New look and feel to launch the first Opencast Project Community Workshop

Thanks to Seamus and Julian at Graphic Mint we are able to launch our first Opencast Community Workshop with a new logo and look and feel. Check it out.

OpenCast Project Full Steam Ahead

The OpenCast Project team has been busy planning our upcoming workshop, June 5 &6, in Berkeley and our open house event on June 13, right after the WWDC.

There will be ten universities attending the workshop to dig into the requirements and best practices for open casting of university content. As you know from my previous posts this is not new to Berkeley, but what is new is our upcoming release of our newly architected application (I say with my knuckles turning white as I grasp the arms of my chair) this Fall along with the engagement of a much larger community of folks from around higher ed to work with us on developing the roadmap for soup-to-nuts open system. Open Source to Open Content.

The OpenCast Project has a new Blog (very new) which over the next few weeks will be gaining a new look and feel (thanks to our great friends over at Graphic Mint) and much more content. Much of the content from the early wiki will be moved over and new information added as we start to release the (oh so secret) plans for our workshops. The community best practices will start going up after our June workshop. If you are interested in contributing to this effort in any way (best practices, ideas, requirements, etc…) please don’t hesitate to contact me or someone else on the team.

Open Cast Planning Grant

Thanks to WIlliam and Flora Hewlett and Andrew W. Mellon Foundations for joining together to support the Open Cast project (new site will be coming out soon) planning grant. This funding will support the project in conducting three requirements and best practices workshops to explore the requirements and readiness for a new community source effort around the shared development and design of an open source podcast capture and delivery system for higher ed. Outcomes will be documentation of the resulting requirements and best practices, the development of a collaborative community (already well underway with over 200 individual participants), and a well defined proposal for next steps.

Why is this important?

UC Berkeley has been delivering open webcast content (audio and video) since the mid-90’s. As we have increasingly automated the process, brought down the cost to sustain the system, disseminated the content to popular platforms such as YouTube and iTunes (go to where the viewers/learners/users are), and increased our installations, we have found that this program makes a difference in both lives and professions.

First, professions.

In Spring 2006, UC Berkeley launched a free podcasting service, which leveraged Berkeley’s existing video webcast infrastructure in general assignment classrooms and our central scheduling and capture system. In doing so, humanities curriculum was exposed to an eager public. These humanities podcasts have had a tremendous impact on the public and far exceed the popularity of the sciences – becoming some of the most popular podcasts on iTunes, wedged between notable media outlets like CNN and National Geographic. Popular courses include “Man, God, and Society in Western Literature,” taught by Philosophy Professor Herbert Dreyfus and Professor Michael Nagler’s “Non-Violence Today”

Webcast video and audio helps to spotlight humanities curriculum and faculty at a time when the humanities are struggling to receive funds and recognition. The American Historical Society, for example, highlights the Berkeley History curriculum on its website . One young Berkeley history lecturer used the webcasting of her course to promote her teaching and scholarship, eventually earning an assistant professorship at the University of Virginia. Without a scalable and affordable system and set of best practices, the sharing of this content and exposure for the Berkeley History Department would not be possible.

Now, lives.

ETS and our webcasting faculty get amazing letters from learners around the world. These webcasts are engaging, entertaining, educating millions of people. There is not a continent that has gone untouched. Here are a couple of examples:

“…As far as I’ve been watching it’s been great, though I’ve only been watching Physics 10 with Professor Richard A. Muller because he’s really such an interesting teacher. I’m interested, I’m laughing and I’m learning…”

“Is there a course on art history? If so I beg on bended knee for that to be uploaded!
Thank you a million times for allowing us to watch your lectures here!
The person who had this idea should be knighted or maybe a petition for sainthood!
The free flow of information is an essential part of the evolution of any society!
Thank you again!!!”

No kidding. Comments like this come in like candy, reminding us why we come to work every day at such an incredible public institution like UC Berkeley.

Interestingly, the UC Berkeley students seem to get it too. They are absolutely in love with webcast because it helps them learn better. In recent focus groups with ETS they have talked about using it to review the lecture and to listen to other teachers from other semesters on the same subjects. They will review the lecture notes at night and then listen to the podcast on the way to school in the morning. Several students have mentioned that while they would love to have these embedded in their course sites, they also don’t want to deprive the public of them. One student mentioned how the MIT OCW helped her augment her studies as a high school student in India and credited her acceptance to Berkeley because of that.

