Author: Clint Lalonde

by Clint Lalonde on All the rest

Build the web you want and support what you use: the 2013 edition

It’s that time of the year when it is time for me to support what I use and encourage you to do the same.

Of all the “business models” in our culture today, I think that the donation/subscription model is one of the most pure and direct. Nothing says “I appreciate the work you do” more than a donation of cash. It is also the most difficult to sustain.

During our day-to-day surfing, it is easy to fall into the mindset that many of the sites and services we use on the internet are free when, in fact, they are either struggling financially, or are kept afloat through advertising revenues or business models that tie them closely to commercial organizations and objectives. The business of taking care of the business subsidizes the free and I have (at best) an uneasy relationship with that. As I wrote last year:

They need money to keep doing the work they do; work that is generally free from commercial interests, which is something that is harder to come by on the web these days, especially in education where the VC money is calling the shots on so many “innovations” revolutionizing education.  Personally, I would rather pay transparently up front than have what I see as valuable become commodified and commercialized.

Last year, I supported Wikipedia, Mozilla, Creative Commons and the work of Audrey Watters, and if you are looking for a place to start your own annual contribution campaign, those are all worthy organizations doing, what I believe is important work. This year, I am making donations to these four organizations.

  1. The Internet Archive. Like Wikipedia, the Internet Archive has a mission to provide universal access to all knowledge. It is the digital historian of not only the web, but our collective culture, archiving long forgotten films, music, books and other items that commercial publishers have given up on long ago. They are a rock amongst the digital ephemera, arching the web and providing free hosting to anyone who wants to add to the collection. Plus they host a large collection of open educational resources.  Last month there was a fire in their scanning centre which did a considerable amount of damage, making the need to donate this year even more important.
  2. Bad Science Watch. This year I got involved with a contentious issue within our k-12 school district. For the past 3 years, there has been a very small group of people in the district who believe WiFi poses a health risk to students. They had managed to convince our school district officials to put a moratorium on wi-fi installations in schools in our district. I launched a website opposing this view (and did probably more research on this issue than I did for my Masters thesis). An important research document for me was their investigation of anti-wifi activism in Canada, and my donation is a way of thanking them for helping with the fight. I am happy to say that earlier this month, the school district overturned the wi-fi moratorium by a 5-4 margin.
  3. MediaSmarts. A non-profit here in Canada dedicated to developing media and digital literacy resources for parents and teachers (one of the big reasons I got involved in the above wi-fi fight). As my kids get older and venture out on the web more and more, I have continually come back to this site for information and resources to help empower them to take control of their digital world. Their daily newsletter is one of the few I read everyday. If you are in the US, a similar organization exists in Common Sense Media.
  4. OpenMedia is one of the organization here in Canada working hard to protect the open internet, advocating for universal access, fighting internet censorship and (as they state in their principles) keeping the “an open network where everyone is free to connect, communicate, write, read, watch, speak, listen, learn, create, and innovate.” They have also been at the forefront of the fight to protect privacy. Their work only grows more in importance everyday.

If I want to have an internet that works the way I want it to, it takes money. And I recognize that I am in the privileged financial position to be able to help a bit to make that vision continue. So, I donate, and I write this blog post to perhap, spur you to do the same and support the organizations that you use that are free and doing work you want to see continue.

 
by Clint Lalonde on All the rest, Social Networks

Those auto-magic algorithms are getting pretty slick

Today I got to work, powered up my Nexus tablet and saw a notification in the notification area I have never seen before that said “4 auto-awesome videos”

What the heck is that?

So I check it out and see that it is, actually, something that is pretty awesome.

I’m not a huge Google photo user. I don’t store much in the Google photo cloud. But when I got my first Nexus phone a few years ago, I did experiment with auto-uploading photos and videos I took to Google Photos. So, I’ve got some stuff from 3 or 4 years ago just sitting in the Google Photo cloud.

When I clicked on the “Auto-Awesome” notification, a video menu screen appeared with stills from 4 albums I had created in 2009 & 2010 during my auto-upload days. I clicked on one and saw that the Auto Awesome feature had automatically taken the photos and videos from each of those albums and made a movie out of it.

Here’s what the auto awesome feature did to a photo album I had on Google Photos from 2009 when my kids were a tad younger. It’s pretty impressive.

Well, played, Google marketing machine. Well played. You got me with your auto-notification and auto awesomeness. I have to admit that when I saw this video, I got a bit nostalgic. I had forgot that these photos and videos existed (I am sure that I have them tucked safely away in my own storage somewhere), but for a moment, the Google machine caught me and made me go “wow, that is pretty slick”

And then I come back to real life.

I am in the middle of reading Dave Eggers The Goog…er, The Circle, which is a dystopian novel set in a world where the fictional “Circle” corporation has taken transparency, openeness, sharing, privacy, ecommerce and social networking enabled by technology and wrapped in technological utopian ideals to an extreme, creating a dysfunctional 1984-ish nightmare scenario. In the past 2 days, with this auto awesomeness feature and yesterday’s personalized endorsement opt-out decision that means my face should not appear as “endorsing” a product that is returned in a Google search, Eggers vision (which, when I started the book last week seemed farcical with its extreme point of view) has suddenly become highly plausible (although, it should be noted that in the world of The Circle, I probably wouldn’t be able to opt-out of the service). Timing, as they say, is everything.

Like many, I think I am torn between two extremes. One, I find surprises like auto-awesome pretty, uh, awesome. And I can see a great utility in it. It has me reconsidering whether or not I should start using G+ and the photo service more as the final result did something that I want my photos and videos to do – evoke feelings of love and nostalgia of a time when my kids were younger.

But in the back I know that this is exactly what Google wants me to do. It’s a brilliant marketing ploy – using my own memories to play on my sentimentality to market their products and services to me, to get me to contribute more to their machine so that the data on me can be fine tuned. You can sense the algorithms at work, analyzing the video. Oh look, Clint has kids (serve ads about kid safety products). They are 9 and 7 (83% of 7 year old boys like Pokemon. Suggest Pokemon as possible Christmas present for son). He takes them skating (send 2 for 1 skating coupon to Gmail). They have a yard (target Home Depot garden ads), and the yard has trees. The trees look like apple trees. He probably harvests apples from those trees (ad’s for Better Homes and gardens website apple pie section).

When you start to go down the data mining hole, it is easy to scream, “stop the ride, I want to get off!” And in the final analysis, you begin to see even more clearly than before that the product Google sells is you.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Teaching & Learning

The most important feature of an LMS

Sometime it’s hard not to feel snarky when you read stuff like:

“Really,” says Ms. Manning, “most Stanford faculty wanted to use a platform that they read about in The New York Times.”

Really? That is what faculty want in an LMS? The one that is mentioned in the New York Times? If that is truly the case, then online learning in higher education really is as borked as all the doom mongers are saying.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be so snarky. Perhaps I should be happy that Stanford – an institution with massive resources – is willing to put some of those resources into the development of an open source LMS like edX (although there is no shortage of existing open source LMS projects that could have benefited from those resources). But when I read that the motivation to support an open source learning project is to improve the “brand” profile of the institution to make sure faculty feel like they are working with the “right” platform because it is the most popular kid in the playground instead of improving that platform for the benefit of the learners, well…yeah. Snarky.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Teaching & Learning

What Connected Educators should takeaway from our parental survey on WiFi in schools

tl:dr: Are you a teacher using technology in your classroom? Help parents understand how you are using it. Tell them how and (more importantly) why you use it. Parents don’t know & we need to know.

