EdTech

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 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 Google Doc.

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 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 EdTech, Open, Teaching & Learning

The ds106 snowflake

I love this ds106 data visualization put together by Martin Hawksey at JISC. This video is a representation of the community activity that occurred in ds106 – the unMOOC MOOC developed by Alan Levine, Jim Groom and the rest of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technology at U Mary Washington (whose innovative work I have gushed over before).

With each white circle representing a blog post, and circles clustered around individual blogs, you can quickly see just how much activity occured during ds106, and how much this beautiful visualization represents a model of learning that reflects the qualities of the internet itself – distributed, networked, nodal, autonomous yet connected. It’s no accident that this visualization looks like the internet itself.  As Alan points out, ds106 was specifically designed this way.

The very essence of ds106 is that it is made of the same stuff that the web is made of, a distributed, open, decentralized connected network managed by participants in the space it inhabits. You will hear people talk about their organizations or projects being on the web. but there is more than a shade of difference of ds106 being of the web.

In an environment that has proven its resilience, growth, and capability, should we not emulate the very ideals of the internet in the learning experiences we create? For the most part, while being on the web, the majority of MOOCs are operating via a structure that is not built by nor cared for by its learners. The truly open, syndicated model of ds106 works because it acts like the web itself.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

I remember Kamloops

jim

Thanks to an invitation from my TRU colleague Brian Lamb, I was lucky enough to find myself attending A Day for Learning at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops last week. It was a wonderful day and I fear that I have taken away much more than I contributed to the success of the event.

The day underscored for me that I need to have these types of events & discussions at my institution. Set aside some space and time, bring together the right people and spend a day talking about teaching and learning, innovation & dreams. It is easy to become insular in any position within an organization, and this event illustrated how valuable it is to bring a diverse group of people from across the institution together. Personally, it came at exactly the right moment for me as I have been grappling with issues of leadership and what that means. This day was a shining example of the types of things leaders like Brian, Irwin DeVries and Christine Adam do, and something I want to recreate at my institution soon.

I also had the opportunity to meet and hang out with a couple of very smart people; Jeff Miller from UBC and one of my EdTech inspirations, Jim Groom from UMW in Virginia, who both came to TRU as a special guest speakers for this event.  Although it sounds contradictory, Jeff gave (in the course of 90 minutes) an expansive, yet beautifully concise, overview of how higher education has changed, taking us back to the birth of higher ed in our province right up to MOOC’s. It was an engaging and interactive session that showed what a skilled and knowledgeable facilitator Jeff is.

Jim followed with a presentation on innovation that revolved around the wonderful Culture of Innovation video that came out of UMW a few months ago. I found the video utterly inspiring the first time I viewed it several months ago for a number of reasons, not the least of which was for the type of institutional buy-in that Jim and the DLTL crew has managed to garner with their ideas and innovations. But having Jim there to break down the video and explain (in as much detail as he could in an hour) the methods behind his madness grounded the inspirational aspect of the video for me. I want to flesh out some thoughts, especially around the concept of A Domain of Ones Own, in a future post as it is the type of initiative that aligns well with my underlying philosophy of the importance networked learning.

There were other takeaway moments. Three students sharing their observations about learning and what engages and motivates them to learn, including the revelation from a particularly focused online student who made Instructional Designers around the world gasp when they boldly stated that they never did coursework in their online courses, only assignments.

There was also a poignant and moving opening address from TRU elder Estella Moller, which evoked some pretty powerful personal memories of my roots growing up with a father who taught trades at a college in a predominantly First Nations community in Northern Alberta. As a long, but important side note, if you are interested in the history of higher education and First Nations in Canada, I urge you to watch the 20 minute documentary on the history of Portage College that shows how it came to be.  It is a powerful story of determination, resistance, community action and the belief that education is a transformational experience and the key to a better life.

I think I have more to say about the ideas that came out of the day, but for now just end by expressing my thanks to Brian, Irwin and Chris for including me in the day, and hope I can return the invitation in the near future.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Teaching & Learning

Remix, Mashups, Aggregation, Plagiarism oh my

I am about to criticize and show examples from a copyright poster (or, for you new-fangled kids, an infographic) I received in the mail today from Turnitin, the anti-plagiarism company. Fair dealing y’all.

