The Auricle

In my recent Leeds presentation, Weblogs: Niche or Nucleus?, I proposed that one of the key affordances of the blog is as an authoring engine for syndicated feeds. In turn, this is contributing to a recognition that syndication solutions, like RSS or Atom, are emerging as the ultimate low barrier, increasingly ubiquitous, metadata solutions. So far so good. But the dot coms have entered, or are eying, this space and that raises some interesting issues for those wanting to exploit this approach to accessing distributed learning resources and tools. I applaud the pioneers like Stephen Downes who recognized, earlier than most, that low barrier to entry metadata solutions like RSS, plus the tools and services to exploit them, provide a highly efficient accessible way to aggregate and provide access to distributed learning resources. Downes doesn't just theorize about the possibilities; instead he makes available his Edu_RSS, Distributed Learning Object Repository Network (DLORN), and most recently his Ed Radio services. But look very carefully at that last word in the previous sentence … we'll return to it later.

In a previous Auricle article Blog syndication as a business model?
I attempted to summarize some of key points of the business vision promulgated in the Morgan Stanley report An Update from the Digital World, October 2004 (pdf).

A couple of quotes from the report are worth repeating:

“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 its syndicated papers, meaning each of those personal syndicated feeds that users set up.” (page 15)

“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)

So Mammon now wants to enter this space and they either want your content or your eyeballs:)

One such example from the commercial space is FeedBurner which describes itself as:

“… an RSS/Atom post-processing service that allows publishers to enhance their feeds in a variety of interesting and powerful ways. By republishing their feeds through FeedBurner, publishers gain detailed feed statistics, maximum feed format compatibility, “shockproofing” to absorb bandwidth spikes, and more.”

We now, also, have 'free' dot com alternatives to the Downes' provision, e.g. Bloglines , and Blogdigger. And pretty polished 'free' services they are to.

Blogdigger describes itself thus:

“Blogdigger Groups allows you to combine the contents of two or more blogs making the combined content easily accessible all at once … You can create a Blogdigger Group using any blogs that have RSS feeds. Once you specify the feeds that comprise your Blogdigger Group you will be able to view the posts from those feeds, sorted by date, and even export your group in OPML or OCS, or subscribe to your Blogdigger Group as an RSS feed.”

If you want to see how 'free' services, like Bloglines, could be integrated into an educational environment then I suggest you visit (or revisit) the seminar 'end products' section of Brian Lamb and Alan Levine’s Educase 2004 wiki seminar - Rip, Mix, Feed: Decentralization of Learning Resources: Syndicating Learning Objects Using RSS, Trackback, and Related Technologies

Or for a Blogdigger example of meta syndication look at the learning objects group established by, I believe, Alan Levine of Maricopa Learning eXchange fame.

Now these dot com entrants are pretty impressive and polished examples and, following the Brian Lamb/Alan Levine demonstration above, I can see how modules of courses could be considerably enhanced by their contribution but … there's always a but:)

Informal learning is one thing but in a HEI context designing, developing, and implementing educational programmes and modules needs to assume robust foundations.

Or to put it more starkly, while I would love to use a Bloglines, Blogdigger et al, what a disaster it could turn out to be if the 'free' service was suddenly not there one day, or a champion like Stephen Downes was no longer able to provide his excellent Edu RSS/DLORN etc? Alternatively, what if having registered on Bloglines, Blogdigger et al and built a dependency to these services within my course, the company changes its business model and wants to charge big fees so that it can stay in business; remember the Movable Type hiatus which led to an exodus from that product?

You may think I'm taking too pessimistic a view. Don't get me wrong I'm grateful that these services exist, if for no other reason than they demonstrate what's possible. But here's a reminder of what can happen when we become too dependent on 'free' services:

“In an audio message posted late Monday explaining his reasons for the shutdown (of Weblogs.com in June 2004), Winer cited the financial costs of hosting the sites, technical difficulties in moving the blogs to a new server, stress and personal health issues as the reasons for the sudden shutdown.” http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,63856,00.html

I'm sure there are many courses worldwide which successfully use 'free services' like Google or Blogger.com. I'm also sure that Microsoft's new blogging solution MSN Spaces, which integrates with its email, messaging and media player will be very successful.

I'm also sure that if we are not careful we will enter a new phase of 'lock in'.

But what's the alternatives?

