OpenIWorld: Justin Riley

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Looked at Reositories and looked at LMs/VLE

Using OSIDs internally as system architecture

How many asset types have you defined

OAI-PMH OSID

OSID system patterns of reuse

Adam franco afranco@middlebury.edu

French elf shoes

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Don’t ask me but all the french men are wearing them.

Keynote OpenIWorld: Vijay Kumar - Advancing the Educational Life of Information Resources

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Vijay Kumar from MIT (Dean and Director, Office of Educational Innovation).
*Problem: Global Challenge of too many on the outside (developing world) looking in (to Western World).
**The same problem is happening within the institution
*To solve this problem we are moving to a “meta-university” where content can be accessed across multiple institutions to enable open education
*MIT OpenCourseWare is just the first step (pebble in the pond)
**every country capable of accesssing OCW has.
**95 OCW consortium sites in 10 languages
*Open Education movement is more than just OCW
**iCampus: iLab: MIT Online Laboritories
**iLabs in China
**OCW highlights for Highschool
**K-12: Curriki, Scholastic, tessa, commonwealth of learning, PhET (at CO), etc
*Harvest the collective advantage:
**MIT Visualising Cultures: harvested from multiple repositories
**India National Knowledge Commision (NKC) Advancing Access and Quality
***India has to leverage massive educational content delivery systems to be accessible to their billion people. Utilise the multiplier effect.
**Indo-US Collaboration for Engineering Education (IUCEE): train the trainer to utilise content repositories for course creation: NPTEL IIT Course Website.
*Are institutions ready for the meta-university? Is education ready for opening up education?
*Influences:
**The Collectivity Culture: participation, colaboration, design, sharing, remix…
**Enablers: Interoperability, Open Standards, Legal Licenses, Consortial agreemnts
*Blended Learning: MIRTLE
*Boundary-less Education
**combined disciples and roles
*Q&A
**most significant barrier to open education movement?
***that we think we can control it rather than embrace how it is happening?
**are publishers enabling this or hindering this?
***business models are changing to enabling this, but this is because the business models are just being established and embraced.

OpenIWorld

Originally uploaded by davidflanders

I’m Lyon France at the OpenIWorld Conference (a legacy community from the Melon funded OKI project, originally based out of MIT). Around a hundred and fifty delegats, of which 50 are French (and utilising the translation system for the English based conference). Nice being at an event where it is small enough to get to know everyone, and plenty of French dining experiences for networking along and on the blue Rhone river.

I’m here with two primary interests: first is the open source library system Koha, the second is my own presentation to the community and the contacts that it might bring out of the woodwork.

Hopefully updates on both will follow.

Looking at hospital property

Originally uploaded by davidflanders

=

Recently it has become apparent to me that most JISC projects go through a specific kind of software development release cycle in comparison to the business software development model (naturally). Of course most are all using a ‘rapid agile prototyping’ development processes (right-rapid-rough as pioneered by Tom Kelley and the IDEO design company), which then lends it self to the current big Web 2.0 companies and their dev processes: Flickr, Netvibes, YouTube, etc. Very similar to Venture Capital funding. However, the trouble with this model is that JISC projects do not have teams of developers (nor teams of monies). My friends down at Google HQ tell me that optimal dev teams are usually 4-6 developers per team with one manager (and anywhere from 20 million to 50 million invested as a first go). And of course, that manager is under the gun to see the code produced get monetized as a product (yielding at least 300% profit). This in comparison to JISC’s typical tag line: “no harm in just learning”. Which is the right ethos, but methodologically the wrong process.

There needs to be a greater push by JISC to emphasise that a project should release a product to the wild -yes to the World Wild Web- not just .ac/.edu; and if that product fails we should recognise it needs to be cut down and dissected picking out the cause of death (i.e. evaluating the project but only for its failures). The emphasis in still on learning here, but learning in the sense of producing a manifestation that could hypothetically be “bought on eBay” (because it is valued). Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying we should be actually selling these things (FOSS all the way), but we should have a competitive nature in releasing something that is worth the communities time to actually implement themselves, e.g. others institutions willing to invest their own hard earned cash to utilise the code the project produces.

