FOTE 2009 in Second Life

We used the opportunity to include a short presentation about our CLASM project, and I shared the platform for one session with James Ballard, our resident Learning Technologist and ace Moodle hacker. The full video and slides (with audio) of our talk are available from the FOTE website; the slides are also on Slideshare.

I was particularly pleased to make contact with Jane Secker of LSE, who knows more than most about CLA, and I am looking forward to discussing some issues with her, as we try to refine the work done on the CLASM plugins and produce a finished package. Jane also published an excellent account of the day’s events on her blog

The audience was a bit different from the JISC Information Environment crowd I’ve made presentations to before, so my talk was a very high-level overview of repository work in the sector, with a few ideas about where trends and technology seem to be leading us. One particular advantage I see is that interoperability between web applications should enable us to focus on using the “right” tools – portfolio, VLE, blog, repository, etc, maybe even VW – at each stage of the institutional/educational workflow, rather than using over-ambitious and over-complicated systems that try to do everything. “Small pieces loosely joined,” and all that.

Unfortunately, while the slides on the FOTE website include audio, the video there doesn’t include the slides, which robs the talk of some context. I have, by some dark means, managed to create a new version which combines the video and slides and upload it to YouTube. (To keep it short and relevant to DA Blog readers, I’ve only included my part of the presentation.)

I was asked to assist James with a demonstration of the Mahara e-Portfolio system. ULCC has been working extensively on personalisation tools for e-Learning, at the heart of which is developing the Personal Learning Plan modules for Moodle, and integrating it with Mahara.

I’ve been very impressed with Mahara since I started dabbling with it on the demo server set up by James Ballard of our Moodle team. Unlike some other e-Portfolio systems I’ve seen, it is intuitive, powerful and fun, and focuses on the task in hand of preparing and managing portfolios. Mahara e-Portfolios can incude not only static information from within Mahara and Moodle, but also external content and dynamic information from external RSS feeds, YouTube, and the like: it’s a very likeable Web Two-ish application that has lots of potential uses, from school and college projects to all manner of personal portfolio projects, such as CPD and Professional Accreditations.

Preservation and interoperability issues abound here too. ULCC’s e-Learning team is working with JISC CETIS on modules to transfer files and assignments from Moodle and Mahara, and ways of packaging up interoperable portfolio packages, in a SCORM/IMS kind of approach, for between Mahara and Pebblepad. Longer-term preservation however does not seem to feature in any discussions I’ve heard: should we be thinking about using repositories to manage and preserve portfolios (or snapshots of portfolios) over the long term, whether for compliance or historical interest? Could this be another job for JISC-PoWR?

You don’t need to hear any more about me and SNEEP, but the other presentations offered interesting insights into work with Institutional and Learning Object repositories, thesauruses – and even a bit of Web 2.0 mashup.

Peter Kilcoyne from Worcester College of Technology demonstrated their JISC-funded Mr Cute project. This has developed a Moodle extension which considerably extends the functionality of the VLE as a repository of IMS Learning Object packages (hence the acronym: Moodle Repository Create Upload Tag Embed). Tangentially interesting (in the light of recent discussions chez nous) was seeing the way Peter’s institution has embedded Moodle in Sharepoint: a fiendishly simple but elegant way to make an open-source web app work more-or-less seamlessly with enterprise and admin systems (reminds me also we should revisit our plan to embed MediaWiki in Eprints). We also learned from Peter that Moodle now has an estimated 60% share of the VLE market in FE (according to a recent ILT Champions survey by Rob Englebright): a useful statistic to know.

Roger Greenhaigh from Harper Adams University College described the National Rural Knowledge Exchange, a resource centre for specialists in agriculture and related matters. With laudable aims of brokering joint projects, consultancy, events, reviews, bespoke training, lab and field trials, visiting speakers, graduate placements, etc., the system has nevertheless had to address a real need for simplicity in order to be of use to much of its target community. Roger described how a huge range of taxonomies was researched – from DEFRA to Dewey to business directories – in order to arrive at the best ways of arranging and classifying the information.

National Rural makes extensive and effective use of many powerful Web 2.0 tools, including RSS/Atom feeds, Google Maps and Flickr. It also tries, where possible, to shortcut established publishing cycles and schedules. The speed with which government organisations, in particular, release information, is not always conducive to timely dissemination: “what’s hot in pigs”, or up-to-the-minute information about avian flu, can’t wait weeks or months for DEFRA’s web publishing process to release it. This enlightened approach seems very reminiscent of the approach of mySociety and IdealGovernment that I described elsewhere.

I was pleased Michael Emly’s presentation reminded me about MIDESS, which was a wide-ranging and ambitious project researching many aspects of repository implementation. Of particular interest to us (in the light of PRIMO and TPYF) is its work on multimedia repositories and IPR issues.

MIDESS also experimented with using METS and OAI-PMH as metadata transmission standards: interesting to hear their conclusion that METS is too flexible to be readily usable. I’m reminded of our work with EAD, a format in which it is very easy to create metadata, but not so easy to reliably interpret others’ uses of it, unless an explicit subset is identified: MIDESS similarly concluded that there is a need for more work on application profiles. Michael also highlighted the issue that current platforms are lacking functionality for multimedia: how can we get that functionality built in?

John Robertson briefly told us about HILT , the High-Level Thesaurus project, unifying many classification schemes. A quick look at one of the HILT demo sites suggests it might be very useful, if ontology is your bag. Creating and maintaining such unions and cross-walks is not for the faint-hearted.

After my SNEEP spiel, Phil Barker explained how JORUM is now moving to a model of open access and deposit.

The closing discussion and questions and comments passim were all very constructive and thought-provoking, particularly regarding the differing expectations of repositories for Learning Objects and Scholarly Works. How real – for example – are the benefits of sharing LOs through an OAI-PMH type service? Sharing Learning Objects/Resources, it was convincingly suggested, is still likely to be hampered by a “why should I?” attitude, by fear of criticism, and by the commercially competitive environment in which many teaching institutions operate. Nevertheless, sharing aside, it’s clear that institutions need better control and management of their learning resources , and for this reason a repository-based approach – whether exo like JORUM or an IR, or intra like MR CUTE – is likely to be essential.

Finally it was a pleasure to meet other colleagues in the field, particularly Shirley Yearwood-Jackman from Liverpool University, who showed me their very nice looking Research Archive (using Eprints). They might be interested in SNEEP Comments too, though Shirley felt her contributors might like more control over which users or groups of users can comment. Although we’re close to having to button up SNEEP 1.0, Rory might have some bright ideas (he usually does).