The Auricle

I presented an opening keynote at the Open University Business School on Friday (23 September 2005) for the Cambridge-MIT Institute�s conference Innovations in the Reuse of Electronic Learning Materials: Enabling Communities of Practice. I had my Higher Education Academy hat on, but given the conference theme and the aim of the keynote to stimulate reflection and discussion, I took the opportunity to �rattle the bars� just a little. As its name suggests, the Cambridge-MIT Institute (CMI) is a partnership between two of the world�s major higher education organisations. CMI declares its mission as “� to undertake education and research designed to improve competitiveness, productivity and entrepreneurship �”

I followed Liz Beatty�s keynote. Liz is Director of Learning and Teaching at the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). She gave an excellent summary of the multiplicity of investments over many years that have been made into what we now know as e-learning. A couple of key messages from Liz�s presentation are worth particular note. First, the concept now is to try and invest funding as close as possible to communities of practice, with the centre�s role being to provide the framework and broad strategy. Second, we all need to learn not to try and tidy things up too much, i.e. attempting to remove apparent ‘messiness’ may also be removing what makes communities work. At the same time Liz emphasized that ‘the centre’ still has a major role in helping communities stay connected to different perspectives and so in preventing �silos� developing. Dynamic communities-of-practice connected to other communities seems to be the goal.

My keynote, Innovation, Innovation but where�s the change � coming from?, was in two, hopefully complementary, sections. First up, were the central drivers for change. For example, in England, national strategies like the Department for Education and Skills e-strategy and HEFCE�s E-Learning Strategy. Both of these set broad goals which then inform the work of organisations like JISC and the Higher Education Academy and therefore, people like me.

My presentation then highlighted the extensive work being undertaken by the JISC Programmes, Services and Projects, the Academy Subject Centres, and, increasingly, the UK�s Centres of Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CETLs). Of particular relevance to the conference theme was the CETL in Reusable Learning Objects which was collaborating with Academy Subject Centres in prototyping and exploring the issues related to the use (or non-use) of reusable learning materials. Several other Academy Subject Centres are also helping their discipline areas investigate the issues related to reusability of learning materials, e.g. what are the impediments to reuse? The Academy Subject Centres make up a unique network situated close to the disciplines they serve and so can apply the essential community context to initiatives and enable synergies which would otherwise not be possible. Several Subject Centres are undertaking JISC funded investigations into reusability and repurposing under the former�s Distributed e-Learning (DeL) initiative (a strand of the broader e-Learning Programme). For instance, the Subject Centre for Dance, Drama, and Music (Palatine) has an project under the DeL banner called PRISM which is working on an interesting distributed learning resource tool; the PDF mock-up available on the PRISM site gives a good idea of where they want to take this. The slides supporting my keynote go into further detail and will give a greater sense of the extensive activity taking place.

So there�s lots of activity on the official front which is trying to reach out to the constituent communities of the UK Higher Education sector and the JISC, Subject Centres, CETLs et al deserve a round of applause for their efforts. But � as we know with Auricle, there�s always a but 🙂

My keynote was meant to stimulate discussion, challenge the status quo, and do more than provide information. And so, we left the world of sunlight and eternal optimism. We moved beyond the �comfort zone� for a brief consideration of the ‘other’ or ‘unofficial’ factors that will impact on the best laid plans for the reuse of learning materials.

I�m not claiming all of the following is original thought and much of it is itself a fine example of reusability (or is that repurposing?); so my thanks to the thought leaders and lateral thinkers on whose shoulders I stand (I�ve attempted to credit appropriately in my slides). Or to put it another way, my presentation was itself an aggregation based on the concept of Filter > Repurpose > Remix > Feed Forward so clearly articulated by Stephen Downes in his ITI 2004 presentation Reusable Media, Social Software and Openness in Education and so nicely demonstrated by Brian Lamb and Alan Levine in their Educause 2004 workshop Rip Mix Feed.

My Challenges to the Comfort Zone series of slides considered the following:

1. Technology can easily become an innovative way of not changing.
2. Reusable learning materials do not by themselves make for deep learning.
3. Technologies increasingly tend to determine practice not vice versa.
4. Are we acknowledging the Reusability Paradox?
5. Does the iPod Generation want a ‘filling station’ not a streaming source?
6. The impact of domestic broadband and wireless on the office and lecture theatre?
7. The uptake and impact of �grassroots standards�?
8. Distributed, decentralized self-organizing systems versus the centralized mega repository?
9. User expectations/rights versus the �lock in� or �lock-out� business model.
10. The growing relevance/importance of user-generated content.
11. Free services and tools with massive user uptake.

