Rocket Science

At the Technology For Education 2009 conference in Bangalore, India there were a number of presentations that have caused me a sense of deja vu (and not just in me, I was at the meeting with Vijay Kumar and he agreed as well).

There are professors talking about the technology they’re using for education, and probably some of them really, really believe they’re doing something new and exciting. But, are they really?

One of the first presentations was about learning objects and metadata. I think it’s 2009, but the presentation was back from the days of 2001 or 2002. Frankly, I’m surprised folks are still talking about learning objects, and the metadata standards used to describe them in the way the speaker did.

Times change, or maybe the world changes–the notions of social media, folksonomies, communities and crowdsourcing didn’t widely exist in 1997 when we started with learning objects and metadata. Or, maybe we recognize better ways to achieve the same outcomes–combining automatic metadata generation, with crowdsourcing to help users better find and use online learning resources.

(Full disclosure, I helped author the IEEE Learning Object Metadata standard. I think that the standard has great value in describing resources. But it’s biggest value is for systems to communicate between systems and for systems to use internally to describe resources.)

Or, maybe, as researchers, we’ve just forgotten how to do literature reviews and learn from the past. But that’s a topic for another post.

So, a while back I said I’d write about my Plagiarism is Good™ idea.

I still haven’t had a chance to pull all my thoughts together, but thought this might be a good update.

I’m now beginning to think that the Plagiarism is Good™ idea is really a suite of tools/services and approaches to looking for use and reuse on the web, especially of open educational resources.

So if you accept the outcomes from this Ph.D. dissertation Patterns of Learning Object Reuse in the Connexions Repository…basically nobody is taking modules from Connexions, modifying them and then sharing them back out through the Connexions platform. One can ask about other types of reuse, especially for sites like MIT OCW. We have metrics of access (web hits, downloads), but those are only proxies to use. How might we get at use?

CutAndPaste Reuse Tracking Tool (CAPReTT™)

So the second tool (the first is plagiarism detection ala TurnItIn that shows where folks are taking whole sites) is what I’m calling a CutAndPaste Reuse Tracking Tool (CAPReTT™). I’ll be the first to say that I didnt’ come up with this idea myself, but rather I thing it’s an interesting tool to build and deploy for OERs*.

The tool is server-side: there’s a tracking server and also javascript that gets embedded in every page. When a user does a cut (and paste) from a webpage with the javascript, a ping is sent to the server to track what’s been cut (I think). And when the user pastes the text into rich text aware editors (a limited number of them are supported) you can get an attribution statement, link back to the source, and Creative Commons license (from data embedded in the document). If the user pastes into a non-supported location, a basic set of information is included with the paste. So in one fell swoop you get attribution and license propagation, as well as a record of what’s being copied.

It may be true that there’s more as-is use than reuse (I’ve been working under the notion of use as adoption and adaptation of these resources since 1997), I think there are more complex notions of reuse than just what was examined in the Ph.D. dissertation above.

*I read about the original tool on the Creative Commons blog post. The original tool is run by a company that will track what users cut and paste from your website. It’s pitched as a way of tracking what gets used and to make sure the original site is attributed. Hrm, that’s exactly what we want to do for educational purposes. If the company was a bit more forthcoming about what it might do with the data it’s collecting, or explaining its business model it might be more acceptable to a group like MIT OCW, or universities in general.

So, as you know by now, I travel quite a bit, and try and fly United when I can.

One step forward two steps back.

It looks like United has finally implemented a digital in-flight media system. From the mid-1990s through late-2008 they typically used a tape-based system (it looked like Hi8 or maybe some other 8mm format tape) that required manual operation by the flight attendants. The new system appears to work in a nearly automated fashion. The purser/flight attendant enters an access code, the duration of the flight, and the system takes over. I’ve wondered why, as other airlines have moved to on-demand systems and integration with new technologies such as USB ports at seats, the ability to play iPods via entertainment systems, why United has taken so long to adopt these “new fangle technologies”.

Things aren’t all peachy. The problems with fully automated systems…

It’s more of a, “Push the button and hope for the best.”

“Restart” If the system needs to be restarted, it has to start over at the beginning. On a flight in June, someone noticed that the wrong movie was playing. Apparently the purser selected the wrong programming (they were going to show the westbound programming on an eastbound flight—which means I’d have to watch the same movie over again, it wasn’t that good the first time through). The purser reset the system, but we had to watch the lead in short feature before the movie, even though the prior programming was queued up to the movie.

“Commericals” The system automatically inserts commercials in the short features and movies. For TV shows, this isn’t so bad, they’re designed with commercials and are intended to have interruptions. For movies, the system seems to pick bad times to insert the commercials. The commercials don’t seem to be programmed in, but inserted randomly. So if there’s a dramatic moment, or a action sequence, expect a commercial to interrupt the flow of the movie. By contrast when movies are played on TV, the broadcasters usually do a much better job of breaking up the flow of the movie. Or perhaps United needs to pay someone more money to select better spots for its commercials. Now that I think about it, hey, what are “commercials” doing in the middle of a movie. that’s new too! =(

/sigh

OERRecommender got a facelift to include the folksemantic sort of notion of social web and interconnectedness. It’s now Folksemantic.com.

All of the code is open-source and available (it always has been), but *news flash* it’s now a lot easier for us to setup. They’ve rejiggered the code to a “single” ruby project available from: http://github.com/jbasdf/muck/tree/master with an instructions-like page.

I missed the presentation at OpenEd 2009 (they changed rooms on me), but watched the uStream video.

In addition to the resource-to-resource recommendation from the repositories that the system knows about, users can now:

• See a Folksemantic frame around any resource that you follow from a recommendation (I don’t particularly like this).
• Make a comment on a recommended page (because it’s framed).
• Follow other users (see followers, and who you’re following via the website).
• Realtime recommendations for any page to pages that it knows about (when using the GreaseMonkey plugin) < - this is kinda cool, but may get to be annoying. (Load up Greasemonkey and the script, and go to whatever site you want, give it a few seconds and recommendations pop up.)
• Near term (within existing funding) Invite system, publish to facebook and twitter, groups, register “attention metadata feeds”, blog, bookmark feeds, browser history streams, personalized recommendations.
• Long term (need funding for this) remix ala send2wiki, sequencing ala makeapath, rating ala annorate.

Read more…

I’ve been meaning to post this for a while now. In early January I ordered something from Jowow through Amazon.com

I wrote a review on the seller, they didn’t like it too much.

Here’s the email they sent me:

Dear customer,

sorry about the inconvenience.

We will refund $3.00 shipping fee.

Could you please remove your feedback?

3 of 5 Wow, really slow shipping. Jan 16, 2009 10:35:22 PM
here’s the link to remove feedback:

1. Please go to below link or log in to your Amazon account and go to ‘view my orders’

https://www.amazon.com/gp/css/history/view.html/?orderFilter=feedback&link=feedback

2. Locate the order ( your order # is 002-xxxxxxx-xxxx869 ), then scroll to the feedback section.
3. Click *Remove*.

When you have removed your feedback, please email us.

Sincerely,

–
JoWow Sales Team
www.jowow.com

They wanted to buy a better review for $3.00 in shipping. Um, no. At least offer to refund the whole shipping amount, not just a measely $3.00.

Interestingly, I can’t pull up the original order in my order history nor can I find the original item at Amazon to link to it directly.

Oh well.