Many people have their own opinion of what an e-learning platform should be (I spelled out some of my own broad criteria here), but that’s a debate in and of itself that we tried to dodge here. In doing so, we may have taken a number of things for granted–feel free to disagree in the comments. In the mode of keeping it simple, we reviewed Nixty by looking at the following areas:

1. Sign-Up and User Accounts
2. Creating a Course
3. Designing a Course
4. Participating in a Course
5. Conclusion

Sign-Up and Accounts

Signing up for Nixty is a straight forward process via new accounts or Facebook. We didn’t see an OpenID option. Users can populate a contacts list via invitations through Gmail and Yahoo! Mail. Any user can sign up as a learner in any public course, or create a new course and share it with the world.

Within a user’s Settings users can upload a photo or avatar of themselves. Noticeably absent is any field for users’ personal web sites, social network accounts, or Atom/RSS feeds.

Users each have a theme-able “Eportfolio” (see Seth’s at http://nixty.com/eportfolio/Sgur). As opposed to a portfolio that showcases a person’s work, Nixty’s Eportfolio is limited mainly to presenting text information via a resume/CV builder.

Users also have a basic “Blog” (see Jared’s at http://nixty.com/blog/read/jaredstein/). The Nixty Blog allows for rich text editing, but, once submitted, new posts can not be edited. The blogs are publicly visible with no option to make private, either to a single course or to other Nixty members.

Nixty has an internal “Mail” tool which allows messaging of any Nixty user (plain text only). We would have liked to see some sort of integration with external e-mail or social media accounts.

Creating a Course

We began our examination of the features and limitations of Nixty by creating new online courses. In short, creating a new course and adding content is easy. Nixty provides a Wizard, but the interface is simple enough that most users can build courses without it. In most cases Nixty uses AJAX to facilitate page changes without reloading the page.

Courses can be designated as “traditional” or “wiki” versions–the latter allows any Nixty user to edit, add to, or re-order course content. After some confusion, @nixty (via Twitter) let us know that “Tests” and the “Gradebook” features are currently only available in the traditional version.

Course settings allow users to choose a course image icon which appears next to the course in Nixty directories. It also allows the instructor to set learner pass requirements for the course, and even issue a certificate to users upon completion.

The core unit of a Nixty course is the “Lesson” folder. Lesson folders can have learner instructions, can be nested, and can contain a sequence of any number of “Content” materials, “Discussions”, or “Tests”. Content is typically embedded HTML, but can also be a document (e.g. PDF or DOC), a media file, etc. We saw no way to scrape content from a web page–blog, wiki, or other. Also, though labeled “wiki” the wiki version of a course offers few wiki-like features, such as easy creation of new pages, access to wiki mark-up, version histories, etc.

The usability of the Content embedder/editor varied over the two days we used Nixty. Sometimes a simply WYSIWYG editor popped right up; sometimes the editor window was too small to use; sometimes it failed altogether with no error message.

Nixty allows for media uploads, though they recommend use of YouTube for videos. This is surely done for space/bandwidth reasons, but to us it’s the sort of behavior that should be encouraged throughout the system: designers (and users) should host their own materials in the cloud (Flickr, YouTube, Wikibooks, etc), and simple embed that content into the system’s framework.

Reordering Lesson folders was a bit painful. Initial ordering forces the creator to assign a number to each item. However, new items are not automatically queued to the next number, but have to be manually numbered through Manage Course > Lessons > Order Folders.

In our testing the “Syllabus” builder appeared to simply be broken, but there are obvious work-arounds, e.g. syllabus as an external file, or embed it as Content in a Lesson folder.

“Tests” can be used for exams or quizzes, and allow for basic multiple choice, true/false, multiple answer, fill in the blank, ordering and essay questions. Tests showed no option for question categories, pools, or randomization. Remember: Tests are only available in “traditional” version courses.

The “Gradebook” only allows for a Pass/Fail point-value cutoff. A clear limitation for most conventional instructors. Again, the Gradebook is only available in “traditional” version courses.

