Use this research tool to learn more information about the topics in your document.

Well now, this looks interesting. And potentially very useful.

At first, I thought that Google had come up with a method of extracting information from your document and using it to return relevant search results, perhaps using some kind of semantic search. Turns out, it isn’t quite that sophisticated (yet?).

But, it still looks like a useful feature as it adds search capabilities right there in the document you are working on, and makes it quite easy to add that web content directly to the document you are working on.

The search interface is a basic Google web search, with a drop down option to search for images or search for quotes. It will also return a Google map that you can embed when you do a location search.

One of the nice features of the search is that it adds an image license filter so you can filter search results based on usage. The options are limited (it looks like the only CC license they use allows for commercial reuse, which really will restrict the results and may be overly restrictive compared to the types of results you would get with a non-commercial use license), but it is still a nice feature that can probably easily be expanded to include the other types of CC licenses.

As I hinted at earlier when I mentioned what I hoped the search would be, you can get a sense as to where this can go, with semantic suggestions popping up based on the content you are entering into the document. Start working on a document that mentions something like the B.C. Education Plan (as I happened to be doing), and resources related to that would auto-magically appear in the search results area, perhaps using my network connections as part of the filter parameters. Which will then turn this feature into a very powerful research tool.

It’s a post that is also a reaction to a tweet that Alec Couros made about the same connected learning initiative over the weekend:

“Researchers Introduce New Model of Learning. Connected Learning” bit.ly/AkzrEN Wow. How’d they come up with something so original?

—Alec Couros (@courosa) March 3, 2012

I get Alec’s point. Reading about the initiative did feel more than just a bit familiar. Is this really “new” as the press has been spinning it?

Well, it’s probably new like e-textbooks became “new and revolutionary” once Apple decided to get involved. Get a juggernaut like the MacArthur Foundation on board with an initiative and it is bound to cause a splash.

I also take George’s point that it is important to acknowledge the people who have been pushing this model of learning for may years. But I actually take the connected learning initiative as an acknowledgment of their hard work, and the hard work of many people over the years. It is the continuing evolution of many conversations that have been pulsing around the edges of numerous communities for quite a while now.

It has me wondering if we aren’t hitting some kid of tipping point in the whole networked/connected/distributed learning world? That there are more conversations going on about it in many diverse communities? In short, is “connected learning” (or whatever you choose to call it) going mainstream?

One of my staff said to me recently “edtech is the new vertical”. Once the public educator in me suppressed my urge to throw up at the VC speak, I found myself agreeing. It seems that the edtech space is “in play”. Money is being invested. Startups are being funded. Things seem to be happening.

Not that I want to lump connected learning with the edtech startup space. Rather, my point being that there is a lot of conversation happening in many diverse communities about this topic, so it seems inevitable that a high profile initiative like connected learning seemingly pops up out of nowhere. It’s in the air.

But I look at the names of the people floating around the initiative and I wonder – did this really just pop-up? I mean, it is coming out of the MacArthur Foundation, an organization that has more than a casual relationship with learning & technology.

I see names like Mimi Ito and Howard Rheingold associated with this initiative. Hardly newcomers, or people who have popped up out of nowhere. John Seely Brown gave the keynote at the conference and, judging from the casual banter, obviously knows Mimi Ito and her work. Howard Jenkins seems to be a fan. These are people who’s work I deeply respect and admire, and who have been either directly in the edtech space or working very close to the edges of the space for a long time. I see their names floating around a project and I pay attention.

Ultimately, I think the connected learning initiative is a good thing. A very good thing, actually. A research initiative that focuses on the type of learning I think is important – networked, collaborative, digital. A pedagogy of the internet, which is what I think open learning/open pedagogy, connected learning, distributed learning, networked learning <insert phrase of your choice> is all about. It what drew me – and continues to draw me – to the work of people like Alec, George, Stephen Downes, Dave Cormie (and others) just as it draws me to the work of the people who I see associated with the connected learning initiative.

