billfitzgerald's blog

Much discussion on the internet concerning the AP's new Pay By The Word policy. Gary Stager had this comment on Will Richardson's blog:

Why shouldn’t journalists and publishers get paid for their work?

Here’s a suggestion for edubloggers who believe that all intellectual property should be free - let’s stop paying teachers.

They just deliver content that is freely available elsewhere, right? Why is hard earned public money being given to teachers? They’re so 1.0!

C’mon teachers, get on board and do your job for free! Conferences can pay keynote speakers with links, rather than that tired old money.

Hello, Gary,

I know (or at least I think I know :) ) that you are playing devil's advocate here, but your comment is off-base. No one is suggesting that journalists and publishers shouldn't be paid for their work. On the contrary: some journalists and some publishers do an excellent job, and deserve every penny they earn, and more. They provide a valuable service by contributing to -- and in some cases, helping to shape -- the public discourse.

Delivering content is a service. Providing analysis on content is a service. Providing context on content is a service. Providing a service deserves compensation. Teachers do more than provide a service; at their best, they help students develop a set of skills that allow them to interact critically with the ideas they encounter, and articulate their thoughts effectively. This transcends delivering "content that is freely available elsewhere." In many cases, teaching is situational: an explanation gets created on the spot to help illustrate a point in response to a specific interaction among learners. Teaching isn't canned (unless, of course, you buy a textbook and deliver that curriculum via Blackboard -- but I digress).

Hence, your suggestion that teachers stop getting paid is absurd. But from reading your writing in the past, I suspect you know that already. Call me crazy, but I suspect you are employing irony (or is it sarcasm) for rhetorical purposes.

RE your suggestion: "Conferences can pay keynote speakers with links, rather than that tired old money." -- this, however, is an excellent idea. Most organized conferences are rarely worth the price of admission, unless you find value in having a vendor sell you a packaged version of a technology that was interesting three to five years ago. Anything that moves us away from the traditional format of Ed Tech conferences can only be a Good Thing.

And while I'm at it, the AP Technology News RSS Feed had the following stories freely available for distribution via RSS:

The following AP story, the rights of which are completely and fully owned by AP, was particularly interesting: "SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- A federal appeals court has made it more difficult for employers to snoop legally on e-mails and text messages their workers send from company accounts...." You can read the full article here, from the link on the AP's web site. The AP reporters have done excellent work in researching this article, and you should read the entire article on their site. The same article can be read on Newsday, an organization who likely pays a fee to aggregate, republish, and rebrand AP content. This fits Gary's definition of delivering "content that is freely available elsewhere."

Gary, and others: It's called Fair Use.

From Cole Camplese, Should it all be Miscellaneous?:

The idea that we can follow a book filled with instructions on how to do information architecture, web design, usability, and so forth may be crazy.

Some great conversations going on about structuring dialogue within organizations, and the inherent tension between freely flowing conversation and institutional control over the messages contained within that conversation, and the need for quality control over content affiliated with an institution.

In addition to Cole's post (linked above), D'Arcy Norman has a couple of good posts that provide some context.

D'Arcy and Cole both talk about the relationship/tension between the institutionally controlled (and provided) CMS, and the role of user created content in that webspace. As I see it, this is more of a design issue -- what mechanisms are you creating as you build your webspace to accomodate content from a variety of sources? A good CMS allows for easy interoperability, and good design exposes that interoperability to the end user in intuitive ways. While this isn't a conversation about tools per se, the limitations of of the underlying CMS play a factor here, but that's a different discussion.

As I see it, the following factors (among others, of course) need to be addressed in the design of an inclusive webspace:

1. Low barrier to entry.

2. Multiple points of entry for end users (ie, choices. A user can post from multiple sites, and push their content to the institutional web space).
3. Tools for multiple ability levels -- some users will only want to use their own blog, while others will be perfectly happy using a tool provided by the organization. Both choices are perfectly okay.
4. Guidelines and tutorials for posting to the system using both external tools, and publishing tools provided by the organization. At its most simple, this would include tagging guidelines, and links where external users could submit their rss feeds. This assumes, of course, a system designed to handle aggregation and embedding of external content.
5. A governance model designed to vet content, and maintain quality control over critical areas of the organizational web presence. We're not talking about abandoning IA, or about turning the organizational webspace into Rome as enjoyed by the Visigoths; rather, we are talking about a system with clearly defined publishing workflows for content essential to the daily functioning of the organization (think admissions info), with rules and guidelines that permit the inclusion of quality content flowing into the system from external sources.