“Discussions” use the term “thread” but are not actually reply-threaded as we expected.

Nixty has neither an import nor export option for courses or materials, making migration to or from laborious.

Despite Nixty’s apparent draw for opencourseware and open educational resource projects, Nixty provides no licensing feature for content. We expected to be able to list license properties for individual items similar to Flickr, educommons, or the Moodle OpenShare mod.

We can’t discuss the course creation/development process without mentioning the navigation on the web site. Navigation is inconsistent at best, and often laborious or confusing. The following video illustrates one example that’s sure frustrate instructors in number of clicks alone:

(Note: I am aware that this screencast is not scaling properly.)

Once finished, a creator can make a course public–this lists the course in the Nixty directory and allows other users to sign up for the course.

Designing a Course

We’ve looked at the nuts and bolts of Nixty in order to experience the possibilities, though actually designing a course is a different matter. Design of a successful informal or open course depends a lot on the limitations and affordances of a given system, the creativity of the designer, and the needs of the learners–an element apparently overlooked by Nixty (and most other LMS). We examined design considerations by looking at adapting my own online course, and examining a few of the spotlighted courses in Nixty.

The course I built in Nixty is based on my existing fully online 3-credit course, which aims to lay the groundwork for new web developers by introducing the basics of XHTML and CSS. The course design is a fairly traditional: primarily linear experience that connects heavily project-based instructional lessons with weekly discussions, journals, and learning quizzes.

(As with any conversion or migration, I had the bitter-sweet realization that my course had flaws scars that I was not quite ready to make public. This does, however, encourage me to make improvements under possible public scrutiny.)

In my course Because there is no built-in assignment tool designers have to rely on Discussions and Tests for activities. I did insert assignments into his Nixty course, and conforming to the nature of the informal, open educational experience I listed them as self-assessment only. And though I did provide a basic scoring criteria list, a better self-assessment feature would allow instructors to create rubrics, and users to score and track their work. Assignment-type activities would also be bolstered by a simple URL submission field, or even linking to artifacts in a learner’s Eportfolio (though the Eportfolio does not support objects/artifacts).

Use of essay-type questions in Tests could accommodate non-standard activities and assessments, but I think for such an option to thrive in an informal experience peer users would need to be able to access other learners’ quiz results for feedback and scoring. Wouldn’t that be interesting?

Alternatively, a Discussion could be used for project submission and peer feedback. Because file upload is not an option, learners would have to refer to files hosted elsewhere. This limitation may in fact encourage better practices in learners, as each would have to have their own space(s) on the web for publishing educational and professional artifacts (e.g. a blog, Flickr, Slideshare, etc). Unfortunately, the designer’s Discussion thread creation prompt does not provide anything more than a plain text editor, limiting the richness of instructions for the learners.

In my Nixty course, as in most courses, the structure is fairly limited and contained by the Lesson folders, which contain only linearly-sequenced Content, Discussions, etc. The following short video shows how OCW_Maven (aka Sarina Canelake of MIT) structured OCW-based courses by interspersing Content and Q&A Discussions:

(Note: I am aware that this screencast is not scaling properly.)

In our opinion a truly disruptive educational platform should encourage alternative structures, including recursive sequencing, e.g. learning branches or paths. That Nixty provides a “wiki” option for the course suggests a highly organic possibility, yet as mentioned several key wiki features are absent, especially dynamic, on-the-fly creation of new pages from links.

Participating in a Course

The idea behind a formally informal course experience is that a critical mass of users congregate around a learning hub in order to provide peer-to-peer or expert-to-peer feedback, direction, or mentoring. This requires a large number of users active on the site. It also requires a method of connecting users with the site’s activities when they are away from the course. Often this is done via e-mail, but the simple–yet surprisingly rare–method is with Atom or RSS feeds, for either content updates or discussion threads. Nixty provides neither feature, which may be the single largest weakness threatening the success of a project that apparently aims to be an open, informal learning hub.

