Write up of the Open Minds Conference [www.infinitethinking.org]
(photo by Dolly)
LAMS was very well recieved at the K-12 Open Minds conference in Indiana. I think its hard to understand what LAMS does until a person has some experience with Moodle without LAMS. There were lots of Moodle users at this conference. My audiance was mostly Tech Directors and they felt that the teachers they were supporting were trying to do LAMS like sequences using Moodle alone and would really appreciate LAMS.
The State of Indiana is officially moving K-12 Education to Open Source so there was a lot of interest in LAMS as a mechanism for sharing lessons plan and helping to administration monitor where in the curriculum teachers were.
Ernie over at LAMS has been working on LAMS "Tool Adaptors". These allow you to use the LMS, e.g. Moodle, .LRN, tools such as Forum, inside of LAMS with far more integration.
Main page on Tool Adaptors: http://wiki.lamsfoundation.org/display/lams/Tool+Adapters
The secret to understanding this is to go into the .LRN and Moodle pages and watch the vidoes of the Forums integration.
But the real power and promise isn't in using Forums, its the concept of being able to integrate tools from the LMS in rich ways with LAMS. That opens up a wide world of possiblities for creating customized solutions for learning.
Our customers, and thier students, are often using a wiki for the first time on one of our sites. I saw a great video on YouTube explaining the whys and hows of Wikis.
I also made a quick demo to show the features they go over in our wiki. Try out the basics and then when you are ready to learn more check out this documentation: http://www.solutiongrove.com/docwiki/howtoxowiki
One of my friends who is also a Linked In Contact wrote me this email in response to Linked In's automated updates :)
On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 5:45 PM, Greg wrote:
LinkedIn
------------
GROUP UPDATES:
...
* Caroline Meeks has joined Women 2.0
...
Geez. I had no idea. I won't ask about the new features.
(Sorry, but it couldn't be left alone...)
Lots of things suck about the Wii Fit game. You can’t string together activities so you waste a minute or two between each activity. You can’t share your data on the internet so you can’t compete with your friends. But I assume they will fix these problems and charge me another $39.95 to get a new version.
The board itself works remarkably well. It's amazing how it can tell where my body is and it's cool to have visual feedback on my balance as I do the yoga poses.
I will be presenting a workshop on Collaborative eLearning at this year's Grassroots Use of the Internet Conference. It's always a great conference. Here is the description of our specific workshop:
The internet is a great source of information, but how do you move from putting your information out there to really supporting learning online? In the past people have moved from static web pages, to multi-media presentations that use the “listen-and-read, then answer questions model”. However, learning is a social activity. People learn best together. As the web becomes more social and collaborative so can online learning.
In this workshop you will get hands-on experience using an open source learning tool (LAMS) to support collaborative learning. We will explore a bit of the theory behind learning and try out some collaborative activities.
LAMS is a tool that allows the creation and sharing of online sequences of activities. Using easy drag and drop tools to facilitate the online equivalent of lesson planning it encourages a real focus on the structure and theory of learning (pedagogy).
The goal of the workshop is not to focus on the how-to of any particular technology but to inspire new ideas for making online learning effective, engaging and collaborative.
Does Sugar coating Linux make kids like it more? [bits.blogs.nytimes.com]
The New York Times wrote an article on Walter Blender's split with OLPC. What bothers me is the black and white mentality about Linux.
Sugar is based on Linux - but that does not make it the same as most Linux desktops.
Sugar was made to support constructivist learning in small children. That's great, but does anyone know if it works? It's a great thing to try to do, but personally I find it hard to use. Now I'm not a non-literate small child, whereas a co-worker's 4-year old pre-reader can navigate the system intuitively. Does anyone know what research they have done on the effectiveness of Sugar vs. a more traditionally laid out operating system for different age groups? One of the unique things about OLCP is they are focusing on 1st graders.