Let�s briefly explore some of the above.

1) Technology can easily become an innovative way of not changing
I tend to ‘repurpose’ the supporting slide for this assertion quite a lot. Basically my premise being that despite the years of investment the ‘white hot heat of technology’ is mainly being used as a mechanism to deliver/distribute content and, therefore, to support what is largely a passive knowledge transfer model, i.e. the only thing new here is the mechanism by which we are attempting to transfer knowledge. I�ve waxed lyrical about this in past Auricle articles, e.g. Clark Kent solutions have super-powers – well sort of! (Auricle 15 October 2004) in which I suggested:

The knowledge transfer model (or is that the information/content model?) is pretty ingrained in the culture of particularly undergraduate higher education. It’s little wonder, therefore, that technology is first perceived as a wonderfully efficient way of disseminating content. Which it is. Diana Laurillard’s 2002 Educause Review article Rethinking Teaching for the Knowledge Society on the inadequacy of the knowledge transfer model still continues to put the case far more cogently than I could ever do. However, like an antibiotic-resistant disease (or is it a comfort blanket:) the content transfer model still predominates.

That�s not to say that I don�t value content, I do, but let�s not confuse this single ingredient with what is the considerably more complex and multifactorial processes of learning. We can become so enamoured with an apparent technological innovation that this can cloak the lack of change over the long term. The jury is out on whether our current focus on learning material repositories fits into this category.

2) Reusable learning materials do not by themselves make for deep learning
Following on from my previous point it�s important not to invest learning materials, even those designed with reusability in mind, with pedagogical properties never intended by the architects. I used the example of SCORM which at one point in its history appeared to be developing evangelists who appeared to believe that model could be applied to areas for which it was never intended. For this reason Dan Rehak�s 2002 reminder is still a worthy quote even today, i.e.

SCORM is essentially about a single-learner, self-paced and self-directed. It has a limited pedagogical model unsuited for some environments… SCORM has nothing in it about collaboration. This makes it inappropriate for use in HE. (quoted in Dan Rehak: SCORM is not for everyone, Wilbert Kraan and Scott Wilson, CETIS, October 02, 2002

Continuing on the reusable learning materials are not enough theme a David Wiley quote provided a timely reminder of the importance of the social dimension to learning.

The further up Bloom�s taxonomy a desired learning outcome is, the more important social interaction will be in promoting student achievement of the outcome � the extent to which one automates their instruction is directly proportional to the extent to which their instruction is confined to the bottom rungs of Bloom. (David Wiley, 2004, Scalabilityand Sociability in Online Learning Environments.

The slide ‘repurposes’ the above quote and partners it with an appropriate graphic before moving on to a further reminder that learning is a process not an event. Here I ‘repurpose’ the well known Gilly Salmon 5 Stage Model.

Warming to the theme ‘learning materials no matter how reusable are not enough’ I took the opportunity to remind the delegates that the coherence of learning is surely dependent on the alignment of outcomes, assessment, activities, events, and learning resources. No one of these by itself is enough. Yet, perhaps because technology now makes it so easy to deliver/distribute resources it�s tempting to think we�re ‘doing’ e-learning. No we�re not. We�ve just found an easy way to deliver/distribute resources.

Into the home run on this section comes the reminder that what we call e-learning is multifaceted with the ‘content’ being only a part of the mix. To support my case I ‘reused’ illustrations by first George Siemens in his Categories of eLearning (2004) and second Scott Wilson�s Future VLE: The Visual Version (2005).

3) Technologies increasingly tend to determine practice

Regular Auricle readers will be familiar with my concerns that we are becoming the servant to technologies and not vice-versa. To support my assertion I referred to the work of Neil Pollock and James Cornford

… universities may be increasingly forced to consider institutional changes in order to maintain alignment with the system. (in Implications of Enterprise Resource Planning Systems for Universities: An Analysis of Benefits and Risks, Observatory on Borderless Higher Education, Issue 3, p13, April 2005). The OBHE is a subscription service.

� the application of the new technologies is generating a myriad of demands for re-institutionalisation of the university as a far more �corporate�, one might even say concrete, kind of organization �(in Cornford J (2000) The Virtual University is (paradoxically) the University Made Concrete.

To illustrate the point I ‘reused’ part of James Farmer’s blog entry from 2 November 2004.

