Mendeley’s Open API Approach Is On Course To Disrupt Academic Publishing, according to TechCrunch. They say: “Mendeley’s ecosystem has now produced over 240 research apps drawing on open data from its database under a Creative Commons license. Those generate more than 100 million API calls to Mendeley’s database per month….The information fueling this ecosystem is being produced by the scientific community itself, putting a social layer over each document and producing anonymised real-time information about the academic status, field of research, current interests, location of, and keywords generated by its readers. The applications can cover research collaboration, measurement, visualisation, semantic markup, and discovery…

Mendeley’s tools now touch about 1.9 million researchers, pooling 65 million documents and claims to cover 97.2% to 99.5% of all research articles published. By contrast commercial databases by Thomson Reuters and Elsevier contain 49 million and 47 million unique documents, respectively.”

RadioActive Europe project which will work with different groups of young people and adults to develop internet radio and set up a European Internet Radio hub kicks off in November. But we are already working on a RadioActive project in London, funded by the Nominet Trust and I am in contact with a number of projects and initiatives around Europe using using radio and video channels with young people and adults.

One of the biggest problems for these project is music. Well it isn’t music as such that is the problem. Access to music has never been easier. I am nostalgic  for those long hours I spent browsing in record shops, and taking hard choices as to which album to spend my hard earned pennies on. Now my phone has more music than was ever contained in my much loved collection of LPs.

The problem is the licensing of commercial music for streaming over the radio or for use in downloads of radio programmes. And of course many young people want to play their favourite music. It is a form of curation and self expression. From talking to many musicians, they too want their music to be played on internet radio. It is a way of reaching new audiences who might buy their music.

But the licensing, controlled essentially by the music industry (and certainly not the musicians) is a total mess. I ploughed through the UK licensing documents last week to try to make some sense out of what we can and can’t do through RadioActive. And this is what I came up with.

“1. For broadcasts that include non Creative Commons licensed material

a) requires a sign off by whoever owns the music – e.g. a friends band

OR

b) A PRS For Music licence and a PPL licence.

In the case of (b)

1. We cannot offer the download of programmes or files containing any part of any Sound Recordings. This includes Podcasting.

2. We cannot loop the (streamed) replay within a 3 hour time period.

3. No more than

– 3 Sound Recordings from a particular album

–  2 Sound Recordings from a particular album

– 4 Sound Recordings by one particular artist

– 3 Sound Recordings by one particular artist consecutively

Assuming – reasonably I think – that we do not go over 270000 performances per year the 2012 licence fee for PPL’s Small Webcaster Licence is £189.41 (plus VAT).

If we played say 8 recordings per hour this would provide us with 649 listener hours per week.

We would have to provide quarterly a Webcasting Report detailing the total number of Listener Hours (i.e. the aggregate duration that all users have streamed the service), and the average number of Sound Recordings played per hour for the quarter and (if they ask for it) –  a Programme Report detailing all of the Sound Recordings used during a given day’s programming.
We also need to know which countries listeners come  from (via web analytics).

The PRS license is far less restrictive costing £118  for 118000 streams. it also allows downloading.

How could that work? For instance cover versions of copyrighted music can be downloaded but commercial recordings cannot.

So in summary (assuming we purchase both licenses) broadcasters have three options

a) To play friends original music with permissions (obtained on paper or by electronic media)

b) To play cover versions of versions by friends with permission

c) To play music covered by a creative commons license

In these three cases we can offer unlimited streaming and downloads

2. To include commercial music in which case we cannot offer for download but can offer on looped streaming subject to conditions detailed above

I think we should purchase the licenses and then explain conditions to broadcasters to make their decision.”

It is all a bit of a nightmare. Jamendo.com is an increasingly rich source of Creative Commons licensed music (although I am told even this is contested in Portugal). And I hope through the RadioActive projects that we can start recording original music. But themess of licensing is stigling creativity and preventing many musicians from getting their music held. All this in the name of an industry which has spectacularly failed to keep pace with changing technologies and changes in the social ways in which we listen to and share music.

