Tag: United Kingdom

Scriblio, Triplify and XMPP PubSub

Joss Winn / / Data, Fun, Libraries, Mashups, Standards & Specs, Web

It occured to me this morning, as I woke from my slumber, that the work I’ve been doing recently with WordPress, could also be applied to a library catalogue using Scriblio.

Scriblio (formerly WPopac) is an award winning, free, open source CMS and OPAC with faceted searching and browsing features based on WordPress. Scriblio is a project of Plymouth State University, supported in part by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Which means that you can import your library catalogue into WordPress and the user can search for and retrieve a record for The Films of Jean-Luc Goddard. Have a look around Plymouth State’s Scriblio and you’ll get a good feel for what’s possible.

Anyway, taking Scriblio’s functionality for granted, you could easily add Triplify to the mix as I have discussed before. So with very little effort, you can convert your library catalogue to RDF N-Triples (and/or JSON). My questions to you Librarians is: knowing this is possible and fairly trivial to do, is there any value to you in exposing your OPACs in this way?

Next, as I lay listening to my daughter chat to her squeaky duck, I thought about the other stuff I’ve been looking at recently with WordPress.  Once you think of your library catalogue as a WordPress site, there’s quite a lot of fun to be had.  You could ramp up the feeds that you offer from your OPAC, use the OpenCalais API to add semantic tags, plugin some more semantic addons if you wish (autodiscovery of SIOC, FOAF, OAI-ORE data??), and, perhaps most fun of all, publish OPAC records in realtime over XMPP PubSub.

Which brings me to JISCPress, our recent #jiscri project proposal, which we may or may not get funded (what are we, a week or two away from finding out??).  In that Project, we’re proposing a WordPress MU platform for publishing and discussing JISC funding calls and project reports (among other things).  There’s a lot of cross-over between the above Scriblio ideas and JISCPress. So much so, that it’s probably no more than a days work to transform the JISCPress platform, hosted as an Amazon Machine Image, to a multi-user OPAC platform where, potentially, all UK University libraries, publish their OPACs via separate Scriblio sites.

You could then, like wordpress.com has done, publish an XMPP firehose from every catalogue over PubSub for search engines or whoever is interested in realtime data from UK university library catalogues. Alternatively, instead of the WPMU set up, each University library could maintain their own Scriblio install and publish an XMPP feed to an agreed server (though that approach seems like more hassle than is necesary if you ask me. You’re bound to have some libraries falling behind and not upgrading their sites as things develop. For less than a collective £4K/year, we could all buy into commercial support for a WPMU site from Automattic to help maintain server-side stuff).

I dunno. Maybe this is all off the wall, but the building blocks are all there. Is anyone experimenting with Scriblio in this way? Don’t tell me, a bunch of you have been doing it for years…

The user is in control

Joss Winn / / Identity, Standards & Specs, Web

Just a quick nod to Andy Powell’s post yesterday about Identity in a Web 2.0 World. As I’ve said before, I’m trying to catch up with the issues Andy discusses and develop them into a blueprint for the Mozilla/Creative Commons/P2P University Open Education course, I am participating in.

Andy writes:

…identity in a Web 2.0 world is not institution-centric, as manifest in the current UK Federation, nor is it based on the currently deployed education-specific identity and access management technologies.  Identity in a Web 2.0 world is user-centric – that means the user is in control…. The important point is that learners (and staff) will come into institutions with an existing identity, they will increasingly expect to use that identity while they are there (particularly in their use of services ‘outside’ the institution) and that they will continue using it after they have left.  As a community, we therefore have to understand what impact that has on our provision of services and the way we support learning and research.

I am therefore reassured that my blueprint outline is not completely off the wall:

University students are at least 18 years old and have spent many years unconsciously accumulating or deliberately developing a digital identity. When people enter university they are expected to accept a new digital identity, one which may rarely acknowledge and easily exploit their preceding experience and productivity. Students are given a new email address, a university ID, expected to submit course work using new, institutionally unique tools and develop a portfolio of work over three to four years which is set apart from their existing portfolio of work and often difficult to fully exploit after graduation. I think this will be increasingly questioned and resisted by individuals paying to study at university.