Last Tuesday I received a memorandum from a manager cc’d by an exec. director instructing me to cease supporting and promoting weblogging, wikis or any other technology not officially supported by the University. The basic reason given being that I have, anecdotally, not used the CMS (this isn’t true, I always use it) and that ‘commentary’ on the issue of CMSs (quoted I think from this blog or another I set up for a course) is unacceptable. A set-up for disciplinary action should I not follow instructions.

And to illustrate the community reaction I ‘reused’ Stephen Downes� OLDaily entry of 2 November 2004.

Words seldom fail me, but it’s hard to find utterances to express my opinions about this. � One wonders how it can be that in a university, of all places, it can be deemed appropriate to stifle enquiry, squelch dissent, and clamp down on expressed opinions freely voiced in an independent forum. I will state this very clearly, for anyone who cares to read this: James Farmer is an important part of our community. We need him. The names on the list of comments (feel free to add yours) – and the names of many more people – are testament to that. Silencing James Farmer is to silence us all – and we will not be silent.

There are a few more slides exploring technological determinism in this section but my main point is that if we need to be careful that technologies in the reusability of learning materials genre, e.g. learning object/material/resource repositories are not construed as another mechanism which will end up determining practice. Some of the discussions in the conference break-out sessions highlight this very point. I believe, that unless we recognize and acknowledge the human factors related to learning materials reuse some of the perceptions and reactions could become major impediments to take up of repositories in UK Higher Education.

4) Are we acknowledging the Reusability Paradox?

David Wiley’s Reusability Paradox is still a paradox which we really can’t afford to ignore, i.e context impedes reuse but increases educational value. D’Arcy Norman put it well in his 2003 post Addressing the Reusability Paradox?:

If a learning object is useful in a particular context, by definition it is not reusable in a different context. If a learning object is reusable in many contexts, it isn�t particularly useful in any.

Or as one CAREO entry puts it:

The problem is that in order to allow objects to be reusable, they must be relatively free from context, but we know that contextualization is critical in a learning experience. It is a real challenge to create reusable objects for ‘course content.’ Also, it is extremely difficult for computer systems to assemble learning objects into larger pieces such as lessons, modules, and courses if there is no context associated with the learning object. Wetware (humans) will need to be involved. CAREO (2004), A Short Course on Structured Course Development, Learning Objects, and E-Learning Standards.

So there you have it, ‘wetware’ (that’s us) are the ultimate aggregators of what’s useful for both ourselves and, sometimes, others. The point here is that perhaps what’s needed are tools and systems which assist the ‘wetware’ in this aggregation, contextualization and recontextualization process. If the digital repositories and reusability initiatives were sold on the basis of having this wetware support role then that would be fine, but if the result, however, is a reduction of wetware involvement (teachers and students) in the aggregation or creation process then technology de facto again dictates practice. With global rising demand for higher education, however, then attempts to industrialize processes usually assumes less ‘wetware’ involvement. Now I’m fairly relaxed about all of this (at the moment) because I think successful teachers and learners are already masters of disaggregation of large objects and re-aggregation of small ones and that technology can be used to enhance our ability to do so. I have more difficulty with the final wetware replacement bit so beloved by some with of an industrializing ‘efficiency’ orientation. But, in reality, I don’t think it will be the ‘industrialists’ who will carry the day; but the wetware will still lose out eventually. Instead, unless we are very careful, it will be a lack of awareness and inertia that does it (see ‘Challenges to the comfort zone’ items 1-3).

5) Does the iPod Generation want a ‘filling station’ not a streaming source?

Here I got a chance to wax lyrical about what content owners and distributors would like consumers to want versus what consumers actually want. Herein lies the concept of ‘reusable’ learning material which either locks people in or locks people out. Herein lies the desire of content distributors to stream material so that they can retain control of the time and, de facto, the place of ‘consumption’ of their offerings. But the iPod generation (no entry after 100 years old) have embraced the download model and highly mobile player devices. But have the reusable learning material interests moved beyond the concept of a centralized repository model with material expected to be consumed at a fixed computer workstation and not on the train, plane or hotel room? So out came my mp3 player/digital voice recorder; out came my WiFi enabled PDA with its movie playing and Powerpoint display capabilities; out came my mobile phone with its, admitedly puny, digital camera. Out came my Powepoint slides of the Sony PSP, Gizmondo, and Archos portable media player. Gadgets, undoubtedly, to some but a good pointer to the need to expand the concept of reusability. Some of the commercial and public sector media interests are waking up to this reality with, for example, Microsoft offering video downloads and the BBC embarking on an increasingly impressive audio and video downloads programme, e.g. the IMP project. I explored some of the issues related to media downloading in my previous Auricle posts BBC TV goes broadband (18 July 2005) and Probing Podcasting from the Professionals (7 February 2005).