New? No. Which I actually think the connected learning initiative acknowledges when they state that (emphasis mine) “Connected learning is a work in progress, building on existing models, ongoing experimentation, and dialog with diverse stakeholders.”

As Alec noted in a tweet later in the day, that last point is crucial. A “dialog with diverse stakeholders” :

@clintlalonde Agreed. Or Siemens. Or Bandura. Not trying to take credit here, but demonstrate that this is a much longer convo. @_valeriei

—Alec Couros (@courosa) March 3, 2012

The conversation is longer. Much longer. But it is happening. And in a lot of different spaces. I saw many people in my PLN at the DML conference, getting excited about what they were seeing. Talking about it. Practicing connected/network/distributed/open learning. Which is, ultimatley, what we all want to see happen.

So, let the conversation begin continue.

From Word to WordPress

This is a big challenge. If I want to take advantage of all the features of Digress.it (like the auto-created table of contents), and create a nicely formatted site, then I need to publish the 130+ page thesis into post size chunks.

The brute force way is to begin cutting and pasting, but I want to see if I can be a bit more elegant than that.

I remember experimenting a few years back with publishing from Word to WordPress using  XML-RPC, so thought I would test this option out. A few setting adjustments in both WordPress and Word to enable XML-RPC publishing and a successful test post has me thinking I am on the right track.

Splitting a 130 page Word document

Still, while this looks promising, I can’t just hit the publish button in Word and magically expect my 130+ page thesis to automagically be sliced up and posted into separate posts. In fact, publishing the thesis this way will end up creating a single blog post of 40,000 words. Not ideal. So, I need to figure out how to split my single long Word document into smaller documents, and then try to publish each of those smaller documents as individual posts.

Surely, there must be a way in Word to split a long document into smaller ones. And sure enough, there is via a Word feature known as sub-documents, which allows a user to split a large document into smaller pieces.

Using the headings and sub-headings of my thesis as the logical starting point for dividing up the content, I split the original Word document into 56 documents based on chapters, headings and sub-headings.

I did have a few formatted tables and images in my thesis and was worried about how they would publish to the site directly from Word. There was some formatting that I need to do to clean up the formatting, but, for the most part, they came over clean and intact, complete captions and legends.

I was also a bit worried about how the participant quotes would translate. Being that this was qualitative research, the analysis draws heavily on participant quotes to support the findings and these quotes needed to be correctly formatted using the correct blockquote tags.

In fact, the only real issue I had (and it was quite minor) was that the posts had extra paragraphs tags at the beginning and the end of the posts, so that needed a bit of editing.

Next steps

So, now that the content is in, I could just stop and call it a self-published thesis. But I want to be able to do a bit more with it. My next tasks will include:

• See if there is a way I can structure the TOC a bit better to have headings and subheadings formatted different from chapter headings. Rught now it’s a pretty long list with no visual hierarchy.
• Setting up a way for people to download the entire thesis as an ebook, probably using the Anthologize plugin.
• Add in a plugin or two to generate metadata, specifically for adding content to a citation manager like Zotero or Mendeley. Perhaps the COinS plugin
• Look at ways to generate hyperlinks within the document to my references and citations. Something like the KCite or Zotpress plugin.

I’d also like to take a crack at some of the CSS and clean up some of the CSS around how tables and data are displayed. But these are all projects for another day.

A sick day at home with a kid gave me the opportunity to start tackling a project I’ve had on my plate for a few months now: publishing my completed thesis using WordPress and Digress.it.

One of the things I promised myself when I decided to do a thesis was that I would post a copy of it in this space in a format that would allow people to comment on it.

I think posting it in an open public space is important for a couple of reasons. For one, I think that, even though it is only a Masters thesis, it still represents academic research, and I strongly believe that any academic research should be as open and accessible as possible. And not just to other academics.