Tests aside, “completion” of a Lesson, Discussion, or piece of content is based primarily on the user clicking “Mark this item complete”. This is fine for monitoring simple progress through a sequence of activities, but provides no real feedback to users on more substantive levels of progress. We suggested previously that a self-assessment rubric and tracking feature would be ideal for projects and assignments. Further, a reflective journaling field could be employed to help users track their thoughts as they progress through the materials.

Discussion responses can be voted “up” or “down”, but we thought that a better user feedback feature would provide additional, aggregable feedback to users in cases where the Discussion is used for sharing of work and solicitation of critiques. Users replying to a thread can use a GUI editor to compose their responses, but can not attach files. Again, this is not necessary with a PLE/PLN-informed perspective on digital identities and self-publishing, but many instructors–and learners–will look for this.

A plus for anyone planning to try Nixty is the fact that their representatives are very active on the support forums as well as on Twitter, and are more than willing to engage the community, answer questions, and offer advice.

Conclusion

As a simple e-learning platform Nixty is fairly satisfying. It’s willingness to provide a home for discussing and organizing content is laudable, and its aim to provide an alternative, open platform for informal learning is something we’ve been talking about for years.

The version of Nixty reviewed here is somewhat promising for informal learning scenarios, and the lightweight nature of the LMS can, at times, feel like a breath of fresh air over heavier LMS. The shifted paradigm of the system and its inherent limitations may encourage designers and educators to think about informal and independent learning in alternate ways.

However, broken or absent features make it difficult to recommend as a serious e-learning platform or an LMS. Indeed, existing Web 2.0 systems–either independently or in tandem–offer better core functionality (e.g. WordPress, MediaWiki), and we can think of other specifically educational platforms that would probably serve as well or better. For instance, the commercial LMS provider Instructure offers free individual course accounts to instructors as well as a public course option for informal open courses. Instructure Canvas is a more mature and feature-rich LMS platform that should not be ignored by open educators and educational theorists. And, of course, open source-minded folks would can just host their own instance Moodle or Sakai. (It’s somewhat surprising that Nixty didn’t build itself on either of these platforms, which are also full-featured and more mature.)

The fact that Nixty is new forces something of a catch-22: many self-directed learners and open educators won’t want to invest the time in using it until a critical mass of users can support those experiences; yet not critical mass is possible without users committing the system.

Despite its weaknesses Nixty is an interesting project, and we’ll be watching as its development progresses in the coming months and years. At this stage at least, Nixty is missing too many features, exhibits too many bugs, and offers little new affordances for us to encourage its adoption at this stage for anything except experimental open educational experiences.

• Assess or track student learning so as to provide formative or summative feedback (e.g. gradebooks, learner analytics, quizzes)
• Share and sequence learning materials–both locally-produced and external content (e.g. wiki pages, documents, multimedia, web pages)
• Facilitate learning communities, both their formation and persistence (e.g. learner identity profiles, discussions, chat rooms, blog aggregation)
• Communicate with learners in order to explore topics, negotiate meaning, and provide feedback, whether those interactions are expert-to-learner, peer-to-peer, content-to-learner, self-reflective (e.g. e-mail, discussion, scoring rubrics, voice/video messaging)
• Aggregate or publish learners’ academic work, either within a “walled-garden” or to the public (e.g. portfolios, blogs, wikis, document sharing)

Dear CLIENT,

Today, we’ve announced that Elluminate, Wimba, and Blackboard will join forces to bring together the leading technology products for synchronous learning and collaboration – and the minds that created them – in what we hope will be a major step forward to pursue new innovation.

We’ve heard directly from you, our clients, that these products are rapidly growing in importance as formal and informal collaboration – in a variety of settings within and beyond the delivery of online courses – becomes increasingly fundamental to the learning process. But you’ve also told us much more is needed to realize the full potential of these solutions for impacting education.