My HTML5 Word Cloud

The school district I live in (SD61 in Victoria BC) has been dealing with a contentious issue for the past 2 years that has held up the installation of wireless networks in a number of our schools. A vocal group of citizens has had a 2 year sustained campaign lobbying school district trustees with the message that WiFi is not safe. That the EMF radiation given off by WiFi routers and WiFi enabled devices pose a health risk to students.

I have been hesitant to blog about the fight here because I know what is coming in the comment section, if the comments on my other site are any indication. This spring, concerned that the anti-wifi camp was winning and influencing our school district trustees, I set up a website to counter some of the claims they were making and to begin to make an argument that I felt was being lost in the health “debate” – that there are pedagogical implications to having schools without ubiquitous internet access enabled by wireless technologies like WiFi.

To make a long story short, the local parental advisory council (PAC) collective for the district (known as VCPAC) intervened with the district and said they would do a parental survey to give the SD trustees some more information about whether or not parents felt that WiFi in schools posed a health risk to their kids.

The results of that survey have been released (if the links to VCPAC don’t work, you can download the survey summary (pdf) and parent comments (pdf)) and I wanted to make a point about the results for connected educators who use technology in their classroom: please tell parents how you are using it and why you are using it.

The results show that there is concern about WiFi in schools, but not for health reasons. While the aggregate numbers show some levels of concern, the details of what those concerns are become much clearer when you read the comments. There are many parents are struggling to see the value of not just wireless technology in the classroom, but the role of technology in the classroom period.

To make it clear, this survey was done based on the notion that WiFi poses a health hazard (a risk that public health officials have continually rejected). The VCPAC did quite a good job of separating the health from the “appropriate use of technology in the classroom” argument in the buildup to the survey but still, those fears about how technology is used in the classroom are abundant in the qualitative responses.

Here’s a sample of what parents are thinking/saying. I should say that I don’t know if these are concerns of people who voted for, against, or were of no opinion in the qualitative questions of the survey.

“I don’t have as many health concerns about wifi (let’s face it, it’s everywhere) as I do have access concerns. Kids may be bringing smartphones, tablets etc and therefore wifi in schools enables our kids open access to everything on the web – THAT is concerning. Can we assume that everyone has parental controls on their kids devices?”

“As a parent of a child in kindergarten I find no specific or positive need to computing or information processing systems. As a matter of opinion elementary students should have no need to access anything related to wireless communications. Even teenage students moving into high school should have no need for WiFi devices within an academic institution.”

“I do not think kids should have unlimited wireless access to the internet while at school. Increased accessibility will increase the use of Cell phones, iPads, and iPods during school hours. This practice should be actively discouraged.”

“Children in Elementary school do not require internet use to learn. Can they not “hardwire” internet into each classroom? Why is WIFI required? How much internet use is needed to justify WIFI?”

“Computer games becomes the new addiction which destroy kids’ future. Most education don’t realize that yet. There are so many kids who are stuck and hooked up with computer games. It is a tragedy.”

“Computers and technology are completely unnecessary at the Elementary school level. Elementary schools should focus on the 3 R’s Reading, (w)Riting & (a)Rithmatic. If they don’t learn the basics in Elementary school, when are they going to learn the basics?”

“Dont have health concerns but do have concerns about kids being able to access information on electronic devices they bring; also don’t believe there is a demonstrated need.”

Now, like many parents, I also have concerns over how technology is used in the classroom, and that it is used appropriately and with purpose and intent. But unlike many parents, I have a perspective informed by my network connections. Because within my PLN I am connected to many educators working in the k-12 system who are doing amazing things with technology in their classrooms and, as a parent,  I want to help set up the conditions for those amazing things to happen in other classrooms as well. Which is why I got involved in this fight to make sure there is wireless access in our schools to allow those amazing things to happen.

So, here is my plea as a parent with kids in the k-12 system to the connected teachers who are using technology in the classroom. Help parents understand how technology is being used in your classroom. Become an informed advocate as to why you use technology in the classroom – what it is you are trying to achieve by using technology. Parents don’t know, and we need to know so that when really basic decisions like enabling connectivity happen, we can help support your continued use of technology in schools.

Thanks. And I would appreciate it if you could pass this blog post on to any connected educator using technology in their classroom.

As for the survey results, I believe that these will be forwarded onto SD61 trustees, who will then likely reconvene their standing WiFi committee. Here is hoping that these results will help put this issue to rest in our district, and can be used in your district if you ever need to fight a similar battle.

Image credits: Word cloud of open ended responses to VCPAC parental survey by Scott Leslie used with permission. Note that words which appeard less than 25 times are omitted from this image.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Open, Teaching & Learning

Who is watching me? Shedding some light(beam) on my browsing habits

Last week, Mozilla announced the release of Lightbeam, a Firefox plugin that allows users to see not only the sites they visit, but also the third party sites that are tracking them on the web. Here is a screen shot of the last 10 sites I have visited and all the site those sites are connected to.

Lightbeam visualization

I love this tool for a number of reasons.

First, the obvious. It helps to make transparent all the sites I am actually “visiting” when I visit a website. In this day and age where privacy online is becoming more of an issue than ever before, it is important for people to know just how extensive the tracking of their behaviours is online. From what I have seen, Lightbeam doesn’t actually show you what information about you is being transmitted or tracked by those third party sites, just that there is tracking going on and with whom. But it is an important first step in understanding just how connected the web really is.

I’ll make the point, too, that just because you are unknowingly accessing third party websites while you view the web, it isn’t always to be tracked. As the development team suggests;

Third parties are an integral part of the way the Internet works today. However, when we’re unable to understand the value these companies provide and make informed choices about their data collection practices, the result is a steady erosion of trust for all stakeholders.

A tool like Lightbeam helps to make conversations about privacy and sharing of data more nuanced. Rather than painting all the third party connections with the same negative brush, I think it is important for us to have more specific conversations around the idea that maybe there are positives to having these invisible connections occurring behind the scenes. For example, many of the interactive features of the modern web require code libraries pulled from third-party sites. Is that Google connection to track you for advertising purposes, or is it to pull a font from the Google fonts collection to make the site you are on work better for you? These are important distinctions.

The second thing I love about Lightbeam is that it is a great web literacy educational tool, and extends the excellent work Mozilla is doing around web literacy by helping people understand how the web works. As building the web becomes more complicated, and the mechanisms of how the web gets built gets more obfuscated under the guise of “user-friendly” or “easy” (by no means are those neccesarily bad qualities, but obscuring qualities nonetheless), it is important that we don’t surrender the control we have over the web for the sake of convenience. Lightbeam represents a deeper dive for Mozilla into digital and web literacy than X-Ray Goggles or Thimble, but like those Webmaker tools Lightbeam exposes the inner workings of the web. Lightbeam, like the Webmaker initiative, are powerful tools to help educate people on how the web works.

Third, Lightbeam is an excellent example of an authentic learning exercise. Authentic learning (Educause PDF) exercises place a great deal of emphasis on having students work on real-world, complex problems and solutions, and I cannot think of anything more complex than the world of online privacy these days. Lightbeam was developed as a partnership between Mozilla and a research team at Emily Carr University of Art & Design in Vancouver that was made up primarily of students. They have created an important (and beautiful) tool that is relevant, timely, and has real world applications.