The title of the poster is The Plagiarism Spectrum:  Tagging 10 Types of Unoriginal Work, and lists the top 10 types of plagiarism based on the findings of a global survey of nearly 900 secondary and higher education instructors. The poster ranks the severity of the offense (#1 being highest level of severity, 10 the lowest) and shows a scale of 1-10 based on how often each type of plagiarism appeared in the survey results. I tried to catch a full size shot of the poster (you can click the image for a larger, more detailed version):

Well, I have some problems with this. Let’s zoom in on the areas I find troublesome.

and

Remixing is the 4th most nefarious form of plagarism, and mashups are #7…at least according to these 900 teachers and instructors. This saddens me because I happen to consider these two activities some of the most creative and original cultural acts happening today. And to think there are 900 some instructors and teachers out there who do not recognize the creative value  and sheer amount of work it takes to create something new and original out of what existed before.

Quite frankly, it astonishes me that in this day and age, remix and mashups are thought of as plagiarism. I am of the school that everything is a remix.

History is populated with examples where multiple ideas, products, music, literature, you name it were mashed-up, remixed and otherwise recontextualized to create something completely new and original. As Brian Lamb puts it in his 2007 Educause article Dr. Mashup; or, Why Educators Should Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Remix:

Elements of reuse have always been present in creative work, even though the borrowing may have been framed in terms of “tradition,” or “influence.” Artistic and scholarly works build on the work of others.

Yet, according to this study, we in education consider these acts of stealing; of unoriginal thought. Plagiarism. Laziness. Look at how lazy these remix people are. They work in bed in their pyjamas for crying out loud.

No good can ever come out of that.

If this is the true and accurate sentiments of educators in general – that remix is, in fact a form of plagiarism – then it makes me realize just what kind of uphill battle we might face here in British Columbia as we move towards creating and modifying Open Textbooks. The challenge being that if educators have this underlying core value that remixing  someone else’s content to create something new is plagiarism, then they are coming into the open text book project with the preconceived notion that we have to build something from scratch; reuse is not an option because it is plagiarism.

For me, this is the wrong way to approach an open textbook project. In order for the open textbook initiative to be successful, I think we need educators to come to the table with an open mind about reuse and remixing existing materials; to modify already existing open textbooks and openly licensed content to fit their specific needs. Not only do I think that starting from scratch is an arrogant place to begin (we are the only ones who know best), I think that if we try to recreate the wheel and start from scratch, we start at the bottom of the hill and put a big boulder in the way. Anyone who has written anything at length knows that it is much easier editing and modifying than staring at a blank piece of paper in the typewriter.

I also have a problem that this:

and this:

are practices being painted with the plagiarism brush.

A retweet serves many purposes, not the least of which is attribution. If someone retweets something that I send out and keeps my Twitter handle in the tweet, I am notified. It is a signal to me that they find what I tweeted valuable – so valuable that they wish to share it with the people in their network. For the person being retweeted, this underlying message you receive when someone retweets one of your tweets is that the people in your network find that type of content valuable. It is a prompt to share more. We all know how important knowing your audience is in communication and writing, and a retweet is a signal back to the original source that someone in the audience found the content valuable, please share more like this. Retweets serve an important function in that it helps me know my audience.

Aggregation is, in essence, curation, a skill that I think is incredibly important in education. There is great skill to being a good curator of resources; a filter. I value the curators in my network.  As educators, we constantly curate resources. It is one of the core learning activities we do – vet resources for our learners and point them in the direction of what we think is important. This is what aggregations is all about.

But the biggest problem I have with this poster is that it brings all of these things together in one handy, scary resource, and makes these practices appear fraught with danger, when in fact, I believe these are core skills required to create understanding in today’s world. This poster is being sent out to other educators like myself in the hopes that it will get posted in a hallway or office so that other educators will see this. The underlying message they take away after viewing this poster is that these practices: Remix, Mashup, Aggregation and Retweet are riddled with risk (thanks, Tracy for helping me articulate this). That whatever positive purpose they may serve in an educational context, the risk is not worth it. And I fundamentally disagree with that.

So, I am going to hang this poster in my office and I am going to use it to trigger a conversation. But I am going to modify it a bit.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Multimedia Tools

Create a book from Wikipedia articles

While doing some random surfing last night, I stumbled upon a new tool in Wikipedia that I didn’t know existed (but has been around for a couple of years).

You can create books (both print and e) of selected Wikipedia content.

The Wikipedia book tool is located in the left hand navigation of Wikipedia under Print/Export. Click the create a book link,  activate the book creator tool and you can start compiling pages in Wikipedia.

As you go from page to page, you will see a new toolbar at the top of each page prompting you to add this page to your book.

Once you are finished, click Show Book where you can add a title and rearranging the articles.