Wouldn’t it be great if more schools could/would do this too?

We hope that Open Cast will make it easier for them to join in.

OCW Sustainability Formula?

I attended the Open Courseware Consortium (OCWC) conference in beautiful Logan, Utah at the end of September. The OCW “movement” is still relatively young (2002ish?), and the OCWC organization is busy trying to define its mission and structure.

UC Berkeley joined OCWC in August, although we have been delivering “open courseware” via our online lectures since 1995 (http://webcast.berkeley.edu). This began as a research project managed by Professor Larry Rowe in his Berkeley Multimedia Research Center (BMRC) as the BIBS project (Berkeley Internet Broadcast System). We are now busy on what we call webcast NG, the next generation of the webcasting infrastructure that is being built upon Sakai’s open source framework and new infrastructure that includes some key elements from one of our favorite education and media companies, Apple. I gave a little talk about this while at OCWC and have attached my slides as a PDF if you are interested in learning more about what we do at UC Berkeley.

Some of the discussions I enjoyed the most were about sustainability. This is always of interest to me, as someone who is responsible for providing centrally supported services to my campus. Sustainability was talked about in terms of the OCWC organization and in terms of the OCW effort in general.

I think a central criterion for sustainability in the open content arena is “perceived value”. This means the value provided by the supporting organizations, and the value provided by the activity of providing the content (think about the alignment of university mission for this one), and, hopefully, the value of the content itself.

I suspect there is a formula for something like this that looks like, sustainability + meeting real (local and global) need + innovation = value. When looking through the lens of this formula, there may be an opportunity to expand the definition of OCW and its associated activities. To date it has often been defined as a publishing model which reflects the artifacts and experiences of a traditional course taught in the physical space of a classroom as well as those represented in an LMS or CLE. When thinking about sustainability, a publishing model makes good sense. However, while sustainability remains (and should be) prominent for most of us (this need is driving UCB’s current efforts), I doubt there is value in constraining the OCW vision to this in the future: innovation and meeting real needs will begin to take us well beyond this.

In regards to the meeting real needs part of the formula, at UCB we deliver videos and podcasts of complete courses via the capture of lectures. As we all know, a lecture is in no way the entirety of the course and this limitation is one of the common arguments used to convince a professor that public webcasts or podcasts are an OK thing to do — we are not giving away the keys to the kingdom! In fact, I think I would be hard pressed to find a large contingent of UC Berkeley professors at this moment who would be willing to release their entire course content in the manner of MIT’s powerful OCW program, let alone obtain an operating budget that would enable me to do so. That said, the email we receive from people all over the world indicates that in many cases, they consider these videos and podcasts alone as fantastic learning aids that expand their thinking and knowledge in valuable ways – these course web & pod casts improve lives! Now, if we could only get the funding to make all this content fully accessible through captioning, then we would truly be meeting real needs.

Adding “innovation” into the mix

While UCB is heads-down on getting our NG infrastructure in place, we are anxiously thinking ahead about new tools that will improve the experience of interacting with this content and help learners manage and share their own learning. These can be simple widgets with discrete interactions, to more complex applications that need to integrate with each other to manage institutional data through a CLE-type environment. Supporting these types of interactions begin to round out the value proposition since the activities that support managing an individual’s own learning and engaging with others to build knowledge are key motivators for learners. One way in which we can start to jump start this and alleviate costs is to form partnerships across higher ed and with companies doing interesting work such as YouTube and Apple, as well as building our platforms in an open enough way that our own constituencies can start to add to the value proposition!

UC Berkeley Launches YouTube Channel

UC Berkeley webcast has a new distribution partner in YouTube: http://youtube.com/ucberkeley. The site was officially launched on Wednesday, October 3, to a great community (global) response. There were many notices of this across the blogosphere and Web. Ben Hubbard, our webcast program manager at UC Berkeley is tracking many of these on his del.icio.us site.