Our combination is a union of like-minded, education-focused organizations to invest in and pursue this greater potential. Working together to form a new and independent Blackboard Collaborate platform group, we believe we can accelerate innovation in technology for collaboration within and across educational institutions, as well as add great value to the interactions between these systems and asynchronous learning platforms. And we can do so at a rate faster, and to an end much more impactful for educators, than any of our organizations could have achieved alone. The new platform group will operate under the strategic guidance of Ray Henderson, who oversees Blackboard’s overall teaching and learning strategy, and will be led by Elluminate’s Maurice Heiblum, who will assume the role of President, Blackboard Collaborate.

As excited as we are about the longer term promise of working together in this way, we realize that as clients of Elluminate and Wimba you will naturally be concerned about the short-term impacts of this news. Our pledge to you is to make our first focus sustaining the positive experience that both of these communities currently enjoy. Further, we will also sustain the goal of improving collaboration broadly, rather than exclusively for those using Blackboard learning management products. In that regard, we will continue current Elluminate and Wimba integration work for open source products, and it is our strategy to sustain those bridges with other commercial LMS providers as well.

Once we’ve ensured that a smooth transition is underway, we’ll begin the work of shaping a combined vision for Collaborate by working in combination with members of both client communities. In the meantime, we’re actively seeking to learn about specific questions or concerns you may have and hear any early ideas for how we can improve your current experience with our products or better integrate them with whatever learning management technology your institution prefers.

Please feel free to channel your thoughts directly to our executive team at collaborateleadership@blackboard.com. We’ve also established an information resource with anticipated FAQs that we’ll update with your input. We’re very optimistic about the benefit that our collective investment in, and passion for, education collaboration can produce for clients. We’re looking forward to digging in together.

Yours Sincerely,

Michael L. Chasen                     Nashir Samanani
President & CEO                       CEO & Founder
Blackboard Inc.                        Elluminate Inc.  

Carol Vallone                             Ray Henderson
CEO & Chairman of the Board       President
Wimba Inc.                               Blackboard Learn

Blackboard’s cautiously crafted language suggests this is a “strategic partnership” rather than a merger or buy-out. There’s a little additional info to be found on the Blackboard web site, but not much.

UPDATE: The Wimba web site confirms that this is another planned Blackboard acquisition, “for a total of approximately $116 million in cash” (more Bb-polished details here).

Though Bb claims, “we will continue current Elluminate and Wimba integration work for open source products” one has to wonder how much the leading commercial LMS provider will do to support it’s greatest marketshare competitor, the open source Moodle. Note also the careful use of “current”, suggesting that after Elluminate and Wimba are combined into Bb Collaborate, this integration work may cease.

To remedy this I have, for quite some time, maintained a custom bit of very basic Javascript and CSS that sets the default view of news items to hidden, with a clickable link to show the entire list from the My Moodle page:

Nothing fancy, and even as I look at it now I can think of improvements…

We just upgraded to 1.9.8 this semester, and because this snippet modifies Moodle core I had my developer Kevin re-test the snippet before I asked our server admin Paul to replace the existing function as follows:

file Location:            '/course/lib.php'
file line:                    "800"
function to replace: "function print_overview($courses)"

Here’s the actual replacement function:

A Brief Tour of Moodle 2.0

www.youtube.com/watch?v=56W-ZQ3dK3w

2.0 includes an entire rewrite of my favorite Moodle tool, the collaborative Workshops activity:

Moodle Workshops 2.0

www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCT8Tm32e1k

Because we’ve been anticipating its release since early 2008 my co-worker Ken jokes that Moodle 2.0 is vaporware, the Duke Nukem Forever of LMS. I joked that we should call it Twoodle. But seriously, I’m still hoping we’ll see an official, stable release by Fall 2010.

