Northern Voice

I'm a little behind the curve here. Other people -- okay, many other people -- have already written some amazing reflections on Northern Voice.

And, unlike the people I linked to above, I'm still not able to condense my thoughts down -- at least not in any coherent way that does justice to the experience -- into anything that resembles "meaning."

And I'm gradually becoming okay with that.

During the conference, I had the good fortune to spend a fair amount of time talking with Alan Levine, Brian Lamb, D'Arcy Norman, Scott Leslie, Chris Lott, Jennifer Jones, Mikhail Gershovich, Jim Groom, and Doug Symington. I also got the chance to attend Nancy White's session; more on that a little later.

In these conversations, we challenged each other. I could say that we disagreed, but that misses the sense of it -- the folks involved in the conversation were an amazing -- almost overwhelming -- combination of open and informed.

In Nancy White's session, her method of facilitation helped me see the different types of beauty that arise from the conversation. I'm still getting my head around the full implications of the way she frames community, and how that can inform the design of community-driven sites.

And now, I'm back home, getting back into the work routine, and packing for another trip. But Eduglu, and open content, or just the Hitchcockian McGuffin -- they all lurk on the horizon. It's coming onto spring. Let's see what blooms.

LiveBlog of Matt Mullenweg's Keynote --

Streamed at http://ustream.tv/channel/nv08 (at least some of it)

Note: This liveblog is rough -- just notes, no editing

Beginning blog platforms --
Open Diary -- 1998
LiveJournal -- 1999

5 years ago -- based on B2

Over 7 million downloads

MM on what Bloggers want -- "Bloggers hierarchy of needs"

1. Expression
The most important tab on the WP blog is the Presentation tab -- allows people to change the theme

A lot of successful web 2.0 companies are successful because they protect users from spam communication

2. Public -- privacy is important, but publically available should be the default -- things that make it easier to connect/follow can have an exponential effect on growth/readership

3. Validation -- check stats to get a sense of readership

4. Form Dictates Writing wrt blogs

Exhortations:
1. Remove the Friction -- make the software 100% invisible
Prediction: volume of posting will blow away all predictions --

4 million pages created on WP.com every month

Wikipedia has 2.1 million pages

Not a shortage of information -- need to filter --

"Two Public Service Announcements"

Achilles Heel of Web 2.0 is spam

FaceBook spam

Content used to be most valuable thing -- attention now the most valuable thing

Exhortation #3 (I missed 2 -- whoops) -- Kill the megabrands

"Matt's Third Law of Social Media -- Unfiltered interaction is worthless at scale -- ie, it doesn't work

Used YouTube example of recommended content

1st generation social networks about creating connections

2nd generation (Web 2.0): people congregating around social objects: Youtube -- Videos; Flickr -- Photos; etc.

Data needs to be filtered to add value to the experience of social networking/social media

Transition to Open Source

Ask Not What Your Software Can Do For You

How to impact OS without coding:
Documentation
Taste of Freedom -- the tools we use in our lives are better than "enterprise" solutions --

Mentions 4 freedoms of social software: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

What matters is that we get the data architectures running systems running on open standards

A wiki for every bill: see who made what changes, and when

Create Open Source alternatives that are better

Introductory Notes

These are some thoughts in progress -- I’ve been thinking these things through for probably the last few years, but things have been getting more interesting of late.

Some of the blog posts that have helped shape my thinking here include:
http://bavatuesdays.com/proud-spammer-of-open-university-courses/
http://weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca/brian/archives/044998.php
http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/464
http://www.chrislott.org/2008/02/17/confused-about-the-blog-uproar/
http://weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca/brian/archives/044813.php
http://www.funnymonkey.com/mini-edu-rss
http://www.darcynorman.net/2008/02/16/on-eduglu-part-1-background/
http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/010236.html -- this is from Tony Hirst, who has an almost overwhelming amount of great information regarding remixing content on his blog.
I've also been thinking about the work Scott Wilson has been doing with FeedForward.

Toward the end of this post, I fall short of the needed conversation when I talk about the Course and Learner sections. There’s more to be said here -- a lot more -- but the poor souls who actually persevere to that point in the post will probably agree that I’ve said enough by then already.

An Open Content and Open Learning environment

External Repository -- in this context, an external repository is a place where content is stored. In many ways, the external repository is an artificial construct that doesn’t need to exist. The single most important argument in favor of the external repository is that the external repo can provide a level of credibility that less “official” sources of information lack. For example, a piece of information coming from the MIT’s OpenCourseware will have more credibility than a YouTube video.