We see this as the beginning of a very interesting relationship. Integrating educational content into YouTube, firmly a leader in the web 2.0 world, begins a unique experiment in building informal learning communities around formal learning activities. Not sure exactly where this will take us, but I expect there to be some tensions along the way and some breakthroughs. I’ll keep you posted.

User-Centered Design and Pedagogy

In my blog post at Penn’s State Terra Incognita blog, I talked a little about how UX designers can help bridge the gap between instructional designers and developers of teaching and learning software:

Another challenge in creating applications for academia is that many of the user goals are embedded in pedagogical methods that may be discipline specific or not expressed in a generalizable way. Instructional designers and faculty are rarely part of a development team. In the higher education community source environment we have an opportunity to remedy this. It may require reaching across local organizational divides to ensure that the user and instructional goals are adequately being met: Often, instructors don’t speak the language of technology, so the instructional designer can help translate, generalize, and communicate their needs. In turn, the instructional designer often doesn’t speak the language of the application programmer, and the UI designer can help translate and represent their needs within the design and work flow of the application for the developers. Here is a diagram that attempts to illustrate this point and show how UX can be a bridging activity: UCD in Higher Education

Since that writing, there has been a string of emails across the Sakai UI and Pedagogy email lists pertaining to this issue (just lucky timing I think). Mark Notess, a usability expert from the University of Michigan pointed the list to an article he wrote for eLearn magazine back in 2001, titled Usability, User Experience, and Learner Experience. While somewhat dated (according to Mark) there are still plenty of points that hold true today as we work on Sakai. This one in particular caught my attention:

Learner-Centered Design

How do the concepts and processes of user experience apply to online learning? To the extent that an online learning system is another piece of software, the applicability is straightforward. All of our methods that have worked well with software applications should be used with online learning and should work equally well. But creating online learning is not identical to creating typical software applications because we have to concern ourselves with things like instructional strategies, content sequencing, and quality of learning.

Web usability has been a hot topic for the past few years, but web-based learning faces some different issues. Web usability has largely concerned itself with e-commerce–product catalog navigation and converting hits to purchases. Other web usability work has focused on information seeking and finding. But web-based learning is a different experience. It raises questions like these:

• How can we keep learners engaged with large amounts of content?
• How can learners get oriented and effectively navigate an online learning environment consisting of dozens of learning resources, tools, and activities?
• How do we engender effective online collaboration between learners?

He included in his email the comment,

“My contention, which is actually motivating my current dissertation research, is that the growth of the web and web-based learning environments has increased (or perhaps created) the need for IDs to be able to work with UX people and developers such that there is a need for a common language and inclusive, cross-disciplinary processes.”

I think he and I are on the same page. When I look back to my graduate training in instructional design, the principles in conducting a needs assessment in a performance or learning environment don’t vary too much from the principles of a good UX field study. Perhaps simply finding the shared vocabulary would be a good starting point. However, UX still needs to translate to developers on the other end of the continuum. They also tend not to have the depth of knowledge (I know I am generalizing here) in understanding the tools of the trade in learning theory, and where behavior in the teaching and learning activities can be generalized and the issues and assumptions imposed by discipline, etc… However, I am starting to ponder the importance of the fact that not only do instructor’s not speak developer-speak (for the most part) they also very often don’t speak pedagogy-speak! So, that leaves us with a lot of people in different fields with common goals and close enough vocabularies to confuse the heck out of each other!

I know this is actually a good thing. I know that the fact that community source efforts allow us to be embedded in an environment where we actually have these different skills sets all organized around a common goal has the potential to be incredibly powerful. It feels like the answer is on the tip of our tongues!

Fleck Extension for Firefox

This is a really interesting add on for Firefox (it comes for Explorer as well, but I don’t use Explorer. You know why). It provides the ability to post a note on a web page and then share it with your Blog or email it to friends. Even if you don’t have the extension it will allow you to see my notes and pop up a tool bar so you can add some also. Try it using the link below.

Fleck.com - Fleck the Web!

The tool is in Beta still, and a little flaky. It also won’t seem to work with Sakai. It sends you into a god awful loop of logging you out, allowing you to use it on the front page (except not on our instance of Sakai, bSpace, which I think is because of the secure site). I tried linking to a “flecked page” from within the Sakai web content tool. It worked. It showed the notes and the toolbar, but they weren’t aligned.