My proposal is to show there are existing technical solutions which would allow an individual to register as a student at a university, provide the institution with their Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, OpenID, etc. identification and from then on, the student uses their existing ID to authenticate against any university online resource. There’s an example of how this might happen in the JISC Review of OpenID, which describes one of the project aims as the development of

bridging software that will allow OpenIDs from any source to be used as identities within the production UK (SAML) federation.

The University of Kent host a demonstrator of this OpenID-to-Shibboleth bridge.

The other aspect of my blueprint is institutional support of a Personal Learning Environment (PLE). I am suggesting that the WordPress Multi User platform is one technology that could support the characteristics of a PLE, being: ((Taken from, Personal Learning Environments: Challenging the dominant design of educational systems. Scott Wilson, Prof. Oleg Liber, Mark Johnson, Phil Beauvoir, Paul Sharples & Colin Milligan, University of Bolton. 2006))

  • Focus on coordinating connections between the user and services
  • Symmetric relationships
  • Individualized context
  • Open Internet standards and lightweight proprietary APIs
  • Open content and remix culture
  • Personal and global scope

The PLE implementation which I have in mind is not, like the VLE, a monolithic system but rather a platform which aggregates and co-ordinates external user-centric services into a coherent learning environment. It is a parasitic system, feeding off content from existing online services such as blogs, social bookmarking, wikis and social networks, but also a rewarding environment which supports and develops the student’s existing portfolio ((In many ways, I am thinking of ‘Identity’ and ‘Portfolio’ as being largely synonymous during the student’s period of study.)) throughout their period of study.

I’ve shown how WordPress can aggregate and archive course activity, how it can enhance the discovery and connectivity of an individual’s and institution’s online profile through the addition of semantic-web-enabling plugins, how it can syndicate filtered content to other internal and external systems (through the use of feed2js, it can also syndicate content to legacy systems like Blackboard, which don’t support embedded web feeds). I’ve also shown that it can support a lightweight social network that integrates with an institution’s LDAP/Active Directory authentication system, and that social network can be OpenID enabled, allowing users to optionally link their OpenID to their WordPress/LDAP account and login via OpenID instead. ((I’ve tested this with DiSo’s OpenID plugin, which works in principle, but I suspect that once set up, the OpenID login for the specified account, completely bypasses the LDAP authentication. Surely just a small amount of development would provide tighter integration. Incidentally, a Shibboleth plugin (by the same author of the OpenID plugin) for WordPress also exists.))

Finally, the institutional and wider benefits to the public can be found when the cumulative data of the platform is itself aggregated into a structured site that enables discovery and re-use of content. An example of this is our Community Posts site, and I have also previously discussed the potential development and exploitation of this resource. Designed and licensed carefully, such a site could provide open educational resources at both user and programmatic levels.

So what empowers the user/student and puts them in control? Data-Portability and Creative Commons licensing? ((Actually, I’m starting to think that CC licensing is little more than an interim step to a better understanding of ‘data’. See ‘You don’t nor need to own your data‘ When knowledge is transmitted online, every aspect of its representation is in a form of data. Both information and instruction become ‘data’ – isn’t it backwards to think of knowledge in terms of something ‘owned’ Do you think of instructional methods as ‘yours’?)).

Open Education Project Blueprint

Joss Winn / / Commons, Open Education, Projects

Each participant on the Mozilla Open Education Course, has been asked to develop a project blueprint. Here is the start of mine. It’s basically a ‘Personal Learning Environment’ (PLE) ((See Personal Learning Environments: Challenging the dominant design of educational systems))and I’m going to try to show how WordPress MU is a good technology platform for an institution to easily and effectively support a PLE. I’m going to place an emphasis on ‘identity’ because it’s something I want to learn more about.

Short description

University students are at least 18 years old and have spent many years unconsciously accumulating or deliberately developing a digital identity. When people enter university they are expected to accept a new digital identity, one which may rarely acknowledge and easily exploit their preceding experience and productivity. Students are given a new email address, a university ID, expected to submit course work using new, institutionally unique tools and develop a portfolio of work over three to four years which is set apart from their existing portfolio of work and often difficult to fully exploit after graduation.