Open - Standards, Source, Content, Services and Culture - Do you know the difference? [www.archimuse.com]
We have an open source product for museum class registration we developed for the Museum of Science so I followed a link to an article on What Does Openness Mean To The Museum Community? What I found was a very clear discussion of different forms of openness:
- Open Standards
- Open Source
- Open Content
- Open Services
- Open Culture
LAMS on the XO [wiki.lamsfoundation.org]
LAMS - The Learning Activity Management System is one of the open source eLearning systms we support. They recently met with One Laptop per Child people (OLCP). LAMS learner runs fine on the XO laptop (pictures here) and they are developing a version to go on the servers that will be at each school.
LoveThreads - OpenACS Eccomerce site [lovethreads.com.au]
Mark Aufflick, a friend in the OpenACS community, just launched a new openACS based e-commerce site for environmentally friendly fashion. Love Threads, Rethead the Planet
Nice site design and nice clothes. Good work, Mark!
Google Summer of Code pays college students to spend their summers writing open source code.
This summer has 3 projects that are related to OpenACS.
A Business Rule Management System based on the high-level object oriented scripting language XOTcl
Student: Franz Wirl
Mentor: Gustaf NeumannVienna
University of Economics and Business Administration
Business Rule Engines (BRE) are gaining popularity in complex
situations where a high degree of flexibility and declarative problem
formulation are important. In particular, BREs enable the use of
declarative programming---"What to do" rather than "How to do
it"---which will allow people with limited or no traditional
programming experience develop web-based applications.
(photo by Elgg Social Networking)
The highlight of Chapter 1 of Elgg Social Neworking is a concise features list - What can Elgg Do?
- Blogging
- File repositories for individauls and communities
- Podcast support
- Full access controls
- Supports tagging
- User Profiles
- Full RSS support
- RSS aggregator
- Create Communities
- Collaborative community blogs
- Create friends' networks
- Import content
- Publish to blog
- Thorough pricacy controls
- Multilingual
- Branding/Customization
- OpenID
- Import/export friends with FOAF
In addition to introducting the features, Chapter 1 covers the basics of social networking as a foundation for understanding Elgg. However, this is probably not how most of our educational users come to Elgg. My observation of educational users is that Elgg's first role is as a simple ePortfolio, then to support blogging for reflection.
Elgg has a new book!
We are currently using Elgg as the ePortfolio and social networking tool of our Personal Learning Environment. My plan is to review the book and highlight the sections in each chaper that are most useful for people using our integrated system.
Preface:
I am writing a lot of marketing material these days as we launch our PLE product. Thus I have a huge respect for how hard it is to describe these rich complicated systems simply. Here is a quote:
Elgg provides each user with a personal weblog, file repository (with podcasting capabilities), an online profile, and an RSS reader. Additionally, all of the user's content can be tagged with keywords - so they can connect with other users with similar interests and create their own personal learning network. However, where Elgg differs from regular weblog or commercial social network (such as MySpace) is the degree of control each user is given over who can access their content. Each profile item, blog post, or uploaded file can be assigned its own access restrictions - from fully public to readable only by a praticular group or individual.
Cesar Brea, who is also on the Board of the .LRN Consortium posted an annoucement on the next OpenACS/.LRN Usergroup.
Following the recent global user group meeting in Guatemala, o resurgence de OpenACS/.LRN will next pop up in Brazil. Here's Eduardo Santos' summary:
I'm happy to announce the first (or the second, if you consider this) OpenACS Brazilian users group meeting. The event will take place at the 9th International Free Software Forum (FISL 9.0) in Porto Alegre, RS, Brasil, from April 17th to 19th.
The article is entitled, "Analysis: How multimedia can improve learning - New research sheds light on students' ability to process multiple modes of learning" and provides a nice, easy summary of the research in this area.
Highlights include a quick summary of the learning theory:
Student preconceptions of a curriculum must be engaged in learning process. Only when the student has the opportunity to correct misconceptions, build on prior knowledge, and create schemas of understanding a topic will learning be optimized.
I attended the National Science Teachers Association conference here in Boston and saw many wonderful things. One thing that puzzled me was a multitude of vendors selling "clickers" for students to key in a multiple choice response to a question. I asked all those vendors if they had competition from people using mobile phones to do the same thing. They all claimed to have never heard of it.