Ironically, one of the key beneficiaries from the Movable Type hiatus was the open source WordPress initiative which, in its genre, is already a pretty impressive blogging tool and is likely to get even more impressive. WordPress is just the latest addition to an already impressive portfolio of first class open-source tools, e.g. Mozilla Firefox, and now Mozilla Thunderbird. WordPress is a good example of a community developed and supported initiative and, from personal experience, it's developed excellent responsive support forums.

But where's the community-supported equivalents of Bloglines and Blogdigger? Stephen Downes has shown the way here, but do we now need a WordPress/Firefox/Thunderbird type initiative that can match or exceed what Bloglines and Blogdigger can do?

Alternatively, could the HE and tertiary sectors, e.g. not facilitate the development of open-source equivalents of Bloglines/Blogdigger? Is there a JISC project in there somewhere?

Voting for Edublog 2004 has started. The organizers wish to have as many votes as possible. Auricle is but one of the nominations. So vote for who you think is best in each category.

In my previous items on a Filling station model of e-learning I've suggested that portable devices are beginning to offer functionality and utility undreamed of even a couple of years ago. The UK's Guardian Online article You can take it with you (2 Dec 2004) highlights the possibilities offered by the humble USB or thumb drive. It's well worth a read. For you Star Trek fans (or haters) out there it wasn't so long again we laughed at ridiculous devices Mr Spock et al were plugging into their ears or tablet devices. Now where's that Bluetooth headset? Has anyone seen my 2GB usb drive? 🙂

Embedded in an article BBC bids to lift standards with 300m bloodletting in the UK's Sunday Times today (5 December 2004 p7) there was a tidbit which suggests that the BBC has plans for a new service called 'Catch-up TV'. I assume this is similar in concept to their excellent established 'Listen Again' service for most of their radio broadcasts. So if you've got broadband then the previous week's material will be available for your delectation. I wonder if they'll avoid the criticisms about supporting only proprietary media players this time? I also wonder if the BBC's use of the term 'Catch-up TV' will annoy NTL who I understand offer a similar product also called you guessed it … 🙂

Now the BBC offers some excellent material beyond the crass 'reality TV' and it would be really good if we could get to the happy situation where we end up with the video equivalent of 'podcasting' which would contribute to the possible future I alluded to in my previous articles about a 'filling station' model of e-learning.

The dark cloud on the horizon is of course the the increasing trend towards capping so-called broadband services; this redefinition of broadband is far from the reality of the 2Mbps definition of the term when it was first mooted.

Apart from capping issues we shouldn't expect broadcast quality streaming, so whether you be an Eastenders or other soap fan (sad sad sad) or a Horizon science programme groupie, then it's likely to be watch on your computer small window stuff. But, of course, if it proved possible to capture or download the file, playing it on your PDA or portable multimedia device may be good enough for helping while away those endless hours commuting on the great British railway system:)

In my recent Auricle article A filling station model of e-learning? I suggested that integrated mobile multimedia players and communication devices could be the 'googly' which catches advocates of centralized e-learning solutions unawares. So are the major proprietary interests responding to this? Apparently not. But … At least one vendor has now pitched in to this space. If you really can't bear to be away from your Blackboard calendar, announcements, and course content, and you've got a mainstream PDA, then ArcStream Solutions' BlackboardToGo apparently wants to be your 'filling station'.

Of course this is going to come at a price; apparently a considerable one. There's some interesting discussion on the University of Iowa's PDA discussion group about this product.

The question is would we want any of the mainstream vendors to fulfill this 'filling station' role? They already want to be your portal vendor, your learning object repository vendor, your learning management system vendor. Podcasting and other syndication solutions suggest there is another way, so it would be a pity if the usual suspects end up to be the 'filling stations' I alluded to in my earlier article.

Of course, the siren call of “synchronization” and “digital rights management” will be trumpeted by an increasing number of vendors who will move into this space; but those apparent marketing affordances may yet end up being the major impediments to widespread adoption of such mobile devices. Ok, we know about the success of the iPod and it's DRM system. But it's now becoming a more crowded marketplace with disparate DRM systems in such devices and that's going to frustrate potential 'buy in' beyond the early adopters.

Finally, what's a googly? Nothing to do with Google I'm afraid; I just borrowed a cricket term. The BBC's Sports Academy defines it thus:

“A googly, or a “wrong'un”, is a delivery which looks like a normal leg spinner but actually turns towards the batsmen, like an off break, rather than away from the bat.”

