open standards

A few more things to look into:

It looks like RDF is coming to Drupal. This has some interesting implications for learning spaces, and doing things that you just can't do in Blackboard.

And here, some very interesting thoughts on using OpenID and FOAF as anti-spam tools. Looks like you and your friends can get together and whup up on the spammers after all.

Over at weblogg-ed, Will Richardson has a post about, among other things, how teachers are increasingly networked outside their district, but not inside their district. As I see it, this is a pretty natural progression, and one that can be loosely compared to how people understood and used the web.

To paraphrase and expand on my comment on his blog:

From Will's post:

But one thing (again) that has really been sticky from EduConn was the idea that local connections support local culture (as well as a few other things, such as leadership, of course) and vice versa.

In many ways, this mirrors how the web itself was understood, and how use of the web developed. Initially, you had large companies creating user silos tied together with an internet connection -- anyone remember Compuserve? Then, people fled these companies and started working on the "real" web, and built sites to connect with "the world" -- Then, as more and more people gained experience on the web, we saw a shift in focus, and people started building web sites to connect with their Neighborhood Association, or specifically for their apartment building -- sites like Craigslist show the power of micropresences, or sites with an intensely local focus.

I sense the same type of pendulum swing in education -- as people get more accustomed to the presence of the tools, the focus will switch to local use. Not surprisingly, this dovetails with work happening around interoperability fueled by open standards, and a safe secure means of maintaining an identity on the web that has grassroots support, as well as support from some of the major players --

I've been thinking about Open Content recently for a few reasons -- As he does with many things, Jim Groom had a great post over on his blog about his experiences at Open Ed 2007.

Here is a lightly edited version of my comment on his post:

On days when I'm feeling cynical, I can't get around the sensation that some of the motivation driving the discussion on "issues of scalability, sustainability, localization, and other infra-structural issues" has less to do with scalability, sustainability, and culturally competent/translated content than it has to do with controlling the flow of content, or slowing the process while businesses figure out how to make money off of licensing.

Because: we have rss and atom, json, soap and rest calls, and xml-rpc, to name a few -- all lightweight methods of moving information from point A to point B. When content is transported (not referenced, but actually copied) from one place to another, it can then be recontextualized, remixed, reused -- all the things that most folks within the open content arena agree need to be happening.

One of the things that is amazing to see about what Jim and Company have done at UMW is that they have proceeded to build out a lightweight infrastructure that works. People can criticize it as unscalable, etc, but when the dust settles you have the same basic response as defenders of Wikipedia: it only works in practice.

The same is true of using existing tools to make truly open content possible -- it only works in practice. We need make broader use of the existing tools, but they need to be improved and made more friendly in order to allow the everyday user (a teacher, a student, someone working on their own without the resources of a university behind them) to access, import, and recontextualize content. These tools need to run on FOSS platforms to guarantee free availability and access.

I'll admit it at the outset: I'm in a bad mood today.

But when I see things like this, and this, and this, all talking about running courses in Facebook, I can't help myself

(Okay, really I can. But in this case, I don't want to).

Read Facebook's terms of service.

The "User Content Posted on the Site" section is particularly relevant here:

When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content on the Site. By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

While IANAL, these seems to render the site completely useless for aspiring writers looking for feedback, as even a private draft shared among friends is licensed to Facebook.

So, if you want to give away the rights to your intellectual property, post it on Facebook. I'm not even going to get into the other significant issues, although they should not be overlooked.

Granted, the traditional LMS is a monolith designed to serve the needs of institutions first, teachers second, and students a very distant third. And yes, a social learning space is a vast improvement. But, a space needs to offer more than just the potential for social learning for it to be a wise choice. Facebook offers some generic functionality that is an improvement over traditional LMS's, but this says more about the sorry state of existing LMS solutions than about the suitability of Facebook as a replacement.

If you want a social learning space, you have a bevy of open source solutions that get the job done more effectively and allow users to retain control of their content and their user data. Moodle, Drupal, or even WPMU are a better place to start.

It looks like Ning has got some new friends -- I first saw the news at everybody’s favorite home for digital whispers, and Marc Andreessen confirmed it on his blog.

Marc Canter has something to say about it, and Diego Doval responds.

Although the exchange started with news of Ning’s newfound booty, Marc Canter brings the conversation back to an important place: the relative openness of social networks. My comment on Marc’s post pretty much sums up my feelings on the matter:

Hello, Marc,
While I agree that it would be *great* to see Ning do the right thing, they will only do the “right thing” if it aligns with their business plan — the open standards you describe (like OpenID 2.0’s attribute exchange) will become increasingly important in how people use the web, and companies that don’t use them will become increasingly irrelevant.
As innovation within open source communities fuel the type of data portability/identity portability many of us have described (along with functions currently absent in Ning, etc,) the real question investors will be asking is, what have I bought for my 44 Mill?

What I find most interesting, however, is this excerpt of Diego’s response to a comment I left on his blog.

RE: "I will look in more detail at the OpenID AX stuff and get back on that (I need to think about namespace and privacy issues)"

Both of these issues feel like red herrings at best. OpenID is designed to give the end user control over their private data, and what data gets shared with what sites. Every site (like Ning) that involves membership already has at least a rudimentary means of dealing with both privacy and "namespace issues" (think about what happens when you try and join a site with a username that is already taken). The means of addressing namespace issues would be a pretty good AP Computer Science project, but really shouldn't be cited as an obstacle by a company with a newfound 44Mil in the kitty.

I also enjoyed the links that explained how Ning is open -- seen here, here, here, and here. While I think it's great that Ning is offering to support these forays into what it calls "openness," these docs don't really lend themselves to the non-technical user. For example, most people don't know what FOAF is, and these instructions really lay a firm welcome mat for the non-technical:

To achieve this, you need to have your own copy of the code (which you can request from developer (at) ning (dot) com) and then make a few changes that will enable this functionality.

Some familiarity with the structure of the code for the Social Network is recommended to follow this example, but even if you’re just starting it shouldn’t be hard to follow these instructions and get this functionality going.

There are two things you’ll need to do to add FOAF feeds for network members:

1. Create the feed action in the Profile module
2. Expose the feed, ie Link to it from the Members page of the network as well as each Member’s individual profile.

Ready?

You betcha.

Any user for whom these instructions make sense already has a broader array of tools available to them. Developers will reap a greater return (and have access to more functionality) putting development hours into a truly open platform like Drupal or Plone than into a closed service like Ning.

OpenID lays the groundwork for a unified identity on the web. Open standards allow for data portability. Most end users who think about these things want them to Just Work (ie, people don’t want to create a new username and password on every site they join, and they want content they create on one site to follow them to “their” space). This level of innovation is currently taking place within open source communities, and at a much lower cost than 44 million. Remaining closed -- or placing artificial barriers in the way of openness -- might attract investors, but it won't retain users (On the other hand, perhaps attracting investors is the goal). The main question I see waiting to be answered is which of the current content silos on the web -- the Nings, the Facebooks, the MySpaces, the Second Life’s (yeah, that’s right, I said it) -- will become the Web 2.0 equivalent of AOL.