Once you have the book tweaked as you like, you can then output & download to EPUB, PDF, OpenDocument, or OpenZIM (a format I am not familiar with), or send a copy to a print on demand service called Pediapress which, for a small fee, will print and ship you a physical copy of the book.

I gave it a try and in about 5 minutes had created a very simple ebook containing the biographies of the current Canadian mens national soccer team (sigh we came so close this time) and the current state of our national soccer program. Here is a Canadian soccer primer from Wikipedia in PDF (yikes – 13 meg) or ePub (1.6 meg) format.

Video on how to create a Wikipedia ebook.

After I tweeted this, Alan Levine & Scott MacMillan replied to me and pointed out that UBC has this feature set up on their wiki’s as well.

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/270759907056304128″]

 

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/clintlalonde/status/270761315293855744″]

 

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/scottmcmillan/status/270762545047031809″]

 

Turns out, there are extensions for any MediaWiki site that can enable instant, on the fly publishing ebook format.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Open, Teaching & Learning

BC to offer free, open textbooks for 40 higher ed courses

Visual Notes of Honourable John Yap's announcement at #opened12
More to come on this as the announcement was made just hours ago at the Open Ed conference in Vancouver, but BC Advanced Education Minister John Yap has just announced that BC will fund the creation of 40 free and open textbooks.

This is very exciting news, for both students – who will save hundreds of dollars each year in textbook costs (it is estimated students spend between $900 and $1,500 per academic year on textbooks. Open textbooks reduce this to around $300 or less when printed books are needed – or $0 for e-copies) – and the open education movement in BC.

Some highlights from the press release:

British Columbia is set to become the first province in Canada to offer students free online, open textbooks for the 40 most popular post-secondary courses.

Because the open textbooks are digital and open, they can be modified and adapted by instructors to fit different classes.

Wonderful as these will be true open textbooks that will be released with licenses that not only allow reuses, but also remixing.

Sounds like there is an aggressive timeline to get these open textbooks created and in the hands of students:

Government will work with post-secondary institutions in implementing an open textbook policy in anticipation they could be in use at B.C. institutions as early as 2013-14.

There will be more on this in the coming weeks, but this is fantastic news for higher ed in BC.

Photo: Visual Notes of Honourable John Yapp’s announcement at #opened12 by giulia.forsythe Used under Creative Commons license

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Multimedia Tools

Creating Interactive Lessons using Ted-Ed

You are probably familiar with TED Talks, a series of 18 minute video lectures recorded at the annual TED Conference. But did you know that TED also provides a handy tool for educators to turn those talks (and other videos) into interactive lessons?

TED-Ed is a platform that allows educators to take any video and make a lesson out of it.

Robert Hanlon, Faculty in Peace & Conflict Studies at RRU, recently used TED-Ed to create 2 interactive lessons for his students; Salma in the Square – Egypt and Witness – The Mayor of Mogadishu. I had the chance to speak to Robert about the lessons, why he decided to use TED-Ed, and what it was like working with the TED-Ed tool (note the audio is slightly clipped for the first 10 seconds).

 
by Clint Lalonde on All the rest, EdTech

A Culture of Innovation

A few weeks ago, I read a blog post from Jim Groom that really resonated and inspired me (as Jim’s posts often do). This particular post started off talking about 3D printing, but then morphed into a post about the numerous innovative projects that have popped out of the creative brains at DTLT over the years. And then the killer bit for me was the last paragraph:

Fact is, if you start chronicling the work we’ve been doing just through the 7 Things series, you start to see a pattern of serial innovation and exploration that not only has success in the research and development stages, but often takes root and becomes part and parcel of  the larger academic culture on campus—which for me is the real trick. But Innovation doesn’t just magically appear, it is born of a culture of freedom, a space that encourages open experimentation, failure (which we have a lot of too), and a shared sense of purpose—a common value system that we are all working towards to make the future of education as accessible and equitably distributed as possible, while at the same time maintaining the humane and interpersonal dimension of learning that makes the whole enterprise meaningful—serial innovation is a mission not a happy accident.

Serial innovation is a mission not a happy accident.

This video from the Division of Teaching and Learning Technology at U Mary Washington takes that paragraph to the next level.

A Culture of Innovation from umwnewmedia on Vimeo.

I WANT THIS so bad for my unit. I want us to dig out of the daily grind to be able to get to the point where we are doing serial innovation. Focusing on the things that are important. Convincing others to come along for the ride. Inspire the people I work with to become as passionate about learning and technology as Jim and his people are.