I have the sneaking suspicion (partially because I have done it myself) that most projects actually look to utilise the money for their own institution infrastructure; producing bits of code that are really only valuable to the specifics of their systems. Throughout being a project manager you are faced with decisions to spend the money on code that will support the community or code that will support your institution (and most times they are not one in the same!). My argument here is that JISC project should always be choosing the quick wins for the community (not quick wins for their institutions).

Currently with the size of budgets that JISC provide (one project manager and one developer) I see the following pattern emerge as a template for JISC software development that requires a definitive product release:

Given there is nothing “really” new about this model: it is just a shortened version of the “New Product Development” model and “Software Release Lifecycle” model. Most JISC projects iterate through an alpha (technology testing strawman) and beta (user testing) stage. However, after these stages JISC projects need to start coming up with the goods. They can’t be a Flickr where they iterate through a 2.2.1342b minor version releases before they are “gamma”. JISC project must produce small releasable products to the academic market. An analogy might be: Flickr releases protyped cars and JISC projects are releasing a dust-buster (dust busters can break down without hurting anyone, cars cannot)?

= Venture Capital Web 2.0 Real World Wild Web Projects

= JISC projects (if they are successful)

The diversion in my model comes with the “the Zenith cycle” as the third cycle in a three part agile development process (alpha -> beta -> zenith). Using a rapid prototyping model, the three step development cycle offers the opportunity by a development team to first test their proposed product ideas (alpha or pre-alpha) making sure it is technically feasible; the second cycle (beta) is the rewrite and scaling up of the alpha cycle to see if it will work in a real world environments, or debugging: often bringing in novice users of the system (and most likely throwing away the alpha code). And finally, is the zenith cycle where a definitive product must be launched and disseminated to a community for pick-up or monetisation. If the community picks up the product (independent use outside the projects own initiation) then it is a success and the three part cycle starts over at a level 1 (as opposed to level 0) whereby they look to enhance the technology for further use. If the product is rejected then the development team stays at level 0 in product initiation and may forgo the creation of the product all together (as in venture capital models).

Ok to surmise:

1. JISC projects should aim to release a product at the end of their funding
2. They should be able to reach a first release of the product in three cycles (alpha - beta - zenith), e.g. 18-24 months
3. If the product is not picked up by other institutions (independently) then the project should be declared a failure and report where it went wrong (still no foul in learning).

**I am interested in the U&I dev model JISC has been pushing, but we are not far enough down the road to comment on this yet.  We are looking into a agile project management tool called Mingle by Thoughtworks which looks to be free for Academic and OS projects!

So what is it going to take to convince people that using the cloud for your repository is the best –if not most viable long term- option for your hardware architecture?

Is it that people don’t understand what “the cloud” is and how it offers true scalability and robustness?

Or perhaps, it is that you don’t trust companies like Google and Amazon Web Services?

Maybe it is even a more base question: is your repository intended for preservation or showcasing?

Well here is some more information for you, in case you really think that your local IT department is the best option for hosting your repository:

• podcast and video on what is the cloud (in terms that anyone can understand) (click on the “the coming cloud” tab and watch the video or listen to the podcast!)
• Amazon is the 6^th most visited site in the UK why wouldn’t we trust them?
• How much money did you spend on your servers for your repository?