Finally, Lightbeam is another reminder of how powerful the iterative web enabled by open licenses can be. I’ve been jazzed lately by the idea of generativity and the generative web, and just how critical open licenses are for driving iterative, collaborative development.  Lightbeam was based on a previous FF plugin called Collusion developed by Atul Varma. It was first released as an independent project by Varma (who now works at Mozilla). Because it was released with an open source license, Mozilla and Emily Carr were able to pick up the project and build upon the excellent work of the original plugin. Open licenses made the refinement of Collusion possible.

 
by Clint Lalonde on Open, Textbooks

Saving students money with OER IRL

There are many advantages to incorporating and using OER’s in education, but perhaps one of the most obviously compelling is that using OER’s saves money for students. Today, another reminder of just how substantial those savings can be as David Wiley posted on the first year anniversary of Lumen Learning, showing that the work Lumen is doing has saved post-secondary students $700,000 in textbook costs.

This spring, OpenStax College released some stats from their first year in operation that showed their textbooks have saved students $2.3 million dollars.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgeA9h2c7ag&list=PLCF-Lie6gOORxRklqFJT2N865aXv_KiQB

Here in BC, we are still early on with regards to adoption so we don’t have the same kind of aggregate numbers that Lumen or OpenStax has. But I do want to give an example of the kind of scale of savings we can achieve in BC by focusing on one adoption.

This fall, Takashi Sato, physics instructor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, adopted the free OpenStax College Physics textbook to use in his Physics class.  What that press release doesn’t note for some reason, is the savings to students taking Tak’s Physics class. he textbook Tak was using cost students $187 dollars. His class has 60 students. Do the math and you can see that moving to the OpenStax free textbook and Tak has saved students $11,220.

1 class at 1 institution for 1 term. $11,220 savings.

Let’s do a bit of math here. 25 institutions in BC. If all we have is 1 instructor like Tak with a similar class load and expensive textbook adopt an open textbook, it would save students in BC $280, 500 EACH TERM.

Saving students over a quarter of a million dollars each term is significant.

One instructor.

 
by Clint Lalonde on Camosun, WordPress

WordPress pilot docs

In 2009 I was working at Camousn College & was given the opportunity to do a WordPress pilot project at the college. We were looking for a solution for faculty who wanted to publish content to the web, but didn’t want the overhead of an LMS. We were using Microsoft FrontPage for many years, but our IT folks were rolling out Windows 7, which didn’t support FrontPage. So the time seemed right for a WordPress project.

A tweet from Tanis Morgan at the JI prompted me to post these resources as they might be a useful starting point for some who are looking to run a WordPress pilot at their institution. The WordPress pilot documentation does contain some links to further resources (although those links might now be dead as it has been 4 years since I created these documents).

Sorry these are in PDF – breaking my own rules of reuse here. Bad OER advocate, bad! But I seem to have lost the original Word docs.

WordPress Pilot Document

Executive summary

Distributed Education would like to run a 9 month pilot project to evaluate the use of the WordPress publishing platform as a possible tool for faculty to use to develop and maintain stand alone websites and/or a blogs.

DE has identified 2 goals for the pilot:

  1. The primary goal is to determine the feasibility of using the WordPress platform as a replacement for FrontPage and Contribute for stand alone faculty websites at Camosun.
  2. A second goal will be to examine the use of WordPress as a traditional blog platform for faculty who wish to explore blogging as part of their pedagogical practice.

The rationale for this pilot is threefold:

  1. The current standard website maintenance tool, FrontPage, has been deprecated by Microsoft and will soon become unsupported.
  2. There is still considerable demand from faculty for stand alone websites that live outside of Desire2Learn, yet are still supported by the College (see June 2009 ITS/DE Staff Survey).
  3. There has also been demand from faculty, departments and other organizations within the college for assistance from Distributed Education in setting up blogs. In the past 6 months, DE has supported the use of blogs for various projects in a number of schools including Health & Human Services (http://nepalfieldschool.blogspot.com/), Arts and Science (http://asnewsletter.wordpress.com/), and the English Creative Writing Program (http://besidethepoint.net/). These blogs have been developed on platforms outside of Camosun.

Download WordPress Pilot Document (PDF 5 pages)

FrontPage Replacement Rationale

This report provides a rationale as to why WordPress was chosen to replace FrontPage for standalone faculty websites.

Download FrontPage Replacement Rationale (PDF 6 pages)

 

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, WordPress

PressBooks, XAMPP and bad paths call for help.

(update Oct 2, 2013 at the bottom of the page. I haven’t found a solution, yet)

I’m looking for a bit of help from any XAMPP, WordPress or PressBooks folks.

I’ve been trying to get a development version of PressBooks running on my Windows laptop and have run into an annoying little problem. I am not sure if this is a PressBooks thing or a XAMPP thing (although I’ve brought it up with PB and they believe it is a XAMPP/Apache issue), but I can’t figure it out & am hoping that there might be someone out there who can help.

The problem has to do with the path to the PressBooks themes.

I’ve installed WordPress, setup a multi-site instance and activated the PressBooks plugin as per the install instructions. I’ve done this a few times on hosted servers & the install is fairly straightforward to get working.

Not so with XAMPP on my Windows laptop. When I activate the PressBooks plugin I see an unstyled PressBooks homepage that looks like this:

NoTheme

Instead of the default theme that should look like this:

withStyle

When I use Firebug and take a look at the code, I can see right away that the paths are wonky to the theme stylesheet.

badpath

That path should begin with http://localhost/pressbooks and not with c:\xampp\htdocs etc etc.

What is confusing is that some of the paths are being rewritten correctly. It just appears to be the style and favicon link that isn’t correct.

It looks to me like there is an issue between Unix & Windows file paths getting mixed together. When I brought this up with PressBooks, they didn’t think it was a problem with their code, which has me heading down the XAMPP path.

Now, I’ve installed many software packages locally using XAMPP before, including numerous WordPress installs and haven’t had  a problem. But this has been frustrating me as I can’t quite figure out why the path is being rewritten to be incorrect.

Could it be an htaccess issue?

If you have an idea where I might start looking to solve this path issue, I’d appreciate it if you could pop a note into the comments.

Update October 2, 2013

Spent the morning looking into this.  Short story, it is still broken. Here’s what I’ve done so far and where I’ve looked (in case Google brings you here with the same problem).

The file that is generating the link to the stylesheet in the PressBooks default theme is called header.php and is located in the pressbooks\themes-root folder. I open the header.php file. These are the 2 suspect lines of code that seems to be returning the wrong code to both the stylesheet and favicon (lines 13 & 14)

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_url'); echo '?' . filemtime( get_stylesheet_directory() . '/style.css'); ?>" media="screen" />

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_directory'); ?>/favicon.ico" />

It’s the bloginfo function that looks like it is returning the wrong path. So I test out and in the body of the document I write:

<?php echo bloginfo('stylesheet_url'); ?>

and sure enough, it returns the incorrect path

C:\xampp\htdocs\pressbooks\wp-content\plugins\pressbooks/themes-root/pressbooks-publisher-one/style.css

This blog post suggests using a different WP function other than bloginfo to find paths, so I try to use the get_stylesheet_directory() to see if it returns a different path, but it returns the same C:\xampp… path

The WP codex suggests yet another function: get_stylesheet_uri()

Same result.