As I reviewed the video I noticed I had made a handful of mis-statements that I should correct here:

• Martin Dougiamas is from Australia, not New Zealand.
• The book I reference at the beginning as inspiring me to rethink Moodle was Jason Cole’s “Using Moodle”
• Our Banner system talks to Moodle via a Luminus Message Broker plug-in, not LDAP (we use LDAP for WordPress MU)
• When I talk about adaptive quizzing, I meant to refer to educational research on web-based/hypermedia learning from the last decade or so.
• Though the Workshop tool has been dropped from Moodle 2.0, its functionality will not be replaced in the Assignment tool–instead a new Workshop tool is in development for 2.0

To be clear, we don’t really know what a model PLN looks like, or how it works, or if it’s efficient; we may not even know what the difference between a PLE and a PLN is. It may be that the one thing we can say definitively is we don’t know what a PLN looks like, for any two are unlikely to be the same. It may be that we want a PLN to resist being reified. When I think of a PLN/PLE I try to keep it open-ended; I conjecture that it is shaped by habits formed in the accomplishment of daily tasks, is connected to resources for discovery of new information, and is fostered by social relationships that may be authentic and trusting or merely incidental, built by one-to-one/one-to-many communications. Many of the facets of a PLN–but especially the social aspects–are increasingly open to the world.

I think we know what a LMS looks like: it is typically a monolithic, institutionally-controlled system that provides user accounts and digital space for the tasks of teaching and learning. A LMS is likely to allow file storage and redistribution, private and public communication, user tracking and logging, assignment management, timed/semi-secure assessment, and so on. Even more so than a traditional classroom, a LMS course environment is nearly always closed to the world.

Jon hit most of the primary strengths and weaknesses of each already, but I wanted to add or expand the list a little, but really just take this chance to brain dump and play both sides of a still relevant issue:

LMS Strengths

1. One-stop shopping. Not only do instructors build everything in one place, students can reach all aspects of the course in a single silo (except in the case of ePacks). Related: tools look and act similarly.
2. Bred by educators. Features are based on feedback and requests from a community of educators (theoretically).
3. Attention of ed tech market. Not only to CIOs attend to education-centric software products, third-party companies (textbook publishers to advanced communication tools such as Wimba) build content and products to work with the LMS.
4. Many models of academic use are available as examples or objects of criticism, especially in fully online courses.
5. Potentially greater latitude in using third-party materials under Fair Use or TEACH act. At any rate, many vague, fuzzy, or even illegal uses of third-party material by faculty are masked by closed system.
6. A closed environment–the metaphorical “walled garden”–may encourage students to freely express themselves.

LMS Weaknesses

1. LMS companies seem prone to buy-out, and thus may “pull the rug” out from adoptive institutions.
2. Adoption often requires licensing, which may inhibit switching, or may impel adoption of new versions.
3. Quality of third-party products and integration is often poor, inhibiting access and blemishing the experience.
4. Improvements, features, and fixes are historically are slow.
5. Design may encourage outdated, limiting, or less effective teaching practices.
6. With the exception of Moodle and Sakai, most LMS are closed source (in spite of Blackboard’s claims to be “open”).

PLE Strengths

1. Tools are based on “real world” needs, uses, and practices, and are more likely to be “authentic”.
2. Tools are likely to be coded or scripted according to broadly adopted standards.
3. Stability may be based on community adoption and support as well as financial viability.
4. Students may engage with communities of practice—real experts operating in their profession.
5. 50 Million Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong. Unable to rely upon corporate contracts or other adoption criteria, Web 2.0 tools rely on continued user support and expanded adoption.

PLE Weaknesses

1. Few models or case studies to use as examples or objects of criticism.
2. Tools often require terms of service agreements peculiar to the product company.
3. Likely not designed specifically for education.
4. For interoperability or data harvesting data must be both open and standardized.
5. Related to institutional control of data, data may be impermanent.
6. Some individuals may disdain open publishing or prefer to maintain privacy.

As our semester crawled into the second week and I began to enter scores and feedback for the students’ first assignment–a blog post–I noticed a couple unusual features:

1. When a student submits an URL for an assignment, Instructure grabs a screenshot of the rendered URL in addition to providing a hyperlink. This ensures that students actually have completed what they claim to have completed at the time of submission.
2. Students and instructors can each reply to an assignment’s score and feedback seamlessly within the system. For instance, after I submitted scores for this first assignment, one student explained in the assignment feedback why I failed to notice that she had in fact completed the assignment. I confirmed this, changed her score, and replied back, much like I would in private e-mail, but without any of the hassle of opening a message, choosing an addressee, etc.

