Flexknowlogy – Jared Stein

The OpenShare block in Moodle

Tonight I’ve released the first all-new version of the OpenShare modification for Moodle 1.9, which I demonstrated last week at OpenEd 2008.

You may view OpenShare documentation or simply download the OpenShare mod now.

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Our Chief Information Office, Ray Walker sent me an article in The Chronicle: Blackboard Customers Consider Alternatives. It’s a great read to gauge the current state of the corporate LMS leviathan.

One passage in particular percolated my sense of irony. In addressing the idea that institutions may have more flexibility to innovate with open source solutions, Michael Chasen… (more…)

UEN and USHE are hosting a showcase of current learning management systems tomorrow, August 14th, at the Marriott library in Salt Lake City. I get to present Moodle at 9:30am, so here’s a quick link to my Moodle Demo presentation page, which includes an overview document and a backchannel for chat.

Today I am presenting at the SFo MoodleMoot on how Moodle can be used to deliver Open Educational Resources, especially through our modification of Moodle, the Open Meta Mod.

Presentation slides are now available and you are welcome to participate in the backchannel through the chat window provided below.

Presentation Slides

openmod.ppt

Web Sites Referenced

• OpenCourseWare Consortium
• Open Educational Resources Commons
• David Wiley’s OpenContent Wiki
• David Wiley’s OpenContent blog
• Utah Open High School
• Creative Commons licenses
• MIT’s “Making the Case for OCW”
• Why a Reputation Economy?
• UK’s Open University LearningSpace
• OpenContentDIY
• Leigh Blackall’s slide on Another Way

P.S. After my presentation was over, I came back to my hotel to find this bus in the parking lot. It’s nothing less than a sign for a questioning open education convert.

After a year-long developer famine, we now have a new Web developer who is assisting us on revivifying the Moodle Open MetaMod project as part of his duties.

In a nutshell: the primary goal of the mod is to allow individual resources OR activities within a Moodle course to be “open” to either non-authenticated visitors or a custom role called “Open User”. There are a number of secondary goals related to intellectual property metadata (e.g. Creative Commons). Much of the information posted here is based on the “official” Open MetaMod page at our Meta Web site.

Project Status

• We have recently corrected errors in the 1.8x version for use in Moodle 1.84.
• The current version of the mod works only on mySQL, though Mr. Sergio Sama Villanueva at Universidad de Oviedo in Spain has added PostgreSQL support, and so adding that to our install package and testing is a high priority.
• Mr. Villanueva has added other features as well, which we plan to test and evaluate.
• We also have a short list of usability alterations and feature enhancements to implement.
• We are working on an update for 1.9 this spring. We hope to present that broadly for feedback from the Moodle community, starting at the June Moodle Moot in San Francisco.
• We plan to host a Moodle 1.9 public instance with several UVU opencourses, and providing pre-made user accounts for teachers, students, and “open users” to test the mod.

Download the Open MetaMod for Moodle 1.8x

Users interested in testing the latest released beta version of the Open MetaMod may download the following ZIP file:

Open MetaMod for Moodle 1.8x

Note that this version of the mod works only on Moodle 1.8x installations on mySQL. A PostgreSQL version is forthcoming. Additionally, unlike previous versions, this version of the mod does not have an installer, and files must be modified manually. In short: use at your own risk!

Detailed Overview of the Open MetaMod

Open MetaMod is a modification for the Moodle learning management system that provides instructors and designers with the ability to mark individual Resources or Activities within a Moodle course as “private” (only visible for registered students) or “shared” (allowing anonymous guest viewing).

A new third option for Moodle Activities, “open”, allows registered non-student users to interact with the class in Moodle activities. This is different from “shared”, as it allows authenticated users on the Moodle system who are not officially registered for the course to interact with students and instructors on the discussion board, take quizzes, complete activities, contribute to wikis, etc.

Instructors and designers can mark resources or activities as “Copyright cleared/Creative Commons” and as “shared” either individually through the normal course module/block interface, or en masse through the Open Settings in the Administration block. All Creative Commons license types are supported in the latest version of the Open MetaMod

Tagging Individual Resources/Activities’ Copyright Status

Note: The default tag of all resources and activities is copyrighted. This is done intentionally to inhibit the accidental sharing of copyrighted course materials.

1. To tag individual resources or activities with a copyright status, first enter your Moodle course and click Turn editing on.
2. Next to each resource or activity you will note either a red “C” indicating Copyrighted or a green “CC” indicating Copyright Cleared/Creative Commons:

   

   • Clicking the red “C” or the green “CC” will toggle the copyright status of this resource/activity.
   • Only resources/activities tagged as “CC” are eligible to be “shared”.

