A really productive student developer.

Max Grossman has worked with my project as a student programmer since January and accomplished a great deal! He starts graduate school next year and hopes to continue working with the project. 

He has been working on our importer/editor. You can see an alpha version at cnx.oerpub.org. The editor consists of a collection of converters that take documents in common formats (Word, Open Office, Google Docs, HTML, or LaTeX) and convert them to a remixable XML format, CNXML. Authors add metadata and then the editor employs an API adapted from the SWORD AtomPub profile (called OERPUB API), to upload and publish the documents to Connexions, cnx.org. The tool is designed to be extensible to publishing to other repositories (libraries of content) as well.

Max started by fixing bugs for us and immediately dove into some really gnarly ones dealing with Unicode handling, improper retention of user inputs, error handling, and the Google Docs file API's. He also did some hand testing. I always like developers to test to see what real users see when they are trying to get work done. And as a side benefit, developers always want to make the process more efficient and Max is no exception. He created a script to break large documents down to isolate problem areas, and he also created a set of unit tests for the importer to be run automatically. Read the full story on his blog.

Import your slides into a lesson on Connexions (at the end of the summer)

Google Summer of Code is almost underway and our project is lucky enough to have snagged a student as part of Connexions' GSoC projects this summer. My earlier blog post describes the goals of the project:

• Develop a web tool that will create a Connexions "module" that plays a set of slides and makes it easy to add an introduction and other simple content. It will be easy to save the slides to Slideshare or Google Docs as well as making it possible to download the source slides.  
• Make it easier to share. Some really valuable, original material is locked in professors' slides. If they were easy to share they would.
• Make open textbooks easier to adopt. Open textbooks need ancillaries. This will make it easy to build a module per chapter with the accompanying slides. This in turn will help faculty adopt open resources.

The student who will be joining the project is Saket Choudhary, a 20 year old developer, a FOSS contributor/supporter and a Python & Ruby enthusiast. He is currently pursuing his undergraduate studies at Chemical Engineering Department of Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India. He will be starting the project in late May and working through the summer.

I am wondering whether it would be possible to provide a little quiz wizard with the slide tool also, inspired by TED-Ed's tool for creating quick lessons out of YouTube videos. This TED-Ed example shows a video that has been embedded with some intro text and a little quiz. It looks a lot like what I was envisioning for a slide module, although the presentation would necessarily look a bit different given the Connexions format. I added a quiz section to the sample module I created in Connexions to get an idea what that might look like.

Should Mozilla teach HTML5? YES!!!

Audrey Watters is conducting research on the question "Should Mozilla develop a tool to help the world learn HTML5?". You can join her fireside chat on Thursday and see the interviews that she has already conducted. (If you are in Houston, like I am, I am sure the fire doesn't sound appealing right now, but the conversation sounds good.)

My answer is YES!!!! And I am hoping Mozilla will build this teaching/learning/doing tool into Wordpress so that two of my favorite ideas (other people's that is) can come together. Earlier I blogged (One webserver per child) about Gardner Campbell's call to action to give students control over their own web persona and information and I suggested that a simple starting point is a blog site that you control yourself.

So, why do I think these two ideas are related? A wordpress site, especially one that you know how to control and manipulate yourself, can be your resume, your portfolio, the place you show off your credentials formal and informal (badges!), the place you control what parts of your online social media you share and display, etc. So lets teach HTML5 right there. Where the code you create can immediately become a part of your portfolio. Where others can engage directly with you and your ideas.

The web development skills become relevant for everyone, not just future computer scientists. Artists and writers and managers and politicians and engineers all have resumes and portfolios and will need the skills to articulate their talents and ideas. Game designers can build simple demos right on their site. Want to collect some data and analyze it? Use your web skills to collect and analyze, and then display the results as part of your blog. Collect badges from various online classes and code academies and display them on your blog. Show off some fun math tricks with MathJax. The possibilities seem endless.

OERPUB: A community to create a flexible architecture for publishing and remixing OER (Open Education Resources)

I realize that we all want yet another mailing list to be on, but hear me out. A group of folks that participate on the Connexions’ Technical Committee wanted a way to broaden that discussion to the wider OER and OER tools community, attract new partners and collaborators, and yet stay focused on the principles of remixability. Thus was born the new oerpub-dev mailing list.