Not only is this feedback discussion feature both seamless and the default, I can also use a built-in rubric, attach individual files (though Instructure has an even better way to upload assignment feedback en masse) and even record audio feedback inline (uses a Flash-based plug-in [still buggy for me on Win 7 in FF3]).

This is a great way to negotiate feedback and scoring with students. This also provides an opportunity for learners to engage in the assessment process. And since the features on this particular tool are easy and even intuitive to use, there is no excuse for accurate, timely corrective feedback that is understood by both instructor and learner.

How do (students’ | faculty | staff) attitudes toward institutional learning and communication systems differ from attitudes toward informal learning and communication systems?

This isn’t nearly as relevant to the WPMU system as originally intended, but I do expect to be able to address the system through this survey without overwhelming participants. Some of the survey questions that pop into mind ask about personal use of social media, perceptions of institutional technology, relevance of both toward learning, perceived efficiency for learning, likelihood of using new institutional technology, etc.

I’m posting this here in case any readers (who I haven’t lost yet through neglect) have ideas on how to keep this useful while maintaining a sharp focus. Suggested questions are, of course, welcome.

I have been critical about aspects of LMSs in the past. I’ve been critical of Blackboard in particular–primarily because of my complaints about the functionality of the Vista LMS, the “must use standard LMS for everything” attitude of some university CIOs, and Blackboard’s past behavior with respect to patent claims. And while one professor encouraged me to wear my “Supporting Innovation, Not Suing It” t-shirt to class, and while I at some point last night woke up saying, “If we tell you all our ideas, will you patent them and sell them to us later?”, I wanted to open my mind to the potentials of the discussion and not be obtuse as a matter of course.

(The following notes identify ideas by speaker, but please note that the words are only verbatim if I use quotes.)

Dr. Wiley began by directing us to consider the history of the LMS, it’s purpose as manifest through functionality and initial usage experiences. A common conclusion was the LMS attempted to replicate what happens in the classroom online: requiring little faculty tech expertise, providing quizzes, assigns, grades, content delivery (paper reduct), discussions [JMS: yes and no. online discussions are both similar and dramatically dissimilar], admin and teaching functions, and integration with campus academic and student information systems.

In response to our growing list, Russ responded, “This is just a collection of things… but there is new capability, and by tying the corporation together we enable new processes. Technology enabled a transformation.”

(JMS: Agreed as a potential. Technology is nothing without appropriate training and inspiration on proper educational application. Through the LMS we quickly accomplished teaching with technology, but not technology-enhanced teaching. But if we ask, how can we leverage technology to make teaching and learning better and easier? We must examine our educational goals, audience, and environment. We must problem-solve, creatively using applications of the available tools.

(Also, there are some ways in which the technology itself has changed the way we teach, albeit slowly:)

1. Quizzes become more reasonable as self-assessments and formative learning activities when done online
2. Discussions become fully participatory, time-liberated dialogs that allow participants to branch and focus on strands that are personally relevant.
3. Digital content is searchable – discussions, texts, etc. This provides different, easier, faster access to materials and ideas that support a participant’s focused interest

We began speaking of the cultural shift associated with (or accompanied by) Web 2.0, and how that may impact education.

Justin makes the good point, if LMs is adaptation of teaching, it also seems this idea of PLE/PLN is just a 2nd generation adaptation of the LMS, i.e., teachers consider, How can I do X, Y, Z — which I did in the LMS easily — without the LMS?

JMS: Some who look at the PLE see it as something constructed by new media, connectivism, not as a substitute for the LMS. Those folks admit they don’t know what a PLE looks like and are uncertain if learning outcomes are similarly measurable. Those most comfortable with the idea of a PLE have some confidence in the organic conditions of it as a learning environment, despite it’s fuzziness.

Granted, some do see the PLE simply as an escape from the LMS, and even though they might be trying to simply recreate what they did in the LMS, they can gain some advantages just by being open: Openness, adaptable, personalized, ownership, persistence, authenticity.

