It is Open Access Week and here at Pontydysgu we are committed to doing our bit to support the cause.

We have a large archive of papers and books to which one or another of us has contributed at some time or other. None of it is going to be a best seller but some of the papers and books may be of interest to researchers, teachers, trainers or developers. And form time to time, I receive an email from people asking about where they can get a copy of one paper or another.

We did have a go at it a year and a half or so ago and Dirk spent ages trying to get the system working using bibtext. The problem is the system was just too clunky. Indeed looking at our stub page of journal articles I see the server is feeding up the following error message – Failed to write file/home/pontydysgu.org/htdocs/wp-content/plugins/bib2html/data/pontydysgu.cached.bib – check directory permission according to your Web server privileges – whatever that means.

So we need a better system. We did think about using the University of Bremen;s open access docuemnt service. But once more, on test this also has its drawbacks. This afternoon I tried creating an ebook on the Lulu site. And it is not bad. However all it basically does is makes available a PDF file, albeit with quite a neat presentation.

So if any of you are interested you can download “Creating Learning Spaces: Training and Professional Development for Trainers” from the Pontydysgu page on Lulu (for free of course).

I reckon this is not a bad format for books. And for papers we are thinking of using Scribd which seems to work pretty well with WordPress. But i would be interested in your views. What is the best way for us to publish an archive of perhaps 200 papers, books and book chapters? And what is the best format? Should we try to produce ebooks for devices like the ipod touch? And, if so, what is the best way to do it> Your help will be much appreciated.

I was going to – and still will – write a post celebrating Open Access Week. But it was somewhat ironic on the first day of the week to receive an evaluation report on a project we submitted under the so called valorisation strand of the Lifelong Learning Programme which focused on the use of social networking and social software to provide open access to the results of projects.

I don’t normally complain if an application is turned down – it is a competitive field and I am not convinced all our ideas are always so brilliant 🙂

But the feedback on this project was truly shocking. It was almost impossible to connect the feedback to the project – indeed I double checked the reference number in case they has sent the wrong review. So then the question is raised of why? And I think it is just because the reviewer does not get the idea of open access. In his or her view the job of a project is to assist the European Commission in managing ideas and project outputs – not to empower projects to develop their own networks.

Anyway (in the spirit of open access) here is a sample of what we write and what the reviewer said:

We said: “The dissemination & exploitation of programme and project results at European level are frequently designed in rather traditional models. The use of static content continues to be the main focus which in many cases reduces the impact that projects may have, both sectorally with user groups, but also with stakeholders & policy makers. This project will connect project leaders, partners & members of the European Commission with key networks & communities. The goal of Europe UNLOCK-Ed is to create an innovative & suitable framework for dissemination & exploitation of LLP project results through an Open Access to Knowledge approach.  The project will develop an interactive framework using participatory media, supported by national training, online multimedia resources, an open Social Network Site (SNS) for online discussions and access to resources, synchronous online & face to face events & a handbook (electronic & hard copy) which will inspire a culture of open participation & sharing of knowledge. It aims to facilitate the development of adequate competencies & skills for LLP funded projects regarding the use of web 2.0 tools & raise awareness of Online Copyright & Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) which are issues which many projects struggle with. An e-guide on Online Copyright & IPR will also be developed & published on the project’s SNS for free distribution.  The project will also provide an opportunity for existing projects to disseminate & exploit their own results through the open e-journal for the publication of European LLP project results which will be established.  To summarise, this project is two-fold: it proposes to harness the latest web technologies to promote & develop effective techniques & methodologies for the transfer, dissemination & exploitation of results & it will also create learning opportunities as to capacity build & empower other projects  to apply the same framework to their projects to ensure the greatest impact & sustainability.

Relevance

They say: (…) detail on the actual dissemination activities that are planned are lacking’

We said: Europe UNLOCK-Ed wants to create an open, interactive, user-generated online knowledge database on topics addressed by lifelong learning projects and programmes. A social network site linking key networks will be launched to promote peer participation & offer a diversity of learning opportunities through the use of multiple online environments & web 2.0 tools. An e-guide, related pedagogical training, multimedia resources including e-journal & online events will also derive from this approach.

It will also target the promotion of innovation in terms of dissemination & exploitation methods at a wider scale while bringing together members of the European Commission, the National Agencies and successful projects with an international audience in an open, interactive environment though the use of a multi-litearte approach which will include web seminars, web radio shows & podcasts. Furthermore,  an e-journal for the publication of papers related with LLP projects is also part of the project’s goals (detailed information is then provided on each WP)

They say: The proposal (…) focus upon the use of a webportal.”

They say: Whilst a step in the right direction, there are some areas for improvement, including the issue of access to and acceptance by the target audiences (promoters, etc.)