Sometimes it is just good sense to follow blindly, so when Paul Walk invited me to Twitter I thought it time to try this thing called microblogging <-which isn’t blogging at all in my opinion…read on.  With contacts like Bryan Kelly, Richard Ackerman, Paul Miller and Andy Powell I was soon off and experiencing Twitter.  Of course as soon as you start Twitter you join in the conversation of “what is Twitter” and “how to improve Twitter”.  My initial answer was what can we do with the Twitter API: especially the idea of a phone app that posted my twitter from a Google maps location so you could actually see where the Twits were coming from.  I also had a look to see if there wasn’t a way to SMTP twits so it could be fed into outlook and then filtered there?  On the whole it was beginning to feel like one big navel gazing exercise and frankly it got in the way of working on Ruby 2.0 this past week.  However, I can now say I am a Twitter convert.  Yes, despite fighting off Web 2.0 Social Networking sights for the better part of four years (AOL… FriendsReunited … MySpace… Bebo… LinkedIn… Facebook) I’ve finally come to see the light (well maybe). 

 So why Twitter, why should everyone have a twitter account?  My philosophical response is because “it is the smallest and easiest way for anyone to publish”, hell a monkey could make more sense than some of the twits I received this week…!  But why is it important to publish, well because we can.  In today’s world Descartes would have said: “I publish, therefore I am”.  In short, it is your responsibility as a human to process knowledge and then publish it back out to the world to re-process (makes you seriously question copyright doesn’t it!)  This that is my 21^st definition for “human”.  OK so enough of the philosophical BS.  Why do I really like Twitter; what are the pragmatics?

I have to go back a bit to explain why Twitter suddenly makes sense to me.  This past Thursday and Friday I attended the JISC EMERGE event for the Users and Innovations start-up projects in York (lovely city by the way).  On the whole the event was a waste of my time (but fortunately with InstantRails2.0 on my machine) I was able to bide the time during presentations until we actually had some interesting conversations with the other projects over some meals and drinks (gold dust project looks like it could be on to a good idea, and the multimedia annotation project I will watch closely: though I don’t think they’re ready for the technology problems required to solve the problem they are addressing).  One of the ongoing navel gazing exercises that EMERGE group is involved in is asking itself: “are we a community” and if so “how are we a community”.  I’ll save you the pedagogical philosophy and multisyllabic nomenclature words (the worst offense being “dystopian connotation of unconference”?!) and skip to the point:  the Emerge community has failed in setting up an online community, but they have put on some decent events (in nice locations) which has in turn provided networking opportunities that otherwise might not have emerged (forgive the pun).  So in essence, this community of “technological innovators” have concluded that communities can not exist online alone; and that face-to-face collaboration is essential for any community to be established (especially if it is to be continued online). 

Ok so here is where this rambling post gets tied all together.  The final luncheon at York had about six of us asking the root question: “so what is it about face-to-face interaction that creates trust amongst individuals times more individuals, ergo ‘a community’?”  The general consensus at the table was the following:

1. Trust is how a community is formed
2. To establish trust you require a means to understand and agree with the person(s)
3. The online environment lacks a means of establishing trust
4. The physical environment establishes trust through set patterns in communication (eg interoperable social standards), such a

a.     Human interaction patterns for initially interfacing with other humans, i.e. small talk, body language, etc

·   machine eqv: defining your service with a WSDL/WADL service specification

b.     Moments of establishing initial trust (pairing between humans) is done through passing common commands (verbs) between one another, i.e. asking questions and/or making statements that all in the conversation can agree upon, e.g. “wasn’t the weather horrible today”, <all agree>

·   machine eqv: common headers and/or verbs passed between ports

c.     Testing one another’s knowledge to see what kinds of interactions may occur, e.g. using nomenclature/acronyms to sort out position within the community framework

·   machine eqv: document types and common syntax for understanding these documents (XML via RPC vs ReST, etc)

5.     .: -> If online communities are to establish trust online and be maintained the human online world requires set interoperable social patterns for interfacing with strangers. 

In other words the online world needs a single platform so that base social patterns can be established for interfacing with other humans.  Facebook was a good attempt at it, but its means of initial social interface were convoluted by too many crud aps (vampire bites, poking, etc).  Which brings me back to my point on the philosophical meaning of Twitter: it is the smallest means of openly communicating with all other human devices (via online).  So long as Twitter keeps it as base and simple as possible (eg Google interface) then they really have a chance of being the initial interfacing platform for creating trust (via online) between humans.  And if trust can be established then further human to human interactions can occur online (eg passing more valuable information between one another, and even passing of objects: money, resources, fluids, etc). 