The second reason is that I want it critiqued by a wider audience of my peers. I want it to be a starting point for conversation. What worked in the thesis, what didn’t, what rings true to others using Twitter in a PLN, which parts are valuable & what parts are fuzzy or just wonky?

Finally, I haven’t had a good hands on WordPress project for awhile now so it feels good to dig into WP again after being in the Drupal/Moodle world for the past year.

The tools I’ll be using

I’m taking my inspiration here from the NMC and the Horizon Report and how they have published that report for the past few years. I’m also inspired by Joss Winn, who published his dissertation this way a few years ago.

You’re no doubt familiar with WordPress, the blog-cum-CMS platform that this site runs on. But you may not be as familiar with Digress.it. a WordPress plugin created by the Institute for the Future of the Book.

What draws me to Digress.it are two features; the ability to link directly to specific portions of a large document, and the ability to allow paragraph by paragraph commenting. Both of these are important when posting something as large as a 40,000 word thesis.

I don’t expect many will read the entire paper, but sections may be of more interest to some than others so I want to section the thesis as much as possible. And, if someone does read it, I want them to be able to comment on something when the comment pops into their head and not have to slog thru an entire section of 2, 3 or 4 thousand words before getting a comment box.

So, technically, here is what I am doing.

Create a multi-site WordPress instance

I want my thesis to live on my domain, clintlalonde.net. Since I already have a WordPress blog running here, I needed to figure out a way to add a second instance of WordPress that I could use Digress.it with.

If this was a few years ago, I probably would have installed a whole separate instance of WordPress. However, since WordPress 3, you now have the ability to run multiple WordPress sites on a single WordPress install. Each site is independent of the other, with it’s own set of plug-ins and themes. So, after doing a bit of reading on how to set up multisites on an established blog, I fired up a multi-site instance of WordPress on my domain clintlalonde.net.

Two Small Issues

The multi-site setup was fairly straightforward. I only had two small issues.

Permalink structure changed

The first was that the permalink structure on my original clintlalonde.net blog got changed when I flipped the switch to make my WordPress site a multi-site instance. The switch added the word /blog/ to the URI’s on my site. This means that links on my site that used to look like this:

http://clintlalonde.net/2012/02/10/frog-in-a-pot/

were changed to this

http://clintlalonde.net/blog/2012/02/10/frog-in-a-pot/

Which broke all the internal links on my blog. So, when you clicked on the title of a blog post from my home page, you ended up with a 404 page not found error. Not good.

After a bit of digging on the WP forums, I found an easy fix to the problem, and was able to safely change the permalink structure to remove the word /blog/ from the link structure and set up the permalink structure to match what it was before. Once I did that, the /blog/ was gone from the URI and my internal links were repaired and working again.

Configuring cPanel

The second issue was that I couldn’t actually create a new sites. Whenever I tried to create a site in the WordPress admin panel, it looked like the site was created. But when I clicked the link to go to the admin panel or to the new site I got a “server not found” error. Technically, this told me that the sub-domain wasn’t being set up properly.

Off to trusty Google to try to find a solution, and it didn’t fail me.  Once I had cPanel configured correctly and my directory structure set up (although I am not really sure why I need to have a folder called blogs.dir in my wp-content folder but, whatever, it worked) I was on my way.

I created a new site and sub-domain at thesis.clintlalonde.net.

Install Digress.it

After getting the site and sub-domain set up, I then downloaded and installed Digress.it. Before I could add Digress.it to the new thesis.clintlalonde.net site, I had to add the plug-in at the admin level of my newly created WordPress network. Once that was done, I went into the admin panel of the thesis site and activated the plug-in.

When I took a look at Digress.it out of the box, I saw that it needed some tweaking. There were unnecessary WordPress widgets in the lower part of the home page, and I wanted to get rid of the default text, posts and comments and get some more useful data posted to begin to see what the site would look like when I began posting my thesis content to it.