I love all the gadgets, widgets and services that social software can provide us. Google Fusi9on table sis wonderful for sharing and displaying data. Dropbox shares my files with others (and across my devices). Google docs is great for co-authoring and crowd sourcing ideas. And then there are Flickr, Diigo, Slideshare, Youtube,  Vimeo and all the rest. I have lost track of how many accounts I have created.

But – are there thunderstorms building in the clouds. Google managed to wipe out my account earlier this year when it wrongly linked two accounts together. And today I have had no email due to the stuttering Apple iCloud (Apple claim this is only effecting less than 1 % of users – it just seems that everyone i know with an Apple cloud account is part of that 1%).

And even the wonderful WordPress.com proved an nonviable solution for a recent web site due to the restrictions on embed codes.

I don’t buy into the argument that because these services are (sometimes) free we cannot complain. In one way or another we are paying for these services – be it through a fee or advertising or whatever. Google and Apple don’t just give things away. The free accounts are tied into their business strategy and at the end of the day their balance sheets.

I read a blog by Doug Belshaw the other day who was trying only to use paid for services. I don’t think that is the answer – paid for data and services can be just as insecure or unreliable than free ones. Come to think of it – Apple’s .mac and .me (paid for) services were always flaky. For web sites, we already host install on our own servers. But saying our own we are merely renting those servers (and one of them is in the cloud). I really don’t want the hassle of running an email server – and certainly don’t want to operate a streaming server.

So I really don’t know the answer to this issue. I think you just have to make judgements on a case by case – app by app – basis of what best does the job and what seems to be a decent service and who is providing reasonable Terms and Conditions of servce.

Here at the Pontydysgu HQ we are still pretty excited about the potential of the Raspberry Pi computer (although we haven’t managed to lay our hands on one yet). If you want to find out more Eben, according to the Raspberry Pi blog, is hosting “a webinar with Element 14 on April 4 at 2pm GMT. The subject matter will suit beginners, and should be pretty interesting for those of you who are hardened hackers too. He’ll be showing you how to:

– download and install the Operating System on the SD card
– run the boot up script
– use the script editor and begin to create applications using the presupplied Python scripts

If you want to attend, you’ll need to sign up for the event at Element 14′s website.”

Those of you who I have had the pleasure of talking to lately will know we are working on a sereis of new ideas. However, we have been so busy that this blog and website are running beyond. Hopefully int he next few weeks, I will I have the opportunity to get it back up to date. In the meantime, here is the abstract of a paper by Ludger Deitmer and myself, submitted for the PLE2012 conference, which describes the work we are developing on using technology for informal learning in the workplace and specifically in Small and Medium Enterprises in the building and construction trade.

Developing Work based Personal Learning Environments in Small and Medium Enterprises in the Building and Construction Industries

Graham Attwell, Pontydusgu

Ludger Deitmer, ITB, University of Bremen

Introduction

Research and development in Personal Learning Environments has made considerable progress in recent years. Yet such research continues to be focused on learning through formal educational institutions. Far less attention has been paid to work based learning and still less to the particular context of learning in Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). Yet it could be argued that it is in just these contexts, where work can provide a rich learning environment and where there is growing need for continuing professional development to meet demands from new technology and materials and changing work processes that PLEs could have the greatest impact. However, for this to happen requires a dual approach, based on informal learning and the development of network and mobile technologies. This paper will describe an approach being developed for learning in SMES, specifically in the building and construction industry in north Germany.

The challenge for knowledge and skills

Many industries are undergoing a period of rapid change with the introduction of new technologies, processes and materials. This is resulting in new quality and certification requirements and standards, and in the emergence of new skill requirements. It is generally acknowledged that a key factor for enterprises to staying agile and adaptive is to have a highly skilled workforce. With the rapid development of new technologies, staying up-to-date with know-how and skills increasingly becomes a challenge in many sectors.