It struck me as pretty easy to build so when I returned home I, of course, checked the wonderful blog From Toy to Tool and sure enough there is a post about a free (for less then 100 responses) service. Liz, you rock!
We love to use pictures in our blogs. My personal favorite is Flickr creative commons search, but thanks to TechSoup we now have a dozen more places we can look for free images.
http://www.techsoup.org/learningcenter/internet/page5977.cfm
I know lots of people saw the interactive white board from the Immersive Education post and wanted one. Here are instructions on how to make your own from Johnny Lee at Carnegie Mellon University
Detailed how to:
(photo by by Davb)
This weeks reading in The Innovators Dilemma by Clayton Christensen includes the concept of the Buying Hierarchy. Products are bought based on four factors in order: functionality, reliability, convenience and price.
I want to apply this to online teaching content. Material that could potentially replace the text book.
Functionality – There is a lot of wonderful content out there and more being produced for free all the time. In addition we know how to get groups of users to collaborate to create content and there are a lot of people in the world who know the basic K-12 curriculum.
Planning an online community [www.idealware.org]
Online communities take planning, care and feeding. If you want one, be sure to read this Idealware article first. Here are some quotes:
do your homework to clarify your community's purpose and composition. If you were building a new residential community, you'd certainly think hard about what sort of people might choose to live there and why.
and
Finally, be sure that you intend to be in it for the long haul. Online communities take time to catch fire. A member's connection with your community grows with each individual small interaction, even those that have no obvious immediate organizational benefit. If you interact with your community members only when you want a favor from them, you may drive people away. Like a friendship, relationships that are only about favors do not stand the test of time.
This is a double learning experience for me. It is a reflective on the reading for this week's class, Chapters 1-3 of The Innovators Dilemma by Clayton Christensen, and how it relates to my project, which is a business plan for our MEL product. It is also my first video of this type as I continue to try to keep up with the average high school student level of video production!
Brandon Hall Research recently reported average LMS prices. The trend towards hosted LMS systems becoming cheaper than installed ones is new but is very consistent with our experience here at Solution Grove. Hardware is getting cheaper and replication systems are getting more sophisticated. If you control all the hardware and every part of the software stack then it's very easy to create a new instance of the LMS system. However, setting up systems inside another organization's data center remains complex. We do set up systems on-site on the customer's preference of operating system, but each operating system, each firewall, mail server, etc. has its own peculiarities and settings and, of course, new sysadmins to get to know.
As an open source fan I had to share this video that so accurately conveys the everyday culture of Italy. ;)
Recently I attended a conference "Enabling the Age of Immersive Education".
The best presentation was by Daniel Laughlin Research Scientist, NASA Learning Technologies. He was able to use Learning Thoery to give a very clear presentation that reinforced commone sense, but helped to organize understanding of the topic. This is definitely a goal for me.
A definite highlight of the conference was the hallway conversation with a photographer, writer and oral historian from Roxbury. She helped me really understand what I'd like to see done with Immersive Environments. As Daniel from NASA explained, our beliefs are burnt into our synapses. If we want to challenge those beliefs, especialy about emotional issue like racism and identity we have to invoke emotions while we teach. Thus, to deeply understand history, in a way that allows us to change our current beliefs, we have to have empahty with the people and cultures we study. I think emersive technologies, in the hands of artists like this woman could have the potential to do this.
Tom Werner of Brandon Hall Research posted a blog featuring an example by Karl Kapp that featured learning about and setting up displays for a hardware store. We have a client in this business so I loved the example.
Positives
- It's a great example of how a 3D environment would provide a better learning experience
- Better detail on the drill
- More authenitc hands on experience learning about the features
- More authentic practice where the learners actually set up the display and have it checked!
However, I really doubt this would work for our client
(photo by Moodle Teaching Techniques by William Rice)
I love the preface to William Rice's book "Moodle Teaching Techniques".
Rice says,
"While most [software manuals] do a good job of telling you how to perform tasks, that is, what buttons to push and menus to choose, they often leave the two most important questions unanswered:
What effect will doing this have on your audience's experience?