So I dig deeper.

Where is the code to the bloginfo function? WP codex says it is in the file wp-includes/general-template.php. So I open that file up in Aptana and start digging. Turns out, the function is actually called get_bloginfo(). The code snippet I am interested is on line 483:

case 'stylesheet_url':
 $output = get_stylesheet_uri();
 break;

Look, there is that get_stylesheet_uri() function again.

So, now I am seeing that a number of functions are returning the wrong path, but still not sure why or where to turn to next. My wafer thin coding skills are showing.. So, I have posted to the WordPress forums and hope I can find some help. Problem is, I don’t know if this is a WP problem, PressBooks problem, or a XAMPP problem.

In the meantime, I have hardcoded the path to the stylsheet into the header.php file and that is working. But what a hack. I am loath to do this without knowing the root of the problem because there could be other incorrect paths that could screw things up. But until I can find a willing soul who can help give me some leads as to why this is happening, I need to do this and get on with the tasks I have at hand.

Technology. Bah!

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Open, Textbooks

What I like about Siyavula

siyavula

I first came across the Siyavula project in the spring of this year when I met Siyavula’s Megan Beckett at the BC Open Textbook Summit in Vancouver. Siyavula is a South Africa based open textbook project (originally funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation)  that has produced a number of open textbooks to support k-12 curriculum in South Africa.

There are a couple of things I like about the project.

First, building on what I was talking about in my last blog post about developing a community centered around an open educational resource, Siyavula textbooks are authored in a unique way; through a series of teacher hack-a-thons or textbook sprints. These events organized by Siyavula bring together groups of educators & technicians to create a textbook in a weekend. Over this summer, another textbook sprint to develop Physics and Chemistry open textbooks (remixing both the Siyavula and OpenStax Physics and Chemistry resources) was organized with the assistance of Siyavula. In his wrapup blog post, Siyavula’s CEO Mark Horner emphasizes that the aim of these textbook sprints is to “seed Communities of Practice (CoP)” for the textbook, and speaks to one of the challenges of getting educators to participate – the fear of sharing:

Sharing is scary (at first anyway), because it involves making something available for public scrutiny, something that is actually an investment of your time and energy, and people may be critical. People may also be very positive, but we tend to worry more about what might go wrong than right.

Mark then goes on to point out that, even though sharing may be scary for some, there are benefits to sharing resources and expertise.

The long-term benefit of sharing, in my opinion, is that even if people are constructively critical, the material improves and a community of practice with a shared knowledge base and best practise can emerge.

So, even though there are challenges with developing the community of practice and getting educators to share resources, Mark believe the challenges are worth it because in the end, better resources and a stronger community will emerge.

In my experience, the fear of sharing is often more in my head than the reality. Most of the resources I have ever developed and shared have been received graciously, and criticism has been positive and collegial.

The second thing I really like about Siyavula is how they are sharing their textbooks, and appear to be committed to making the books available in remixable formats. For example, if you look at their Physical Science Grade 10 textbook, you’ll see that students have a lot of choice as to how they want to interact with the textbook. There is a website, a downloadable PDF file, or students can order a printed copy (it doesn’t look like an ePub version is available, which is the only other format I would add). But in addition to those formats aimed at students, they also have the source formats available for download, in this case the original Open Document and TeX files. This allows other teachers or open textbook projects to be able to edit or remix the textbook in the native technical format that the book was written in, which increases the likelihood that this open educational resource will be remixed and customized.

Finally, the textbooks also contain a Teachers Guide, which educators find a valuable additional resource that will increase the likelihood of adoption by other educators. And the source files for that are also available for download so it can be easily customized.

The development of a community of practice, remixable formats, and supplying additional teacher resources. Three things that make the Siyavula project stand out for me.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Open, Social Networks, Textbooks

Can the GitHub community be a sustainability model for Open textbooks?

tl:dr Like open source software, it takes a community to maintain an open textbook.

Anyone watching my Twitter feed this week knows I’ve got GitHub on my mind.

gitonmind

Part of the interest lies in the fact that there are some technical projects in development that I want to follow. But another part of me is interested in exploring the ideas of community & collaborative authorship and how individuals come together & contribute to create and maintain a shared resource.

On GitHub, the resource is usually software, but as I pointed out a few days ago, there are a number of academic projects popping up on GiTHub that are taking me down this path this week.

One of the non-technical questions we spend time thinking about on the open textbook project (and there are many) is around sustainability, and I think there is a model in the GitHub community that could be applied to open textbooks as a sustainability model.

GitHub is not only a code repository, but also a community for developers. At the centre of the community is the software; it is the tangible artifact that the community develops around. Members of the community take on the collective responsibility to maintain and develop the software, contributing code, fixing bugs, developing documentation, etc.

Outside of the big open textbook projects (which are currently being supported primarily by grant & foundation money), some of the more successful, small scale open textbook projects I see are starting to use this community-as-resource-steward model to maintain and improve their resource.

One small example of this is the Stitz-Zeager Open Source Mathematics Textbook site where the textbook authors set up some community forums over the summer. I see setting up a discussion forum for those who have adopted the book as a good way to begin to develop a community around the resource & begin to engender a feeling of community stewardship around that textbook.

Scaling up from that example, I was also struck this week by the story of Joe Moxley, an English professor who wrote a commercial textbook published by Pearson. In 2008, he received the copyright work to his textbook back from Pearson (I’d love to hear the story about how that happened). At that point, Joe had a few options for what to do with his book. In the end, he licensed it with a CC license & released it online as Writing Commons. In Joe’s words (emphasis mine):

In 2008, when I received copyright back from Pearson for College Writing Online, a textbook I’d published online in 2003, I decided to self-publish the work. Rather than pursuing a for-profit model, I opted to give the book away for free, first at http://collegewriting.org and later at http://writingcommons.org. With hopes of developing a community around my project, I established a distinguished editorial board and review board, and I invited my colleagues to submit “web texts”— that is, texts designed for web-based publication—for the project. Since then, rather than helping merely a handful of students, the work has been viewed by over half a million people, and we’ve been able to publish original, peer-reviewed web texts.

Since then, dozens of authors have contributed resources to the Writing Commons, and the project continues to encourage contributions from the community to further develop and improve the resource. This benefits not only the project,  but, as Joe points out, also the contributors.

From my experiencing directing the Writing Program at USF, I’ve found that graduate students, adjuncts, and university faculty take pleasure in developing collaboratively-authored pedagogical materials. Additionally, developing online teaching and learning spaces via collaborative tools energizes colleagues as well as students, giving them an opportunity to extend their learning, to talk with one another, and to produce relevant texts—texts that other Internet-users may read. Engaging colleagues and students in a collaborative effort to build a viable textbook creates energy and focus for courses. Rather than importing the values of a book editor from Boston or New York, faculty can customize their contributions to meet the special needs of their students and colleagues.

and (again emphasis mine)

Ultimately, from my perspective as an academic author, by crowdsourcing what had been a single-authored work, I’ve gained communal agency while losing some individual agency. I may no longer be able to do exactly what I want, yet from a team effort I can do more than I’d ever imagined.