Post conference I also made another visit to the Creative Archive site (set up by the UK’s BBC, the BFI, Channel 4, and the Open University) to sample progress on the download front. There’s certainly some material to download, but you can’t help feeling that there should be much much more by this time. We can but hope that the sticky sands of rights clearances don’t eventually suck this magnificent enterprise down.

6) The impact of domestic broadband and wireless on the office and lecture theatre?

In the UK there are an awful lot of broadband connected homes out there. According to OFCOM in the August 2005 edition of their Communications Market Quarterly Update

By June 2005, there were a record 8.1 million broadband connections in the UK. The growth in broadband connections has driven the uptake of products and services that are either unique to broadband, or that provide a far more satisfying user experience at faster broadband speeds �

Add wireless networking to internet connectivity and the synergies become evident very quickly. When a mobile device can connect ease to the nearest network then the dynamics of teaching and learning are subject to change. Teachers downloading resources are probably well within the comfort zone, but you can just feel the loss of control as students download a resource, photograph a screen, record a lecture, or access a web page in near real-time and then go on to share said resources with annotation or commentary with their peers. Want the students to use the official systems? Then they had better be good (see item 11, i.e. the ‘free’ services). Of course the institutions could ban the use of wireless capable devices, phones, laptops etc but I don’t think this will prove productive somehow. It’s probably best to adjust and try and build infrastructures/systems which support the reality that every student is a potential author, editor, aggregator, commentator, or content distributor; and now they are acquiring the tools and have access to the infrastructure which makes this an increasingly normal part of their life. A vision shared by others like CETIS’ Scott Wilson who said earlier this year in his post The VLE of the Future.

eLearning is as much about setting contexts as having tools or content, and the VLE of the future will act like a personal organiser that helps users coordinate tools and services from learning providers. It will also have a very strong social networking capability, so that users can discover other people with shared interests and goals, and forge instant connections. If a user wants to host a sim or a role-play, then they will be able to use their VLE to discover people to take on the other roles based on their published interests and availability … the VLE of the future is going to be less like an information portal, and more like an aggregator. its going to be more like an editing and publishing tool and less like a browser. Its going to break out of the browser window and sit on the desktop. The VLE of the future will look less like a Content Management System or Intranet, and more like a cross between Shrook, SubEthaEdit,XJournal, iChat, iCal, and iTunes (well, on a Mac at least). It will be slick and minimal, and will actually be fun to use

And what about voice over broadband networks? Sample this also from the same OFCOM report:

A number of key enabling factors will facilitate development of fixed-mobile convergence, notably: the emergence of handsets with multiple transmission protocols (GSM/WCDMA/Wi-Fi/WiMax); the growth of voice over IP (VoIP) offerings over fixed broadband and Wi-Fi platforms; a move towards all-IP transmission of voice and data over mobile networks

The move of the telephone conversation to the internet or intranet will also force us to review what exactly we mean by reusable learning materials and the processes by which we create, store, archive, find, and distribute them.

7) The uptake and impact of ‘grassroots standards’?

Lots of energy continues to be devoted to the centralized specifications and standards but, meanwhile, it’s the humble ‘grassroots’ efforts that seem to be having the greatest impact. The uptake of RSS continues to grow and in the social networking arena FOAF is more relevant than IMS specifications, SCORM et al will ever be. Am I speaking heresy here? 🙂

Although some may argue that the reusability advocates have yet to provide the evidence supporting the efficacy of reusable content in a higher education context, the vision has now been enlarged to incorporate the concept of reusable learning designs or more accurately Learning Design, i.e. the IMS specification. It’s here that the work of the Higher Education Academy’s Subject Centres is particularly pertinent. Some of the Subject Centres are working on a number of JISC funded projects under the latter’s Distributed e-Learning banner which are exploring the issues related the uptake (or not) of reusable learning materials. Because the Subject Centres are close to their discipline communities this provides synergies with JISC e-learning initiatives that would be hard to provide any other way.

Personally, despite some concerns, I try and maintain an open mind about Learning Design (the IMS specification), and particularly about reusing learning designs (the pedagogy). On the one hand the concept is one which academic staff will feel comfortable with, i.e. they design and students follow the prescription. But let’s reflect on the first item in my ‘challenges to the comfort zone’, i.e. despite the intentions of the developers, technology can so often provide an innovative way of doing the same as we’ve always done. Also, it would be good to see some consideration how well aligned the concept of student centredness is with the concept of Learning Design which, at its heart, is a teacher-centred, not learner-centred specification. But I could be wrong and I’m sure there’s someone out there who will want to put me right:)

8) Distributed, decentralized self-organizing systems versus the centralized mega repository?

