Month: September 2006 Page 1 of 2

A discussion on a mailing list indicates that government legislation may be a barrier to the Web 2.0 idea of making everything open.  In someway related to, or tied up with the issue of privacy etc.

In the discussion some are worried that the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA)  means that online discussions for a course can’t be made completely open.

I’m not a lawyer but reading the page I wonder if participation in a online discussion is actually part of the student record.

Either way the point is that having everything completly open is not always possible.

There are no new ideas.

UC Berkeley are already using Google Video to host course videos.

The content on this page —drawn from campus seminars, courses and events—is just one part of UC Berkeley’s commitment to the broadest possible dissemination of knowledge for the benefit of our state, the nation and the world.

Jeremy Geelan has a
post about “Social Computing”: Oxymoron – or the biggest new thing since the web itself?.

A nice summary overview, with some good references. Including a Forrester report that includes the following quote

“To thrive in an era of Social Computing, companies must abandon top-down management and communication tactics, weave communities into their products and services, use employees and partners as marketers, and become part of a living fabric of brand loyalists.”

A long and interesting post from Dion Hinchcliffe about a bunch of Web 2.0 stuff.

The bit that caught my eye was the section title “Web 2.0 is much more about a change in people and society than technology”

This resonates with all those Web 2.0 naysayers that point out that none of the technology in Web 2.0 is really new. What is new appears to be how that technology is bundled and leverage to enable people to do different things, and that there are people who are actually ready to do different things.

The blogosphere and other “Web 2.0” communities show that there are people who have changed, who are ready to “be Web 2.0”. But I’m not sure how widespread those people/views really are.

The eLearning 2.0 crowd is a pretty small proportion of all educators. I know that most of the people at my institution have little or no idea about this 2.0 stuff and the ideas of openness, sharing, remixing etc would be very challenging.

Getting the technology working is interesting and fun. It’s also easy compared to using and introducing the technology in a way that a majority of people within an organisation will change their current practices and be “2.0”.

A post that looks at how/if the adoption of Web 2.0/eLearning will occur. Will they or won’t they?

The basic premise is that its usefulness and ease of use that will be the major factors. And that for Web 2.0 tools ease of use should be quite high. So it all comes down to usefulness.

It’s a reasonable assumption, but I am wondering how other factors will influence adoption rates. Is it just these two? Probably yes.

So this will be somewhat problematic for my idea of Web 2.0 course sites. What will be the perceived usefulness of this idea to individual academics. Not much. It’s more likely to appeal to management. It won’t even appeal to the sys admin type staff.

It will be a very challenging idea to encourage adoption of.

Obviously asking the students is an important task. Here’s a list of applications considered useful for college students. Includes a long list of comments.

Some additions

• NoteMesh a wiki site per class for students to share notes about a class
• skrbl – shared whiteboard

A 2005 article outlining 6 main themes in designing a web 2.0 site

1. Writing semantic markup (transition to XML)
2. Providing Web services (moving away from place)
3. Remixing content (about when and what, not who or why)
4. Emergent navigation and relevance (users are in control)
5. Adding metadata over time (communities building social information)
6. Shift to programming (separation of structure and style)

Another post builds on this through examination of Movietally using the 6 themes.

Another piece of evidence about the problems of making all (or even most) University teaching content free is this piece about DRM being one of the top requests from Universities for the next version of Apple’s iTune U

Other lists

Albert Ip has started a list of collaborative type tools available on the web. One of many, but a good start.

Misc tools

• Slideshare – described as YouTube for Powerpoint by Alan Levine
  TechCrrunch have the original article which talks more about the service. It’s still in beta at the moment.

Background Problem

Everytime someone is introduced to Webfuse they wonder why we haven’t sold it, made it available to other organisations.

Apart from being lazy, the real reason doesn’t seem to be accepted all that easily. i.e. that the whole idea behind Webfuse is that it is the “glue” between the various bits of software and the CQU context and consequently very specific to CQU isn’t widely accepted.

Making it more general

So with the web 2.0 course site idea (must get a better name – Webfuse 2.0?) need to think about a way of making it more portable to other institutions.

One approach would be to support the heavy weight education standards – IMS, SCORM and the like. I have a problem with that approach. Similarly, web services.

Some of the lightweight service stuff might work.

A solution?

UNAPI looks like it might be a solution. From the UNAPI description

unAPI is a tiny HTTP API any web application may use to co-publish discretely identified objects in both HTML pages and disparate bare object formats. It consists of three parts: an identifier microformat, an HTML autodiscovery link, and three HTTP interface functions, two of which have a standardized response format.

The idea would be that obtaining all the institutional information (course codes, names, students? etc) would be done via an UNAPI service. So porting it to another institution would be implementing that API for that institution.

Making the rounds of the blogosphere, or at least the little part I’m currently following, is an Enterprise Web 2.0 blog – “examining leadership and people issues raised by next-generation of web technologies”.

It includes a post Top 10 Management Fears about Enterprise Web 2.0. It includes a long list of comments and various other folk are posting about it.

These are issues that will need to be considered.