Now, I am not sure if the team of contributors who are contributing to the success of Writing Commons are the people who actually use the open resource in class & suggest improvements based upon their direct experience with the resource, but I suspect it is.

Which is the point I am trying to make – those who use a resource are more often than not the ones in the best position to maintain that resource. And the best way to maintain that resource is not a single author being responsible for the maintainance and upkeep of the textbook, but an entire community of engaged users iteratively adding improvements and developments to the textbook over time.

Kinda like the communities of developers who cluster around code projects on GitHub. Those that cluster and contribute are generally those who stand to gain the most from the success of the project. They might use the software on a daily basis for their projects, or it mind underpin an important piece of their work. So they have some motivation to contribute and maintain the project. Just like faculty who adopt an open textbook .

Now, this community development model is not something that is exclusive to GitHub, which is just the latest flavour in a long line of success stories in open source collaborative software development (in edu you don’t have to look much farther than Moodle to see a perfect example of a successful open source community development model in action). But there are some feature of GitHub that I think parallel a community open textbook development model.

First, GitHub allows for various levels of engagement with a project. For newbies in the community (those lurkers on the edge watching for little pieces of low hanging fruit that can bring them in deeper in the community), they can contribute in small ways to improving a project. Find a spelling error? You have the power to fix it in a fairly low risk operation that would bring some recognition from those deeper inside the community.

Moving up the scale, you could contribute a new chapter, or revise a section of text , add images and graphics, charts and tables. Build supplemental resources and easily contribute all of this back to the original project to iteratively improve it.

Finally, the OER holy grail, a full on derivative remixed version of the project is one click away with GitHub. Fork, and you have a complete clone of a project ready for you to begin your own fully developed derivative version of the work. And, if it was a particularly active project, branch another community who might be interested in your derivative version of the project.

This isn’t new stuff. The roots of Open Educational Resources lie in the Open Source Software (pdf) movement. Which is maybe why I find myself this week so enamoured with the GitHub community. It grounds me and connects me to the roots of where we come from. I don’t know if any practical application of my playing and exploring of GitHub this week will lead to something concrete with the open textbook project, but at a theoretical level it has connected me back to the roots of OER. And even if GitHub plays no part in open textbooks, I suspect this won’t be the last time I think openly about community supported open textbooks.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Teaching & Learning

Some Badge resources

My Nerd Merit Badges arrived!

I attended the Connected Learning presentation on Do-It Yourself Badges yesterday hoping to get some more technical information about how to set up a badge server. You can see the group notes from the session in this .

Badges are something we have talked about here at BCcampus; issuing badges for the various activities and events we put on. I am hoping that I can carve out some time from the open textbook project to explore the technical side of issuing Badges in a bit more depth.

While the discussion didn’t dig deep into the technical infrastructure of setting up a badge issuing system, I did come away from the webinar with a couple of interesting resources that I wanted to share.

The first is a WordPress plugin called BadgeOS that allows you to add Mozilla badging to a WordPress site. Reading the description, it looks like the plugin does more than turn your WordPress site into badge issuing site, but also has some assessment pieces baked in.

BadgeOS™ turns your WordPress site into an achievement and badging system. Your site’s users complete steps, demonstrate skills and knowledge, and earn digital badges. Easily define the achievements, organize the badge requirements any way you like, and choose from and combine a range of assessment options to determine whether each task or requirement has been achieved.

I am eager to play with it, and dive deeper into the BadgeOS ecosystem that appears to be developing around the plugin. If you have any experience with it I would love to hear your impressions of the plugin in the comments.

The second isn’t related to technical infrastructure, but rather an instructional design template on how to design a badge. It is a badge design canvas/matrix that helps you determine the assessment criteria for your badge and prompts the developer of the badge to consider things like what skills & behaviours do learners have to demonstrate to earn this badge, is the badge part of a larger learning path, and what evidence is needed to earn this badge. It might be a useful instructional design prompt if you are are considering designing a badge.

Have you played with Badging? If so, I would love to hear your experiences.

Image credit: My Nerd Merit Badges Arrived by doctyper used under CC-BY-SA license

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Textbooks

Here a Git, there a Git everywhere a Git

I meant to spend most of the day today prepping for my week-long facilitation stint for our Adopting Open Textbooks workshop (which began yesterday in SCoPE), but instead got distracted by books and Github.

If you are not familiar, Github is a very popular code repository used by programmers to store code & collaborate with others on software projects. Recently, GitHub has been popping up on my radar with regards to open textbooks. I’ve come across a few book projects that are using GitHub.

Kathi Fletcher and the OERPub development team have been exploring GitHub fairly deeply, using the code repository as the backend to store book content being authored using OERPub.

A couple weeks ago, I came across an open Philosophy textbook originally authored by Walter Ott. Alex Dunn took Ott’s textbook,  converted it to the Markdown language (using a document conversion tool that I need to play with more called pandoc) and stuck it in GitHub (he could do this because Ott licensed his book with a CC license allowing the creation of derivative copies). Since GitHub is designed for collaborative coding, Dunn’s idea was to see if he could encourage others to contribute to the further development of Ott’s original book.

The third book project in GitHub that popped onto my radar earlier today via a tweet from Alan Levine, was the release of the open ebook by (now RRU and Victoria based colleague) George Veletsianos Learner Experiences with MOOCs and Open Online Learning.

Hey look! It’s been released on GitHub.

I’ve been playing with GitHub for the past couple of months trying to wrap my head around how it works and, to be honest, it is not the easiest to use (although the GUI tools certainly make it easier for those who are not comfortable bashing around with command line). I’m a hacker, not a coder, and the only time I used a code repository was about 10 years ago when I quickly found myself tangled in the underbrush of branches and trunks. Picking up Git a few months back took me right back to those days. So, I am not sure how practical using GitHub will be for those who are not at all technical.

That said, there are some very interesting possibilities about using GithHub as a repository for an open textbook.

For one, it is built for collaboration and has robust version control. Collaboratively authoring is what it is made for, and writing textbooks is often a collaborative affair. True, it was made for collaborative code authoring, but in the end a document is a document, be it code or words.

It is extremely easy to fork (create a new copy) of a project. In the OER world, this ability to easily clone one project to create a derivative version is very attractive. Want to modify a CC license textbook? Fork it and off you go.

GitHub can handle a number of document types. Word, HTML, LaTeX, whatever format you feel comfortable authoring in, Git can handle.

Finally, along with each repository comes a stand alone website to host the project. Meaning your textbook has a home on the web. For free.

Like I said, learning Git is not going to be for everyone (but if you are interested, ProfHacker has  a nice Intro to GitHub aimed at educators and academics, along with a few more use cases that you might find interesting), but it has certainly piqued my interest enough that I am going to keep playing with it, at least to try and keep track of some of the projects I am interested in, like OERPub and PressBooks.

Then at the end of the day, just as I am packing up, this tweet from Mark Smithers pops into my feed

Coursefork. A Github for course creation. Hmmm….maybe the investment time in learning GitHub will pay off in a few ways for educators.

 
by Clint Lalonde on Open, Textbooks, WordPress

I really need to write some posts about PressBooks

This thought has run thru my head almost daily for the past few months, ever since I arrived at BCcampus and started playing with PressBooks as part of the open textbook project .  I need to take a page from CogDog’s book and get better at documenting process and practice, like he does with posts like this on building TRU’s rMOOC site.