Marking Individual Resources/Activities as “Shared” or “Private”

Note: Changing the copyright status of a resource marked as “shared” from “CC” to “C” will automatically disable the shared status.

• After a resource/activity has been tagged as “CC”, the grayed-out door icon will become clickable.
• “CC” resources/activities default to “private”, indicated by a brown closed door icon.
• Clicking the door icon will toggle the private/shared status of this resource/activity.
• “Shared” resources are indicated by a glass door icon.
• An open door icon, which indicates a fully “Open” status.

Making Copyright Status and Shared Status Changes En Masse

Tagging and marking individual resources seems pretty onerous, right? Well, this is purposefully the case so that instructors/designers are forced to consider the copyright status of each and every resources or activity.

However, we’ve also accomodated the need to tag and mark multiple resources and activities simultaneously with the OCW Settings link, found in the Administration block.

• To tag a subset of resources/activities as Copyright cleared/Creative Commons, simply click the checkbox next to the resource/activity group.
• At the top or bottom of the page, click Save Changes.
• Clicking Save Changes on the Copyright Status page takes you into the Private/Shared Status page.
• Only resources/activities marked as “CC” will be eligible for “shared” or “open” status.
• To toggle a subset of resources/activities as either “private” or “shared”, simply click the appropriate radio button next to the resource/activity group.

Terminology

C

Copyright This indicates that a resources or activity is protected by copyright law, and should not be made available to the general public. For one’s own protection, one might best assume that all resources or activities are de facto copyrighted<./dd>

CC

Copyright Cleared or Creative Commons license. This refers generally to the idea that a particular resources is legally eligible to be made available to the general public. Ensuring the Copyright Cleared or Creative Commons license status of a resource and activity is solely the responsibility of the instructor or course designer.

private

Indicates that a resource or activity should only be available to registered Moodle users who are also enrolled in the course.

shared

Indicates that a resource or activity should be viewable to both registered Moodle users who are also enrolled in the course as well as anonymous Moodle guests.

open

Indicates that an activity should be fully accessible to registered Moodle users regardless of whether or not they are officially enrolled in the course. If a course allows “Guest access”, anonymous Moodle guests may view but not interact with “open” activities. Note: This feature is not available in the current version of the Open MetaMod for Moodle.

Before responding to the (apparently provocative) question posed by Chris Lott this week, “What does your PLE look like?”, I have one genuine question that precludes defining one’s PLE (playing into the indictment of the concept in what D’Arcy Norman initially showed as his PLE) is what is the utilitarian scope of a PLE? Presumptively we are primarily talking about networked utilities (e-mail, Web) but clearly also just plain digital utilities (computer, files [I think Ray mentioned desktop searching]), now how about the physical realm? My office? My phone? Pens and papers? My bookshelf? My colleague’s office? The library?

I ask this question without facetiousness, because if we’re talking about a holistic look at individuals learning environment, we certainly don’t want to restrict it to Web, and I even think just brainstorming the variety and interconnectedness of utilities and tools in our non-digital learning environment(s) may validly inform our digital ones, and can provide anecdotes through which we can better adapt (ourselves and others) to the online tools.

As far as my PLE, though I outlined a laundry list in your wiki, I’m now trying to think about it more organically. I’m currently toying with conceptualizing my digital PLE through a metaphor of physical space, with interconnected rooms and even “wormholes” that take me in and out of the “real” world. While at first I imagined this as a house with multi-doored, hexagonal rooms and intermediary halls (plus windows one can jump out of and back into the “real world”),

Walter R. Tschinkel’s cast of an ant colony, The nest architecture of the Florida harvester ant

it might end up being more simply sketched as the architecture of an ant colony. This latter metaphor is probably seems particularly apt to anyone who knows me, as my “train of thought” is more akin to a state of ants scurrying from one point to another as they forage with semi-obscured motivations and objectives, constantly adjusting based on new and immediate information.

I’ve read a number of blog posts and articles about learning management systems (LMS) and personal learning environments (PLE) as of late. LMSs, once the darling of educational technologists, have been getting a sound thwacking inspired by the recent Blackboard patent lawsuit victory. In almost a stars-aligning continuity, PLEs have been gaining more attention and support as “Web 2.0″ technologies have improved, broadened, and gained in popularity amongst communities. Several aspects of both have risen to the top of my constantly-refilled cup of questioning: LMS as a “walled garden”, PLE as perhaps pedagogically superior but strategically tenuous or immature, and the lack of full debates between the two approaches to technology-enhanced education.

