Connexions Conference Sprint Day 1!

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We had a fantastic first sprint day after the Connexions Conference. Over 50 people, from all over the world were here. We had user interface designers working on Connexions, OERPub, and Siyavula, content entry and enhancement sprint working on a Life Sciences textbook and procedures for Physics teaching materials planned, developers sprinting on Connexions, the OERPub Connexions Importer, and a new Visual Editor for Semantic/Structured Documents.

Sprinter photo by Daniel Williamson

Below is a brief list of the checkins the groups did at the end of the day.

Design Sprint

  • Connexions importer at oerpub.org : Got advanced mode options compact on each page
  • Designed workflow for creating new versions of documents


Content Sprint

  • Disastrous morning — initial document had unexpected structure (a table inside a heading). Lots of struggling – also known as learning!
  • Got over half the textbook in in the afternoon after the nuclear option (cut and paste the document with all formatting removed). Then put the formatting back in. As the importer improves the nuclear option should be needed less often.

Repeatable process for St. John’s Physics content

  • No complete solution yet.
  • Open Office — better for general audience, but converted all math into inline math
  • LaTeX — problem with math fonts on mac

Bug fixes on Connexions

  • Took a while to get up and running. Easter eggs in the buildout
  • Fixed a handful of bugs
  • Cancel button for banner color so doens’t change if you haven’t gotten it right
  • Collection rendering improved
  • Login status improvements
  • Design for editing the modules (content) in a collection being derived

OERPub Connexions Importer bug fixes

  • Fixed red text processing that was going wrong, better id gen
  • JP enhanced client to use public google docs URL, button disabling
  • Ying fixed google new stylings bug
  • Various other bugs
  • The fixes will help both cnx and oerpub

Visual editor

  • Looked at Aloha, TinyMCE, WYM editor
  • Aloha doesn’t work on ipad
  • Mercury — in place DOM editor, works on the ipad — looks well structured, easy to extend
  • Wym focused on semantic editing
    • difficult to extend — too strict, has javascript hand xhtml parser — would be a lot of work.
  • TinyMCE — plugin created for adding exercise, auto numbers, validation next.
    • Mapped a small snippet of CNXML to HTML with microformat and microdata. TinyMCE handles both. CSS3 to style.

Project plans for 2012

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I am thrilled to report (a bit belatedly) that my fellowship with the Shuttleworth Foundation has been renewed for another year and I have big plans for the next year (along with the team of designers, developers, testers, open ed collaborators, and students working with me so far)!
Year 1 Review and Year 2 Plans

In Year 1 we:

In Year 2 we plan to:
  • Work with specific OER producers and help them publish their content efficiently while making it remixable using the OERPub tools.
  • Create an easy to use visual editor for the importer to create a full service “Massive Content Enabler”.
  • Expand OERPub to include common APIs to make open assessment banks interoperable.
References
I am always looking for more people to get involved so if some aspect resonates with you, please get in touch.

Let the Machines Do the Walking so Teachers Can Do the Talking, Creating, Adapting, and Remixing

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An API for Open Publishing or  A Little Plumbing Goes a Long Way

I recently gave an update on my Shuttleworth Foundation Fellowship. My goal for the fellowship is to make it easier to publish open education resources that are adaptable and remixable. My slides for the talk are below.
OpenEd11 Fletcher OER Roadmap

You can also see me give the talk at OpenEd, but unfortunately some time is wasted on technical difficulties with the projection. Maybe it will give you a laugh.


Background: I spent four years at Connexions, a repository for teaching and learning materials where anyone can publish and anyone can teach, learn, and remix. That experience led me to see the need for a way to push innovation and development into the community beyond the repository. Connexions provides services for storing, retrieving, and remixing educational content, but trying to provide all of the other services that educators and learners need directly within the repository just doesn’t scale.