Or, to put it another way … sometimes unexpected things happen that changes everything:)

The Guardian Online recently ran a story Risk Free Rebellion (11 November 2004) which I thought was quite interesting. The story described how 'Live CDs' provide a risk free mechanism for testing distributions (distros) of the open source Linux operating system without having to install it on your system and run the risk of giving the ubiquitous Microsoft Windows a seizure. But there's more. So what's so good about this? Sure, you get to try out another operating system, which is ok for the technically curious, but what's in it for the 'normal' person:) ?

Well first think subject domain. Then think applications/packages specific to a subject domain. Then think operating system and subject specific packages all on one CD. Put CD in appropriate PC slot and voila! operating system and key packages for the discipline are ready to go.

It turns out there's a lot of 'Live CD' specialist distrbutions already out there as a visit to Frozentech may soon demonstrate (the link was down at the time of writing).

No sacrifice is too great for the Auricle readership so I downloaded a couple of these distributions from Frozentech. One was customized Linux distribution which in essence was a toolkit of media editing and viewing tools plus the usual suspects of wordprocessing, email etc. All of these tools plus the operating system nearly filled a CD and so took a couple of hours to download on my domestic broadband system. Nevertheless, it appeared to work well.

The second download was even more interesting because it was a single purpose solution, i.e. it contained a minimal operating system (a micro distro:) and a multi format media player. The whole Geexbox distribution was only around 50MB. I didn't hold out much hope for this but I slotted in the CD I created from the download and restarted my PC and a couple of minutes later I was watching a DVD. Now I begin to see how the equivalent of Microsoft's XBox gets created. You take a small box, try not to make it look like a PC and load a minimal operating system and mini applications and there you have your new product.

Other micro distributions include group collaboration tools.

But you can't write to a CD, so what if your distribution contains wordprocessors etc?

Many of the distributions are aware of hard and removeable drives on a host system and so it become possible for user specific data to be stored to say a thumb/flash drive so that the user can carry their data away with them.

Caveats? There's a few. Many of the more modern distributions do a good job of automatically detecting specific hardware on a users PC, e.g. video and audio cards but you can't guarantee this and if something isn't detected it's contact your local unix/linux guru time. The casual Live CD user will probably walk at this point. Nevertheless, a motivated member of faculty with a large class to teach may still opt for the guru route. Also, it's important that the user of 'Live CDs' realize that the CD contains the operating system as well as the applications and that this type of CD doesn't run from within Windows … it's an alternative to Windows. Finally, if you want something a 'bit special' on a 'Live CD' it's back to that guru again … and don't forget to test it before you run off too many copies. Nevertheless, once your Live CD is created and tested on your target environments you'll not need to worry about your library of applications being missing the next time you visit the shared computer lab.

Despite the caveats there's something neat about plugging in the tool or toolkit appropriate to a particular job in hand and I can't help feeling there's some potential to be explored here.

One of the tools my colleague Brian Kelly from UKOLN provided for delegates to yesterday's UCISA workshop in Leeds was the Mozilla FireFox extension Wikalong. Here's some brief initial commentary on this interesting 'e'-tool. Basically, Wikalong puts an editable web page (a Wiki) in the sidebar of Firefox.

So why would Wikalong be of relevance? The 'Possible Uses' section of the Wikalong page proposes several but “A roaming blog. Use kwiki's blog feature and you can edit, others can view your thoughts on a site by site basis” should be of particular interest. This use is a similar to the 'document-centric discussion' concept of the asynchronous discussion based D3E which enabled commentary to be associated with particular online journal articles. D3E was a useful earlier demonstrator of the potential synergies which can be released by aggregating applications or services.

Caveats? Wikalong is only at version 0.12 so is best considered an interesting, but still, potentially, very useful, artefact at this stage.

Private Wikalongs are apparently pending.

Firefox is an already impressive open source tool particularly in its native support for RSS; but with extensions like Wikalong, and others, coming along it's perhaps not too imaginative to begin to view it as a platform. Add a touch of Google Desktop and that Windows interface begins to become less relevant … perhaps:)

Microsoft should be really really worried … not perhaps.

Today I'm in Leeds where I'm one of the speakers at the Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association (UCISA) event Beyond Email: Strategies for Collaborative Working and Learning in the 21st Century. I'm here with Brian Kelly, one of my colleagues from UKOLN, which is also based at the University of Bath. Brian holds the UK Web Focus post which is funded by the JISC and the MLA.

UCISA “represents the whole of higher education, and increasingly further education, in the provision and development of academic, management and administrative information systems, providing a network of contacts and a powerful lobbying voice.”