Technology Enhanced Learning

While technology-enhanced learning (TEL) has been suggested as a means to address this challenge and support learning at the workplace, its potential has not yet been fully realized. Especially in many Small and Medium Enterprises (SME), the take-up has not been effective. A critical review of the way information technologies are being used for workplace learning (Kraiger, 2008) concludes that still today most solutions are targeted towards a learning model based on the ideas of direct instruction in a more or less formal manner. That is, TEL initiatives tend to be based upon a traditional business training model with modules, lectures and seminars transferred from face to face interactions to onscreen interactions, but retaining the standard tutor/student relationship and the reliance on formal and to some extent standardized course material and curricula.

Informal learning and Personal Learning Environments

However research suggests that in SMEs much learning takes place in the workplace and through work processes, is multi episodic, is often informal, is problem based and takes place on a just in time basis (Hart, 2011). Rather than a reliance on formal or designated trainers, much training and learning involves the passing on of skills and knowledge from skilled workers (Attwell and Baumgartl, 2009). In other words, learning is highly individualized and heavily integrated with contextual work practices. While this form of delivery (learning from individual experience) is highly effective for the individual and has been shown to be intrinsically motivating by both the need to solve problems and by personal interest (Attwell, 2007; Hague & Lohan, 2009), it does not scale very well: if individual experiences are not further taken up in systematic organisational learning practices, learning remains costly, fragmented and unsystematic.

The Building and Construction Sector

The building and construction trades are undergoing a period of rapid change with the introduction of green building techniques and materials followed by new processes and standards. The EU directive makes near zero energy building mandatory by 2021 (European Parliament 2009). This is resulting in the development of new skill requirements for work on building sites.

The sector is characterized by a small number of large companies and a large numbers of SMEs in both general building and construction and in specialized craft trades. Building and Construction projects require more interactive collaboration within as well as under different craft trade companies. Following the logistical chain also with planners and architects as well as with suppliers of new materials.

Continuing training is becoming increasingly important for dealing with technological change. Much of the further training offers are too little connected with real work projects and there is often little transfer of learning. The cost pressure in building enterprises limits chances for time-consuming training measures far away from the workplace. (Schulte, Spöttl, 2009). In all this there is an issue of how to share knowledge both between workers in different workplaces and of how to provide just in time training to meet new needs and how to link formal training with informal learning and work based practice in the different craft trades.

Mobile technologies

In the past few years, emerging technologies (such as mobile devices or social networks) have rapidly spread into all areas of our life. However, while employees in SMEs increasingly use these technologies for private purposes as well as for informal learning, enterprises have not really recognized the personal use of technologies as effectively supporting informal learning. As a consequence, the use of these emerging technologies has not been systematically taken up as a sustainable learning strategy that is integrated with other forms of learning at the workplace.

An approach to developing PLEs

We are researching methods and technologies to scale-up informal learning support for PLEs so that it is cost-effective and sustainable, offers contextualised and meaningful support in the virtual and physical context of work practices. We aim to:

• Ensure that peer production is unlocked: Barriers to participation need to be lowered, massive reuse of existing materials has to be realized, and experiences people make in physical contexts needs to be included.
• Ensure individuals receive scaffolds to deal with the growing abundance: We need to research concepts of networked scaffolding and research the effectiveness of scaffolds across different contexts.
• Ensure shared meaning of work practices at individual, organisational and inter-organisational levels emerges from these interactions: We need to lower barriers for participation, allow emergence as a social negotiation process and knowledge maturing across institutional boundaries, and research the role of physical artefacts and context in this process.

The paper will explore the evolution of this work in developing work based PLEs, capturing informal learning.

There seems to be a real buzz developing about the release of the Raspberry Pi computer. This  QR code poster nwas developed by Jonas Butz, a high school student from Germany. But before I go on to look at what the Raspberry Pi is, lest explain why I think it is so important.

There has been a long debate in the UK on what kids should be taught about computers. fairly obviously the ‘old’ curriculum which all too often focused on the ability to use things like spreadsheets or worse still Powerpoint was inadequate and failed to interest many students.

I don’t think the latest government policy of introducing a GCSE (the single subject qualifications students take at around 16 years old) in computing science is really the answer (even with a focus on programming).

I am still worried about how we can move from the idea of digital literacies to critical literacies (although I guess this depend a little on how you define these terms.