We said: the project is called: Europe UNLOCK-Ed (Using Network Links to Openly Create Knowledge in Education)

The SNS will be based on Open Source software and will include different areas for peer participation. The site will be open to all visitors and participants willing to engage actively, and will be able to register for a free account. The SNS will also feature group areas and allow interaction in different languages.

Aim: To develop a hands-on training programme on the appropriate use of participatory media for dissemination & exploitation of project & programme results.

A handbook on the use of participatory media for innovative dissemination and exploitation of programmes and project results will be a direct output of the development of the training course carried. The handbook will compile relevant information and practices covered in the training course in the partners’ country languages. It will be published on the project’s SNS for free download.

The open e-Journal platform will be based on open-source software with advanced search facilities through the use of collaborative meta-tagging. It will be open to the wider community and feature international publications focusing on dissemination of results of European programmes and projects. When possible, the e-Journal will be featured in the Directory of Open Access Journals. It will also feature the LOCKSS box as to ensure the preservation of the e-Journal’s content in the long-term.

A WP consisting in exploring the thematic of Online Copyright and Intellectual Property Rights with the help of an expert in this area. An e-guide summarizing the main points concerning this issues will be the main output of this WP. It will be released in the SNS for open access and free use and distribution under a Creative Commons Licence.

A event focusing on the organization of  a face to face event combining the celebration of the Open Access Day with the core purpose of the project. It will aim to encourage the effective use of participatory media for dissemination and exploitation of project results. The event seeks to promote the project, provide hands-on opportunities to learn about the use of web 2.0 , online copyright and IPR to create a culture of open knowledge and sharing at national level .

European Added Value

They Say: (…) focuses on past projects

We said: The project targets at the creation of a framework in the development of innovative strategies for the dissemination and exploitation of European project and programme supported by Erasmus, Leonardo and Grundtvig. It seeks to instigate an open, cooperative environment linking important network and communities together in an open forum for sharing of practice and co-construction of knowledge in relevant topics of different educational sectors.

The project will benefit projects across 3 of the LLP sub-programmes and so will celebrate a diversity of projects, from a diverse range of cultural and linguistic backgrounds.  Projects in countries other than those represented in the consortium partnership will be able to access the online resources offered by this project, regardless of cultural and linguistic background.

They say: ‘The proposal needs to consider the responsibility for dissemination in terms of existing actors (project promoters, national agencies, EC)

We said: The project aims at building opportunities to engage and promote intercultural dialogue by linking key existing networks and communities together in an open forum for the dissemination and exploitation of lifelong learning projects and programme results.

(…)

Project will target Erasmus, Leonardo & Gruntvig projects & will link key existing national agencies & international networks & communities in a shared dialogue focusing on practice & research of thematics relevant to the LLP. It will seek to bring different levels of expertise together by connecting younger researchers and practitioners with senior peers across fields. Diverse asynchronous and real-time interaction opportunities will be created for participants to share their projects.

Projects built on networking strategy, to connect existing network & communities in an interactive open forum, where sharing practice & collaboration among projects will be enabled through social media. The project will make use of national agencies to link into existing projects offering them resources and training to give their projects a wider visibility especially at a policy level, ultimately supporting the achievement of wider impact and transference of project results on a larger scale.

I don’t often write about software releases. But whilst the latest beta release of Google Wave has dominated the technical press and blogs, for social networks and learning the BuddyPress 1.1 release may prove just as significant.

BuddyPress is a long running project to turn the WordPress blogging software into a social networking application. And very good and powerful it is too. But the earlier releases were quite hard to install and style. The 1.1 release makes setting up and styling BuddyPress almost as easy as WordPress.

Why is Buddypress important for education? Social software is of increasing importance for learning. Unlike the more traditional educational technology approaches through Management Information Systems and Virtual Learning Environments, social software offers far more potential for informal and collaborative learning. And as Jo Turner Attwell wrote in a guest contribution to the Wales Wide Web yesterday students are able to create a virtual space to manage their own learning, whilst using social networking as a support system to scaffold their learning. And this is indeed what many students have done, with or without the support of teachers or educational institutions. Increasingly, educational institutions have begun to establish their own social networking spaces on Facebook, Ning, Google, Twitter or one or more of the myriad of social software services offered by commercial providers.

However, there remains several problems. Firstly such services allow only limited customisation in terms of functionality. Although open APIs may allow mash ups and some extendibility, the core software remains under the control of the provider. Secondly many of these services rely on advertising as their business model, although some will provide advert free sites for educational providers. But more importantly it raises questions of who owns the data. Of course terms of service differ between social software services. But in the most extreme cases *e.g. Facebook) the terms of service basically specify that they own the data. Furthermore it can be very difficult to extract your own personal data from such platforms, making it hard, for example, to develop an personal learning record or e-Portfolio, when access to personal work is restricted.

