Rocket Science

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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 read an article on WebWorkerDaily that summarized two other articles (“Getting to No” and “4 Signs That Your Potential Clients Aren’t Interested (and What to Do About It)“) about selecting and working with clients that are applicable to our work at OEIT. Well, with a little translation.

OEIT

OEIT takes on projects dealing with educational innovation and technology. We’re supposed to work to either scale up interesting projects that have been prototyped by faculty/researchers or explore innovative technologies with the potential for broad adoption at MIT and beyond. And what I believe really makes us different is a view to connecting the dots and scaling up. We may choose to work on some fairly narrowly defined projects for individual faculty, but we do so with an eye to what we can leverage more broadly.

So, OEIT is a bit different from the target audience of WebWorkerDaily, which focuses on freelancers and consultants. But we’re also similar. We have the choice as to which projects to take on, how to integrate those projects with a greater whole, and how to accomplish the goals of the project.

Nevertheless, I think we can learn a lot from the two posts, and some of these items I’ve already tried to nudge us toward.

Read more…

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