Sounds of the Bazaar 7

Here is the October edition. Accompanying sleeve notes to follow….. 

 Listen to the full copy of this edition [33:02m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (341)
 Graham Attwell\'s round up on new developments in e-learning: | Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (128)
 Magda Balica on on-line facilitator skills [7:24m]: | Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (100)
 Glen Hoddle on multi cuturalism and learning styles [10:26m]: | Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (282)
 End notes to this weeks programme [0:34m]: | Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (77)

Add comment October 23rd, 2006

Why Moodle has become such a big success

In a recent podcast, Prof. Michael Kerres –director of the Duisburg Learning Lab – has commented on the success of the Moodle LMS. Kerres states that Moodle is about to dominate the market for Open Source LMS. In his view, this phenomenon cannot be traced back to the technical features of the Moodle LMS.

Experiences from the Duisburg Learning Lab – where several LMS are hosted in parallel and users are free to choose their favorite system – have shown that a majority of users prefer Moodle to other LMS. Why?

Kerres’ hypothesis: Moodle appears most appealing to all target groups within a virtual learning environment. System administrators are happy about the easy installation procedure and the standard set of third-party software (Webserver, PHP, MySQL). Authors and teachers are supported by the easy-to-use authoring tool and course environment which do not require extra training. And finally, learners take advantage from its intuitive graphical user interface supporting as well as its collaboration tools that foster the building of learning communities.

Concluding, Kerres argues that Moodle will win the competition with other Open Source LMS not only in the short term but also in the middle term perspective.

If one critically reviews Kerres’ argumentation, several concerns cross one’s mind:

• There is no reliable data about the German market share of Moodle in the field of Open Source LMS. There certainly is a dominance of Moodle in terms of media coverage but this does not necessarily reflect its actual deployment.
• At least for the UK, we have a more reliable data basis for the market share of Moodle in Further and Higher Education Institutions. According to the OSS Watch Survey 2006, 56% of Further Education Institutions (FE) and only 9% of Higher Education Institutions (HE) use Moodle as Virtual Learning Environment. But: Except for Moodle, the only OS LMS which has been taken into account in the survey is Bodington. Thus, these figures have to be regarded with caution.
• Setting up Moodle is easy and it does not require specialized third-party software to be installed by the administrator. But this is also true for many other LMS.
• Admittedly, Moodle’s technical features are not outstanding so indeed its attractiveness must be founded in Moodle’s usability.

Moodle - hype or not?

In his podcast, Prof. Kerres also states that moodle’s current high profile among the educational community contains some irrational traits. And indeed, it has often been observed in various economic sectors that market participants are not immune against irrational behaviour.

But at the time being, the question if we are currently experiencing a Moodle hype cannot be answered. It might be that we are currently undergoing the advent of a consolidation in the OS LMS market, with Moodle taking the lead role because of its usability. Exciting times ahead.

6 comments October 13th, 2006

Open Documents, a way to go

If we read documents as information in general -since it needn’t be a file on paper and will typically be understood as an electronic document these days-, I could, from the title of this blog, be understood as a fighter for free information. Knowledge is power and power to the people. I will not go into that now.

What I do mean with this title, is that information should be available and readable by as many people as possible. This can be seen on both a world-wide scale as well as on a small scale in creating software (environments) for learning. In other words: we shouldn’t make assumptions in which context or for which purpose the content will be used. Content (documents) should be self-contained and open to integrate with various (software) environments and contexts of use.

A future sketch

It is often heard that we live in an information society and I guess that nobody would deny that. The cost-effective new ways of sharing information via computers, digital media and the Internet or private networks, have made the world of information huge and more diverse.

Still, there is a great deal of publishers and educational institutes that would like to stick to the old model of having one information source (a book for example) that the learner is obliged to use. Of course large investments made in creating educational material should be earned back. But the possibilities promised by multimedia and fast Internet are tempting and the use of Internet is still growing.

In my opinion eventually there will be other models used based on smaller reusable units of learning that are easily redistributed (resold maybe) since it is not likely that people will download complete books. These smaller units might have an increasing quality because of online feedback.

The results of a future scenario exercise presented by Teemu Arina at the conference in march 2005 directed to networks of knowledge interchange. These would be feed by infoware, social networking, social software, blogs, collaborative tagging and/or data storage and so on. A growing number of initiatives on the Internet like eduforge.org, http://www.opencontent.org/ (mainly for the OpenCourseWare of MIT), opencourse.org and many others make it more likely that learning in the future makes a shift from classroom- or book-based learning to gaining knowledge via various knowledge communities on the Internet.

The problem is that there is so much out there, that you don’t know where to start. Moreover, even if we know where to get the knowledge, we might not have the proper rights to access or use it. So there are three issues to tackle to enhance innovation in future learning:

• the ability to find educational material;
• the right to use the material;
• the ability to open and (re-)use the material.

Where to find Open Content?