BuddyPress is open source software, with a growing and vibrant development community. Of course we already have Joomla, Drupal and Elgg. But BuddyPress goes further than these systems in providing support for to easily setting up and support groups and communities. It promises to allow the development of rich social networking services based on locally installed and controlled web sites. It can be freely customised to suit different learning needs. And the data belongs to the user! Pontydysgu are developing two sites for continuing professional development using BuddyPress. We will keep you informed of how this work progresses.

On Sunday there is a general election in Germany. Readers may be interested to see that the fastest growing party in Germany is the Pirate Party. Although they are unlikely to win sufficent vites ot enter Parliament, the Pirate Party is sunceeding in promoting a  debate over civil rights and restrictive copyright laws.

Wikipedia describes the party’s programme as follows. “The party opposes the dismantlement of civil rights in telephony and on the Internet, in particular the European data retention policies and Germany’s new Internet censorship law called Zugangserschwerungsgesetz. It also opposes artificial monopolies and various measures of surveillance of citizens.

The party favors the civil right to information privacy and reforms of copyright, education, computer science and genetic patents.

It promotes in particular an enhanced transparency of government by implementing open source governance and providing for APIs to allow for electronic inspection and control of government operations by the citizen.^[3]

The party opposes the dismantlement of civil rights in telephony and on the Internet, in particular the European data retention policies and Germany’s new Internet censorship law called Zugangserschwerungsgesetz. It also opposes artificial monopolies and various measures of surveillance of citizens.

The party favors the civil right to information privacy and reforms of copyright, education, computer science and genetic patents.

It promotes in particular an enhanced transparency of government by implementing open source governance and providing for APIs to allow for electronic inspection and control of government operations by the citizen.”^[3]

The Reuters newsblog quotes Gero Neugebauer, political scientist at Berlin’s Free University, who “said the traditional parties’ failure to properly understand the internet may have put wind in the Pirates’ sails. “The large parties have treated the issue as if the only people using the internet are old men with lewd ideas who want to look at pornographic images or practice paedophilia,” Neugebauer said in a recent TV interview.  ”If the Pirate Party manages to make clear in society the conflict which they presently represent … then they definitely have the potential to get above the five percent hurdle,” he added.”

Some time ago I wrote a post entitled ‘Hairdressing, Serious Games and Learning‘. It was not because I knew anything about it but because I was live blogging a conference presentation. Frederic Aunis who works for L’Oriel presented a game they had developed for teaching business skills to hairdressers. t was a good presnentation and a good game. The problem is that he game is owned by L’Oriel and access is retsricted to those with a  contract to the company.

The post is – somehwat embrarrsingly, one of the most popular I have ever written. Yet, I am afraid, it gives no help to those who are hitting it – presumably becauase they are searching for games to help them in teaching hairdressers.

I don’t know a lot about hairdressing but I have gleamed a little from research colleagues at the University of Warwick. Hairdressng is a very polular vocational training course. In part it is a course chosen by those who do not know what to do. But in part it is because people envisage owning and running their own business. The sad factor is most do not make it and whilst hairdressing businesses can be very profitable the reality fo rmany emloyees is lng hours and low pay (OK – if you don’t agree please feel free ot comment!). And whilst most trainees take well to the practical elements of the course, they struggle more with the theort – especially science – and have little interest in learninga bout how to run a business.

Hence the idea of a game. And according to Frederic it works. But, back to the problem. We need open source games which can be used by all. I am not a hairdresser or a games designer. But I know a little about both. The European Lifelng Learning programme is now on call. Is there anyone interested in a project to design an open souce game for teaching hairdrssers about running a business. I am looking for hairdressers, hairdressing teachers and trainers and educational games deisgners. Just leave a comment or email me if you would be interested in such a project.

I’m not sure about the ‘do no evil’ empre. And not sure about Google’s motivation for launching another browser on the market. But I love their cartoon book explaining the Chrome browser. Also good to see that they have licensed the cartoon book under Creative Commons. Here is one page explaining standards and Open Source.

In June I wrote enthusiastically about Twemes. Twemes is the service which uses hash tags to aggregate posts from Twitter, Delicious and Flickr. We  had a great time using it for communciation in confernces and workshops. One of its greatest virtues is simplicity and sponteneity. We intended to use it as a main channel for communciation at Alt-C. And when we went to set up our hash tag it was gone. Here is the last posting dated Augst 13 on the Twemes blog.