Ok let me surmise in more humanistic terms.  Twitter is small talk: a way of interfacing with other humans in a way that gives out information that may be meaningless in terms of content (“what the weather is like”, “how the sports teams are playing”, “what the hotel is like” etc) but is valuable in terms of establishing set patterns of trusting and communicating further information with one another.  Don’t get me wrong, Twitter could get it wrong and start to build beyond its base principle, but at its start it looks to be a common platform that all people can come to and begin to participate in so that further services may be utilized, eg the conversation might just actually go beyond small talk.  Ergo, it might just answer the problem: you have to have human trust before you can have an online community.

 If you made it this far through my rambles congratulations, and if you found it interesting in the slightest then do give me a Twit as we may have much more to talk about?!  Twitfully,  dfflanders

This is really just a though experiment that is trying to kill two birds with one stone:

1. In the following screencast I’m playing with my tabletPC and Jing screencasting software.  I wanted to see how seamless and easy it would be to get my thoughts down on paper and expose them to the world (thus far it has been a breeze).  But are thoughts worth publishing?
2. My free-time thoughts have been thinking about categories and relationship recently and my latest venture into understanding some mathematical principles behind it all has led me to the following consideration: in the digital world copied-proxies are free and while they are the same as the original object in terms of human understanding, they are different in terms of programmatic understanding.

So be warned this is a big alpha test of both software, workflow and ideas.  Please do leave a comment, especially the bits that were annoying.

Screencast HERE

Android is Google’s first Operating System (OS)…for mobile phones. It comes in response to Google wanting everyone to have GSearch, Gmaps, Gmail, GDocs, GEtc in every pocket on the planet (without having to write software for someone else’s platform). It is significant because it is an Operating System, but it is even more significant because it is the next generation in Operating Systems and it is open, wide open!… but let me back up before I get carried away.

Since attending the m-libraries conference at the OU, I’ve had the following user case in mind: deliver large scholarly objects to a students mobile device (eg articles, learning objects, how to videos, etc) just in time and based upon the students learning progress (eg a short article an hour before a lecture, a how to video once they have gotten through homework question, a learning object passes back after asking a question, etc)

Could a mobile device deliver such an environment, and once more deliver that environment to 90% of the student population? Well they have the hardware, but a unified software platform has been missing. Now there looks to be two platforms which will overcome all other mobile OSs (side note: will we end up buying phones based on their OS, like we do with desk-tops?): Google Android vs. Apple’s iPhone?

Google in starting the Open Handset Alliance is looking to make this a reality (or at least a really good idea). While the Google Android OS exists it has yet to be massively manufactured (but have a look at the OHA and partners: Motorola, HTC, nevermind the hackers who have already launched it on their own phones). The business strategy is therefore a bottom-up approach where they are leaving it to the developers in the wild wide world to make the killer apps that will bring the masses to this platform. This puts it in direct competition with the iPhone which has taken a top-down approach (Apple developers only, creating a set of apps that run flawlessly on a shiny phone). Both these are valid approaches, but which will be the default platform to design for? Only time will tell.

Ok so how do we take the above user case forward? First we have to decide which platform to use. The iPhone SDK is not availaible, so I attended the Android Hack Night at Google HQ London to begin to get my head around what it would take to develop the above user case.

So, hopefully over this holiday season I will have some time to post some of the high-level architecture that I am proposing for an android app that would meet some of the criteria for the above user case. But before that, it is important that you take the time to go over Google high-level architecture for Android:

• watch these videos first, then have a read over the 
• content provider architecture (this will be the primary dev area for my app):

One you’ve done that (a couple of times: it is technical documentation afterall), then hopefully I’ll have another post up and maybe even some protoypes to get your imaginations going? We’ll see how much Christmas gets in the way of having a play?