So, here we go. The first of what I hope will be a few posts about PressBooks.

First off, PressBooks is a WordPress plugin designed for creating ebooks. The brainchild of Hugh McGuire, PressBooks was released as an open source project earlier this year (there is also a hosted version at PressBooks.com).

Interest in PressBooks as a platform for creating open textbooks began last year with my predecessor Scott Leslie. Last year, BCcampus supported the creation of a couple of small scale open textbook projects using the hosted PressBooks service (earlier this summer we migrated the books to our own self-hosted PressBooks server, which we are still configuring and customizing). You can see the books Database Design and Project Management, created by Adrienne Watt.

Over the summer, one of our developers, Brad Payne, has been active with the PressBooks development community, writing code to extend the plugin, concentrating on adding more input formats to PressBooks so we can import existing open textbooks and use the platform as a textbook remix tool. Brad’s excellent coding on Open Document Type and ePub importers were accepted into core PressBooks this summer, meaning that we can now import existing open textbooks that are in those formats into PressBooks. Brad is currently working on a Word importer. Last week I imported and ePub version of an existing Philosophy open textbook into PressBooks and was quite happy with the results here (a blog post about this process is coming).

So, why are we so interested in PressBooks?  As you would expect with this project, we had a number of requirements, both core and optional. And we looked at a number of authoring/remix platforms (and continue to do so, watching closely the development work that both Connexions and OERPub are doing in this space). But for now, we have decided to focus on PressBooks.

For one, the authoring platform is built on WordPress which has proven time and again to be both powerful and flexible as exemplified by solid edu projects like ds106, edublogs and UBC blogs. The PressBooks UI authoring experience for faculty should not be a big hurdle, especially if they have worked in WordPress before.

PressBooks allows us to create a well structured website for each book, as well as publish that same content to ePub, PDF and mobi (Amazon Kindle) formats. Create once, publish many times using transformations gives students and faculty maximum flexibility as to how they want their textbook content delivered. A caveat about PDF publishing. It does require additional software that is not open source – Prince XML – to produce the PDF outputs.

However, other than Prince, the project is open source. We felt this was particularly important considering that this is an open textbook project. Not only philosophically, but because it enables us to become part of a development community and contribute to the development of the plugin.

The web version produces a very nice, mobile and tablet friendly user experience. Not a lot of flash here, but very useable on a number of platforms.

It is web-based, meaning that there is no software download & install for authors.

Those are some of the reasons why we are working with PressBooks. But, as with all software, there are challenges. Perhaps the biggest is that it is a platform designed for ebooks and not etextbooks, and there is a difference. ebooks (particularly works of fiction) are written to be read in a linear fashion and a great deal of emphasis is placed on the written word. Textbooks, on the other hand, don’t always have the same linear narrative and often include additional pedagogically oriented content types like sidebars, indexes, q&a’s and other such material to hep students really understand the content.

There is also no search feature for the website versions of the book (you do get search capabilities if you use the ePub or PDF versions of the book as search is baked into both ePub and PDF reading software). But the website version of the book does not have a search engine, which we think is important for electronic resources that are often used as reference resources by students.

There are more pros and cons, which I will get into more detail in the future. But for now I wanted to get the “I’ve got to blog about PressBooks” monkey off my back and start the conversation as I know there is interest in BC about the platform.

 
by Clint Lalonde on Open, Textbooks

The Generative Open Textbook

IMG_1826.JPG

I am 3 chapters into Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet (and how to stop it) and have spent the past week viewing so many things around me through a “generative” lens.

Generativity is a system’s capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences.

Generative systems are built on the notion that they are never fully complete, that they have many uses yet to be conceived of, and that the public can be trusted to invent and share good uses.

Zittrain uses the term “generative” specifically talking about technology. He is fundamentally speaking to the nature of the PC and the underlying technologies that power the internet, and the design decisions made by the early architects and engineers of both the PC and the internet to focus on flexibility over predetermined function.

Both PC’s and the internet are generative systems. In the case of the internet, the original architects and engineers didn’t much care about what the network was used for – they just wanted to create a system that would connect systems together with as much flexibility as possible. From that flexibility, purpose would be born; that flexibility would “generate” uses. And, indeed, this has been the case with the internet. The generative nature of the internet born out of its flexible design has made a whole whack of applications possible that the early developers did not necessarily envision; e-commerce, social networking, video streaming, email, all these applications arose from the same flexible, generative system – the internet.

The same is true of the PC. The PC did not have a single purpose when it was being developed in the garages of the early enthusiasts and hobbyists. It was designed as a generative system, flexible enough that the end-user could decide how to use it to fix whatever problem they were having. This gave rise to a myriad of uses for a PC, from gaming to word processing, accounting to photo editing. All made possible by the generative nature of the PC.

I love this term – generative, and since reading it in Zittrain’s book have been thinking of how perfectly it encapsulates the spirit of open textbooks (and, indeed all Open Educational Resources).  OER’s are generative in that their future use is not bound by their current use. They can be adapted and modified, recontextualized and used to solve problems that the original authors didn’t even know were problems, let alone something that needed to be solved.

Of course, this is the optimistic view of both OER’s and generativity. The generativity of the internet which gave rise to the convenience of online banking also has given rise to new ways for bad guys to access our money. And OER’s are only potentially generative. If they are never adapted, modified or reused, then their generative nature is squandered.

And there is evidence that the generative nature of open textbooks is not being used. In research conducted between the fall of 2009 and summer of 2011, John Hilton III and David Wiley examined how often the (then open) textbooks from Flat World Knowledge were actually being adapted and remixed to create custom textbooks. Of the 3,304 adoptions of FWK textbooks, they discovered 247 (or 7.5%) books that were different from the original FWK textbook. Of those 247 books, by far the most popular customization was faculty deleting chapters (60.32%).

I suppose I can look at the research and go, “Wow. Almost 250 faculty adapted an OER! That’s great!” But instead the pragmatist (who has a project that is relying on faculty adaptation for success) looks at the 92.5% of faculty who didn’t modify a lick. The overwhelming majority of faculty who adopt open textbooks are looking for fully finished solutions.

Which makes me question whether OER’s are really generative. After all, a generative technology based on Zittrains definition, is grounded in the assumption that:

…the public can be trusted to invent and share good uses

But the research shows that, in this case, not many are.

All this is rolling around inside my head as we move towards the second (and potentially most complicated and challenging) phase of the BCcampus open textbook project; remixing and adapting existing open textbooks (watch for a call for proposals later this fall). Phase 1 had BC post-secondary faculty reviewing a number of existing open textbooks, and it has given us some extremely useful information about the textbooks in the open textbook collection. There have been a few adoptions, but most of the reviews point the way towards revision work.

The prospect of building on existing OER’s is both exciting and terrifying for me. Terrifying because I know that so many have tried hard for years to encourage remix and reuse with little (7.5%) luck. But exciting because there have already been faculty who took part in the review phase approaching us with questions about adapting and modifying the textbooks, and (anecdotal at least) it feels like there are some positive vibes in the air around adaptation.

Are we final ready to fully realize the generative potential of OER’s? I don’t know. But I am feeling energized and enthused heading into phase 2, and am hopeful that we will come out the other end with something of value. And a few strong case studies that sees that 7.5% mark rise.