I think this will be increasingly questioned and resisted by individuals paying to study at university. Both students and staff will suffer this disconnect caused by institutions not employing available online technologies and standards rapidly enough. There is a legacy of universities expecting and being expected to provide online tools to staff and students. This was useful and necessary several years ago, but it’s now quite possible for individuals in the UK to study, learn and work apart from any institutional technology provision. For example, Google provides many of these tools and will have a longer relationship with the individual than the university is likely to.

Many students and staff are relinquishing institutional technology ties and an indicator of this is the massive % of students who do not use their university email address (96% in one case study). In the UK, universities are keen to accept mature, work-based and part-time students. For these students, university is just a single part of their lives and should not require the development of a digital identity that mainly serves the institution, rather than the individual.

How would it work?

Students identify themselves with their OpenID, which authenticates against a Shibboleth Service Provider. ((See the JISC Review of OpenID.)) They create, publish and syndicate their course work, privately or publicly using the web services of their choice. Students don’t turn in work for assessment, but rather publish their work for assessment under a CC license of their choice.

It’s basically a PLE project blueprint with an emphasis on identity and data-portability. I’m pretty sure I’m not going to get a fully working model to demonstrate by the end of the course, but I will try to show how existing technologies could be stitched together to achieve what I’m aiming for. Of course, the technologies are not really the issue here, the challenge is showing how this might work in an institutional context.

I think it will be possible to show how it’s technically possible using a single platform such as WordPress which has Facebook Connnect, OAuth, OpenID, Shibboleth and RPX plugins. WordPress is also microformat friendly and profile information can be easily exported in the hCard format. hResume would be ideal for developing an academic profile. The Diso project are leading the way in this area.

Similar projects:

UMW Blogs?

Open Technology:

OpenID, OAuth, RPX, Shibboleth, RSS, Atom, Microformats, XMPP, OPML, AtomPub, XML-RPC + WordPress

Open Content / Licensing:

I’ll look at how Creative Commons licensing may be compatible with our staff and student IP policies.

Open Pedagogy

No idea. This is a new area for me. I’m hoping that the Mozilla/CC Open Education course can point me in the right direction for this. Maybe you have some suggestions, too?

RAE: UK research funding results visualised

Joss Winn / / Mashups

Yesterday, the results of the funding allocation for research in UK Higher Education were announced and published on the Times Higher Education website.

Successive RAEs have concentrated research cash in the hands of the elite. This time around, the pie has been shared more widely.

The full spreadsheet of results being available, I thought this was a good opportunity for someone to visualise the data, so I published the data on Google Docs as a CSV file, which Tony Hirst fed into IBM’s Many Eyes wiki and now we can really see how the pie has been shared. Click on the images to view the interactive visualisations.

A pie…

RAE Funding Pie
Funding allocation by university group

Some bubbles…

FTE staff submitted to RAE by institution and coloured by group
FTE staff submitted to RAE by institution and coloured by group

A bar chart…

% change in total recurrent research funding
% change in total recurrent research funding by group

and a matrix…

Cash change in funding by institution and group
Cash change in funding by institution and group

You can read about the University of Lincoln’s 628% increase in funding, here and here.

UK WordCamp (Ed)ucation?

Joss Winn / / Conferences, Fun, Learning Landscapes, Software, Web

Having heard about the WordCamp Ed event in Washington DC, I’m thinking of organising a WordCamp, focussing on the use of WordPress in HE and FE in the UK.  Would anyone be interested in helping with the organisation of this? 

There is some support for organising WordCamps from Automattic. A lot of the items listed there would be easy to facilitate with support from one of our institutions.  I’d be happy to ask the University of Lincoln. We’re just off the main North-South East Coast rail trunk, but the access isn’t bad from London up to Edinburgh, and it’s a good, modern university, with decent facilities in a historic city worth visiting. 