And I increasingly feel we should be able to teach kids how not just to hack software and to have a critical understanding of the role of digital technologies in society but also to be able to hack the hardware itself. Steve Jobs always talked about Apple’s aim to be at the interface of engineering and the liberal arts. But in many ways Apple’s closed infrastructure and its obsession with locking down devices (to the extent of even using special screws which cannot be removed without Apple tools) has stopped young people being able to explore hardware and try out their own hardware solutions. Surely hacking hardware is the best way of learning engineering and at the same time thinking about what role technology might play in our societies.

So I am excited by the launch of the credit card sized Raspberry Pi computer which it seems is now shipping at a price of 25 dollars for model A and 35 dollars for model B. OK this is without a keyboard, mouse, monitor or case. But, in my experience, the first thing geek kids do is remove the case from their computer!

This video talks about the Fedora Linux release which is being recommended for the Raspberry Pi.

The ‘About us‘ section of the Raspberry Pi website is modest (take note Apple – and, for that matter, OLPC) in explaining their ambition:

We don’t claim to have all the answers. We don’t think that the Raspberry Pi is a fix to all of the world’s computing issues; we do believe that we can be a catalyst. We want to see cheap, accessible, programmable computers everywhere; we actively encourage other companies to clone what we’re doing. We want to break the paradigm where without spending hundreds of pounds on a PC, families can’t use the internet. We want owning a truly personal computer to be normal for children. We think that 2012 is going to be a very exciting year.

FSCONS: YaCy Demo from Michael Christen on Vimeo.

OK….this is a techy video. But it is important. In an age when large software companies are increasingly controlling the internet, YaCy has been developed as a free search engine that anyone can use to build a search portal for their intranet or to help search the public internet. YaCy developers say:  “When contributing to the world-wide peer network, the scale of YaCy is limited only by the number of users in the world and can index billions of web pages. It is fully decentralized, all users of the search engine network are equal, the network does not store user search requests and it is not possible for anyone to censor the content of the shared index. We want to achieve freedom of information through a free, distributed web search which is powered by the world’s users.”

What a difference the Creative Commons License makes.

According to the icould web site:  “icould gives you the inside story of how careers work. The icould storytellers relate, in their own words, their real life career journeys. There are over a thousand easy to search,varied and unique career videos as well as hundreds of written articles. From telecoms engineers to police officers, from landscape gardeners to web designers, from engine drivers to zookeepers; they talk about what they do, what it’s like, how they came to be where are and their hopes for the future.”

The service has just celebrated its second birthday. A email from Director, Dave Arnold says:

Happy birthday to icould! We launched icould two years ago this week and although we are still in our infancy, we are growing well and becoming better known. We’ve doubled the visitor numbers to icould.com in the past year and also now have icould content streamed on key sites such as Guardian Careers, Career Wales, Skills Development Scotland, TES and the Frog schools learning platform, extending icould’s reach to millions of young people across the UK.

We’ve continued to add to our career videos and written content, with recent additions featuring advice on student finances and more practical tips for getting a first job. We’ve also created a new ‘Focus On’ area, designed to demystify certain sectors and types of work, exploring all the jobs and career possibilities within that theme.  These Focus On areas consist of around eight to ten new video stories, new written content, competitions and specific guidance on training opportunities and company information.

Focus On Music was the first new area on icould.com sponsored by BlackBerry.  Launched over the Summer, it looks at careers of people behind the stars in the music industry. Focus On Music profiles the unseen heroes behind a music star, for example Jesse J’s choreographer and music video director and Tinnie Tempah’s publicist and photographer. We wanted to show that you don’t have to be behind the microphone to have a successful career in the music industry and hopefully we give young people an insight into the breadth of careers within the industry. This area was launched in July and has attracted considerable media attention as well as several successful partnerships, one with the iconic NME which has resulted in an icould user being offered a work taster experience with the Editor. We have also created some new free teaching resources to complement this new initiative.

……..