I'll report back on the rest of the event later in the week but the main purpose of this Auricle article is to provide access to my slides and notes for the event.

The title of my talk is Weblogs: Niche or Nucleus?, with a bias probably more towards the latter than the former.

As we'll see, however, there are some potential gotchas! for the institution who finds blogs have caught them unawares.

There are also some potential gotchas! for the blogging enthusiast who finds themselves at odds with institutions, or representatives thereof, who take a less than supportive view of this form of publishing.

I have a roadmap for my presentation, but in this article I'm providing many more slides than I will ever be able to talk to in the time I've been allocated; nevertheless, hopefully, they'll prove useful to both the event delegates as well Auricle readers. I openly admit that I'm standing on the shoulders of some of the giants of blogging for this presentation and so I liberally cite their work throughout.

In summary, my presentation attempts to show that weblogs are already being used extensively within education and that their use should be welcomed and embraced. Some users of weblogs are, in effect, using weblogs as learning environments in their own right. While there is still some debate about the level of interactivity inherent in the weblog model, there appears to be less argument that such 'micro-publishing' for an audience (who may, or may not, comment) is consonant with some of the goals of higher education, which are to develop the skills of analysis, argument, and discourse. What is clear from the examples shown and the experience of established 'bloggers' is that it is the sense of ownership of the story/article/item (then offered for public/community reading/review) which differentiates the blog from other, more transitory, forms of electronic communication. I tend to support the argument put forward by others in the e-learning world that, ironically, effective blogging arises when the putative blogger learns to read and listen to the arguments and information being put forward by others; then, and only then, does it become possible to contribute in a non trivial way to the community of 'listeners'.

Even a cursory trawl around the Web will uncover examples of how institutions, companies and organisations, yes, even universities, have been unprepared when they are faced with the reality of such 'bottom up' publishing reaching out to specialist communities or even, shudder, the general public:)

Higher Education, as a global concept, puts itself forward as an incubator of free speech, ideas, debate and discourse. Of course, one person's free speech can, oh so quickly, be construed as an unwarranted attack on others or, alternatively, the undermining of the status quo. The challenge here, particularly, for the HE and broader tertiary educational community, is to support the right of academia, in all its forms, to publish, what may very well be, unpopular or divergent views expressed in vehicles like weblogs, whilst at the same time differentiating those from postings which are blatantly '…ist' in their intention. It's going to be difficult but we need to find a way forward and, again, we can be 'carried on the shoulders of the giants' who have gone before us. Reasonable, innovation-supportive Acceptable Use Policies (AUPs) are one way forward and there's some good examples out there.

Below, are my annotated Powerpoint slides (in PDF format) in the order of presentation. I'm providing them in print resolution but sectioned to minimize download times. If you want a quick overview either jump to the screen resolution handout PDFs and HTML variant at the bottom of this article.