From a business model or control perspective the vision of a centralized repository becoming such a killer service that users fall over themselves to deposit their material must be ever so tempting. But how does this mesh with this?

… the view that digital resources are inherently distributed and will never be delivered by a single service provider. Source: JISC Information Environment Development Strategy 2001-2005

Or this?

Applications aren�t islands of functionality any more; they are bridges for information (Simon Bisson, Building Bridges, Guardian Online, 8 September 2005).[/i]

Or this?

http://www.syndic8.com/stats.php?Section=overview#FeedCount

What’s really interesting is to reflect on the how the internet makes it possible to aggregate ‘stuff’ from disparate sources which reflects the interests of individuals and self-organising groups without a central repository in sight. At this point of course comes forward the arguments about quality-assured content and service-level agreements. I believe that the learning technology communities need to pay much more attention to we facilitating the management and self-organisation of distributed information and resources than we currently do. After all our national strategies wax lyrical about personal learning environments and student flexibility. But, yet, the world of IMS/SCORM implementations and learning object repositories seems to be dragging us in the opposite direction. So ideas on a postcard please on how high quality materials providing easy user access and reuse can be achieved without locking users into or locking users out of monolithic centralized repositories with aspirations to be digital libraries which require teams of information specialists or putative digital librarians to support them … phew!!

At this point, before sampling the slides associated with User Generated Content (item 10) and the ‘Free’ Services (item 11), I recommend reading the online version of David Wiley and Erin Edward’s paper Online self-organizing social systems: The decentralized future of online learning. The original PDF link now appears to be dead but the HTML alternative in Google is still functional so that’s what I’ve provided. Of course you can still source this, in all its formatted glory, in the Quarterly Review of Distance Education, vol. 3, no. 1 (2002): 33�46. (Wiley D and Edwards EK, 2002).

Finally, in this section I reflect on the fact that my local public library has just sent me a ‘Libraries Loyalty Card’ which each time I visit I get it stamped. Four stamps and next time I choose a film, talking book, CD, or Playstation game, I can pick another one for free. Real libraries are sure changing. I wonder if they are going to be around in, let’s be optimistic, 50 years?

9) User expectations/rights versus the ‘lock in’ or ‘lock-out’ business model

Let’s consider an example of real versus ideal. There’s not many of us who, when faced with the difficulty of locating a resource in a local site, haven’t reached for our favourite search engine to do the job and therefore found the required artefact or document within seconds. But is that going to be possible if the resource is locked away in a repository deliberately hidden from the prying eyes of a Google, or a Yahoo, or whatever, and stored in IMS, SCORM or some other packaging format? On the one hand IMS et al can fly under the the interoperability banner as increasing freedoms and rights but, on the other, they may actually reduce access either because the user hasn’t got the appropriate bit of kit or application, or because the standard isn’t always so standard. Why? It’s been ‘extended’, ‘enhanced’, or ‘improved’ of course.

So how am I supposed to get the resource out of such the repository and into my personal learning environment, portable media device or whatever? The fact that the resource is IMS Content Package compliant matters not a jot to my MP3 player or PDA. In fact this ‘packaging’ has just prevented me getting access to what I need. Of course we could argue that my device itself needs to be standards compliant, but it is … just not those standards. It can read RSS. It can play MP4 movies. It can play MP3 audio files. It can display HTML. It just doesn’t know about IMS and SCORM etc etc and it doesn’t have the memory or the applications for it to do so. And so the ‘packaging’ has become a problem for me because it prevents me getting at what I want. And we haven’t even got to digital rights management yet:)

Those of you who have read my previous Auricle article on digital rights managment will be aware that I have concerns that, yet again, those things which are initially promoted as solutions, so often become a problem. Digital rights management systems can easily take away rights from users. My MP3 recorder/player is a case in point. It’s a very good player with one fatal flaw, i.e. once an MP3 file is on the device it stays on the device or is deleted from the device, there is no way of transferring the file back to some other device or computer. The assumption is that only pirates would want to transfer an MP3 file back off the device. But yet the documentaries and recordings I listen to are freely available podcasts free of archiving restrictions which I may wish store on another system but, no, my device’s DRM dictates what I am allowed to do. So the next such device I buy will have no such hidden functionality.