George Siemens blogs up just exactly the news I’m interested in week after week, and on the 28th he posted up a reference to Peter Tittenberger’s short piece The Strength of Garden Walls found on his a touch of frost blog. This article describes the percieved value of institutionally administered learning management systems and social software tools as “walled gardens” for their ability to provide teacher control over user access to learning materials and tools, and the distribution of the participants’ input and output.

(I should restate that, for most institutionally administered social software tools are set up specifically to inhibit or even disallow public access and public viewing, often out of fear of legal repercussions for providing access to students’ personally identifiable information (e.g. in the United States, FERPA in higher education and K-12). For example, LMS’s natively restrict public access, typically don’t allow publishing of student work outside the password-protected site, and authentication access is often provided only through the institution’s student information system. So walled gardens don’t really provide teachers with control, they simply give teachers a box of handcuffs, sans keys.)

My perception is that most of the prominent folks involved in new teaching and educational technology believe that the walled garden approach is “bad”, that LMSs are “bad”, and that open, learner-centered strategies, such as personal learning environments (PLE) are “good” (or at least “better”) because they better reflect or adapt to current Internet-driven trends in networked information and social connectivity. To elaborate:

• Educators who believe in fostering authentic learning experiences have become increasingly disillusioned with the walled garden of the LMS. Increasingly popular “real world” Web-based social software has cast many LMS tools as redundant.

• Many institutionally adopted learning tools, driven by the perceived needs of the institution, directed by non-faculty IT, and limited by the pace of administration, are rarely able to maintain currency with readily available “real world” tools simply because the institution has neither a massive, global audience to demand innovations, nor the breadth of competitive capitalism to fund and incentivize them. Tools provided by education-centric companies such as Blackboard often come in packages, overproduced versions of real-world tools tightly bound to provide a one-stop-shopping experience, and therefore a supposed panacea for all educational technology needs. Few Web application companies would commit such an act hubris–Google has proven itself fairly capable of such a Heraclean act, with competitors Yahoo! and even Microsoft taking tentative stabs of their own.

• Educators personally committed to ideals and philosophies of openness–open source, open access, open publishing–are also frustrated with LMSs and other institutionally controlled software for their innate closed-ness through restriction of access for both contributors and readers.

• And while distinctions between the accuracy of definitions and theories of collective intelligence and connective intelligence are being debated, they share a common recognition that there is significant value in community-involved (influenced?) and socially-invigorated education. Educators who ascribe to such learning theories also find the walled garden approach to be too limiting and lacking provisions for social networking within the institution, let alone the world.

These common postures (I’m abusing that word this week–thanks, Scott) taken against the “walled garden” approach to educational technology are sound, but I do not want to suggest that the LMS is therefore obsolete, for I have presented (and probably insufficiently) only one side of the issue. I daresay there are as many sound arguments the use of walled gardens and even the traditional LMS. And though I have seen Scott Leslie weigh pro’s and cons of “loosely coupled” approaches and even one or two ed tech bloggers recognize the continuing significance of the LMS, I’ve not yet seen a full and complete debate involving people genuinely committed to each of the two sides. (If anyone is game for staging one, my alter-ego would be happy to suppress my doubts completely and take the pro-LMS side–in fact, my ego would probably not let me resign that side to anyone else!)

In my opinion, a really good debate on the subject would illustrate philosophical differences between the two sides, and might even invoke political stances (technology adoption in education [if not pedagogy in general] as “conservative” vs. “progressive”; information access and publishing as an issue of power, definable through capitalist or socialist anarchist ideals, etc).

Even if the outcome of such a debate was largely in favor of an authenticopenconnectedcollective strategy, there are of course still questions about how a PLE is LE really looks and acts like, if it is teachable. Just today on Twitter there were a number of provocative questions about the value of PLE, either as a term or as a “single”, methodological approach.

Add to that the problem that I personally still can not say with total conviction that the LMS is obsolete. Folks like myself have talked up the potential value of PLEs, but broad adoption of the PLE is currently impossible because key technologies and services are still being developed (e.g. good hubs of aggregation [go eduGlu]) or have not yet been widely adopted (e.g. OpenID). Compound that with faculty and administrative anxieties regarding new technologies and teaching approaches, and I can only conclude that the LMS will be around for a long time yet. So until fully viable (every need) and broadly accessible (every application) alternative strategies and methods become available, we might as well openly examine, in good-faith, the value of the LMS, the benefits of walled garden systems, and our reasonings for choosing one or the other.