I’m sure there would be a lot of interest in attending. It could appeal to teachers, students, researchers, ICT and web dev staff.  We could appeal for the involvement of edubloggers who have a lot of experience in advocating the use of blogs in HE and FE. 

There was a WordCamp in Birmingham in July 2008. We could contact the organisers of that event for advice as well as the organisers of the DC event.

The day might be organised like this: 

  • Registration and welcome
  • Keynote 
  • Live WordPressMU install and set up. A useful overview for both administrators and users. Also introduces the language of blogging which people will hear constantly throughout the day. i.e. ‘posts’, ‘pages’, ‘tags’, categories’, ‘blogroll’, ‘plugins’, ‘themes’, etc. 
  • Two or three presentations with Q&A on how people are using WordPress in education (maybe one from a marketing perspective, the others from a teaching and learning perspective) 
  • Lunch 
  • Keynote 
  • Special interest group sessions: research groups, teachers, students, marketing, administration, development, etc. 
  • Group feedback 
  • Presentation on forthcoming WordPress features. Integration of WP with other (social) services. Intro to BuddyPress and BBPress as extensions to WordPressMU.
  • Close 

Is anyone interested in helping organise a WordCamp(Ed) in the UK? Please leave comments below and join our new Google Group.

ALT-C 2008

Joss Winn / / Conferences

I am at the Association for Learning Technology conference (ALT-C 2008) until Thursday. It’s the main UK conference for my area of work and the first time I have attended. I went to two pre-conference sessions today, as well as the F-ALT08 evening planning and discussion.

There’s a CrowdVine site for the conference, which is working very well to connect people both before and at the conference and the F-ALT08 wiki has been useful for pulling people together. I am proud to wear the official fringe badge.

This morning, I attended the Experiencing Mobile Learning and Assessment workshop at Leeds Metropolitan University. Three people spoke, really just introducing the themes for the afternoon sessions and giving a largely predicatable overview of the issues surrounding mobile learning and assessment. The afternoon sesssions looked good, but I left to attend the OpenSim, a pre-Second Life taster workshop. This was worthwhile as I’ve not really engaged with Second Life and we were able to trial some basic features of virtual worlds by using OpenSim running on the desktop machines rather than over the net.  Using Second Life still doesn’t appeal to me personally, but I can see that it has some useful applications for role-playing different situations which are otherwise difficult to emulate in real life.  I was mostly interested in OpenSim itself as an open source response to Linden Lab’s Second Life and will install it when I get back to work for other colleagues to test a Second Life-like environment prior to jumping into Second Life itself.

After registration and checking into the accomodation, I had some food and a wander around the sponsoring organisation’s stalls in the main hall. There were a couple of useful finds, notably that Learning Objects, Inc. are extending their wiki plugin, Teams LX,  for use outside of the Blackboard VLE, basically providing a wiki-farm tool with fine access controls, including fully public. I’m currently on the look out for a wiki that’s as good as WordPressMU is for blogging. Confluence is currently my favourite, having used it extensively over the last few years. If anyone has any other suggestions, please let me know.

Finally, the F-ALT08 gathering in the student union bar was a decent way to end the day. Good to meet people, get a badge and talk loosely about the work we do. The session this evening was about Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), namely the Connectivism and Connective Knowledge course which started today with over 1600 registered ‘participants’.

Connectivism and Connective Knowledge is a twelve week course that will explore the concepts of connectivism and connective knowledge and explore their application as a framework for theories of teaching and learning. It will outline a connectivist understanding of educational systems of the future. This course will help participants make sense of the transformative impact of technology in teaching and learning over the last decade. The voices calling for reform do so from many perspectives, with some suggesting ‘new learners’ require different learning models, others suggesting reform is needed due to globalization and increased competition, and still others suggesting technology is the salvation for the shortfalls evident in the system today. While each of these views tell us about the need for change, they overlook the primary reasons why change is required.

