2002/03/14: Repreive and more programming

Is IMS too complex?

David Carter-Tod: "Personally, one of the things that tends to disturb me about IMS, SIF and other similar initiatives is that they are industry promoted and funded and tend to put the interests of industry first. This tends to translate into a little more complexity than necessary and also to higher barriers to entry for startups and open source solutions. I see the digital rights management issue in a similar vein. All I want is the ability to give things away, but I suspect that's not really what they're thinking about."

IMS is quite complex, certainly compared to things like RSS 0.92 and OPML from the Userland world. Do the IMS specs need to be so complex? I'm not sure. Some days I think that they have to be rich enough to really accomodate the needs of all the players who need (and want) to interoperate. If universities just need to talk to each other and have significantly different needs from corporate e-learning and the military, then maybe the universities should be working on their e-learning specifications effort. But if there are enough commonalities, all these insititutions should work together (as they are on IMS). I share David's concern that the universities might not have an adequately robust voice at the table of IMS. (People who are more knowledgeable about IMS should comment!)

Is Macromedia that evil?

Simon St. Laurent: "Remember the scene in Aliens where the baby alien emerges from the guy's stomach? Flash has been tunneling deeply in the innards of browsers and web site development, and its latest iteration (Flash MX) looks like a full-blown attempt to emerge and kill its host in the process."

Evaluation of Web-based Flexible-learning

Stephen Downes: writes about a NVCER report: "There's a lot going on in this interesting and informative study looking at the evaluation of online course materials from the standpoint of the interactions between teachers and students. Some surprises - when the sum of possible interactions is considered, videoconferencing is ranked quite low (see the chart on page 22). The report reaches some expected conclusions, though: "The picture that emerges is that the technology and arrangements for flexible learningCRLFis being used to extend traditional teacher-centred approaches to off-campus learners, rather than providing for new approaches to teaching and learning. Nevertheless,CRLFindependent student engagement,linked more to adult learning principles than to traditional classroom methods of learning,is also occurring. This independent learningCRLFis associated with rich teaching and learning interactions.CRLFThe findings have two main implications: firstly, the uptake of technology in flexible learning gives new life to traditional teacher directed learning; secondly, technology also provides alternative approaches by encouraging and supporting more independent learning with greater active engagement..." The HTML link provides a summary; the full report may be obtained by following the PDF link"

Back to the drawing board on my BC&C article

As I mentioned yesterday, I've been working on an article on educational technology standards that I was hoping to publish in BC&C this spring. I sent my current draft out for comments and hoped that my readers would say "great -- it only needs a touch up here and there". But subconsciously, I knew that my article was nowhere near where it needed to be. I thank Brandon Muramatsu for kindly pointing out all the flaws that he saw in my piece -- and for surfacing what I knew subconsciously anyhow.

So it's back to the drawing board for me. Graciously, the editors of BC&C have let me submit the article for the next issue of BC&C.

So what's the matter with the draft? Essentially, I wrote the draft for myself (and for people who are already immersed in the world of educational technology standards). I took this approach because I first had to understand the various specifications and standards-making process and how they related to each other before I could even hope to explain them to others. Hence what I wrote was in personal shorthand.

So whom am I trying to reach (instead of my alter ego)? I'm trying to talk to people on campus (faculty, staff, students, decision makers) who have some interest in educational technology (either positive or negative). Some of my audience will have heard of IMS, metadata, standards compliance. Others will not have. Some are trying to make decisions about educational technology products (such as learning management systems). Others will be skeptical about the value of ed. tech systems.

I really do want to address all these people (although trying to address all these people might be problematic). I want my readers to understand at a basic level what ed. tech specifications are (that is, what they are built to accomplish), why they are important for this campus (even if very few people will need to understand the details), and how to learn more (I've had to sort through a lot of literature to get to where I think that I have some handle on how everything fits together). Remember: some of my audience will not know much about educational technology in general. Remember also that few people really want to read an alphabet soup of terms.

In its broadest sense, educational technology is not a new thing to the university. To me (and to many folks today), ed. tech is synonymous with computers in education (and sometimes even more narrowly, the Internet and education, the stuff of distributed education). I remember going to a talk (sponsored by the Center for Studies in Higher Education) at which the speaker reminded us of waves of technology that were introduced into the university, each of which was supposed to utterly transform teaching and learning: the overhead projector, radio, tv, multimedia stations, and now the Web. It's easy for me (as a fervent user/worker/believer in the Web) to think, "boy, they were silly to think that TV was going to change things. It's obvious that it couldn't be as transformative as everyone thought. But the Web is different...."

Why do I bring this up? I think it's just to remind myself that educational technology means different things to different people -- and that I need to nail down some common framework if I want to write about ed. tech. The second point is that I'm incredibly optimistic about the potential of the Web but that I speak to many people who have heard the same optimistic talk before, except it was about some previous miracle technology. We're really early in seeing how the interaction between the Web and education will shake out. And people on campus are on different points in the adoption lifecycle. A while back (a year or two ago?), I attended a seminar at which faculty who represented the cutting edge of technology use in the classroom on this campus spoke about their work. Let's see whether I can remember who spoke....Diane Harley, George Chang, Carolyn Merchant, Alex Pines, and Marc Kubinec. One thing that I was struck by was that George Chang talked about how he used email lists to foster discussion in his classes. He offered marvelous stories, made excellent use of the medium -- but email lists are relatively old technology, which nevertheless represents the cutting edge of groupware on campus. This is not sophisticated groupware, P2P, Jabber, Groove, blogging, syndication, learning object talk. So the way I've been talking about IMS specifications is akin to my talking about the difference between Firewire and USB to people who have never hooked up a multimedia peripherals. "So why are you talking about IMS again...." is the constant refrain for me to hear as I rewrite the BC&C piece.

The campus needs to know about ed. tech specifications because these specifications will deeply affect the nature of educational technology without necessarily being visible to most of the users of educational technology. That's fine if things work as they should -- when the standards and specifications support what we as a university want. But the game might already be decided by the time decision makers on campus understand how things are being shaped. This assertion is a bit abstract. Let me present an example. Microsoft Word is a de facto standard for documents. It is also a proprietary standard, owned by Microsoft. No one is legally compelled to use Word but if you want to exchange documents with many people, you will probably end up using Word. Yes, one can use other word processors and convert to Word -- but the conversion is usually not perfect or even good enough.

A major concern for the educational technology world is whether there will be the Microsoft Word of that world, de facto and proprietary standards which lock us all in before it's too late (practically speaking) to switch course.

More later ...

Feb Apr

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