Down But Not Out

“As many of your have already noticed, Twemes.com has not been able find all tagged tweets over the last few days.  This is due to Twitter’s decisions to shutdown and/or limit access to a number of their APIs.  Whether by design or by accident, Twemes.com now only has limited access to Twitter.  We have made appeals to Twitter staff to help us continue to keep Twemes.com in operation but those requests have had no impact on our access to the Twitter API.”

So services can disappear. Very good services. And here is not sign that Twitter are doing anything to substitute for it. We are looking at a couple of things – but have not found anything as simple and good. Any suggestiosn welcome.

The message I draw from this is that there is a big difference between Open APIs and Open Source. It is one thing being able to access and use an API. But you never know when a provider will choose to change it or as in this case to limit access. At least wih Open Source the control lies in the community and hopefully tehre would be an open discussion before making changes which would break third party services. I hope the open source microblogging platform Identi.ca continues to develop.

A quick update on developments with Freefolio.

Regular readers may remember that Freefolio is a ‘social’ eportfolio being developed by Pontydysgu and our partners, Raycom. Freefolio is based on WordPress MU and includes a serie sof plug ins for gorup management, structured blogging, aggregation and so on. Why a ‘social’ e-Portfolio. Becuase our primary aim is to support learning and we see learning as a social process.

the development of Freefolio is currently beings upported by Kent and Medway Connexions service.

This week we demoed the latest release whcih includes numerous improvements over the previous version. These include amongst others:

1. Easier account creation
2. Greatly simplified and redesigned backend user area
3. Fully customisable dashboard
4. Greater user controlled widgets
5. Full multi media integration through media centre
6. Bringing together of all personal data – profile, settings and CV on one tab
7. Provision of many templates for user choice – some of which allow considerable customisation
8. Replacement of spam karma by less intrusive spam filter
9. Greater code modularization allowing easier future updating and customisation.
10. Full integration of structured blogging templates in wordpress ‘write’ section.

We are working on the group functionality and are planning a presentation module plug in.

In the past we have provided access to a demonstration site for those interested in Freefolio. our first site got hacked down by robots registering accounts. We changed the account creation system to block bots, but then encountered probelms with real (well, brainless but human) registering accounts to spam their wares. Weare planning a new demo site with the new release as soon as we have found someone to moderate the site.

In the meantime if you would like to know more just email me.

No time to stop to look at this in any depth (am writing a new paper on Personal Learning Environments). But Brendan Barrett from the UN University reports that the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe has just endorsed a recommendation to promote e-learning including the following specific reference to Open Source software and Open educational Resources:

“E-learning can be a powerful means of creating open educational resources accessible to everybody thus counteracting a divided knowledge society. In this regard, the Assembly calls on member parliaments to support the so-called “open source” movement in software development and initiatives for open educational resources – freely accessible on the Internet, and to adopt measures to combat the digital divide in order to close the gap between those who have access to ICT and the acquisition of ICT skills and those who do not, thus ensuring digital literacy for all.”

This is good news! You can find out more here.

The European Commission funded Bazaar project was set up to look at the use of Open Source Software and Open Content in education. The project ended in December, 2007. As ever the work of compiling the reports and different outcomes of the project takes a little time after a project. One output is a new report “BAZAAR Project Scenario Papers “. This report is based on a scenario setting exercise and two workshops – one entitled How Dude -where’s my Data and the other on Personal Learning Environments. However the scenario setting exercise went further and included:

• Social Software, Tools and Content Creation
• OERs and the Culture of Sharing
• Interoperability and Metadata
• PLEs, e-Portfolios and Informal Learning
• Open Educational Resources
• Data Integrity and Storage

The report – which is 41 pages long – is attached below.

Here is an excerpt on short term scenarios for social software in education.

“These short term scenarios are a vision of a future that incorporates the use of social software for knowledge sharing, capability development and education and training delivery. They are presented in order to gauge an understanding of ‘how it could be’ if social software was more widely adopted by education practitioners. This future is very close!

Social software will force us to completely re-think our business and delivery models for many activities. It’s already happening in the media and many other industries from telecommunications to music and book-selling. Usage of social software is way beyond how people learn – it is about how organisations see themselves and how they do business.

Integral to the visions of the future is the realisation that the ‘Generation Y’ is a significant part of that future. They are already engaging with social software and making connections and sharing knowledge. The ‘Generation Y’ is a significant driver in the uptake of new technologies, along with business in its quest for efficiency. Organisations and education need to ‘catch up’.

The sense of urgency for change is perhaps being forced by the convergence of the changing nature of working and learning in a knowledge era and responding to the needs of the ‘Generation Y’. This generation are natural multi-taskers (or, at least, very good fast-switchers). They innately use technology to communicate within and outside of their working lives.”

I thoroughly recommend this report for anyone interested in social software, open source, open content and so on….

Download the scenarios report here.