First, to replace the text on the homepage. Digress.it uses the contents from a WordPress page titled “About” to populate the homepage of the site. So, I created an “About” page and added some info about what the site was about along with the abstract of my thesis.

After that, I got rid of the default widgets that appeared in the area below the textbox.

I’ve noticed that the admin toolbar that runs across the top of the page is badly formatted and might need some tweaking. But since I am the only person who will see that, it’s not critical right now since I am the only person who will see it. So, this will do for now.

Before I wrap up my first days work, I install the Akismet comment filter to begin filtering out comment spam. I’ve found with WordPress sites, it pays to fire up Akismet sooner rather than later as the spam starts rolling in pretty quickly.

With WordPress multi-site up and running and Digress.it installed, the challenge now becomes one of getting the content from Word into WordPress in a more elegant way than cutting and pasting. That’s the next challenge, and the next blog post.

Here is my video response.

After I did the video I felt like singing that old Sesame Street song “one of these things is not like the other” as I have lumped Apple in with this fine batch of openness when, in fact, I have some issues with the open of Apple and iTunesU. But I still think that iTunesU and the announcement last week that they are going to offer full courses through iTunesU fits with the point I was trying to make, despite the open/closed distinction.

And I said Stanford Thrun when it is really Sebastian Thrun from Stanford University.

As I read about the low cost tablets popping up in India like the $140 Classmate and the $45 Akash, I can’t help but wonder, would these low cost tablets exist if it were not for Google and their open source Android operating system?

It once again points to the importance that open source software plays in driving innovation. If Google had decided to create a proprietary operating system available only to an elite group of manufacturers with hefty licensing fees, would we see these kinds of inexpensive products appearing? Would we be seeing the kind of uptake of mobile devices that we are seeing right now?

Sure, you can argue that these tablets are nothing but cheap riffs on a truly innovative product (the much more expensive iPad), and you wouldn’t find me necessarily disagreeing: the iPad was a truly innovative product that created a whole new segment of products. But it is one thing to create an innovative product, and quite another to create an innovative environment that enables more innovation, especially innovation that lowers the cost barrier and allows technology to move from the elite to the common.

More is different. And by providing us with an open source platform to build on, Google has helped ensure that we will see what this different will look like.

Image: Powered by Android by JD Hancock used under Creative Commons Attribution license.

For those of us working within the confines of an LMS, this type of design can be a challenge. And while using an Open Source option like Moodle means we do have some flexibility in customizing the LMS for UID (and Moodle has certainly put some thought into making the platform accessible), customizing is often easier said than done.

Which is why I am happy I stumbled across this IRRODL paper “Universal Instructional Design (UID) Principles for Moodle from Tanya Elias which makes a number of recommendations – both technical and pedagogical – on how to improve accessibility within Moodle.

Elias begins the paper by outlining eight universal design principles, based on the work of the Center for Universal Design (which, as an aside, have this wonderful printable infographic (pdf) outlining the principles). She then goes on to make recommendations on how to design Moodle courses & content to meet these guidelines.

Below is a summary of the principles, the recommendations from Elias, and a few of my own thoughts in italics.

1) Equitable use

The design is useful and accessible for people with diverse abilities and in diverse locations. The same means of use should be provided for all students, identically whenever possible or in an equivalent form when not.

Recommendations

1. Put content online and make them accessible by screen reader, text-to-speech, and screen preferences programs.
2. Provide translation to overcome language barriers for learners for whom English is a foreign language.

The takeaway here for me is make content accessible, and the most flexible, accessible content on the web is HTML. Eliminate those PDF, Word and PowerPoint files and convert them to the native language of the web – HTML.

2) Flexible use

The learning design accommodates a wide range of individual abilities, preferences, schedules, and levels of connectivity. Provide the learners with choice in methods of use.