Meanwhile content owners and distributors start from a position of distrust. Such thinking can have a profound influence on public funded bodies with major initiatives of general community benefit. For example, the BBC interactive Media Player (iMP) initiative is a great initiative but we had all better watch our forthcoming programme downloads within seven days because the BBC apparently now has a system to make it so; and just in case you don’t or can’t … tough! … the iMP wont let you view after that. Now I’ve actually got a great deal of sympathy for the BBC team who have to negotiate the deals with rights holders. As a result the negotiating teams have to offer technological solutions such as iMP to nervous rights holders but as a consequence the BBC appears to be giving with one hand and taking away with the other. From one perspective, apparent advances such as iMP could leave the viewer worse off than today. Unlike your normal video recorder this is a video recorder with the equivalent of a data self-destruct which removes user rights and reduces freedoms previously enjoyed. Video recorders free the users from the tyranny of the schedules. iMP could herald a genre of solutions which introduce a different form of tyranny.

To complicate the picture a little more we now have relatively new entrants like Orb offering technologies which:

… gives you secure access to your digital media from your home computer through a simple Web interface. Stream your live TV, photos, music and videos to any Web-enabled device.

Orb’s access ‘your’ media, anytime, anywhere vision is about leveraging personal repositories not centralized ones.

10) The growing relevance/importance of user-generated content

So does your institutional VLE, or you, value user-generated content? Or is such content considered of such little consequence that it’s periodically automatically expunged? But let’s consider again Wiley’s assertion that:

The further up Bloom�s taxonomy a desired learning outcome is, the more important social interaction will be in promoting student achievement of the outcome � the extent to which one automates their instruction is directly proportional to the extent to which their instruction is confined to the bottom rungs of Bloom. (David Wiley, 2004, Scalability and Sociability in Online Learning Environments.)

If social interaction is a key component of deep learning then surely anything which captures even a little of the representations and product of this interaction must be valuable? But yet do we value it? I suspect not much. Why not? See ‘challenges to the comfort zone’ item 1. On the one hand we declare our belief in student-centredness, socio-constructivism, personal learning environments et al, but on the other hand the methods and tools we actually use expose the gap (or is that a chasm) between the rhetoric and reality.

But yet look at the richness and diversity of user-generated content become available outside of the educational world. For example, I frequently cite and ‘reuse’ and ‘repurpose’ quotes and concepts from thinkers and commentators who communicate via their blogs and wikis. That doesn’t mean we need to eschew books, journal articles, or papers, but at the same time we perhaps need to move away from the comforting assumption that the wild wild Web has no relevance to scholarly work or discourse because it bypasses the ‘usual’ quality filters. There’s much of quality out there and the various communities are a good source of helping us find it.

Let’s consider weblogs which, arguably, provide the easiest route to generating content for the Web. On the second of November 2004 the Technorati counter indicated that 4,476,617 weblogs were being ‘watched’ and 679,432,343 links tracked. Returning on 11 September 2005 the numbers had increased to 16.9 million weblogs and 1.5 billion links tracked. Technorati is just one such source of such data so we can be pretty sure there’s many many more, and that’s before we consider blogs where English is not the medium of communication. And as for the compromised quality argument? … try taking a look at this example from Echo Journal. Here a couple of clinicians with an interest in cardiology are generating content and commentary, it’s rough, it’s ready, and it works.

Moving on to podcasts (using uber simple RSS to disseminate information about and automate the download of media – usually audio – recordings/radio shows from the interent/intranet to a users player device, e.g. an MP3 player). Jump on over to iPodder.org or whatever your favoured podcast aggregator may be. There’s good, bad, and ugly content there but there’s usually some gem to be found. Two podcast ‘programme formats’ stand out for me as potentially valuable sources of reusable learning material, i.e. the expert interview and the conference presentation. The latter, however, is considerably enhanced when the speaker remembers they are actually speaking to a global audience who may lack the non verbal and presentation slide cues of the live event.

Lest we think this is all this focus on user-generated content has become terribly altruistic, Mammon is also casting a beady eye in this direction. In 2004 the Morgan Stanley report An Update from the Digital World (October 2004) recognized the commercial potential of simple syndication formats like RSS:

Web-based user-generated content is at the heart of some of the most relevant and fastest-growing applications we have seen on the Web. (page 4)

In our model, Yahoo! potentially serves as an ‘agnostic’ Associated Press, collecting freelance pieces from the Web, and distributes a portion of the revenue generated by advertising in each one of its syndicated papers, meaning each of those personal syndicated feeds that users set up. (page 15).

But the Morgan Stanley report also attracted attention to what was then the nascent podcast, videocast community.