We’ve recently launched the next area, a Focus On Finance sponsored by Standard Life, which looks at the range of careers and skills needed in the Financial sector, proving that you don’t have to be an expert with numbers to work in finance!  We have a number of other areas in the pipeline, including a Focus on Media, which will launch in the New Year.

We continue to listen and respond to your feedback and are currently undertaking further research on the usage of icould.com to inform future developments.  We really appreciate your input, so please keep your comments and suggestions coming in.”

Obviously icould is on a roll. But lets use the Wayback machine to take us back to spring, 2009. I don’ t know, but I suspect that at that time iCould was struggling to make much impact. And here is one of the major reasons why. The Terms and Conditions of use at that time stated:

“Use of the icould website

Unless otherwise stated, icould owns the intellectual property rights in the website and material on the website. All these intellectual property rights are reserved.

Unless otherwise stated, you are entitled to use the icould website for personal use in any way, providing you do not reproduce any of the information as your own and/or seek to profit from it. Personal use constitutes viewing the icould website online and printing pages and/or documents for review offline.

If you wish to reproduce any materials accessible on the icould website including information, graphics, images and other design elements in printed or electronic form, you must obtain written permission first. Please use the contact details at the bottom of this page if you need to obtain permission.

Linking to the icould website is permitted, although displaying our pages within a frame of another website is not as this constitutes reproducing our content as your own.”

Now let’s forward to the present day. Under Terms and Conditions we find the following statement:

“…..we give permission to use the contents of the Site on a creative commons licence which can be found at:

Attribution-Non-commercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported

This licence gives you permission to broadcast icould.com pages over the school network or use them on a whiteboard in a classroom.  You can circulate articles, use the worksheets and so on. This applies in any education or training context.

In simple terms:

• You can copy, distribute, transmit the work and display the material with the exclusion of full length versions[i] of stories.
• You may create derivative works with the exclusion of full length versions of stories.

Under the following conditions:

• Attribution: You must give icould credit and make clear the resources come from icould.com.
• Non-commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes or make any charge for the work.
• Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a licence identical to the Creative Commons licence.

This means you could, for instance, create electronic worksheets or create electronic careers posters or include them in an e-portfolio or personal learning environment.”

Not only that, but icould provides an API key to make it easy for developers to incorporate icould materials in their own sites.

There is a lesson here for developers and content providers and indeed for many education and learning projects. Few of us have the clout to make it on our own. But through allowing use of our materials and projects we can build impact on a vastly greater scale. And whilst going creative commons closes off some business models it opens up others.

Congratulations to icould for opening up their content. And happy birthday. Lets hope they continue building on the success they are presently enjoying.

I am intrigued by this abstract is for a Symposium that will be presented at ALT-C 2011 by Frances Bell, Cristina da Costa, Josie Fraser, Richard Hall and Helen Keegan and is published on Frances Bell’s blog. I am reproducing it in full below.

This symposium will examine the paradoxes of giving and receiving online in education in a changing economic climate.  Each of the panelists will briefly address topic areas within the symposium theme, followed by an opportunity for present and at distance audiences to contribute, concluding with a 25 minute plenary discussion.

Symposium delegates will be provoked to reconsider the costs of participation online by paid and unpaid participants in ‘open’ discussion and sharing of resources.

Open Educational Resources exist within communities that create, use and sustain them (Downes 2007). When ‘communities’ in Higher Education break down due to redundancy and casualisation of labour what happens to OERs? Are they sustained? Can they reach out to other contexts?

All areas of education, including the school sector, currently face significant financial challenges and uncertainties. Institutions are increasingly reviewing the provision of devices and services, and looking at learner owned devices and commercially owned ‘free’ cloud-based services. What is the real price of an education system supported and transformed by embedded learning technologies?

Ownership in the age of openness calls for clarity about mutual expectations between learners, communities and ourselves. Ideas and content are shared easily through open platforms, and yet attributions can be masked in the flow of dissemination: does credit always go where it is due?