When would you want to do this?"
We are getting very close to having an integrated Moodle+ELGG+LAMS product and I'm realizing that we will need to write exactly this type of manual and/or training. As Rice puts it, "we need to combine 'keystroke-and-click' directions with advice on how to make the best use of the solutions and what effects it will have on student's experiences."
Cesar Brea pointed out Bill Ives' post, "Serena has Adopted Facebook as their Intranet."
We've created corporate intranets (demo site showing off what we did for Cesar's company) and Facebook apps so we've thought about this. I think the key to what Serena has done is using Facebook as a front end but having the intranet itself on a private and secure system. Then, you have the best of both worlds. Facebook becomes the watercooler, an open place for employees and friends to interact, while corporate documents and work discussions take place on a private system with controlled access.
Happy New Year!!
If you are reading this on an RSS reader, then you might not have noticed our new look!
After you admire the attractive new graphics and layout, you may find yourself wondering why we have ads. If I were to give an advice to a small company, I would not recommend a corporate blog with ads as the ads will likely lead off your site to a competitor's.
So why don't we take our own advice? For us, our blog is more than a marketing tool, it's our playground to learn about all things on the web. Our space for hands on learning. Ads can be important to a web site and so we're experimenting with different ways to incorporate them.
Yet another interesting article in the latest issue of Innovate on an online tool to evaluate Fair Use in copyright law: Fair Use Education for the Twenty-First Century: A Comparative Study of Students' Use of an Interactive Tool to Guide Decision Making. Greenhow, Walker, Donnelly and Cohen (2008) evaluated a Fair Use Analysis (FUA) tool developed by the University of Minnesota Libraries intended to scaffold working educators who wanted make a good decision as to whether they were within Fair Use guidelines.
The Learning Circuits Blog has a monthly Big Question. For December the question is: What did you learn about learning in 2007?
This year I started a Master's program at Harvard Graduate School for Education with a course on "Learning Technologies Across the Content Areas" by Prof. Barry Fishman. However, what was valuable was not being exposed to the various learning technologies but to the basics of the Learning Theory. Uninspired pedagogy in the classroom, translation onto the Web is not going to be any better.
by Robert Herrick
WHENAS in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.
Next, when I cast mine eyes and see
That brave vibration each way free ;
O how that glittering taketh me !
Tonight is my play with new Web 2.0 sites night. So how do you go from Web 2 to Renaissance Poetry?
It all starts when Jott spams me with an announcement of their new jott-links that let me add events to my google calendar by dialing their number and speaking into my cell phone. This seems cool and when I get to the signup page there is a list of other web sites that have jott-links. One of them is Mosio, which is a service that promises you human answers to any message you text them.
DAMN! Why didn't I read about Zotero 2 months ago? I just finished my first research paper in 20 years and, let me tell you, it was not a pleasant experience. Thanks to Innovate, the Journal of Online Education, I now know about Zotero, an open source firefox plug-in. If you have a paper due soon check out the video tour.
Version 1.0 looks useful for an individual student, but what I am really watching is the server support in Version 2.0 that will let people share resources, urls, notes, etc. Many K-12 schools have issues with student information being shared on the open internet. Because Zotero is open source it could potentially be set up for a single school, creating a private version of a top rate research tool. I will be watching to see how well it could be integrated into a Personal Learning Solution (PLS). My wish list includes:
One of our clients, The Center for 21st Century Skills, is a leader in this arena and we are supporting the ELGG–Moodle Personal Learning Solution they are using in high schools in Connecticut.
Putting on my learning technology geek hat instead, I wondered how this idea could help teachers keep track of what content their students were using on the web. In .LRN, as well as other LMS systems, teachers can load in content from a course pack, IMS, SCRORM package, etc., and make it available to their class. They can then review reports of students, pages viewed, time on page, scores in exercises, etc. However, more and more content is out on the web, not in a course package. The National Science Foundations (NSF) National Science Digital Library (NSDL) project is just one example of the many.