If one is looking for open content on the Internet, finding good material might be a problem since there is so much out there and there is not just one website to go to. One might use a search robot like Google, but since it has such a wide coverage, the number of hits in a search can be large and therefore it might be hard to find the right information. Communities forming their own portal offer both a social network and a source of information with their own searching engine. By starting a new community and bundling the knowledge and judging skills (of other information resources of interest) of the members, soon an interesting website of information can develop itself.

I believe that judging information is such a complex task, that human skills are necessary next to the work machines can do. A group of users together is very powerful to create a useful information source by selecting, rating, adding and commenting to, information. By facilitating new groups of users that create open content, such communities can prove themselves or not. In time the most useful or valuable information resources will remain and enrich themselves to grow out to content providers (for specific target groups perhaps).

May we use it?

As a learner finds information on the net, he/she may read it, but copyright issues might prevent teachers from using information in their classroom or online course. If the reuse of educational material by teachers is blocked for some reason, the information wealth is more likely to grow in quantity than in quality since everytime material is written anew. But these days the right to use material can be dealt with, by means of a special license mechanism called Creative Commons Licensing which I have been talking about in an earlier blog (An alternative to copyright to enhance sharing educational material). The idea is that the maker of the material can offer in an attached legal document a broader range of preset rights than the standard copyright laws permits.

What is open about Open Documents?

Since we share documents, there should be an agreement on how to read them technically. I will not have a plea for Open Source Software here, but what is important is that documents follow an open standard or at least have the document format publicly available. A simple concept like xml to structure information has been used to make translations between documents possible. The use of open standards makes it worthwhile to invest in the development of new tools that can be made available online such that users can read and modify their downloaded documents.

Open means also that we have the legal rights to use the software and that it does not remains behind walls. Apart from that it means that the document is self-contained by which I mean that it has meta-information that not only describes the document for insiders, but in comprehensible standards to enable a fit in several contexts. Html-documents are a good example of open documents. Anyone understanding the (available) standards can peek into the document and reuse and/or change (parts of) the document.

Last but not least, open means easy to use with little effort to integrate in the existing tooling a person has got. The document format should at least be easy to translate to existing document formats of common available tools and readable by (Open Source) software that is freely available. I think that html became so widely used, apart from its powerful concept of linking locations, because of the fact that translating html to a readable text-file is a matter of omitting the tags (mainly) and the availability of free browsers did the rest.

How to share documents?

Again, as in the beginning of this blog, if we interpret the word document as the broader concept information, a website where you can browse information and download files, might do. I found on our own Bazaar project blog an interesting link posted by George Bekiaridis in his article An alternative way to share our data online about a company called synology offering (for money) a way to quickly set up a website with loads of possibilities. The thing is, that files or information like html-texts alone are not enough. To be able to find and judge information items quickly we like to do two things: label them and group them.

Labelling information can be done by giving an url a tag in a tagging system, giving it a useful name or by providing meta-information. For the latter a number of standards have been developed (specific for learning material) like SCORM, IMS Learning Design. By means of providing and refining meta-information the chance that a piece of information is indeed shared between users, gets higher. The specific purpose of sharing determines the kind of needed meta information and the tools around it. Either we have a lot of different open standards or we have several big ones that are inevitably quite complex and extensive standards (which are not likely to be used manually by individuals). This would ask for new tooling. Preferably, we would have these tools online available instead of downloading them per individual.

Grouping documents can be done on several levels. One of the most important ones is having a website or a network held up by a community. The administrator or the members in the latter case are responsible for the quality and judging the (a)propriateness of the documents within. This means that uploading a document to a specific website or network of websites, is meta-information itself. The users will find a restricted set of documents in their community, all with the type of meta-information of their interest.

Therefore it will be interesting to form new communities around repositories of information or possibly a website with blogs, mailing-lists, tags or rss-feeds of links and other services. It will be interesting to have such services available online since various communities of practice are likely to evolve outside of the settled institutions that have the server space, full rights and fund, to maintain websites of knowledge and interaction.

In the light of this, it is interesting to mention two initiatives with more or less the same philosophy. At web.opendock.net you will find a free downloadable set of tools (interpretable text-files) based on Open Source technology like MySQL and PHP that are available at almost every server (even hired ones). So setting up your own community means uploading a bunch of files at some server address and changing a few settings. Although the installing documentation is mainly in Italian, setting up a new website, should not take long I suspect. What you get is the common social network website functionality like blogging, mail and so on.

At OpenDocument.net that will be launched soon, there will be software available that is based on PHP and MySQL too that will offer you a way to group documents in a repository (rather than information in general as for opendock.net). The way the metadata is organised is so flexible that new modules for different metadata formats can be added to the repository. In the blogs Sharing is a joy for all and What we want from a FLOSS repository it is argued how a repository for educational material should look like in our opinion. It supports IMS Learning Design and Creative Commons and allows the units that are stored to have a structure of their own. They comprise all the (meta) information and files or references that belong to their context. We believe that we can combine the benefits of having a flexible metadata system and a lightweight Internet repository service as to both group and tag information in a flexible way to facilitate new communities of practice.

Add comment October 10th, 2006

An alternative way to share our data online

I was thinking about the Bazaar seminar in Barcelona entitled “Hey Dude, Where’s My Data?” and how to manage our data stored in different locations online.