Openness in the production, sharing and reuse of education/resources is meaningless in the face of neoliberalism. Where coercive competition forms a treadmill for the production of value, openness/OERs are commodified. Control of the educational means of production determines power to frame how open are the relations for the production or consumption of educational goods or services, in order to realise value. The totality of this need, elicited by the state for capital, rather than the rights of feepayers, parents, communities or academics, shapes how human values like openness are revealed and enabled within HE.

Scarce research monies focus attention on impact factors, arguably stagnating practice. For publications, Open Access can increase wider societal impact but at the expense of career progression.We explore the tensions, paradoxes and professional costs on societal benefits, individual agency and academic progression.

Obviously this is a bit of a mash up proposal but it does raise a lot of questions. I think there is a tension between the idea of communities and institutions. Communities of practice, and for that matter the communities in which Open education Resources are being produced and shared, cross institutional boundaries. Furthermore the use of OERs may be within an institutional setting but may also be outside.

This again is reflected in recognition and reward structures. Whilst reward structures within institutions are based on either monetary compensation or in terms of progression, rewards within the community may reflect a wider understanding of recognition, especially respect or standing within that community. Does credit always go to who it should? Probably not, but this is taking a very individualistic view of research. Surely credit should be shared in the community rather than in the closed door offices of academic researchers.

Are OERs being commodified? Presumably the term “coercive competition” refers to the growing practice to require academics and researchers to publish their work as OERs. I don’t really understand what the authors mean in saying “The totality of this need, elicited by the state for capital, rather than the rights of feepayers, parents, communities or academics, shapes how human values like openness are revealed and enabled within HE.” Of course the idea of openness is being hijacked by institutions. But at the same time the movement towards openness is contradictory and I am not sure this is reflected in the abstract. Especially missing is a discussion of the nature of OERs in allowing reuse and modification and the impact this has on (commodified) relations of production and intellectual property. And at the same time, the spread of OERs is allowing new open forms of learning and knowledge production outside the confines of the institution. thus whilst the movement towards OERs may be becoming commodified the use of OERs is challenging traditional understandings of those very commodities.

I don’t think this reveals a paradox but a dialectical contradiction. Present schooling models of education are being found to be wanting. The discussion about open education is important in that it could provide an alternative to privatisation. The discussion over OERs forms an important part of this debate and to this extent the debate over this symposium is extremely interesting.

More on that research and learning infrastructure question. Online meetings are becoming ever more important and at least in theory, are a good idea because they cut down on traveling time, cost and harm to the environment. I say in theory, because at the moment we seem to be having meetings just because we can but no doubt we will grow out of that.

Last year I wrote about the different online platforms available, bemoaning the quality of the audio on many of the Flash based systems. At that time I was recommending two platforms – Elluminate – which despite problems of firewalling (and also all too often audio quality) was a fully functional working space and reasonably reliable – and Flash meeting – a free service provided by the UK Open University.

One of the drawbacks to Elluminate is that it is a paid for product although I have always found the Elluminate staff to be very generous in ‘lending’ online space if needed. Whether that will continue since they have been taken over by Blackboard remains to be seen.

Flash meeting is a great service, but is limited in terms of functionality. it works best for meetings of up to about 20 or so people – more that this and the interface becomes a little tricky.

Last year I looked at the open source Big Blue Button project. whilst promising it was not quite at a real use stage then. But since then it has come of age. The web page describes their  vision to be “that starting a web conference should be as easy as clicking a single metaphorical big blue button. As an open source project, we believe it should be easy for others to embrace and extend. And while web conferencing means many things to many people — our focus is to make the best web conferencing system for distance education.”

BigBlueButton is increasingly being integrated in other Open Source applications such as Moodle, Drupal and WordPress. And there are a number of commercial hosting providers. Now the UK Jisc has just announced an online video and audio conferencing service powered by BigBlueButton. As yet it has to be booked by email, but I have no doubts that Jisc will develop an online booking system. Sadly the service is limited to ‘UK academia’, based on having a .ac.uk email address. Brut hopefully Jisc will consider extending this in the future.

This seems a good example of how a public sector educational infrastructure provider, Jisc, can use Open Source Software to provide services to support a research and learning infrastructure. Another reason to support Open Source and defend public services.