What to do when faced with a 40+ page RFP that has been clearly written with proprietary vendors in mind? Have other open source vendors faced this? Usually, we are just too busy to play a very time consuming lottery ticket. Is there education we can do for procurement people that will make it easier for them to find an open source solution that might be a significantly better deal?
I have found one excellent blog post on the web: http://service-architecture.blogspot.com/2006/07/when-open-source-meets-procurement.html
I recently had to decline to bid on a project that was trying to confederate a large number of state schools that could quite likely save a significant amount of money by using open source. Here is an excerpt from the letter I wrote declining to bid:
So much to say so little time to blog...
I have a lot to report from the .LRN Conference, but if you don't want to wait for me to have time to blog take a look at the videos of the whole conference!
Meanwhile I'm just going to reblog a few interesting articles from Tech Soup:
Ever the source of practical advice: How to Record, Edit, and Promote a Podcast
Podcasting is a useful, affordable way for nonprofits to expand their reach and further their missions. We'll walk you through the process of creating and posting your own podcasts. http://ga0.org/ct/n7a7i2917EIy
Stop Cyber Bullying Day [www.pbs.org]
I am posting in support of Kathy Sierra. I have the privilege to hear her speak at the .LRN conference in Boston last fall. She gave wonderful, inspirational, insightful and educational talk I feel she is acting with great courage to post about what is happening to her.
It is frustrating to have no ability help beyond a post in support. Working in a male-dominated field such as open source is challenging. As a woman working closely with highly male dominated open source project I've been very pleased to see growing number of strong new female contributors to the project. I definitely notice the ratio and I do feel that when working within the setting of my open source project, whether online or a face-to-face, I am very conscious of how I act, dress, what kind of jokes I make, compared to contexts that have a more balanced gender ratio. However, I never would have dreamed of this level of harassment of an IT blogger.
Cesar Brea has written a wiki page on OpenACS.org that explains the "what" and the "why" surrounding the recent announcement that OpenACS/.LRN is the first to support the IMS LD specification for designing open-ended, collaborative learning experiences online. Currently this is a univesity research project but as Solution Grove works to find the synery between online games, communities, and learning we expect this sort of functionality to be extremely useful.
Olga C. Santos is presenting at FLOSS International Conference (Jerez, Spain - March 7-9, 2007) two papers regarding the usage of .LRN at UNED. The first one presents the two different use cases taking place in this University, Exploitation (Innova Section) and Research (aDeNu Group), and the second one the on-going works of aDeNu group in ALPE research project where .LRN is used.
Martin Kloos' "Comm.unities.of.prac.tice 2.0" examines how three different collaborative tools; blogs, wikis and social bookmarking, support learning in communities of practice.
http://www.martinkloos.nl/thesis-M.Kloos.pdf
Solution Grove implements all three (plus forums) and I often struggle with how to explain to people which will work for their situation. Here is Kloos' take.
Social bookmarking focuses on informal information sharing and the creation of
a shared repertoire, blogs focus on meaning making, and wikis focus on knowledge
creation and collaboration. In other words: social bookmarking focuses on
informal information sharing, weblogs focus on informal socializing (e.g. interaction
and discussion), and wikis focus on formal knowledge creation and
collaboration.
One of the interesting rewards working in an open source community provides is the opportunity to learn about work being done in other countries.
FAA (Open and Accessible Training) is based on *.LRN* to support accessible standard-based (IMS, SCORM) collaborative and adaptive courses along the full life cycle of eLearning.
In turn, EU4ALL (European Unified Approach for Accessible Lifelong Learning) aims to build an open and accessible service architecture for all to cope with the accessibility requirements in higher education institutions in Europe. *OpenACS* toolkit (using the web services support developed by Wien) is going to be used.
Links:
I've posted a "wink" of the class registration system we did about a year ago for MGH on the med.openacs.org site.