As someone who works in a similar unit with a similar mandate at a higher ed institution, I find the DTLT approach inspirational, and love how there is such buy-in at the institution for the common vision. As I said in my comment to Jim’s post, the tension between innovation and sustainability is one I constantly battle with. And while innovation is a word that looks good on a mission and values statements, if it isn’t backed up with the things Jim and his colleagues talk about – culture, failure, play, willingness to take risks – it remains locked away as words on statements.

A culture of innovation. This is my goal.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

How do you do Moodle upgrades at your institution?

Looking for a bit of feedback from the Moodle community with this post, so please add any comments. Actually, looking for feedback from any community that uses an LMS, not just Moodle.

We’re struggling a bit right now with an upgrade strategy for Moodle. Recently, Moodle has implemented a regular release schedule, releasing a new, major release twice a year (December/June) with minor releases 6 times a year. While I am a generally fan of the Agile “release early/release often” development philosophy, it is quickly becoming obvious that this is going to be operationally challenging to keep up. In my understanding of the release early/release often philosophy, the changes in each release are meant to be incremental improvements and not feature driven. The problem I am seeing with Moodle right now is that the changes are not incremental. Some of them are downright massive.

Our story is that we have just finished launching Moodle 2.1. We did not upgrade from Moodle 1.95 to 2.1, opting to have 2 learning platforms running to minimize disruption for the students as the two platforms are quite different. So, we have bit the bullet internally and are phasing in Moodle 2.1. New students in new programs are in 2.1, existing students finish their programs in 1.9.

The 2.1 project took us over a year to plan and deploy, partially because we had so heavily customized the 1.9 platform that it took a lot of code rewriting to make sure 2.1 would do what we wanted it to do. We went from over 400 customizations in Moodle 1.95 to less than 10 in Moodle 2.1. We abstracted those customizations and have now redeployed most as modules or plugins. All this was done in the hopes that future upgrades would be more nimble. There was (and still is) a weariness with doing “mega” upgrade projects that take over a year of intensive resources to plan and deploy. We wanted to be able to roll out quick updates a few times a year as close to the Moodle schedule as possible. That was the theory.

In practice this is much more difficult, mostly because the pace of change coming out of Moodle core development is massive. We have just launched 2.1, but now find ourselves 2 versions behind. By December with the release of 2.4, we will be 3.

Now, going from 2.1 to 2.2 will be pretty invisible for our end users as the changes are not that different, and don’t touch some of our customizations. But going to 2.3 means quite major changes at there are overhauls of some key features of the LMS that touch many of our users (navigation, a complete rewrite of assignments, new activity and file picker, key places where our users interact with the LMS). 2.4 looks to be bigger still, with the addition of team assignments, which is one of our key customizations. So, do we wait until 2.4 is out in December, setting our upgrade schedule back to the summer , or do we rewrite our team assignment customization to work with 2.3 knowing that it will be useless in the future? Our work becomes redundant next year.

All this is to say, even these dot upgrades (which we thought would be fairly minor and easy to keep up with) are becoming what we hoped they wouldn’t be – mega-upgrade projects. But now they happen yearly instead of every few years. We are looking ahead and trying to figure out, do we live in perpetual Moodle upgrade land to the point where we operationalize Moodle upgrades each year, or do we stop and sit where we are?

Technically, it takes massive resources for us to do these upgrades, primarily because customizations need to be examined and tested against the code changes. But we have good coders, and they can do the work. The bigger issue is prepping our users and supporting faculty through a constant change cycle. Now, change is good, but when you find yourself in a situation where you are expending huge resources to manage change well, you kinda go is it worth it?

We’re feeling a bit frustrated right now and find ourselves at a high level crossroads. Is this constant upgrade cycle becoming our new reality? It’s becoming obvious that we underestimated the changes each dot release of Moodle is bringing. We were expecting smaller, incremental changes that would have a fairly minor effect on our end users or customizations, not entire rewrites of core components or massive UI changes.

So, my question to you, if you have stuck with me this far (thank you) is how are you managing your Moodle upgrades with the new Moodle release schedule? Do you have regular upgrades scheduled, or is your strategy to sit and wait awhile?

Any insight into your situation and how you manage the upgrade cycle is appreciated.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

3 ways I use Google Reader to do things other than read

The ultimate Swiss Army Knife for sale in Interlaken

A post by George Veletseanos got me thinking about one of the key tools in my PLE – Google Reader – and how I use GReader for things other than reading the myriad of sites and blogs I subscribe to. Here are three things I do with GReader beyond reading.