Within a new publishing model, the Information Architecture (IA) required/desired by the organization still has a critical role, but the IA realistically can't be extended over all content in all contexts. At a certain point, IA stops being an organizational tool, and something central to the user experience, and becomes a barrier to efficiency. This becomes especially true when IA gets extended into the learning space -- and the learning space/community building space is where "miscellaneous" needs to flourish freely.

Content management often gets dragged out as the punching bag here, but the problem has less to do with the CMS than it has to do with restrictive rules governing the use of the CMS. Some of these restrictions are, of course, designed into the specific CMS/platform, but all CMS's are not created equal, and it's important to separate the choices made by an admin/organization from what is actually required by a CMS. In many of the discussions I hear about freeing content for reuse, the definition of a CMS gets conflated with the rules governing its use.

It's also worth noting that the most secure system is one that is so complex that no one will use it. From a sysadmin perspective, that's great. No users vastly reduces the security risk, and virtually ensures that the IA will remain intact, and unsullied by user error. I'd love to see some good numbers on the amount of time used within organizations chewed up by end-user "training" (ie, here's how to work around security requirements) compared to support and outreach (here's how to immediately be productive using any of these freely available tools).

We're past the point where IA, publishing workflows, and quality control are mutually exclusive. The meaning of "managing" content has shifted. We can set up publishing workflows that direct selected content into an existing navigational structure, and the route can include steps for editing and approval. Allowing people to work with the tools of their choosing doesn't mean selling the farm and turning your organizational site into MySpace. Providing options for users, and allowing increased interoperability between these tools and the organizational webspace, requires planning. The barriers aren't technical; they are organizational. More importantly, the migration/flight away from the organizational enterprise is well in progress. While the IA of many organizations doesn't reflect this, the change is already occurring.

I don't usually pass these things on.

Particularly in the case of videos -- but this, created by Tony Hirst, was too good not to share.

Thanks to Brian Lamb for posting about this.

From an Op-Ed in the June 1 online edition of the NY Times by Brian Greene: Put a Little Science in Your Life

The entire piece is worth the read. If you are pressed for time and need to choose between reading this blog post and the article, choose the article.

Some excerpts that struck me as particularly relevant:

in teaching our students, we continually fail to activate rich opportunities for revealing the breathtaking vistas opened up by science, and instead focus on the need to gain competency with science’s underlying technical details.

In fact, many students I’ve spoken to have little sense of the big questions those technical details collectively try to answer: Where did the universe come from? How did life originate? How does the brain give rise to consciousness? Like a music curriculum that requires its students to practice scales while rarely if ever inspiring them by playing the great masterpieces, this way of teaching science squanders the chance to make students sit up in their chairs and say, “Wow, that’s science?”

and

At the root of this pedagogical approach is a firm belief in the vertical nature of science: you must master A before moving on to B.

In reading this, I was struck how applicable this is to most disciplines, and how the requirements of a system that uses high-stakes testing as a primary means for assessing mastery (and as the basis for funding/management decisions) squeezes out the time required for engaging students around a big-picture vision of a subject -- and how that subject really cannot be contained within curricular lines. While most subjects have a set of core competencies that allow for a greater exploration of the subject, the core competencies cannot be confused with the end goal.

Among the many benefits of open content, this feels like one of the most compelling: content that can be freely edited and redistributed allows a teacher to balance the core competencies against the big-picture understanding. If this learning is supported within a learning environment that supports student-directed inquiry, the information contained within an open curriculum could provide a supporting framework for student work. This type of blended learning environment (part online, part face to face; part teacher directed, part student directed) would allow shared focus on core competencies and larger questions.

Note: this is a comment that is currently in the moderation queue of the original blog.

Hello, Ken,

In reading through this post (as I did, a couple times) before replying, I was left wondering if you had actually read any of the posts you linked to. For example, you link to the post Authority is not truth — in this post, the author links to a very detailed analysis that debunks some blatant inaccuracies of a WaPo article. What is the matter with that? It’s an excellent model of critical thought. Read the article. Please.

RE: “These guys look intellectually and emotionally indistinguishable from their students.” — I don’t know what’s worse, the disdain this shows for students, or the pretension about the value of appearance.

