadata always bring up issues of privacy particularly here in the UK which he thinks it is pretty strange since the UK has CCTV everywhere.

He is now showing us a slide of all the repositories (a flow chart diagram) of all the metadags and the databases. So, there are several functional layers: content, web services, metadata, tools, and services. He is saying he would like to get into our Microsoft Office environment so, he can gather the metadata from it – although he says they have a tool to do this already (I think).

Ok, talking about some architectures (was he talking before about architects rather than architectural infrastructure with respect to database structures– these words are getting confusing!) – and how people can search for architectural structures via the metadata and get the pictures for it.

He’s talking about something called SAMGI (Simple Automatic Metadata generator interface – http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~hmdb/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=29&Itemid=57) which can automatically get your metadata.

Ok, now he is unto the “can’t keep up – too much hassle” bit. He’s talking about people not wanted to put in metadata no matter how much you say it is a good thing … because it is just takes too much time.

He is talking about www.blip.tv, in which by using metadata, one can get much better results. Blip tv allows you to put it in as creative commons immediately.

Unto something called for “snowflake for learning” … that everyone is unique and we all need our unique environment to work with open resources.

He is saying searching is so passé and so 2006 … it should just be able to be found on your desk when you want something – such as getting recommended resources for you – and is mentioning his VLE blackboard to see how it should work.

He’s is talking about http://attentiontrust.org about tracking data and in particular they’re looking at property, mobility, economy and transparency and he wants that the tracking history should be able to be transferable between sites such as moving my tracking history from google to yahoo if I want to.

This is a lot more interesting than I thought. Question time!

Yishay from Knowledge Lab: Talking about that some of his colleagues feel reluctant to put their own papers on the internet because of copyright issues

Erik is saying he respects copyright issues but he wants to be able to share things with no hassle and if that means the university have to pay something to get rid of it – he doesn’t care – he just wants to use it without any hassle and thus moving out the problems of using materials for educational purposes …

He says he posts everything online – although according to other people he is breaking some laws and if there is some problem with the materials he would take it down … or if that is still a problem … well, then sue him (I think this is assertive aggressive stance)

Ellen: Do you refer to your IEEE when doing your courses (not sure if that is exactly what she is saying)?

Erik: Emphatically replies that he does … and tongue-in-cheek says that we all know our IEEE thing by heart.

He is saying that human-generated metadata is not as good because people are lazy and tend to accept the default and that the automated generated metadata is better.

Blog Analysis

Scanning blog posts on the OpneLearn conference, I find this quote from Tony Hirst:
“[I think it’s interesting to compare my notes with those of a couple of others who blogged the same talk… John Seely Brown – Patrick reporting, OpenLearn Keynote Address by John Seely Brown, Open Learning Broadly Construed and John Seely Brown Keynote Speech (hmm – i wonder what would happend if i passed each of these through the same content analysis tool.”

So, with the help of the wonderful http://www.tagcrowd.com – here is the visual comparison (I’ve confined it to three, or this makes a very long post)!
Tag cloud of Tony’s blog post:

Tag cloud of Patrick’s blog post:

Tag cloud of Gill’s post: