Rocket Science

Photo Credit: koalazymonkey

On the List!

It would be really useful if it was easier to link to a specific segment in a video, or to easily choose a video, trim it, and upload it to Wikimedia Commons (although most of the videos are non-commercial, which means that they could not be included in Wikipedia, only linked to). It might also make sense to make a series of shorter videos, rather than one long one – it would make reuse much more feasible.

Haklev, S. (2009, October 25). “Combining OERs with Wikipedia – a winning combination”. Retrieved on October 26, 2009 from Random Stuff that Matters Website: http://reganmian.net/blog/2009/10/25/combining-oers-with-wikipedia-a-winning-combination/

Absolutely!

These are just some of the features we hope to implement in the SpokenMedia Project and it’s Rich Media Notebooks.

I’m sitting here in my first class at MIT.

2.003J

If you were at MIT you’d understand this. I can deconstruct it for you but it’s still mostly a mystery to me. The number before the decimal point indicates the department, 2=Mechanical Engineering. The number and letters after the decimal point indicate the course, 003J=Dynamics and Control. Here’s where the system gets to be a bit less clear. Really the system should mean the course number is 03 or even 003. I’m not sure what the J really refers to.

For most at MIT that’s enough to communicate everything they need about the class.

For everyone else, I’m sitting in an introductory dynamics and control class in mechanical engineering.

Why am I here?

I’ve been working with Prof. Kim Vandiver on some of his pedagogical approaches mediated with educational technologies. I ask Kim if I could sit in on his classes to see how his approaches are working. Plus I wanted to see what it was like to be an MIT student.

Kim’s doing a few things differently than most MIT faculty.

• Students are encouraged to work together on problem sets; but are expected to turn in their own work.
• Students are “required” to answer an online survey, just after their problem sets are posted, to provide quick feedback to the instructors. Basically, at first glance, do they think they can start answering the problems; do they have enough information to frame the question. If not, where/how are they unsure of how to begin? This is intended to help the faculty provide additional support during the recitation sections to clarify the material and concepts. (This is the part I’ve been helping them with. Surveys in Stellar, MIT’s learning management system, are frankly a bear–or insert your favorite “b” word here.)

On the engineering side, Kim uses an interesting vector notation. His position vectors include a notation of to and from so the position vector, r, between points a and b is: r_b/a. Oh yeah, the way he draws his r’s is kinda funky–they look like an indeterminate greek character. I’m pretty sure when I took this subject the first time, I woulda just used r₁ (and taken care of the relationships between points a and b in the diagram).

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.

Here’s the presentation I gave at OpenEd 2009 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

In the uStream video below, my presentation starts at about 19:30 in. The first part of the presentation is Mara Hancock from UC Berkeley talking about Opencast Matterhorn. (Unfortunately they forgot to start saving the stream at the start of her talk.)

I’m halfway through my marathon two-week, around the world trip. I’m not dead yet, but I think I flew over it sometime on Saturday/Sunday.

I gave three presentations (2009 Technology for Education Workshop, Microsoft Research India and IEEE Computer Society Bangalore Section) while in India, basically the same one–but in three different durations. First was 20 minutes, then 5 minutes and then an hour. Needless to say by the third one, I had things down pat.

My presentation to the IEEE-CS Bangalore Section was also the best presentation of the three–I was able to spend the time to present the material, and got great questions from the audience. I’m really annoyed at myself that I didn’t record the presentation, it would have made a great slidecast.

I’m embedding the first presentation, the one with a slidecast, below.