Tom's Two Cents

Carla Federman, US History Teacher at Mary Institute and Saint Louis Country Day School, is teaching her Cold War class with a new twist this year. She will be reenacting the Cuban Missile Crisis using 15 different Twitter accounts. You can follow the tweets at http://thea.micds.org/twitster/index.php, or if you use Twitter you can follow the individual characters here. TwHistory was the brainchild of Marion Jensen, and started with a reenactment of the Battle of Gettysburg earlier this summer (press release here). My colleagues at the Open University of Catalonia have been doing interesting work on microlearning with Twitter, including interesting work on using Twitter in language learning by Graham Stanley. They were even able to interview Jack Dorsey, CEO and founder of Twitter, about using Twitter in education (here and here). So what are your thoughts on microlearning using Twitter?

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If you like OpenCourseWare and Facebook, you need to check out CourseFeed.

CourseFeed started out as a virtual classroom app that supported Blackboard announcements and content, but it is growing into much more. Currently CourseFeed allows anyone on Facebook to add OCW courses from Stanford, Notre Dame, and Utah State University. The class wall allows anyone to discuss the course materials. CourseFeed is a simple concept, and yet a big step toward personalized, lifelong learning!

Check it out here: http://apps.facebook.com/coursefeed/?display=landingPage

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Do you know what I do with openly licensed YouTube videos when I think they are worthwhile? I copy the YouTube link and paste it over on dotSub.com. (DotSub can import directly from YouTube.) Why do I do this? Because YouTube isn’t very useful if you are deaf or don’t speak English.  DotSub.com allows anyone to come along and add a transcription or a translation in another language. I don’t know why YouTube doesn’t support this. It’s so easy to do. C’mon Google, what’s the harm in allowing translations like dotSub? If you don’t have time to develop it, just get out your checkbook and buy dotSub. It’s the least you can do as a huge-but-not-evil tech company.

Here’s the The Networked Student on dotSub: http://dotsub.com/view/41f08de7-68dc-4365-af4c-5733f565b9e1 Subtitles are offered in English, Czech, Portuguese, and Spanish.

The Networked Student was inspired by CCK08, a Connectivism course offered by George Siemens and Stephen Downes during fall 2008. It depicts an actual project completed by Wendy Drexler’s high school students. The Networked Student concept map was inspired by Alec Couros’ Networked Teacher. I hope that teachers will use it to help their colleagues, parents, and students understand networked learning in the 21st century. Anyone is free to use this video for educational purposes. You may download, translate, or use as part of another presentation. Please share.

Edit: Rob points out in his comment that YouTube does support subtitles, but I see no attempt to allow others to contribute translations. I understand that this adds complexity and the possibility of malicious translations, but dotSub.com provides an easy translation interface and allows the owner of the video to control which users can translate.

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I’m reblogging and expanding on a comment I left on Jon Mott’s blog post about the demise of Lively, Google’s Second Life clone. He and I and lots of others are interested in the idea of using collections of social web apps to form Personal Learning Environments in “the cloud.” Institutions are showing interest, but with obvious concerns about lack of control. While Jon’s post focused on the need for caution with cloud apps that can be temporary in nature, I think his words of caution can be applied more generally to any app that doesn’t come with clearly marked exits. Usually, these exits come in the form of standards-based content export capabilities. Look for them. Like the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, robust import/export is the sign of a good app.

Now let’s look at this from a marketing perspective. If you are Blackboard, why would you ever allow anyone to export anything useful? If a customers are packing up their content that means they might be leaving. That’s like a crab trap with a big hole at the other end. That is unacceptable.

If you are Blackboard, you talk about IMS Common Cartridge compliance. But don’t do anything to make it actually happen. Take your time talking about it. Heck, you can even join the IMS Global Learning Consortium. That looks good. But don’t write any code until you absolutely have to. And when you are finally forced to implement CC, don’t give users an exit that works too well. They might use it.