Photo credit: IMG_1826 by vlidi released under CC-BY-SA license

 
by Clint Lalonde on Open, Textbooks

The business of textbooks or why do students prefer print?

Students prefer print.

Julie K. Bartley, an associate professor of geology and chair of the geology department at Gustavus Adolphus College, hears the sentiment from her undergraduates. “Our students don’t really want to have e-books,” Ms. Bartley says.  Chronicle of Higher Ed

I hear this a lot, with some (industry) research suggesting that 75% of students prefer print over electronic textbooks. A 2010 study from Woody et al (E-books or textbooks Students prefer textbooks) supports the notion that students prefer print to electronic.

It is becoming quite clear that, despite the ubiquity of computers and interactive technology in their lives, students preferred textbooks over e-books for learning

But why is that? Why do students seem to prefer printed textbooks to electronic ones? Says Ms. Bartley:

“What I hear from them a lot of times is that they feel some sort of comfort in being able to hold the thing in their hands.” Chronicle of Higher Ed

and

Based on these results, we argue that at this time the medium itself may not be as comfortable as a textbook experience for readers (Woody et al)

I don’t want to minimize the tactile experience of reading a physical book, and I do acknowledge that there are some pedagogical qualities of a physical book things that are easier to do in print than electronic, like flip back and forth quickly between pages to help connect concepts located at different parts of the book. But I sometimes think this reason is given far too much importance when we examine student format preferences and we are missing out on an equal, if not more, important factor biasing student format preference.

Economics.

Most of the studies that have looked at student textbook format preferences have compared a publishers resource to itself; a publishers printed textbook versus the same publishers electronic offering. And when you look at the economics behind this choice, it’s easy to see why students might pick print over electronic. As Kent Anderson’s points out, from a student perspective, the economics of e-text vs print just does not make sense when it comes to publishers textbooks.

For the vast majority of students, print textbooks are economically superior to e-books simply because there’s a robust used book market for expensive print textbooks. Buy them new, sell them back. Want them cheaper? Buy them used. The market is much more favorable and robust.

As an example, would I buy a $52 e-book when I can buy a $115 print book that has, as its low offer, a used price of $84? With print, I can essentially “rent” a textbook for a semester for $31, an economic edge of $21 over the e-book — and with no upfront cost of an e-reader.

In other words, it is cheaper for a student to buy a textbook and sell that used textbook to recoup costs. There is a market for used textbooks. There is no market for a used e-text version.

Not that you could sell your e-text version even if there was a market because students don’t actually own the e version of the publishers textbook. The publishers don’t “sell” e-texts – they lease access to them, usually for 180 days. Even if a student wants to keep the textbook, they cannot. After 4-6 months, they lose access to the e-textbook.

But yet this fall, students will feel an even stronger push from publishers to choose e-text over print even though they are not buying them.Why would publishers continue to push formats that students don’t want?

Simply put – to undercut the used textbook market. Publishers don’t make money from the sale of used textbooks, so they are eager to see the print market dry up and for students to adopt e-text. So there is an economic incentive for publishers to kill off physical textbooks and push e-texts on students, who are balking at the terms they are offering and rejecting their expensive e-text. Plus, e-text versions make collecting data about students use of the textbooks possible, something they can’t do with print versions of the textbook. And there is gold in that there data.

Yet, offer a free and open text and then it is a vastly different story – students will choose the free and open electronic version of a textbook over low cost printed version.

Lindshield & Adhikari created an electronic textbook (they called it a flexbook) for a Human Nutrition course and found that, even though low cost print on demand versions of the book were available, students (whether on campus or online) overwhelmingly chose the electronic version.

Campus
(n = 93)
Online
 (n = 102)
Primary way of using the flexbook
   Google Docs version shared to Gmail or K-State Google account
23 (24.7%)
20 (19.6%)
   Web version (accessed through link)
24 (25.8%)
14 (13.7%)*
   PDF (downloaded)
43 (46.2%)
51 (50.0%)
   Hard copy (self-printed or purchased from vendor)
3 (3.2%)
17 (16.7%)**
Second most common way of using the flexbook
   Google Docs version shared to Gmail or K-State Google account
13 (14.0%)
20 (19.6%)
   Web version (accessed through link)
23 (24.7%)
13 (12.7%)*
   PDF (downloaded)
21 (22.6%)
20 (19.6%)
   Hard copy (self-printed or purchased from vendor)
3 (3.2%)
5 (4.9%)
   Flexbook used in only one way
33 (35.5%)
44 (43.1%)

Research from Hilton & Laman (2012 paywall) shows a similar student preference for electronic vs print, with 62% of students choosing a free online version of the textbook compared to a low cost print on demand version of the same textbook (n=307). Incidentally, the Hilton & Laman research, like previous research, showed that students who used the free open textbook scored higher on departmental final examinations, had higher grade point averages in the class and had higher retention rates than those students who used a traditional text).

Now, there is a certain “d’uh” quality to this – free wins is kind of a no-brainer. But, for me, it shows just how powerful the economic argument is when it comes to student format preference. Which is why I think that when it comes to discussions as to whether students prefer one format over the other, we need to look closely at the economic terms being offered to students for those electronic resources and see whether the students are rejecting the format, or the terms being offered to them to use that format.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Open

PDF is where OER's go to die

I really dislike PDF. No, really. Dislike is too measured a term. I hate it. I want to declare war on the tyranny of PDF for content that has been licensed for modification and remixing.

We WANT to reuse!

As part of the BC Open Textbook project, we want to start from the point of building on what others have done before; to realize the promise and potential of OER reuse. It only makes sense that we try to reuse what already exists in the commons and avoid recreating the wheel?  Why create a Calculus textbook when a half dozen already exist that can be modified?

There is no shortage of OER material

It doesn’t take a deep immersion into the world of OER to see that there is no lack of OER material. The OER movement has been around for over a decade and in that time, vast repositories of openly licensed content have been created and collected and sit in repositories (including BC’s own SOLR where 10 years worth of Online Program Development Fund projects are stored). Developing resources from scratch isn’t an issue. But reusing those objects or improving those resources? Um, well….

Okay, we have pretty well solved the legal issues around modification

In the early days of the web,there were very few mechanisms that would allow people to legally copy, reuse and modify material found on the web. Copyright was rigid and worked against the principle of reuse. Well, that environment has changed immensely in the past decade with the rise of licenses like Creative Commons, which allows content authors to specify up front how their content can be used. We now have a large body of work licensed in a way that allows for reuse. That legal impediment to reuse has been dealt with, and we have content that authors have legally given others the right to remix and modify. We have crossed that hurdle.

Now it is a technical hurdle

And this is a massive problem (at least for me right now), as anyone who has spent any amount of time trying to convert documents from one format to another knows. I am finding some great CC-BY licensed resources locked away in technical formats that, for all practical purposes, makes reuse near impossible (yes, I am looking squarely at you, PDF. Flash, you are not far behind).

In other words, I can legally modify and reuse this material because the license says I can, but in practical real terms, I cannot because the content is locked in an unmixable format.

Content that is made available in a legal format for modifying, but is not made technically available for modifying seems so self-defeating. Sure, go ahead and use my content, you have my permission, here is my PDF file <insert pin into balloon>.

It feels like we are crossing one cultural hurdle around reuse (ownership, licensing, etc) only to be faced with another in that we cannot technically modify what we have been given the legal right to.