The need for an ecosystem of tools and services: To maximize the benefit of the materials, we need editors to create the content, converters to take our existing content and create remixable versions, tools for rating, reviewing, and discussing the content, services for printing, services for packaging for learning management systems, adaptive learning environments that delivery and coach, alignment tools, and lots of things that have yet to be invented. That innovation and creativity needs to occur in an open ecosystem around learning repositories. 

Step 1 (Done). Closing the loop: Making publishing easier. So the first step in the fellowship was to choose and adapt an API (Application Programming Interface) for publishing to Open Repositories. This step involved research, advice gathering, and then specification writing.

We now have a specification called OERPub that is based on SWORD which is in turn based on the blog publishing API, AtomPub. A couple other blog entries (one, two) discuss SWORD (Simple Webservice Offering Repository Deposit) but in a nutshell SWORD is simple, has a large community of implementors, and gets the job done for publishing learning resources as a unit with educational metadata that applies to the whole resource. SWORD had been implemented mainly in institutional archive repositories rather than for learning resource repositories, so our adaptations to SWORD extend its usage strategically for OER. OERPub makes the API relevant to open education and good for adaptation and remix. OERPub adds recommended educational metadata, explicit mechanisms for creating new versions and creating adaptations (derived copies), and workflow and error handling for handling repository specific publication and licensing requirements. The European education agency, JISC, that sponsored the SWORD development has helped fund an OERPub client – described in Step 3. The SWORD community has offered to host the new OERPub specification and help publicize our efforts.
Step 2 (Done for Modules). Implementing publishing in Connexions. The second step, was to implement OERPub in Connexions (cnx.org) to provide a concrete test of the new specification and provide the first-ever programmatic pathway to create, edit, and publish content in Connexions. We chose Connexions for the first implementation of OERPub because anyone can publish to Connexions (so the benefits are broadly available) and Connexions content is remixable, which is the kind of content that we are trying to increase. This step, implementing the API, is akin to building some very handy plumbing. The implementation in Connexions for creating, editing, and publishing modules rolled out in the first week in October.
Step 3 (In Progress). Community Prototypes leading to Massive Content Enabling. Step three is to put this all together and work with content producers and software developers to build creation, editing, and translating tools that help authors publish great content and lead to massive increases in adaptable learning content. This is the “glass of water” step that the plumbing is there to deliver. I am planning to write future posts about the ones we have planned and some early stage ideas. Live samples are coming soon. Below are a few we are actively working on.

  • Prototype Massive Content Enabler (Code on Github). This importer currently takes Word documents, Open Office/ Libre Office documents, Connexions documents, Google Docs, and some HTML and blog entries. It transforms them if needed into a remixable XML format (CNXML), shows a styled preview, and then lets authors upload and publish to OER repositories (currently Connexions).
    • Components of this tool can be used on their own, like the previewer (code on github). The converters can all also be used on their own, and more importantly, improved independently.
  • Translation. Connexions content CC-By licensing makes translations a simple matter of fluency. We are working on a tool that lets translators select a Connexions module and the tool derives a copy, gets the content, retrieves a machine translation candidate (if requested), edit the translation, and publish the new module with links to the original — all using the OERPub API.
     
  • Batch Operations: The API also provides immediate benefits for experts that are comfortable writing scripts that make repeated operations fast and efficient. The Washington State Board of Community and Technical Colleges Open Course Library has produced 42 courses for high-enrollment, high-impact community and technical college courses. Each course is represented by a Connexions module that showcases the syllabus, downloads for learning mangament systems (LMS’s) and pointers to the Saylor Foundation versions of the courses when available. These Open Course Library modules were created using the new OERPub API. Upcoming batch scripting projects will publish translations for existing content and link them to their original-language sources, and will produce a tool for textbook publishers to migrate content from a development server to the live server.




    Overconfident or Visionary?