I would love to be able to have faculty and students use this tool for analysis of websites, images, or even for peer review on a paper. If it could “cross over” into the CLE/LMS world without giving up its neutral zone status, that would be rad.

Fluid Project Funded!

The FLUID project was funded by the Mellon Foundation! It will officially kick off next week, with our first all-project F2F meeting in Toronto the week of April 16th.

This project (Flexible User Interface Design) is focussed on improving the User Experience (UX) and accessibility in Community Source Software. It will do this by attempting to address both the technical and the social constraints that tend to make UX and accessibility (as well as QA and Security) precarious values in software development of these systems. It will focus firstly on uPortal, Sakai, and the new Kuali Student Systems projects. The University of Toronto ATRC is the PI on the project, joined by UC Berkeley (ETS), Cambridge University (CARET), University of British Columbia, and York University as core partners. There are number of other institutions engaged as secondary partners as well as a several commercial affiliates such as IBM, Yahoo, and SUN.

This work will be available open source via the ECL license and will produce a design patterns and persona library under the Creative Commons license.

This project is very exciting and complex. I will likely be posting more on this as it ramps up over the next several months.

Hewlett Foundation OER Review & grantees meeting

I just returned from a week on the road, and one of the stops was at the Hewlett Foundation Grantees conference. Just to be completely on the up-and-up, Educational Technology Services (ETS) at UCB (where I work) is not a grantee. But we have been talking to Cathy Casserly about our program, so we were happy to have me attend and learn more about where the foundation is going based on the recent review of their OER program and their diverse set of projects.

If you haven’t read the review report, and you are in the Ed Tech or education field, I highly recommend it. Some of the interesting highlights in the report for me were:

1. A focus on the need for not only and active learning-by-doing environment, but also a learning-to-be environment. Each of these supported in a web 2.0-3.0 collaborative environment. (Very near and dear to my heart)
2. The above combined with an increased need around “Cyberinfrastructure” will be an opportunity to deliver on the need for research-based learning experiences and the support for increased computational capacity across higher education and extending into k-12 and lifelong learning.
3. The concept of an Open Participatory Learning Infrastructure (OPLI) which promotes a learning ecosystem and culture of learning that is never static, and as an ecosystem in the physical world is “always in a state of perpetual ferment.” Learning is never done.
4. Recognition of the global shift happening in population, technology adoption (such as cell phones), and global educational needs. The meeting was started by viewing the Shift Happens video.

Some of the areas that I see need to be explored and expanded are:

1. IP support. Developing open content is complex in a world where fair use is under attack and litigious publishers, RIAA, and MPAA are looking for any reason to punish perceived violations (rather than looking for a stronger business model).
2. Best practices for developing/capturing/sharing OER. The cost for developing sustainable OER has not been proven out as of yet.
3. Building tools that enable active and engaged learning activities around the new learning resources.

It was a good meeting. I particularly enjoyed the booklet on storytelling as a best practice. Hewlett is doing good and meaningful work, which is good for the world and takes the long view. At this meeting and the COSL meeting last September I was struck by how many excellent projects and people Hewlett is funding who are really passionate about their mission and thinking about better educational experiences and in turn a better world.

LibraryThang — I think I luv you!

Sing it to the tune of Wild Thing!

I may be behind the times (as evidenced by my taste in music!) in discovering this sweet new tool, but the LibraryThing web app is new to me and, WOW, I like it. LibraryThing is a site that helps you catalog your books (your library) either by capturing the metadata through a simple search on Amazon or the Library of Congress or through an actual bar code scanner (you can purchase it on the site) which you can use on your physical library. You can then rate these books, comment on them, talk about them with all the other folks who have added them to their library, or simply share your list with friends. You can see the start of my library (done in all of about 2 minutes) here.

SO, why do I like it so much? Probably for the same reason I like Flickr. I like to share the things I like and I am lazy. I guess I don’t really care if “all those people out there” that I don’t know find or like my reading materials, but I certainly like being able to point friends and colleagues to my pictures or favorite books without having to attach them to an email. Now, if only my friends and family had a list like this (ohhhh, yeeessss) I would never have to face going to bed bookless again. I can’t wait to get home tonight and start adding to my library for your browsing pleasure.