This also flies in the face of your line in a recent comment: “You mentioned suits. I don’t wear ‘em.” — which flies directly in the face of your picture on your about page, which is of some guy (you?) in a coat and tie. Personally, I don’t care. But, since you brought it up… IMO, wisdom doesn’t need a fashion sense.

You also mention “Forty year old tenured men” — and this comment again raises the specter that you haven’t actually read the people you criticize. Who among them has tenure? (Hint: not many). Your generalizations diminish your credibility.

In your original post, you say, “Ultimately, however, I would not recommend that we politicize learning 2.0 and certainly not by reducing it to the level of of DIY culture.”

Then, in a comment, you say: “I also tried to post on your Half an Hour, but Blogspot is blocked here in China and I can’t comment through a proxy.”

This juxtaposition raises a couple thoughts: First, in the states, anyways, education is politicized. IMO, learning 2.0 is a useless expression that, like most labels (and I include edupunk as well, btw) reduces some useful ideas to bitesized pieces the marketing guys can sell — but that’s an entirely separate conversation. NCLB, net neutrality, the role of texbook companies in creating policy decisions — you’d need to be blind to deny that politics and economics haven’t played a role in shaping educational policy.

And then, you say that Blogspot is blocked in China. So how is it that blogspot is blocked? Feels a little political to me. Any impact/connection between learning/net neutrality/censorship?

Also, as you read the posts you link to, do you ever get the sense that maybe, just maybe, there’s a little tongue in cheek going on here? Maybe? Because, as the author of one of posts you link to, I feel pretty comfortable saying you missed it.

Cheers,

Bill

Okay. This is starting to feel like a movement.

The men at the factory are old and cunning
You don't owe nothing, so boy get runnin'
It's the best years of your life they want to steal

-- The Clash, Clampdown. Joe Strummer and Mick Jones

At its most rich, education is subversive. Education means struggling, at times for the sake of struggle. It means getting angry about the right things, and acting constructively to address them. Edupunk means sounding a barbaric YAWP in the interest of curiousity as to what will come out. I don't know when the notion of education as a transformative force lost currency as part of the mainstream discourse (here in the states, I suspect it was right around the time that the notion had difficulty fitting in a scantron bubble, or getting you into The Right School), but it's nice to at least hear people talking about a DIY ethic founded on openness and transparency as a solid way forward.

And I'd like mine in a large, please.

Seriously. Who did up the shirts?

The Summer of Code application process is underway. Along with some good folks at The Oregon State Open Source Labs, we have put together a proposal to share content between Moodle and Drupal.

In combination with the recently developed functionality to author and export content from Drupal in IMS LOM format, you could author courses in Drupal or Moodle, and use those courses interchangeably in Drupal, Moodle, or any other LMS that imported IMS LOM.

The IMS code, and a detailed writeup, is freely available.

The Summer of Code is open to all college students. If you're interested, apply.

The planning for the Summer of Code is well underway.

This summer, we're working within the Drupal community, and with the Open Source Labs.

If you're a student, and want to get involved, read over the project lists (linked to above), and submit a proposal. Students receive 5,000.00 for their work.

So, if you're a college or university student anywhere on the planet itching to expand the amount of freely available code in this world, sign up and make a proposal.

Over on his blog, Miguel Guhlin asks:

Anyone have suggestions on how to respond to this question? I welcome all brainstorming ideas...

We are ready to implement a student portal (with teacher and parent portals to follow) for our 1:1 campuses. We would like for this portal to be a web-based, searchable, "pretty"

While "pretty" is subjective, this is one place where spending a little time with either an ID or a graphic designer, or both, will benefit your site. "Pretty" has a frequently overlooked cousin, "Usability" -- sorting out your navigational structures (done in Drupal using the core block and menu items), and making sure your theme enhances these architectural decisions, will often get you both Pretty and Usable, which is a winning combination. Starting with a solid base theme, like Zen, helps you theme your site in a time-efficient way, particularly if you and your team are learning how to design/theme in Drupal. Drupal can be themed pretty effectively via css alone; if you have someone on staff who can work in php, there really isn't much you can't do. Also, if there is one element you decide to outsource, the theme is a pretty good choice.

container for all of the learning materials that we've purchased and/or created for students, including audio books, legal MP3 music files,

The Audio module -- it can generate iTunes compliant feeds, has an embedded flash player, and can be used to create playlists.

clip art, videos and animations,

The Embedded Media Field module (used along with Content Construction Kit, or CCK) allows you to embed and play media from within your site, and embed videos from external sites, such as the Internet Archives/etc. If you want more robust video handling (ie, something that will convert various formats into flv video) use the Media Mover or the FlashVideo modules. In very general terms, Media Mover is designed to work as a media processor with a full harvest --> process --> store workflow; FlashVideo works in a similar way, but has scaled down flexibility for storing media on external locations. Either FlashVideo or Media Mover will get you a site that, to the end user, feels like a YouTube clone.

