Rocket Science

At COSL, our great designer Corrine designed a series of ( ) pen t-shirts for the 2005 Open Education Conference. I was doing some clean up and archiving of my COSL stuff, and ran across these t-shirts posted on Zazzle.

Source: Brandon/Zazzle

Who knew ( ) pen was that Open, and C ( ) ntent looks pretty content.

In February 2008, COSL sponsored a two and a half day OER Sprint to develop working code demonstrating interoperability between Open Educational Resource projects.

One of COSL’s contributions to the Open Education and educational technology fields was that we demonstrated working code. We prototyped and disseminated a number of tools and services to promote OER projects to work together.

At MIT, the group I work in at OEIT has a focus area on Content and Curriculum that can be viewed as an extension of this COSL philosophy.

I think it’s time to sprint again.

[I started writing this post in April, and haven't really had a chance to come back to it. So I figured I might as well clean it up and present it as is. --Brandon]

COSL Philosophies

At COSL we had a number of philosophies that guided our development of learning technologies.

• Open is good. Open encompasses principles including sharing and transparency. We want our tools to be used, adopted, adapted and modified so they provide value. Open provides the best way we know to accomplish these goals.
• Communities are important, but challenging to identify and support, and must be nurtured. This is a really bastardized summary of research on online communities, and should serve as a warning to any project thinking communities are a panacea that will save their project.
• Education is “different”, but the tools and services we develop for this community should not be separate. History Experience has taught us, “If you build it, they mostly don’t come.”
• Don’t reinvent the wheel. Use existing open web tools and services. Integrate and adapt them to your needs. 80% might be good enough. (This is the pareto principle that we use to say that even if an existing tool or service only provides 80% of the functionality you want that’s 80% you don’t have to develop yourself and the 20% might not be really important.)
• Prototype tools and services to demonstrate what’s possible. Assume that someone may come along and do your idea better, faster, larger and be prepared to migrate to a “competing” solution. This may not make as much sense here, but I expand upon this idea in a recent post.
• “Working code trumps all.” ’nuff said. (We’ve attributed this quote to the late Phillip Dodds of the Advance Distributed Learning Initiative and keyboard playing alien communicator from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.)
• Education projects are rarely as well funded as startup companies, a corollary to above. Leverage what you can from the open Web, even if from a startup company. They may not be sustainable, but are you? And they’re almost definitely better funded and can innovate and deliver faster.
• Interoperability and integration are good. Tools and services, content, and projects are not islands or walled gardens. Open up and provide for and assume interoperability and integration.
• Simple is very good. Making it easy is also good.

Exploring Sustainability at OEIT

Some of the challenges we didn’t get a a chance to work on at COSL, but that I am exploring through my current job at OEIT are:

• Long term sustainability of projects. Education projects rarely understand what long term sustainability means, nor how to achieve it.
• Sunseting/ending projects and the implications for groups of participants. Education projects rarely end deliberately, they often suffer slow lingering deaths that are not useful for any involved.

I might have mentioned this in a previous post, but one of COSL’s philosophies was to adopt and adapt existing general web tools and services (social bookmarking via Delicious, or source code distribution via Sourceforge) rather than building education-specific tools and services (I don’t have a really good counter example for social bookmarking, but eduForge for educational open source projects).

The general thinking being, that the primary distinctions between education-only and the general web is a perception of quality and a “shared space”. Neither of which, I believe, really holds to be true. It’s all about perception and I have yet to hear a compelling reason for why “education” has to be different and separate. And certainly these perceptions don’t provide enough inertia to overcome neither the scale and support and nor usefulness of general web tools.

Here’s the punch line: education-only tools are likely to be challenged to generate enough users and use and are not likely to have sufficient support to grow and evolve.

The big, often unrealized consequences of this is that the potential maximum audience for the tool or service starts off as restricted. This limitation, combined with the perception from educators at all levels that they are “too busy” to adopt a new technology or technique, and a tool/service has to be a “home run” or even a “grand slam” to get the attention of enough of them. This is especially true when developing a service that requires a large number of users to be successful, as in a community of participants.

The end result? Education-only tools and services often ultimately fade into obscurity.

[I should probably expand on this, but I don't have the motivation to write more right now --Brandon]

One of COSL’s software and service development principles was to prototype, and support long term if necessary, the types of tools and services we thought would be useful for teaching and learning writ-large. This philosophy lead to funding from the Mellon Foundation to build the Folksemantic tools and services we developed in 2006-2007.

Folksemantic Tools

Folksemantic built alpha and beta versions of the tools we thought were necessary to link folksonomies, social media/social networking, and the semantic web to be harnessed to support open education.

At the time we started, many of the tools were unique–but as we progressed, and we fully expected this to happen, a number of startup companies emerged providing the very tools and services we were working on. This is an outcome we expected. Really, we wanted to use/implement these tools and services for a greater purpose. If the tools and services existed, seemed relatively stable, had reasonable funding/support and had reasonable uptake we’d gladly use the service. But until that occurred, we wanted to demonstrate the value and one method of providing the tool or service. And if necessary, we’d continue running the tool/service over time.

Twine a Better Incarnation of Ozmozr

For example, we built Ozmozr to absorb the web. As a better social media aggregator Ozmozr was a fully functional proof of concept that had many of the underlying features and intents of the recently launched web 2.0 site Twine.

Twine Understands Your Interests

• Discover information that matters to you
• Collect and share bookmarks and other content
• Receive recommendations based on your interests

–Twine

Acawiki an Modern Incarnation of Gistr

On October 7, Acawiki, a modern incarnation of Gistr, launched.

AcaWiki is like “Wikipedia for academic research” designed to increase the impact of scholars, students, and bloggers by enabling them to share summaries and discuss academic papers online.

–AcaWiki

Justin Ball of COSL “wrote [Gistr] during a meeting. Gistr is a small utility application that helps us gather up our research in social network in one place.” The source code is still available, but the site was decommissioned earlier this year.

To be fair, we never really did anything with Gistr, but we did promote the idea and if you do a search you’ll see a few blogs picked up and reported on and described Gistr’s intent. And I haven’t checked, but it’s likely that the decision to develop Acawiki might have had some of it’s beginning in discussions between Acawiki founder Neeru Paharia and COSL’s David Wiley. And certainly it’s a small world because my current boss provided a great summary in Acawiki’s press release.

AcaWiki can provide an important ’sense-making’ function for enabling easier sharing of knowledge that can help to build bridges across disciplines—and even between academia and those outside.

–Vijay Kumar
senior associate dean anddirector of the Office of
Educational Innovation and Technology at MIT