Anyway, here is my comment from Jon’s blog:

Seriously, people have been painting themselves into corners ever since the invention of… um… paint. Whether you are talking about cloud-based apps or a Blackboard server nestled safely in your institution’s server farm, you can still wind up stuck… either locked out or locked in. While parts of the cloud will likely blow away, new ones will likely take their place.

The real question is “Can you get in or out of where you currently are, and can you take your data with you?” Frankly, I would rather take my chances on being locked out of a few cloud apps than locked into a single, proprietary LMS. Interestingly, I’m working with a group on an IMS CC-Blackboard converter that should get around the import/export problem despite Bb’s foot-dragging. Guess where it will live? In the cloud… with all those risky, new-fangled apps.

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Yesterday I spoke to Jayson and Rich from ClassTop about CourseFeed, their Facebook app that connects users to other course members and course content. This includes a shared “course wall” and “course notes,” which can be posted to and tracked via Facebook. And for students enrolled at institutions with a supported Blackboard content management system, CourseFeed provides additional course notifications from within Facebook. It got me thinking about how something like CourseFeed could be a bridge from traditional OpenCourseWare sites to something even better. I’m imagining a Facebook app that could serve as the hub of a Personal Learning Environment (PLE), the part of your social network where you can track discussions and fresh content on subjects that interest you. CourseFeed is not there yet, but I think they are moving in the right direction.

For now CourseFeed seems to be mostly about delivering course notifications for Blackboard users directly into Facebook, and the course community seems limited to students enrolled in the Blackboard course. (I tried the CourseFeed demo, but I couldn’t test it further because my own institution’s Blackboard does not yet support it.) Since CourseFeed is currently designed with an emphasis on Blackboard, the course content is not shareable for many of the reasons Jon Mott pointed out in his OpenEd 2008 presentation: Blackboard is closed, impenetrable, rigid, and ephemeral. Currently CourseFeed invitations are limited to students who are enrolled in the same course at the same institution. Others cannot join the course. And if the Blackboard course is removed at the end of the semester, it gets removed on CourseFeed as well. The students no longer have access to that course.  ClassTop has also had to move to an opt-in agreement with Blackboard institutions — meaning they have to seek institutional approval, school-by-school, before CourseFeed can be enabled on that school’s Blackboard server. I understand why they had to do it this way, but it kind of kills the potential for CourseFeed to go viral. With these kinds of restrictions, it is notable that CourseFeed has nearly 21,000 active monthly users.

Now think about what something like CourseFeed could be if it were designed without all the Blackboard roadblocks. What if ClassTop designed CourseFeed or another app specifically for course content that was already vetted for copyright issues and openly licensed? These courses exist by the thousands on OpenCourseWare (OCW) sites created by prominent institutions all over the world. If CourseFeed were designed as a way to personalize OCW courses, every course could be linked to its own permanent Facebook group. Anyone interested in the course, including students and professors from other institutions, could join and participate in these groups at any time and for as long as they wish. These connections and discussions might ultimately become more valuable to participants than the original course, perhaps even leading to the creation of additional course content or the formation of new OpenCourseWare sites at other institutions. Additional tools and apps could be developed to promote the kind of learning system that Jon Mott described as open, permeable, flexible, permanent, and free.

I believe more and more students will want to track their favorite subjects and study groups, the same way they keep track of other groups and friends on Facebook. Blackboard will never fill this need because their learning experience is both temporary and unshareable by design. (Yes, I understand why… fair use… blah, blah, blah.) But if CourseFeed directed those same Blackboard students to some recommended, related OpenCourseWare courses, they could form learning goups that would still be there after the course was over — even after graduation, when they are (hopefully) trying to apply some of what they learned. The beauty of it is that the content is already there. Thousands of courses. Any takers?

Please Note: When I refer to Facebook, I realize that other, similar sites exist internationally, including many successful clones. PLE applications could be build for any number of social networking sites that support community driven application development. Personally, I think Facebook will continue to lead in this space, both in the US and internationally. They have undertaken an excellent community-driven translation effort, which is another area of interest to me.

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