Dr. Carl Blesuis did a poster presentation on the system at AMIA. It's a great poster that covers the collaborative features as well as registration. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be on the web any where. I'll post when he puts it up. Meanwhile I hope you enjoy video the tour of "dotLRN Ecommerce" a very flexible and powerful course registration tool for .LRN. If you would like to learn more about the features of this package please refer to the Register to LRN page on Solution Grove.
This is a demo of a "Carousel UI" integrated into OpenACS to allow users to pick images.
- Old Microphone: Tour of our social Bookmarking app
- New Microphone: Tour of our drag and drop portals
From Creating Passionate Users - "How to be an expert"
So the world conspired to encourage me to attempt to learn a new skill – Video. What lead me to foolishly believe I could learn to put videos on the web?
- Last week I read an interesting article about students using cell phones for video.
- I was chatting with Cesar Brea who has big plans to install a blue screen and do video interviews.
- I wrote a post on Revver a profit sharing video hosting service.
- I also have a shiny new cell phone, the Motorola Q, and it does make videos.
I have been reading Web 2.0 for Business Advantage: A Personal Guide to Profiting from the New Web by Kathleen Gilroy of the Otter Group. She says, "Find your personal style" when you blog and I think I may have finally found mine. I think I'm a Wink-er!
I have a confession. I hate to write. Well maybe not hate it. I can do it and in running a business I get lots of practice. But I sure don't love it. It doesn't put me into "Flow" as Kathy Sierra of Creating Passionate Users puts it. But I do love discussing web sites and web ideas. I enjoy showing people sites and talking about how those ideas could be used to solve their problems.
Beth Kanter pointed me to Revver. Revver puts ads at the end of your videos and splits the profit with you. This seems cool and I was excited to see if I could create winks describing OpenACS, host them there and maybe collect a few cents for me or for the dotLRN consortium. Unfortunately, they don't support swf, which is the format wink creates.
AMIA2006 - free software AND free beer [www.rodspace.co.uk]
http://www.rodspace.co.uk/blog/2006/11/amia2006-free-software-and-free-beer.html
Portals by Mashing Up – Solution Grove & IBM [billives.typepad.com]
Solution Grove featured in Octavianworld.org [www.octavianworld.org]
Here is the back-story.
We have a client that needs to add significant graphing capability to their site and we are determining which open source tools to integrate with to meet this requirement. We always strive to have our work be reusable, so I thought what would be the most valuable thing we could do with a graph for each of our clients.
Many of our sites are variations of communities of practice. In a community of practice the users are interested in finding other users like themselves, and seeing where they are different from others. They may also be interested in new users and perhaps who are the old timers.
Web 2 with lots of colorful pictures [www.masternewmedia.org]
I am blogging this because I want to reuse it with nonprofit clients who are just starting to think about how they want to use Web 2.
http://www.masternewmedia.org/news/2006/10/12/web_20_ten_ways_nonprofits.htm
PR 2.0 [www.shiftcomm.com]
PR2.0 Essentials: http://www.shiftcomm.com/downloads/pr2essentials.pdf
This covers Web 2.0 from the point of view of Public Relations. Although current Solution Grove clients are promoting missions and trying to create communities of practice, the unapologetically commercial view point of this article provides a slightly different angle that may help drive new ideas.
Search 2.0 [www.readwriteweb.com]
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/search_20_vs_tr.php
I'd add to the list google's social search offering:
http://www.google.com/coop/docs/guide_topics.html
This is important to a number of Solution Grove clients who's business/mission involves helping a wide audience find deep, high quality information on fairly specific areas. Feeding/seeding these sorts of tools may be a means of achieving that end.
Good Advice from Ideal Ware [www.idealware.org]
Based on my experience and observations I would add another section to this article on Learning Management Systems. I see many organizations combining formal "learning" with the less formal types of KM described in this article. For example we have built a corporate intranet that includes both SCORM-based training programs for new employees and many of the "Answer Questions" and "provide information for decisions" types of KM. I've observed that many nonprofits, professional organizations and continuing education organizations combine formal education for certification requirements with less formal knowledge management, especially of the "encourage people to take advantage of other people’s knowledge" and the "ensure everyone can find the documents and other resources useful to them" kinds.