I am a bit miserable about a series of questions that I whipped up for a survey device at the request of an instructor who teaches a Distance Education course.

Not only do I disagree with the instructor’s desired objectives in using this survey (she essentially hopes to prove that the reason students are failing her online course is because they are under-prepared or have wrong assumptions about online education–of course it couldn’t have anything to do with the fact that the course has nearly no media-enhanced learning, no student-student contact, and very little student-instructor interaction), I disagree with the questions that I wrote.

Of course anyone who has written survey questions with a mind to gain accurate and insightful information on the participants knows what a challenge the task is from the get-go; I don’t kid myself that it’s no easy endeavor, but I also think there has to be a better way.

Among my primary objectives in writing the questions were the following ideas:

• Keep the survey short, so that students would actually do it.
• Have some redundancy to check for accuracy and inhibit prejudicial responses.
• Avoid asking questions that dare students to label themselves “dumb”.
• Avoid questions that tempted students into labeling themselves “smart”.

But the primary objective was essentially this: after reading a good number of “student readiness” surveys online I wanted to avoid asking questions that gauged a student’s willingness to partake in a lonesome independent study course. “Independent study” is not equivalent to modern “distance education” in the Stein dictionary (in fact, even “distance education” is not equivalent to “distance education” in the Stein dictionary, but that’s another story). And so though several of my questions are based on the questions asked in other “distance education” surveys, I purposefully steered away from presumptive questions like:

Feeling that I am part of a class is:
a. Not particularly necessary to me.
b. Somewhat important to me.
c. Very important to me.

As if being “part of a class” is somehow mutually exclusive from distance learning! And it’s not that I’m opposed to independent study types of courses; in fact, I myself greatly enjoy and grow in isolation, but I recognize that’s not necessarily the norm.

Then there are questions that perpetuate instructors’ presumptions that they can get back to distance students at their leisure:

My comfort level with waiting a few days to receive instructor feedback is..
Low   Moderate   High

While it may be an unfortunate reality in distance education programs that instructors do often delay responding to students (I recommend a 24 hour turn around at the latest), we certainly don’t want to encourage that behavior, nor do we want to discourage student expectations of their instructors.

Finally, I also have disagreements with the term “student readiness” in general, as that tends to automatically place the blame for student failure at the feet of the students. Jared Spool, a Web usability expert whom I greatly admired, once inspired me to make the following provocative paraphrase, There are no user errors, only
design errors. And while I recognize that this statement is not universally true, it does challenge the designer (in this case, the instructor or the instructor’s instructional designer) to reconsider blaming the user (aka student) for failing to complete the task.

My Questions

Even though I have a pretty good insight into what I think is wrong with so many “student readiness” surveys, I still had a hard time making my fundamentally different. But I’ll share them here anyway, with the hopes that some brainy folks can offer better suggestions to achieve the same general objective: determine if our students are adequately prepared–both mentally and technically–for an online course experience.

(Note: these questions are randomized in the final survey to mask redundancy.)

Options: Strongly Agree | Agree | Disagree | Strongly Disagree
1. I often get things done ahead of time.
2. I can work independently and meet deadlines without being reminded.
3. I learn best through live classroom discussions.
4. I am comfortable engaging in class discussions on the Web.
5. If given clear instructions, I am confident that I can complete the assignment independently.
6. I often need to have instructions for an assignment clarified or explained more than once.
7. As a reader, I sometimes need help to understand the text.
8. When I need help understanding the subject, I am comfortable e-mailing an instructor to ask for clarification.
9. When I don’t understand something I’ve read, I ask the instructor to explain it as soon as possible.
10. I am very competent using e-mail and Web sites.
11. I am a skilled writer.
12. I don’t always comprehend what I read.
13. I expect to spend less time on an Distance Education course than a regular on-campus course.
14. I often put things off until the last minute
15. I expect a Distance Education course to be easier than a regular on-campus course.

If you hate these questions, give me something better.

And if you like them, you can download them here (This survey is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.):

• DE Readiness Survey (survey).zip Blackboard Vista IMS Survey version
• DE Readiness Survey (quiz).zip Blackboard Vista IMS Quiz version (scored for a “perfect” student)
• DE Readiness Survey.txt Moodle GIFT format (scored for a “perfect” student)