The first thing we have to look is why we are using services such flickr, youtube etc. I believe because we need a fast, free or even cheap, reliable and easy to use place to store our data online. The best of course is to have such a service just for us, managed by us without any ads and data mining. Most of us will say that this is very expensive and probably we don’t have the skills needed to manage a service.

Few days ago an advertisement email arrived in my inbox and it was for a product called Disk Station. The text was starting as “Time to redefine how you share, how you store, and how you connect your data.” Looking at the web site (http://www.synology.com/enu/products/DS106serise/index.php) Disk Station is a portable server which has some interesting features copied from product’s web site.

Share More Than just Data
Disk Station integrates so many features you could ever think of in a Home & SOHO environment. It shares data, printer, photo, web, multimedia files and more! Having a Disk Station is connecting all your digital contents. It makes sharing everything easy yet controllable.

Program Your Own Web
Creating your own web site is always a fun thing to do. Disk Station now supports PHP+MySQL. You are free to construct your own web site with dynamic web contents, or to install PHP open source applications from the Internet, such as blog and bulletin board,

Let the Music Play
If you have cool photos, music, and movies, why not share them out? You simply upload the files to Disk Station, hook up a Network Media Player, and you can start enjoying them with your TV or audio set.

Total Backup Solutions
Data backup is so important but people tend to ignore it, Disk Station makes data backup so complete and automatic that backup always be done without your attention. From Network Backup to Local Backup, from USB Copy to PC Backup (Synology Data Replicator II), you can always find the backup alternatives that fit your needs.

Share Photos with Right Persons
Having trouble to share your photos with right persons? Photo Station lets you not only share them with friends through the Internet, but also control who should be able to view which photo albums. You are now the master of your shared photos.

What if plug a Disk Station in a network with static IP and give access to our peers through the internet.  I’m sure some of us now and the rest in 1-2 years will have a lot of bandwidth and a static IP (you can do it even with dynamic IP) to connect such devices on the net. I don’t think that everybody will run a service like flickr but will have the able to run our own services with our own policies using our own hardware which is not very expensive. The price of Disk Station in Greece is 320 Euros.

I’m not trying to advertise any product. I’m trying to share some thoughts on how to use a product like this in terms of sharing our data through the internet.

I’ve already ordered a Disk Station and I’ll try to test it. So in a next post I’ll share my experiences on using it.

2 comments October 4th, 2006

Sounds of the Bazaar 6

Well we’ve got to edition 6 of Sounds of the Bazaar. And
its a bumper issue.

This is a holding page - full ’sleeve notes’ to follow.

In this edition:  

Graham Attwell on Plagiarism.

On September 12, the Observer said: “One of Britain’s newest universities has found more than 200 students guilty of cheating after it launched a crackdown on what university officials admit is one of the biggest problems they face.

Using a computer program to catch students trying to pass off others’ work as their own - often simply ‘cut-and-pasted’ from the internet - Coventry University discovered that 237 students had broken the rules. As a result, seven were expelled from the university, while another 12 cases are pending.”

Are all these people really cheating.

On 12 September the Guardian reported: “The National Union of Students (NUS), vice-president, Wes Streeting, is becoming familiar with the problem. “We are coming across an increasing number of cases where students have been accused of plagiarism when it’s not obvious that the accusation is justified,” he says.

“A big problem is that students are not being told what plagiarism is, or how to avoid it. Students may be referencing an author in the bibliography, but not in footnotes. We are also being told of huge differences in the way that departments within the same university are dealing with the issue.”

Graham Attwell suggests the idea and meaning of plagiarism is a social construct.

Alexandra Toedt on the development of the Illias VLE

Alexandra Toedt talks about the development fo the Illias Virtual Learning Envionment and claims prior art over Blackboard! She discusses models for sustainability for Open Source Software in education.

Web site of the Week - Steve Denning’s site on story telling

Stories communicate ideas holistically, conveying a rich yet clear message, and so they are an excellent way of communicating complicated ideas and concepts in an easy-to-understand form.Stories therefore allow people to convey tacit knowledge that might otherwise be difficult to articulate; in addition, because stories are told with feeling, they can allow people to communicate more than they realise they know.

Steve Denning’s web site explores the use of story telling for learning and knowledge sharing.
Hans Werner Franz on teaching and learning

Hans Werner Franz is an experienced researcher and trainer. In this interview he talks about his approach to training managers in Small and Medium Enterprises, through authentic lerning activities and projects in the workplace.

 Listen to the full edition [34:22m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1597)
 Introduction to this edition [0:22m]: | Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (820)
 Graham Attwell\'s rant on plagiarism in education [6:04m]: | Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1069)
 Alexandra Toedt on the development of the Illius Open Source VLE [7:03m]: | Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1589)
 Web site of the Week - Steve Denning on storytelling [3:19m]: | Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (923)
 Hans Werner Franz talks about Teaching and Learning [13:48m]: | Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1034)
 End notes to this weeks programme [0:43m]: | Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1740)

Add comment October 2nd, 2006