I caught something of Justin saying that the open source (OSS) community is ignoring hard problems… OSS technology fails to provide sophisticated learning features like adaptive release, adaptive testing… The OSS community not taking it on…

(JMS: I accept that specific example as an inadequacy of available open PLE/PLN or Web 2.0 tools. There aren’t currently automatic gatekeeping (pre-programmed or “smart”) tools for PLE/PLN tools and media. Siemens and others might say teachers are naturally the gatekeepers. Users are the gatekeepers (though perhaps this is inadequate). Or maybe we don’t need those gatekeepers at all, that is, we can encourage the fundamentals of information fluency by directing students to assess and re-direct themselves.)

JMS: OS community is not taking on education in general. Why would they? Education is still a niche. Adaptive release is a very education-centered feature. OSS e-learning, like Moodle, include or plan to include it.

David Wiley: “Data. Through the LMS I can capture and use data in a way I never could before.” Also, liberty of users to control consumption of content. E.g. playing course media at 2x speed.

Justin Johansen: Teachers can teach to a style, users can adapt to their preferences (disruptive).

Sara Joy challenges, suggested/asked if LMS can be a “disruptive technology”.

David: At USU an instructor with no budget for “clickers” went to the dollar store and bought $1 laser pointers to accomplish the same thing. Throw up a slide, students with laser pointers indicate choices anonymously on screen. It’s personalized (and probably more fun).

Russ: “Isn’t one of the fundamental issues also location independence?”

Justin: “Definitely, esp. when gas prices were $4/gallon.”

Dr. Wiley whips out slides of 6 changes:

• analog –> digital
• tethered –> mobile
• consume –> create
• generic –> personalized
• isolated –> connected
• closed –> open

Jon Mott: There’s a book about organizations being like spiders, which can regrow a leg, or starfish, which have legs that, if severed, can grow into a new starfish. Are we like spiders or starfish? Best organizations are hybrids. Starfish-like activities. eBay features of a spider.

JMS: Some in education want that severed starfish leg to turn into a bird. But education’s history doesn’t show that we’re evolutionary–there’s no dramatic mutation between generations that changes the species. Education is certainly not, historically, subject to revolution either! It’s adaptation at best. It’s incremental change.

Aaron Johnson: Web 2.0 can be transformative in, for instance, using a blog publishes homework online, for the world to see–maximal exposure.

Dr. Wiley points out that several class blog posts have been picked up by Stephen Downes, which impacts the community, impacts the class, impacts the writer.

Justin: In the old system publishing homework was your mom putting your assignment on the fridge with a magnet.

Aaron: It’s also transformative in a way that democratizes access. But how are things changing in how people behave and interact? Do I get more out of that?

(JMS: We’ve seen that young people’s sense of privacy may be changing, and also that online exposure can bite us in the rear.)

Justin: I haven’t had a transformative e-learning experience in the classroom discussion forum. It’s usually, “do this boring thing for class or else”.

JMS: I have. (That’s what put me in e-learning over a decade ago, and I have them with some regularity now)

Jon: I learn something everyday on Twitter. I follow about 150 people, all of the ed tech related. My network has expanded, and for the better.

JMS: And learn to filter junk out, hopefully!

Russ: Yes, adding people, one by one… “adding diversity, accumulating collected knowledge… but at some point you reach a threshold.”

JMS: At first there’s a lot of noise, but you learn to filter that out, or cut it out. I follow around 60 people, but that changes from week to week. I’ll follow a lot of people who I will later un-follow, not because I don’t like them, but because their use of Twitter may not contribute to or match my own personal way of valuing Twitter. (JMS: I’ve talked too much. Time to listen more.)

Aaron: A lot of us still use the web for adaptations of normal life. Despite my tech-savvy nature, I hear about Web 2.0 stuff and I think do I really need that? Is the real transformation in the things that we do, or in helping people understand what they can do now, with this ability to use technoloy?