For most cases, Embedded Media Field does all that's needed.

documents, presentations, and such.

For images, use ImageField (along with CCK), Imagecache (for on the fly scaling of images) and Lightbox2 (for a clean image gallery functionality). This combination will let you store full size originals while generating thumbnails and scaled down versions of the image, and displaying the images inside a clean gallery, all from one upload.

For documents, the easiest thing is probably a content type where you upload files. If you are uploading pdfs/word docs/ppts/etc you can create a text description to simplify finding the doc via searching. If you want to get into coding, there are ways you can extract text from various other formats and expose that to the search index, but that is an added level of complexity that, depending on your goals, may or may not be worth it.

Edit, March 29, 2008
For Drupal 6, it looks like there is now a module for this -- the Search Files module "allows searching through the text of PDF, MS Word, plain text, and other types of files in given directories of the server."
End Edit

We have all of these now on a shared server on our Windows network and the students can access them fine. However, it is not easily searchable and does not provide a way to include a description of each resource, along with other pertinent information (thumbnail sketch, Lexile reading level, etc.).

For each of the resources listed above, you can include full text descriptions, alongside controlled keywords (for things like lexile level, etc), alongside freetag folksonomies (a la delicious). Additionally, using CCK, you can create custom forms/storage mechanisms via the web browser, without writing a single line of code.

And, using the Views module (bascially a web-based query builder/display tool) you can choose how/to whom/where/when you display your data, and filter on keywords.

We have looked at several "document management" solutions, but I don't really feel like they are as broad as what we would like to use. We've also looked at Microsoft SharePoint

Ahh, Sharepoint. Recoil from the functionality; run screaming from the expense :)

, but are frightened by how expensive it is on both a one-time and a recurring basis. We have a Moodle server already, but this doesn't seem to really fit well there as we are not interested in running "classes" right now.

Within Drupal, you could also allow specific users (as defined by role) to create informal working groups using Organic Groups. These groups can be fully public (both in content and enrollment), fully private, or some mixture in between.

Drupal also gives you tools for flagging inappropriate content, setting up publishing workflows (allowing, for example, a submission --> review --> edit --> publish workflow for a newspaper/magazine), setting up private content between users, setting up social networking, online portfolios, etc, etc, etc.

Since some of these materials are purchased and so have user limits, we would also need for this system to use Active Directory to authenticate our users.

LDAP Integration module.

What are you using to run your student learning portals? How is it working? How much did you have to spend up front?

Everything I have listed here is freely available on drupal.org.

• Combined cost, Purchase and Licensing: 0
• License Renewal Fees: 0
• Pricing structure based on number of users: none -- as many users as you want.

I could go on...

Like any system, Drupal has a learning curve, and this is also an area where getting outside help to streamline building internal capacity can save you person-hours, and therefore money. When working with an outside person, always make sure there is a mechanism for archiving the content of these trainings, so that the process of training also jumpstarts the process of creating a body of documentation about your system.

How much maintenance is required?

Server maintenance is pretty standard, and I'd recommend a LAMP stack. For the Drupal codebase, I'd plan on 1-2 hours a month for module upgrades. These can generally be scheduled, and the upgrade process can be made fairly painless by setting up three sites: your production site (the one where everybody is working); your QA site (the one where you experiment); and your backup verification site (where you make sure that your backups work). The QA and the backup site can be run on the LAN, on a pretty anemic machine.

Feel free to ping back with any questions.

I just came across this tool for Mediawiki: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Send2Wiki

This extends the possibilities for using mediawiki as a remixing engine for open content repositories that are otherwise closed. I particularly like the pdf to wiki functionality.

A tool like Send2wiki, combined with the WikiArticleFeeds Extension to generate RSS feeds for republishing/reorganizing in an open content repository would allow a great deal of flexibility for creating and remixing open content.