These external repositories, however, need to expose their content via rss/atom, or web services, something that many of them do not do. With that said, it would also be nice to see the major OCW repositories use less pdf’s to allow for easier modification.

On a technical note, Tony Hirst pointed to a Mediawiki plugin that exposes full Mediawiki articles as rss feeds. This extends Mediawiki’s flexibility by allowing Mediawiki content to be imported via rss feeds.

Planning Repository -- the planning repos are the staging grounds of course preparation. Planning repositories will import selected courses from a variety of external repositories. While a limited number of people might have access to an external repository, more people can have access to a planning repository. Within the planning repository, users can edit existing courses, add links, text, images, etc. Then, users can select individual pieces of different courses, and re-organize them into a new course. By definition, planning repositories should be messy. They are workspaces, and should be viewed as a place where people go from draft versions to more polished versions of course materials.

For example: a history department creates an departmental planning repository. Initially, they import a variety of courses from different external repositories. Then, instructors add content as needed. Once they have finished adding content, they select the lessons/material they want for their course. So, an instructor teaching a course on the Rise of Modernism could incorporate material from a course on WWI. Once the instructors have selected and organized their lessons, they export them into their courses.

On the technical side, the planning repository could be a Drupal site built using the FeedAPI. I described how to do this here, and revisited the idea here. Alan Levine (in the comments here) and Jared Stein and Patrick Gosetti-Murrayjohn (in the comments here ) ask about how to select individual pieces of content for inclusion in a course. Once you have imported content into a Drupal site, you can use Views Bookmarks, Nodequeue, or node references (part of CCK) for doing exactly that.

Once the individual lessons have been selected and organized into a course, they can be exposed via an rss feed.

Mediawiki would also make an excellent planning repository by using XFeed to aggregate external content and the WikiArticle Feeds Extension (linked to above) to generate rss feeds for curriculum.

However, here is another wrinkle: every school is already producing curriculum. Teachers generate curriculum for all of their classes. If a school used a planning repository to coordinate curriculum planning, they could export the polished curriculum to a web site that could become an external repository. In this way, schools generate their curriculum maps and provide open content as part of their ongoing course planning and development process.These planning repositories becoming external repositories would have one enormous advantage over existing content repositories: they would be fully open, with all content within them accessible via rss feeds. For all schools currently undergoing accreditation reviews, how much time are you spending collecting up curricular materials? If you build your curriculum as described in this post, you have all your curriculum ready to hand, and categorized via tags.

It’s worth noting that the technology to do this exists now, and can be built entirely using open source tools.

It’s also worth noting that, using Drupal, you can clone an entire site -- configuration, content, and even user accounts -- and move that site with minimal effort. It’s what we’ve been doing with DrupalEd for nearly a year, and with less sophisticated class sites since September of 2005.

Courses -- In this context, courses are blog based tools, and could be delivered via a tool like Wordpressor Drupal. Curricular material could be imported; Jim has shown how to do this, D’Arcy has shown how to do this , and the aggregation examples I linked to earlier show how to do this.

The feeds of learners taking the course could be added to a blogroll, or, in the case of Drupal, could be imported directly into the site. With OpenID becoming more prevalent, students could either be site members, or be granted access via their OpenID. This flexibility would allow learners to interact with the course using their preferred tools, and, if they wanted, using their pre-established online identity.

Learners -- In this context, learners are just about anyone. You don’t need to be a student to be a learner, although, for obvious reasons, most schools probably wouldn’t allow open enrollment in their courses.

For me, the interesting piece of this has to with the potential for a true PLE. While I’m not particularly enamored of the whole notion of the PLE (I see it as more of a construct than a piece of technology, and something that is better achieved via innate curiosity than lines of code, but that’s another conversation), this system of open learning solves one of the main problems inherent in most PLE implementations: how to get course content out of the course and into the PLE. In this situation, that’s not an issue, as learners use their chosen tools to contribute in their courses. As they are doing the work from their platform, they retain control of their work in a way that just isn’t possible using proprietary LMS’s, or even open source LMS’s like Moodle.

Next Steps

The next steps could include any/all of the following:

• A school, or a group of teachers, banding together to create course materials in a planning repository. Dan Meyer has called for something along these lines a while back.
• More teachers using a blog-based approach to delivering content. The WPMU work that Jim helped spearhead shows one way of doing this; and the folks at BYU have illustrated another way of doing this.
• Existing Open Content repositories could actually expose their content via rss feeds. If this happened, one of the enornous barriers to actually using the open content that has been published to date would be removed.

These thoughts are incomplete -- what's missing? What needs closer examination? What else needs to be considered here?