1) Archive my tweets.

I subscribe to the RSS feed of my Twitter account. I started doing this back in the day when Twitter capped access to old tweets at “about a month” or around 3000, or some other ridiculous number. Now, with Twitter tightening developer access to their api’s, we may begin to see services that allow you access old tweets slowly dwindle.

If you have some server skills, you might want to use a tool called ThinkUp to archive tweets (which not only archives, but also gives you some Twitter stats on your own network activity).

But not everyone has access to their own server or the chops to install and configure their own web service, so a relatively quick and dirty way to archive your tweets is to subscribe to the RSS feed of your Twitter account.

Now, your Twitter accounts RSS feed is even tougher to find than the RSS feed for a Delicious tag. To subscribe to the RSS feed of a Twitter account, you need to know your Twitter user id number. You can do this using a service like MyTwitterID or IDFromUser and then plunking that number into the following url:

 http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/xxxxx.rss

Replacing the xxxxx with your Twitter ID number. Pop that RSS feed in GReader and you are archiving your own tweets.

This is also handy if I want to archive the tweets of key members of my PLN and take advantage of the second thing I like to do in GReader…

2) Search my trusted network for resources.

In GReader, you’ve got the power of Google search,  and I  often use that as a place to start my search about a group of topics. After all, I only add sites that I trust and have vetted as being a valuable resource to me, so who go to the crazy wild web first when I can go directly to the sources I have curated?

3) Track my own comments.

If I add a comment to a blog post, I will subscribe to that comment feed so I can follow up with what gets posted as comments and take part in the conversation. I have tried a number of comment tracking services over the years, but still find this the most reliable and user friendly way to track conversation on blogs. In Greader I have a folder called Comments, and when I subscribe to the Comments feed for a blog post, I add the feed there. That way I can take track the convo and take part in the conversation.

So those are 3 ways that I use Google Reader beyond reading. How about you? Any hacks or ways you use Google Reader that is a bit unusual?

Photo: The Ultimate Swiss Army Knife by redjar used under Creative Commons license.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

Getting a RSS feed for a Delicious tag

I keep having to refer back to how I have done this in the past because it is not obvious within Delicious how to do this, unless you start to dig around the developers documentation. So, I am posting this here in case anyone else needs to get the RSS feed for a Delicious tag.

I’ll get to why you may want to do this in a minute, but first the meat of the post.

To pull an RSS feed for a tag, the url pattern is:

http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/tag/<insert tag here>?count=10

So, for example, to pull an RSS feed of the last 10 resources tagged moodle, the url would look like:

http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/tag/moodle?count=10

That will pull an RSS feeds of the latest 10 resources tagged with the keyword “moodle”. If you want more or less resources, you simply change the number 10 to whatever number you want in your feed.

If you want to track a different tag, simply replace the word moodle with whatever tag you want to follow. So, if you want to track the last 20 resources tagged “pln”, for example, the feed would look like this:

http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/tag/pln?count=20

Now, why would you want to do this? Well, one of the things I like to do is monitor Delicious for new items that are tagged by the community, but I don’t want to have to go to Delicious to see what is newly tagged for whatever topic I am tracking. What I like to do is pull an RSS feed into a site I already check everyday (actually multiple times a day) – my Netvibes page, which is my personal dashboard.

Here is what the Moodle example above looks like on my Netvibes Moodle tab:

The widget is in the top left corner of my Moodle tab, which is in context with all the other Moodle resources I am tracking on the web. Now whenever someone tags a resources with the keyword “moodle” in Delicious, it will appear in this widget, in context with all the other Moodle resources I am gathering.

 

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

Google Docs adds search to documents

I opened up a new Google Doc this morning and was greeted with a new Google Docs feature called Research.

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

WWhat is this new Research bit?ell 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.

Filter search results by licenseOne 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.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Teaching & Learning

New like e-textbook new?

I started writing a comment on George’s spot post Connected Learning: What have they done with Alec, Will, Vicki?, prompted by the announcement coming out of the DML conference in San Francisco of a “new” learning model called connected learning. I quickly realized that what I wanted to say was not a comment, but a blog post.

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:

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” :
<


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.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, My Masters, WordPress

Publishing my thesis with WordPress and Digress.it – Part 2

I’m working on publishing my thesis on this site using WordPress and the Digress.it plugin. This is part 2. You can read about how I configured WordPress to run a second blog on a sub-domain and set up Digress.it in part 1.

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.