Recommendations

1. Make synchronous sessions optional, or make them small group sessions to make it easier to for participants to schedule.
2. Provide recordings of synchronous sessions.
3. Present content in multiple formats.
4. Offer choice and additional information.

If you have the option to record what you are doing (which is baked into most synchronous applications), always record it & make it available to students. Not only good for accessibility, but good for review for students who can attend as well.

3) Simple and intuitive

The course interface design is easy to understand, regardless of the user’s experience, knowledge, language skills, technical skills, or current concentration level. Eliminate unnecessary complexity.

Recommendations

1. Simplify the interface.
2. Offer text-only, mobile and offline options.

Most Moodle courses are built from a standard course template, meaning there may be blocks and tools you don’t use. If you are not using them, remove them. They are clutter.

4) Perceptible information

The design communicates necessary information effectively to the user, regardless of ambient conditions or the student’s sensory abilities.

Recommendations

1. Incorporate assistive technologies
2. Add captions, descriptors and transcriptions

On adding caption & transcriptions, a good low cost way to do this for video is to use YouTube for hosting your video and take advantage of their transcription and captioning features.

5) Tolerance for error

The design minimises hazards and adverse consequences of accidental or unintended actions.

Recommendations

1. Allow students to edit their posts.
2. Issue warnings using text and sound.

Moodle gives learners 30 minutes to edit their posts, by default. if your administrator has disabled this option, here is a good argument to have it re-enabled. I would also say that audible warnings are good, but there should be a mechanism to disable them if the user decides they don’t want them.

6) Low physical and technical effort

The design can be used efficiently and comfortably and with minimal physical and mental fatigue.

Recommendations

1. Consider issues of physical effort.
2. Incorporate assistive technologies and multimedia, and embed links.
3. Include a way to check browser capabilities

The paper notes that “extensive use of external links and external programs (my emphasis) in this way increases the technical effort required by all users.” So, not to harp on this point (but I will), but every time a learner has to open a PDF, Word or PowerPoint file, they have to load a new, external program.

7) Community of learners and support

The learning environment promotes interaction and communication among students and between students, faculty, and administrative services.

Recommendations

1. Provide study groups and tools.
2. Provide easy-to-find links to support services.

An easy win to add a block with links to institutional student services.

8) Instructional climate

Instructor comments and feedback are welcoming and inclusive. High expectations are espoused for all students.

Recommendation

1. Encourage instructors to make contact and stay involved.

As the paper states, “Instructor accessibility is an essential component of course accessibility.” An involved instructor will recognize when a student is struggling and can take steps to intervene and help.

Many of these principles are not Moodle specific and could be easily adapted to any online learning scenario. Where the paper does get Moodle specific is where Elias notes how many Moodle modules and plugins are available to help achieve these principles. This is also where the paper falls a bit short in that Elias gives the number of modules available and doesn’t actually review, or even name the available Moodle modules. So while it’s nice to know there are 4 translator modules available for Moodle, it would be useful to have the actual names of those modules and, even better, a review on whether they met the recommendations. Still, a useful piece of research on accessibility and the LMS.

When I last looked at the Moodle mobile app a few months back, it was still pretty slim in terms of functionality, which was fine. It was a first generation mobile app so I didn’t expect killer functionality out of the box. And I deeply respected the fact that, out of all the functionality they could have delivered in that first crack, they decided that it was important to give students the ability to upload media captured on their mobile devices to their courses – a signal (to me at least) that they were looking at mobile devices through a disruptive lens.

The 2.2 release adds another piece to that mobile app, now giving learners the ability to download course content from the course to their mobile device. I have to say, not quite as pumped about this feature as I was about the upload feature in the first go round, but I get that for many students content is the key – it’s what they come for.

One thing is for certain with this new feature – we are going to have to be ever more vigilant on issues like optimized file size and correct web formats for content as we develop our courses. We do have a fairly stringent technical quality checks for our courses, but stuff does get through.

