Rocket Science

[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.

Interweb, I’ve just written up the seed of an idea for the next big thing. The problem is, I probably shouldn’t share it just yet. I sent an email off to my boss, we’ll see what he has to say. It may provide us a clear goal and work for the next five years. Bet you wished you know what the idea is…hopefully, soon enough, I’ll be able to share it, or maybe even get back to Plagiarism is Good™.

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.

It’s been a long time since there was a summer full of movies that I looked forward to going to the theaters to watch. A very long time. I think I definitely would call 2009 “a blockbuster summer”! (2009 Movie Picks)

Movies Growing Up

I first remember summer blockbusters and wanting to go watch movies probably starting in junior high; I think it was junior high probably in 1984 or 1985. At the time, it was the “thing to do”, to go hang out at the mall. If memory serves, we spent most of our time hanging out at the Sherman Oaks Galleria, the Galleria of Valley Girl fame. (Aside: I was in elementary school during the height of the valley girl phase in the early 1980s. One of the girls in my class was even an extra in the movie.) Though as I got into high school we started going to more malls (having friends with cars) including the Northridge Fashion Center and others.

(At some point I’ll have to write my story about Indiana Jones from 1981.)

What is a Blockbuster?

The “original” summer blockbuster is generally credited as the movie Jaws in 1975, and was defined as a movie that grossed more than $100 million. Other blockbusters were Star Wars in 1997 and Indiana Jones in 1981. (Today, even most mediocre movies can gross $100 million and the definition, I think, is a little less well defined.)

Read more…

I’m behind in what I need to write for work, so I’m not going to have time to write up more as promised in my previous teaser post.

I did figure out a way of doing this, I think relatively easily (without building my own web crawl index), but it’ll cost money to do it (probably a lot).