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    Although I live in the world of bite-size, modular education that can be remixed and adapted, I also have a very healthy respect for the power of narrative and a good storyteller to enhance learning. Stories are sticky. And that is a good thing for learning. But the seduction of a good story can also lead to overlearning and overconfidence. Dan Kahneman’s recent New York Times Magazine article (Oct. 23), illustrates the point with his own experience evaluating leadership potential and analyzing financial performance of stock traders. For traders, the statistics say that those end-of-year bonuses are just rewarding luck.

    “The confidence we experience as we make a judgement is not a reasoned evaluation of the probability that it is right. Confidence is a feeling, one determined mostly by the coherence of the story and by the ease with which it comes to mind, even when the evidence for the story is sparse and unreliable. The bias toward coherence favors overconfidence. An individual who expresses high confidence probably has a good story, which may or may not be true.”

    We ought to be able to do something about the exhorbitant salaries and prestige that we give to smart, hard-working gamblers, but the flip-side of that coin is that visionaries also are overconfident. They have a story in their mind that is so compelling that they keep working despite failure. The Emperor of All Maladies (Mukherjee), about the science and scientists behind the search for a cure for various forms of cancer, illustrates careers that spanned decades before some theories panned out. The leaders in Good to Great (Collins) typically took 10 years to turn middling success in a business into great success.

    The open education movement is similar. The story is compelling. If we take the vast sums of public money that we spend buying textbooks over and over, and instead create a permanent, shareable, and adaptable store of teaching and learning, it will unleash creativity and productivity trapped in underserved and undernourished (intellectually) populations.

    I am still convinced and I am still keen on being a part of that story.

    One webserver per child

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    Below is a fairly long quote from Gardner Campbell’s Educause 2012 presentation, A Personal Cyberinfrastructure. Jim Groom introduced it at Open Ed 2011.  Campbell advocates giving every student their own web server to administer over the course of their school career. I will let you read his words, and then I have a few thoughts.

    “Suppose that when students matriculate, they are assigned their own web servers — not 1GB folders in the institution’s web space but honest-to-goodness virtualized web servers of the kind available for $7.99 a month from a variety of hosting services, with built-in affordances ranging from database maintenance to web analytics. As part of the first-year orientation, each student would pick a domain name. Over the course of the first year, in a set of lab seminars facilitated by instructional technologists, librarians, and faculty advisors from across the curriculum, students would build out their digital presences in an environment made of the medium of the web itself. … They would play with wikis and blogs; they would tinker and begin to assemble a platform to support their publishing, their archiving, their importing and exporting, their internal and external information connections. They would become, in myriad small but important ways, system administrators for their own digital lives. In short, students would build a personal cyberinfrastructure, one they would continue to modify and extend throughout their college career — and beyond.”

    I really love this idea. The younger generation is digitally immersed. They have a presence in all the social media platforms. They use technology and the web like they drink water. But, do they control it? Are they reaching their full creative potential? Are they in charge of their digital presence?

    At OpenEd11, alternative ways of showing what you know were a hot topic; badges that highlight education challenges completed, portfolios that physically show what you know and what you have done. There is no need for specialized portfolio software when a blog with entries tagged “portfolio” can show off your best work. These are elements that would naturally fit into a student’s personal cyberinfrastructure.

    The web is full of services to help you engage, socialize, share, and perform. With their own webserver, students can put that all together, take control of when, where, and what to showcase, mix and match and combine elements, invent new things, decide what is private and what is public, switch services when needed, create their own spaces. Students can create their own journals, newspapers, radio stations, chat rooms. These are skills everyone should have, not just us geeks.

    Several prestigious universities have created communication programs that span their undergraduate programs, with the goal of producing articulate alumni. Creating and curating a personal cyberinfrastructure could easily fit into such programs and enrich them for the digital age.

    And of course tying this all back to my passion for open education, lets get started created courses and learning materials about making this real. Sounds like a challenge for School of Webcraft to me. And how about some new modules in Connexions on getting students started and creating programs in your school?