Jon: Novelty of technology is not enough. You have to be evaluative. How is using this going to help me? I user twitter not to be social, but to be professional.

JMS: The beauty of these tools is the personalization. The beauty of the PLE is the personalization.

Jon: I’ve used delicious for my own purposes, but have finally found a use for it in collaborative environment.

Justin: (To his group) Why aren’t we using delicious on our OER project?

(JMS: Note to self, we might put our group’s open ed project links list on a wiki instead of a Google Spreadsheet. Then reach out to community and get additional links for free.)

We somehow manage to move the conversation back to the future of the LMS.

JMS: I see the future of the LMS being not a replication of these open, existing tools, but a way to structure, organize, and adaptively control or smart-sequence these. As Justin pointed it, adaptive releasing, setting and resetting paths, etc.

Justin: Would we, by using the LMS as a place to integrate Web 2.0, personalized tools, push folks away from using those tools?

(JMS: Is Justin talking about the creepy treehouse-ness? I don’t get a chance to ask…)

Russ: “Is it not a false choice to give proprietary vs open source? … Is it not a distinction without a difference?”

(JMS: There are potential advantages in both that we should not lightly dismiss, e.g. proprietary may have quality advances, resource advantages, corporate attention, collaborative integration and first-choice with publishers; openness may have adaptability, customization, lower cost, ownership. [To me the subscription model is so painful, I personally want the ability to keep and maintain code perpetually, for example, stay at WebCT CE 4.1 for a decade if we wished.])

Russ: For a while technology was pulling the practice, but now (as we talk about web 2.0 tools) but now it seems we’ve flipped that.

Wiley: “Forget open code source for a minute. Forget APIs. Look at YouTube, Flickr, GoogleMaps. They all have a common language: RSS. APIs are great if you like that. But these tools are bleeding syndication, and they don’t punish you for mashing it up.”

John Hilton: Free access vs. open source vs. paid license.

Jon: “Once upon a time there was a Blackboard.com where you could create your own course for free.”

Russ: “It’s back.”

So we are talking about interoperability of the learning object (LTI)?

Wiley: “But LTI is so complex. RSS is sooo easy. Some clever folks, like Tony Hirst, will use Pipes or APIs. There’s technical accessibility, then there’s an expertise-less accessibility.

Jon: Having APIs and web services is critical. Maybe we need more than single sign-on.

Russ: “To Dave’s point about the data, if you want to use the data you have to have that captured in an environment.”

(JMS: Data can be made accessible through APIs, no?)

Jon: Livetext does program assessment and portfolios. You can build and expose your portfolio. Creators can easily export.

Dave: Yes, let’s just get data out of the end. Because even with standards everyone speaks their own dialect.

Aaron: Searchable.

John: By Google?

Aaron: Internally? Or… What do we mean by LMS for open ed?

Wiley: “Simplest example–and OCW is 1.0 simple–I built my course in Bb. How do I publish as OER? I probably need 30hrs to do it.” (JMS: Push-button public publishing?) Content publishing, content importing.

Justin: A lot of our Bb courses are full of PDFs, PPTs, DOCs, maybe HTML…

Aaron: What does Bb add in terms of content ability? It sounds like you’re talking about the same thing, replicating a course structure. Or how do you get the content out without having it trapped in the LMS’s structure?

JMS: You could do it both ways:

JMS: You have a “repository”, though I dislike that word. It’s a plain web server, or a wiki, or WP, or even an LMS repository. It contains the content–PDFs, PPTs, DOCs, HTML. You can share those straight off of the repository as disagreggated pieces. OR you can link to them directly from your individual LMS course structure. This eliminates course-to-course redundancy. OR you can link to them directly from your opencourseware platform. AND/OR your LMS has a way to select which pieces of the individual course to “open”, and then publishes an open version of your course with some parts hidden.

Wiley mentions OpenShare mod.

JMS: OpenShare does part of this for Moodle: lets you incrementally tag license metadata for resources and activities, and then mark those resources and activities as open or closed. Public can view those open items; registered students can view all the items.