For example, today I had to deal with a course that wasn’t backing up and restoring properly. The culprit? 2 PowerPoint presentations; 1 was 54 meg the other a whooping 102 meg. Pity the poor student in that class who decided to download that content on their mobile device. That’s 20% of my monthly data right there in those 2 files.

Anyway, not Moodle’s problem. In fact, in this feature they have given me a tool and another reason to enforce standard file formats and optimized file sizes, so I am grateful for it, and for the continued development of the mobile application. And realistically, we won’t have to worry about this for at least a year or so as we are still in the process of migrating to 2.1 from 1.9 and have decided to continue on the 2.1 path and not go straight to 2.2 when we release next year.

You can read the official release notification in the Moodle forums.

I realized something tonight as I read the story of how Virginia Tech professor John Boyer landed a Skype interview for his World Regions class with Aung Sun Suu Kyi, leader of the democratic movement in Burma – I don’t give near enough credit to Skype as a disruptive educational technology.

I’ve helped faculty use it for just this kind of activity – bring in a guest from a distance as a guest speaker, and not thought twice about it. I’ve read stories of teachers who have used it to bring sick kids into class so they don’t fall behind. People are using it to connect with native language speakers to learn another language.

All this for free in a package that most grandparents use to speak with their grand-kids.

Maybe it’s because Skype has reached that point where it has become boring which, according to Shirky, is now the point where the conversation becomes interesting. Which is to say, once we stop our fascination with the technology itself and it becomes first mundane and then invisible, then and only then do we begin to see the change it has on society. Maybe Skype is at that point.

Tomorrow John Boyer is introducing his students to Aung Sun Suu Kyi. Want to see a group of motivated students? Check out the last 30 seconds of Boyer’s video request to Aung Sun Suu Kyi, posted on YouTube.

But it doesn’t have to be someone world famous to make it relevant for students. For Camosun College video instructor Andy Bryce, it was a former grad of the Applied Communication Program who now works for CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada.

Which begs the question, who do your students want to see in your class?

Photo: sign of the times by Doug Symington used under Creative Commons license.

@courosa Use ifttt.com to 'trap' and auto-post tweets to Posterous. You can capture tagged items from Delicious and Flickr as well. #eci831

September 18, 2011 5:53 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@thecleversheep

Rodd Lucier

I don’t blog much these days about new web services or tools that I discover (if you are interested in what I find in terms of cool tools then you can connect with me on Diigo where most of the good web tool discoveries I make end up), but this service Rodd Lucier popped onto my radar screen is one that deserves a mention.

The service called If This Then That, a useful little utility that allows you to automate simple tasks from a number of different web services using the simple conditional statement if this happens, then do that. What IFTTT does is allows you to create simple web tasks mixing different web services that follow that flow.

For example, I was able to quickly set up a simple task that posts links I tweet to my Delicious account. IFTTT checks my Twitter account every 15 minutes.  If it finds a tweet with a link in it, then it posts that link to my Delicious account (and, by the way there is already a great service that handles this type of task already, but this was a proof of concept task for me with IFTTT).

IFTTT supports a number of web services, including, Twitter, Gmail, Delicious, Dropbox, Evernote, Facebook, Flickr – basically all the major services are here – and allows you to set up time and date specific actions; a simple cron for web services, without having to know cron commands.

I like this service a lot. IFTTT takes a powerful computer programming concept (the “if-then” conditional statement) and gives us something that is incredibly useful and easy for non-programmers to use to automate web tasks, as opposed to say Yahoo Pipes which held a lot of promise in simplifying programming concepts enough to let the lay person build some powerful tools. I love and use Yahoo Pipes quite a bit, but in my experience Pipes requires a fairly sophisticated grasp of programming to be useful for most people. IFTTT simplifies the process of creating useful tasks considerably over Pipes, and I expect I will be using it quite often in the future.

Nice find, Rodd!