Draft Mission:

The next paragraph is how the fledgling oerpub.org website describes the group:

“We are a community that discuss and develop open source technology focused on designing, and implementing “An architecture for remixable Open Educational Resources (OER)”. OERPUB is not a single project but a collective where open source projects with the same goals can discuss the tools and architectures that work best for authoring, adapting, remixing, and publishing open education resources and then delivering them to the web, mobile, tablet, and print. If you are interested in advancing the tools that education authors use to create, remix, typeset and publish semantically rich documents, please join the discussion.”

In some sense we are still figuring this new group out as we go along. The idea grew out of the Connexions Consortium Technical committee and my Shuttleworth Fellowship to create a technical “roadmap” for remixable OER. specifically, textbook-like OER.

Some brief history:

• Connexions Consortium Technical Committee formed 2.5 years ago and has always had non-consortium-member members and has welcomed anyone to participate. Right now it meets on a conference call every 6 weeks and in person once a year. When we last met, we decided to become part of a larger and broader group under this oerpub umbrella.
• Connexions’ current architecture is a single interacting piece of software that is a repository, an editing environment, a quality control system (lenses), a search and web display system, and an engine for building pdfs, epubs, offline html packages, etc. It is hard to grow an ecosystem around it because components are not separable and APIs for interacting with the system are sparse.
• I have been supporting components and API’s for remixability through my fellowship.The goal of the fellowship is to support a broad set of repositories and tools, while encouraging much more remixable OER content in general. I started out with a publishing API called OERPub based on SWORD which is based on AtomPub and now I am focusing on building converters and editors that help authors create semantically rich and remixable OER and then use the API to publish the content. SWORD is supported in a bunch of scholarly repositories so it creates opportunities for dual publishing and for sharing development of editors and composers.
• Connexions is planning to rearchitect and wants to build components that are separate and communicate through APIs. They are also rethinking the semantic format that documents are stored in with a strong leaning toward a subset of HTML5 with additional semantic markup to do cool education-y things. So this larger group has an opportunity to influence those choices in ways that support the broader community.

Remixability:

I have always thought that Connexions’ vision captured the essence of remixable OER in the following principles:

• Modularity -- Rather than publishing complete works (books, papers, conference proceedings, courses, etc), it pays to support topical chunks that can be strung together to make many different collected works. Each topical chunk is reusable, adaptable and mixable.
• Semantic document structure -- Having a semantic structure makes things much easier to remix, because you can put sections together and have them flow smoothly. You can also do fancy things like pull all the glossary terms or exercises together.
• Shareability -- Making reuse licensing super easy. CC-BY is a simple, elegant choice for promoting maximum reuse opportunities. It really should be possible to mix other licenses in also, however, but more repositories will need structure that supports remixing.
• Permanence -- To build interesting systems that remix, combine, adapt, rate content, and so on, you really need to know the content is secure and uniquely addressable. When it lives on someone’s website, it could move, disappear, etc. Permanence makes the investment in reuse secure.

Participants and recruits:

The vision for OERPUB is broader than Connexions, though.

• Siyavula, Flat World Knowledge, CK12, Saylor.org and others are all creating shareable content in semantic formats. They are interested in supporting remixability, but it is still a technical challenge.
• Siyavula, OpenStax College, and various university presses support sharing and remixing their content, but still want a sophisticated and branded publishing system. One size fits all won’t work, but they could certainly share and adapt tools for producing PDF, EPUB, MOBI, Web Etc.
• Wikiwijs and Vietnam Foundation (they use cnx software) have major OER initiatives and also would like to figure out ways to share technology and remix content. Projects like Booktype have infrastructure for supporting remixable content and creating multiple delivery formats from a single source.
• Tons of universities are creating content and storing it locally as Open Courseware in DSpace/Eprints/Fedora/educommons repositories. If remix were easier to support, many of them would be willing.

My personal goals for the oerpub-dev list is to create the place to discuss (and develop and experiment with) an architecture for remixable OER that maintains the principles above, but is technically flexible and inclusive of a larger development community.

Some of the relevant discussions include:

• How to use HTML5 as a semantic document format?
• How to make really, really usable structured documented editing work?
• When and how to build converters that help with remix -- DocBook/CNXML/DITA/LaTeX -- are all semantic formats that can translate fairly well one to the other.
• What sorts of API’s should repositories “speak” to facilitate reuse of the code AND reuse of the stuff in the repositories?

Interested? Join us at oerpub.org, and oerpub-dev.