RSS and syndication work admirably well for text feeds, but we believe a natural extension of the format could be to images, audio, and video � an early version of syndicated (multimedia) feeds is podcasting. Podcasting allows users to subscribe to feeds of Internet radio shows through RSS � a description of the show appears, along with an announcement to the RSS reader that an audio file is in the feed. The twist here is that � with free applications such as iPodder � the audio file is downloaded automatically and put in the playlists on your iPod . (page 14)

But enough of Mammon and so we finish this section with a reminder to visit (or revisit) Brian Lamb and Alan Levine’s Educause 2004 production Rip, Mix, Feed which demonstrated what they meant by decentralization of learning resources. Brian and Alan are examples of the type of innovative people, with an excellent theoretical grounding, who actually get on and do something and share their experiences and reflections via their blogs, wikis, and various reports. There’s quality a plenty here.

11) Free services and tools

Let’s assume for a moment that Virtual Learning Environments, Learning Management Systems, IMS, SCORM etc did not exist. Would the e-learning world collapse?

Not for a moment.

It would pause for breath, look round at what was available and get on with it. This might cause consternation amongst those of a centralist bent, with concerns aplenty regarding quality of content and how to support such diversity, but in the main the e-learning world would survive and perhaps even thrive.

Would there be reuse of learning materials? Oh yes. Perhaps more than exists now. Would they all be stored in the same place? Sometimes, because some would still try to shrink the Web to repository level so they could control access. Would it all be wrapped in the same packaging? Probably not, unless a community decided it wanted it that way. Would they be standards compliant? Sometimes, but putative standards would be cooked in a user cauldron and so rendered down to what genuinely useful. Such ‘standards’ would either fly quickly or sink into obscurity because they failed the usefulness test, were not freely available, were too ‘heavy’, or were so complex that a cadre of technical experts/high priests was necessary to sustain them.

Take a walk through what’s already available ‘out there’. The ‘obvious suspects’ like Yahoo and the mighty Google urgently want to be your new ‘best friend’, or at least become your primary means of access to the world of rich Web resources.

Google has a veritable outpouring of ‘free’ services and tools like Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Images, Google Blog Search, Google Scholar, Google University Search, Google Groups, Google Desktop, and Google Video (in Google Labs). For a quick overview of the ever expanding Google interests then John Battelle’s Guardian article All the world’s a platform is worth a read (Guardian IT, 29 September 2005).

Yahoo has really got the RSS bug with its My Yahoo wanting to become your route to personal enlightenment supplemented, of course, by its clever provision of Creative Commons Search. For those wanting to share what interests them then Yahoo’s 360 service (currently in beta) could be of interest.

And what to make of Yahoo’s acquisition Flickr with its simple shareable photo archiving model which seems to go from success to success? Not an ontology in sight here. Instead we have the uber example of the folksonomy at work with the apparently anarchistic Flickr tagging model apparently doing the categorising business. And we even have the temerity of some users who propose that Flickr annotated photo entries with comments be considered ‘learning objects’. For example sample Bertrand Sereno’s Tarte au Citron or Alan Levine’s Volcano Types. Rough and ready these may be but they are very easy to prepare, and are highly accessible

But the big two are not alone.

World Wind, NASA’s alternative to Google Earth, shows that publicly-funded bodies with a mission to inform and educate also have a major role to play.

Furl is in there offering its Find, Save, Share model. So if you’re interested in, sharing your latest reading on, say, e-portfolios it may have something to offer.

Then there are the aggregator services like Bloglines or Blogdigger. These two examples were created by Brian Lamb and Alan Levine for their Rip, Mix, Feed workshop at Educause 2004.

And we mustn’t forget Stephen Downes’ Edu_RSS which predated the .com aggregator services. Stephen have the foresight to realize that light footprint XML-based protocols like RSS could play a major part in information dissemination and aggregation. Stephen’s Distributed Learning Object Network (DLORN) also showed that a decentralized self-registration approach to learning materials ‘storage’ was possible.

That concludes my ‘challenges to the comfort zone’ but before I wrap it up completely lets reflect on what stands out in the ‘free’ services, i.e. most of these are simple but powerful tools which place individual users, or groups thereof, in control of what they consider relevant to the goals they want to achieve. Sure, most of these could also be used for non-educational, and for what some may consider trivial, purposes; but not necessarily so. For example, a simple RSS aggregator and weblog or wiki could go a long way towards supporting the teaching and learning aspects of a programme of study.