Apparently only about 15 people are registered for credit.  George Siemens, one of the two facilitators of the course is attending the conference, so I expect we’ll hear more about the MOOC over the next day or so. On the whole, most F-ALT attendees were sceptical about the value and longevity of MOOCs although I think it’s an interesting idea and hope it is a success, though how that is measured, I’m not sure. On an individual level, I think that with some effort, a lot could be gained from the 12 weeks of participation and reflective assignments. From my own experience of the Linux community over the last few years, I’m convinced of the benefits that can arise from participating in large, distributed, open and focused communities. Hopefully, these characteristics can also be developed in an educational context like the MOOC.

Session 4: National & International Perspectives

Joss Winn / / Conferences, Open Access, Repositories

Arjan Hogenaar & Wilko Steinhoff, from KNAW, gave a presentation on AID, a Dutch Academic Information Domain. I’ll be honest and admit I didn’t pay much attention to this as I was writing up my blog notes for Session 3. Follow the hyperlinks for more information.

I was able to concentrate on the next two presentations which were both interesting and relevant to our work at Lincoln. The first was by Chris Awre, from the University of Hull, who is working on the EThOS project, a joint project between several HE institutions and the BL. It’s a project to provide a central repository service for e-theses produced in the UK. The idea is that the BL will harvest e-thesis specific UK ETD metadata provided by University repositories to create a single point of access to this type of academic output. Interestingly, the business model for this is a subscription service, whereby universities are expected to pay for the harvesting of metadata and digitisation of hard copy theses when they are requested. The content is Open Access (search, download), financially supported by a paid-for harvesting and digitisation service. It’s always interesting to see how people are creating new business models based on freely giving a product away. I hope it’s a success.

The third presentation was by Vanessa Proudman, from Tilburg University and the DRIVER Project. This was excellent, not least because of the rare clarity of presentation but also because the research findings are directly relevant and useful to us at Lincoln as we embark on establishing a repository service in the University. Vanessa looked at the challenges we face in populating our repositories and suggested key methods of increasing the number of deposits, noting that even with a Mandate, the deposit rate is only 40-60%. This work is published as part of a new book (chapter 3), which, naturally, can be downloaded here. Upon return to work, I intend to look at this in detail and begin drafting a plan for the next phase of our repository project, which is to establish an Open Access Mandate at the University and begin the important advocacy work within the Faculties.

Open Repositories 2008 Conference

Joss Winn / / Conferences, Open Access, Repositories

OR2008, the Third International Conference on Open Repositories began today and I’ll be posting my session notes to the LL Blog. It’s a bigger conference than I imagined. There are 486 delegates, from 35 countries, with about a third from the UK, a third from Europe, a quarter from the USA and the remaining 10% of people from Asia, Australia and New Zealand. The conference halls are packed and there is even an over-flow room where people watch the main sessions via a video feed. Not me! I get to the conference sessions early in order to get a decent seat.

The Conference website has the full programme in PDF format. True to form, there’s also a repository of conference papers and presentations.

The Keynote speaker discussed the requirements of the scientific community, arguing that open access to, the interpretation and display of scientific data is essential for these repository users. He said that the Protein Data Bank was an excellent example of such a repository. These repositories need to be embedded into the ‘white coat’ researcher’s daily work and not just places to deposit finished articles. He told us that researchers are not prepared to change the way they work and that students should be trained in good information management as they are the future of research. He pointed to several ‘open’ endeavours, such as ‘science commons‘, the ‘Open Knowledge Foundation‘, ‘open data‘ and ‘open science‘.

He reminded everyone that even the simplest of processes are complex to map, and being integral to the authoring process, trying to capture and integrate this digitally, without intruding on the work itself, is the most difficult of challenges. A worthwhile challenge, nonetheless, as 90% of scientific research data is, apparently, lost. The ICE-RS Project, is one such endeavour.

Of course, this is something businesses are also concerned with and is the stuff of Enterprise Content Management Systems (ECMS). I do wonder whether it would be a useful project to study and report on current commercial and open source ECMS solutions, as there seems to be little to no overlap between academic content management systems and repositories and those used in the corporate world.

Interestingly, he mentioned the use of Subversion as a way of backing up and versioning research, something I’m familiar with in software development but hadn’t thought about using for version control of my own work. Something to look into…