Session roadmap (435 KB)
This just provides a graphic of my order of battle:)
Blogs: A brief history (325 KB)
A quick look at the origins of, and key events in blog history. And they are older than you think!
What's a blog? (228 KB)
So what exactly is a weblog anyway? We can define blogs from a structural, functional, or even philosophical point of view.
Types of blog (221 KB)
A brief consideration of the key types of blogs with some representative examples.
Blog & Syndication Statistics (217 KB)
So where can we get the metrics? Despite the absence of one single definitive source of data the apparent growth rate of blogs is still pretty astounding.
Blog Affordances (242 KB)
Now we get down to heart of the presentation. What can blogs contribute? They can contribute a lot, but two features stand out. First, they are by far the easiest means of publishing to a dynamic Web site. Second, they are in effect an authoring front end to syndicated feeds like RSS and Atom. In turn, syndication technologies can make a major contribution to the creation and support of distributed learning systems. I provide some example of such syndication in practice and ask everyone to reflect on the potential for themselves or their institutions.
Contexts of Use (2.93 MB)
So how are blogs actually being used in education? The simple answer, of course, is limited only by the imagination of the blog authors and the support offered by their host institutions. Included in my examples are: the blog as an important personal knowledge management tool; supporting the development of critical analysis skills; and building interdisciplinary bridges, with Harvard showing us one way forward here. We've got blogs supporting courses and becoming de facto VLEs; we've got blogs supporting informal continuing professional development; we've got blogs being used for 'citizen' reporting purposes. Some institutions, have even taken a leaf out of the commercial hosting companies like Blogger.com and now offer their communities a 'no brainer' facility for setting up their own personal blog, e.g. the UK's University of Warwick.
Finding Quality Blogs (213 KB)
So where can you find 'good' blogs that interest you? There's certainly no shortage of blogs but, for the moment, the solution appears to lie within the blogging community itself with some community members becoming trusted aggregators/annotators and providing the online tools to make it easy to register a blog. Of course, there are attempts to have 'official' aggregations, plus the commercial world has obviously been looking at what's already out there and as a result are beginning to offer some pretty polished tools and services … which, unfortunately, has some less positive implications.
Some Constraints & Issues (586 KB)
We've been pretty upbeat so far, but here we turn over some stones and enter the discomfort zone. There are certainly some technical constraints and issues but all of those can be overcome with goodwill and some knowledge/effort. In the main, blogs are dead easy to install and use when you are functioning at the individual or small group level. Many certainly offer multi-author multi-weblog capabilities, but you need to read the small print! Multi-author and multi-blog may be supported but the process may be manual, which just won't scale if you want all user accounts in your institution to be given a blog. So choose your blog engine with care … fortunately there are some open source solutions around which, apparently, can scale, e.g. LiveJournal. However, most of the constraints and issues related to weblogs are not technical at all, they are policy related. Weblogs, and the syndication which most natively support, can either be viewed as either transformational or disruptive technologies. Problems tend to arise where institutions view them as the latter, i.e. 'the bosses don't like blogs'. Problems arise, also, when blogs are perceived as endowed with almost mystical powers to transform the learning process. Failure, inevitably awaits those institutions who do no more than provide the technology but provide no guidance and state no expectations. Alternatively, those instituitons who adopt a 'use this blog or else' stance, linked directly to assessment, are likely to only engender inputs that the students feel they 'have' to do. To this pot pouri of things to consider we can add avoiding blog spam, moving beyond the trivial input, and considerations of digital rights. The last of these is particularly important in the blogging world, which is based on the ethos of sharing. Sharing, however, does not mean 'ripping off' … sorry, I meant plagiarism. Fortunately, Creative Commons licensing has a lot to offer here, particularly 'Attribution Share Alike' licensing..
Policies? (1.62 MB)
This section is really an extension of the last. Serious problems arise when policies are reactive because they are, therefore, invariably, perceived as repressive. We look at some of the situations which have arisen when 'differences of opinion' arise between blog authors and their host institutions/organisations. There are also some examples of how spurious complaints about blog authors work can result in the complainants getting their fingers very badly burned.
Blog Futures? (2.63 MB)
The humble blog just seems to go on and on. In one relatively recent incarnation it appears to act like a digital 'filling station' for media devices. The commercial world is also beginning to cast an eye in the direction of blogs, either as a source of business intelligence, or viewing key bloggers in an area as 'thought leaders' which will pull a readership to articles syndicated on leading sites such as Yahoo!
Links and Resources (227 KB)
Finally, as if there has not been sufficient to read and digest I leave you with a lot more.

If you want all the slides at once I'm also offering the complete slides from presentation (4.81 MB), again in PDF format, but this time encoded at screen resolution to keep the file size small. Here, also, is all the slides in handout format (546 KB) again in screen resolution (2 slides per page).

Finally, here's the basic HTML version of the presentation. As usual, despite several attempts by me, Powerpoint doesn't quite manage to pull off HTML export that is a perfect representation of the presentation, but it's probably good enough. Nevertheless, maybe I should start looking for another, more Web friendly, interoperable presentation tool similar the quality offered by Mozilla Firefox? 🙂

If you fancy access to 100,000 images and sounds courtesy of the British Library then visit Collect Britain which describes itself as “the British Library's largest digitisation project to date.” Several things are of note. It's UK National Lottery funded (New Opportunities Fund), so we, mainly the great British public, have paid for its development. But it's got '.com' in its name, so does this suggest some ultimate commercial intent?

The current site says nothing about the licensing and reuse of material for educational purposes apart from to claim “copyright the British Library Board”.

And, finally, there's not an RSS or Atom syndicated feed to be seen. That's a real pity, particularly in a British Library project.

Looks interesting though and if these few concerns above were addressed … ?

The beta of Google Scholar is now available. This new area of Google activity describes itself thus “Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.” It's obviously still a beta and needs populating. The frequently asked questions in About Google Scholar seem to admit is isn't covering the complete field of academic discourse. Also, non traditional sources such as webblogs aren't getting a look in … but of course they aren't peer reviewed are they? 🙂

Still if Google Scholar picks up pace then there's probably cause for other commercial companies in the same space to be very concerned.