Barriers to reuse?
So with all this global energy and effort going into reuse of learning materials why hasn’t it already taken off big time? After all we’ve had IMS and ADL SCORM for a long time now? Is it just that one final big push will do it?

I don’t think so.

The problem is that the ‘efficiency’ agenda has perhaps been dominating our thinking and the ‘inconvenient’ human factors have been all but ignored.

Some of the discussions in the other conference sessions focused on impediments to the reuse of learning material. I could relate these to item three on my ‘challenges to the comfort zone’, i.e. we increasingly tend to fit our processes, procedures and practice around what the technologies will allow us to do, not what we want to do.

A key concern seems to be the perceived loss of autonomy and the opportunity for creativity when learning materials are reused, add a dash of perceived job insecurity introduced by reviews of ‘teaching’ workloads where reusable learning materials are in use, and the scene is set for a visceral rejection of the whole concept and a desire to keep other people�s ‘hands off my stash’ (of personally created or aggregated resources). ‘Hands off my stash’ is a memorable descriptor for non-participation which is not my own; I think it was used by colleagues from the Community Dimensions of Learning Object Repositories (CD-LOR) project who were also at the conference.

It strikes me this is similar to the reaction of staff when a company knowledge management system is imposed and the assumption made it will become a repository of all the tacit knowledge of the personnel ever employed by the enterprise. The result of course is staff do what they have to do to satisfy the bureaucratic requirement, but no more, and the concept of a ‘knowledge culture’ degrades to a point where it becomes empty rhetoric.

Successful knowledge cultures require a lot of trust, sharing of a common goals, and above all rewards for the contributors which outweigh the perceived disadvantages of ‘giving it all away’. And I don’t just mean monetary rewards. Hang on … isn’t this what we mean by a community?

Let’s get back to ‘hands off my stash’. The ‘stash’ in this context is the artefacts, links, thoughts, ideas, reflections and whatever the invidivual deems to be valuable and which helps them participate in whatever roles they have in life. What’s important here is the high degree of personal control. There is no teacher or student worth the name who does not have a ‘stash’ of physical or virtual artefacts organized in a way to suit their interests and preferences. Or to put it another way we all have personal learning environments (manual or electronic) of various degrees of sophistication whether that’s a ‘repository’ of notebooks or files or something like Auricle.

Auricle as a personal learning environment? Auricle as a ‘stash’?

Indeed it is. Weblogs and wikis represent considerable investments of time and energy and so authors must value them.

Auricle is a valued personal repository of thoughts, arguments, issues, and links which I search frequently to filter > rip > remix > repurpose. Part of the filter, remix, repurpose stage is to compare what I said and thought in the past to what I’m saying now. But at the same time, because Auricle posts are also public and there’s a good chance they are going to be filtered > ripped > remixed > repurposed and sometimes commented upon by others, I try and make the postings coherent and useful for others, which in turn increases their usefulness to me. So you see, it’s not all altruism:)

I use Auricle as but one example which works for me because I feel ownership of my postings and benefit directly and indirectly from the effort of populating the beast. Auricle is my thought recorder, my argument former, my issue identifier and explorer. I would probably feel the same about a larger community weblog but again the sense of ownership would be critical and that comes from having a sense of control, i.e. I can find quickly find and remix/repurpose ‘my stuff’ or even move it somewhere else.

So how responsive is someone going to be to the reusability of learning materials ethos if they don’t have this sense of control? For example, make the personal find, deposit, withdraw, and reuse of ‘stuff’ difficult due to interface, interoperability, or licensing issues and reuse will be stillborn or die shortly after birth. At the same time if we want reuse beyond the individual then there’s a considerable amount of investment required into persuading and demonstrating the benefits of reuse to those who want to keep your hands off their stash.

What perhaps clouds the issue is that we tend to use the terms reuse and repurpose interchangeably whereas, on many occasions, the latter actually represents the more normal behaviour of the effective teacher and indeed learner, i.e. to identify (filter) extract (rip) the resources/artefacts/examples from one source and embed them within their lesson, lecture, tutorial, article, material (remix) so that in a new aggregation (repurpose) they can be used to extend, explain or support teaching and learning on yet other occasions (feed forward). That is the creative act of design and so perhaps we need to recognize and applaud this. The difficulty of course is that this has been implicit and largely hidden behind the office, classroom or student bedroom door and now we want to bring it out into the sunlight where the digital rights mavens await.

N.B. You will find the Powerpoint slides supporting this posting and other presentations on the Academy Web site.

Any views expressed in this Auricle posting are mine and should not be construed as necessarily representing the views of any other individual or organisation.