It can be done, but…

Content can be liberated from PDF documents, but it is a difficult, expensive, nit-picky process that requires a lot of manual work by people with some tech chops. To expect an average user to be able to liberate content in a PDF and make it into a reusable format that can then be output to a number of different formats cleanly is just not going to happen.

It doesn’t have to be this way

So, I make a bit of a plea. If you are creating content and have made the decision to license with a CC license that allows others to modify (and good on ya!), please consider making that content available in technical formats that can be remixed and modified. Even Word documents are preferable to PDF. Make the source files available.

A deliverable for the open textbook project I hope to achieve

This is my own personal goal for our project. To make available open textbooks in as many remixable formats as we can so that what we create can not only be legally modified, but technically. I want to make our source files available so that other can use what we have done.

And I want to take that a step further. If we convert a locked PDF document that is released under a CC-BY license into another format for reuse, then I want to make those source files available. It seems like we should be able to do that as it will be part of our normal workflow anyway. So, hopefully, in addition to creating new content as part of this project, we will be able to make available other existing open textbook materials that are locked away in PDF documents available for others to reuse. If we could do that as a natural byproduct of our work, that would be a victory in the ongoing battle to end the tyranny of PDF.

 
by Clint Lalonde on For Fun

What's on your laptop lid?

I love laptop lids and how they have become a space to reflect the personality of the owners; a place where you can tell a story about yourself, your beliefs and the things that are important to you. I find laptop covers fascinating, and when I got to a conference & meet people for the first time, the stickers I see on their laptop cover often becomes a good starting point for conversations to find out more about the people behind the screen.

A short Twitter exchange between George Veletsianos and Martin Weller caught my eye.

Here is my laptop cover. It’s still a work in progress as I have only had it for a couple months.

My current puter

First thing you probably notice about my laptop is that it is not an Apple. Judging from the lids I see at the conferences I attend, I think I am among the minority of the EdTech community in that I am a PC. I love that Martin’s got the Clash smashing guitar sticker overtop the Apple logo giving the impression that Joe Strummer is about to make apple sauce. Nice bit of visual subversion there.

A couple of the stickers on mine are probably pretty familiar – Firefox, Wikipedia, WordPress, MediaWiki, Creative Commons. There is also one from a project that Martin is involved in – the OER Research Hub project. When I was at the Connexions conference in Houston a few months back I met one of Martin’s colleagues working on the project, Dr. Beck Pitt & slipped me the sticker.

The stickers you might not recognize are the Village 900 sticker, which was the campus community radio station I managed for a few years (& sadly, recently went dark), Extreme 107.3 was the last commercial radio station I worked for in 1999/2000 and is, um, also off the air (I sense a theme here). The One Less Car is from the Greater Victoria Cycling Coalition. I am an avid cyclists and, at one time, was active as a volunteer with the GVCC. There is one of these on my bike as well. The last (for the time being) sticker is the Open for Learning sticker is from the 2011 ETUG spring workshop held in Nelson, BC which, in retrospect, I wish I made a better effort to attend.

So, what is on your laptop lid? What stories does it tell about you? I’d love to see a photo of it & hear some of your stories.

 
by Clint Lalonde on All the rest

This is not my web

I saw this tweet pass by my stream earlier today, so went to read the post. Then I started digging around the site and realized Audrey has not just turned off comments for future posts, but has removed all comments from her blog. Period.

I had a bit of a back and forth with Audrey, hoping that she might reconsider her decision to delete all the comments on Hack Education. In my opinion, the conversations that have happened there constitute an important record in the history of EdTech as we go through a critical period of change. She has been one of the most thoughtful and vocal critics about the business of EdTech at a time when we need critics the most, and I have seen many thoughtful comments and conversations take place in the comments.

But there have also been assholes. And worse. Much worse.

This makes me incredibly sad and angry.

“Stupid bitch”, “fuck you”, and “stop being such a bitch.” While that content is highly offensive, it’s the pseudonym that this coward uses that casts a cold chill on the message and takes it from vitriolic to menacing threat. Jack the Ripper. The very name conjures up horrific images of violence against women. A name chosen as a pseudonym designed to do one thing and one thing only: silence through intimidation.

You could chalk it up to it just being the internet. That comments like this are part and parcel of the game. But it shouldn’t be. It can’t be.

It can’t be.

When I see comments like this, I become painfully aware of the existence of the types of terrible gender barriers that prevent many woman from participating in open spaces. It is one thing to have ideas criticised and debated. It is quite another to be attacked in a manner designed to threaten and intimidate and make you fear for your safety.

I don’t know if this specific comment had that effect on Audrey, but I do know that comments like this have led her to not only stop accepting comments, but to remove all comments from her site. It is a decision that I know she did not take lightly.

I know she will not stop writing or being a sharp critic. In fact, I hope that this may prove to be a liberating exercise for her as it frees her from having to worry about dealing with the assholes on her site.

But I do mourn the lose of conversation. I know, I can always leave a comment here, link back to her blog and signal her that way in hopes of having a discussion through pingbacks and trackbacks. That is still possible, but in reality what you end up with are a hundred individual voices scattered all over the web. It becomes a monologue and not a conversation. And I actually do read comments and often find them illuminating. In the case of Hack Education, much of how I think about the Silicon Valley attitude of education has come from comments left by people on one of her blog posts. Through their own words I see their plans.

Let me make this clear – Hack Education is Audrey’s space. She can do with it what she wants. And while I do feel that we in education have lost an important part of our history with the deletion of the comments from Hack Education, I respect her decision. No one should be subjected to the kind of abusive anonymous threats like those left by idiots.

We cannot accept this. Especially if you are male and reading this; we need to stand up and shout – loudly – that this type of language and behavior will not be tolerated.

Men do not just need to stop being violent. The vast majority of men are not violent. But men do need to stop being silent. Calling violence against women, whether street harassment or sexual harassment or rape or murder, a “women’s issue” allows men to ignore it as if we have no responsibility for it or stake in ending it. We all have grandmothers, mothers, sisters, daughters and female friends and colleagues. Our lives are inextricably interwoven; women’s issues of safety and equality directly affect our lives as men. Donald MacPherson

This cannot be our web.

This cannot be our culture.

We cannot have discourse silenced because of intimidation.

We cannot have women hesitant to enter into these open spaces because of crap like this.

This is not my web.

 
by Clint Lalonde on Open

Remix my words

opennessteachtheweb.003

A tweet from Emma (@sunnydeveloper) just made my day.

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/sunnydeveloper/status/334675937461415937″]

The backstory

A few months ago I wrote a blog post titled Open is an attitude in which I used a project that Emma and I worked on (Mozilla HackJam) to illustrate some of the ways in which “open” influenced how that event unfolded. Last week, that blog post was remixed by students participating in the #teachtheweb MOOC (Mozilla Open Online Collaboration) event currently underway. The students have the following as an assignment:

MAKE Project this week: Find someone to collaborate with and create a make about why being open is important to you.

So, a group of learners in the MOOC got together and decided to use my Creative Commons licensed blog post (that allows for remixing) as the basis for their project. Among the artifacts they created includes a series of visuals that have been released on Flickr under a Creative Commons license for others to now take and use/adapt, and a CC-BY YouTube video that can also be used and adapted by others.

Needless to say, seeing my work used, reused and remixed in this way makes this open educator very happy.