Friday, April 26, 2013

Day 2 -- Sprinting continues

The Saga Continues

white board photo of api for services for transforming documents. Details not critical.
A few people headed home after day 1, but we still had over 20 people sprinting on day 2. On Day 2, we continued to code and also had several design discussions on technology and APIs. 
Transform Services: One of those discussion was between Connexions, Vietnam OER, and OERPUB (my Shuttleworth funded team) about a common API for transforming documents from one type to another (Word to HTML to EPUB to PDF, etc). Although it sounds really esoteric, it turns out that this is an area that is ripe for collaboration and sharing code, not only among these teams, but also for anyone producing digital and print books like Booktype, Pressbooks, and even OReilly. The photo to the left shows a quick sketch of common ground and this doc has a further writeup on the ideas shared. After the discussion the VOER team headed home, and one of the Connexions developers started refactoring current code to match the new shared vision.
Wordpress editor embed: And the photo to the right shows the progress on getting the OER editor embedded in Wordpress. It builds on an existing Wordpress plugin for Aloha (the base HTML5 editor of the OER editor.) The existing plugin needed to be updated to make everything work (as all code does periodically) and that has been submitted back to the original developer. We also added in the new semantic elements drop down (not shown) and are updating to the latest Aloha to correct for a bug that Clemens recognized in the behavior. 
Internationalization: Clemens Prerovsky from Aloha showed a group of us how Aloha internationalization is done. Basically they use "keys" in the code and then each plugin has a set of language specific files with key-string pairs. Translators edit those directly right now. Although not super streamlined if you have lots of new translations to do, it is simple and straightforward. We also need translations for auto-generated text that is a part of the content being created, and we discussed the added complexities that entails.
Abandoning Content-Editable: Since we had an Aloha founder in the room, Phil of CNX and Clemens of Aloha discussed the problems with trying to use content-editable in the editor. Browsers handle events in the content-editable region differently which means that the Aloha base functions have a lot of code to correct for that. It may be saner to essentially implement cursor and event handling from scratch and not use content-editable. Clemens will take that idea back to the Aloha team and perhaps we will work on it during the Aloha barcamp, June 6,7 in Vienna.
Wikipedia Therapy: The folks working on wikipedia entries got to experience editing over time (see the OpenStax College entry), which doesn't happen in a 2 hour workshop. The wiki folks also provided feedback on how to navigate the wiki world and respond to reverts and slightly heated discussions. They worked on cross-wikipedia licensing issues, for instance when a resource from Brazil is reused in English wikipedia and the license is in Portugese.
Logging and Analytics: Connexions did more work on logging. Ed, normally consumed by planning and management enjoyed being able to develop for a couple of days. Ross investigated pwik -- an opensource analytics and log analysis framework. He created a million line log file to do some load testing and initial results indicated that performance may be a limiting factor.

I hope this gives a flavor for the cross-pollination that happens at sprints; conventions agreed upon, ideas germinated, bugs identified by experts across the room, nagging questions answered, opportunities to branch out, or branch back and brush up skills and rejuvenate.

Thursday, April 25, 2013

Sprints at Connexions - Day 1

We had an excellent first day of sprinting after the Connexions conference. Today's report includes pictures of people working together, but tomorrow we will include more links and screenshots, hopefully. About 30 people total participated on the following projects:
  • Clemens from Aloha gave a mini lesson on the Aloha editor and then VOER and BCCampus built Hello-world plugins. Marvin from OERPUB wrote documentation about how to create new plugins!
  • BC Campus, Aloha, and OERPUB worked on a Wordpress plugin for the OERPUB editor. We have embeds of the editor in the
Oerpub Remix tools and in the Connexions Authoring Tools Client. But this is the first embed in a completely independent framework.
  • Marvin cleaned up the media plugin prototype.
  • Huy from VOER worked on creating links between different sections of a textbook, including search and integration with the editor.
  • OERPUB's UI team brainstormed about integrating an author's workspace, organizing textbook content, and the editor and its semantic toolbox. They also did user interface testing with sprint participants around a few last details of the editor design.
  • Ha from VOER got install instructions written for Fedora for the Authors Tools Client. 
  • Other topics, less editor related - a group worked on Wikipedia pages for OpenStax College and learned about making good reference materials that Wikipedia articles can point to (with good dates and author info). CNX worked on better logging, a catalog for OpenStax textbooks, VOER did Elastic Search research and porting old simple author accounts to OpenID.

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Notes from the Saylor Digital Education Conference April 2013

It's the money, stupid.

At the Saylor Digital Education Conference, this past week (April 2013), Michael Saylor talked at length about his own educational journey. He came out of MIT with no debt and was able to start a company. A student coming out of college today with over $100,000 in debt or a medical school with $400,000 of debt cannot innovate or take a risk. He stressed that the goal of the Saylor Foundation is free education for everyone. And finally, I understood that he actually meant what he said. He doesn't mean he will put free content on a website and super-focused students can go through it all themselves. He means a high quality, guided college education for FREE. How that will happen isn't clear, nor is how that will be sustainable, but that is what many at the conference are figuring out through trial and error yielding the next set of ideas. The argument for free is pretty clear. Right now, a 4 year college degree costs $200,000 or more. A colleague mentioned that colleges themselves claim the true cost is nearer to $280,000. That is just not ever going to scale to universal education, and it truly is limiting the future of even our brightest and most fortunate students.

How about free?

Saylor thinks that universal, free education will happen online, interactively, and will be personalized using software that people at the conference (and others) are developing. It might be paid for through advertising, or through recruitment fees, or through business models as yet unheard of.

I am also convinced that we can learn a lot more with a little help from our digital friends. We will have the ability to interact with digital models, to interleave practice with memory refreshers, to create online portfolios of our vision. We can have all our past knowledge and entire degrees worth of new knowledge at our fingertips.

But don't spend it all on technology.

I do have worries about all this focus on digital everything transforming education. So far, most of the really dramatic results in education that I know of come from giving smart teachers the ability to interact directly with learners. Technology has never matched the dramatic gains that smart teachers make. More on that in the next post.

OER from the learner's perspective.

My talk at the conference was chiefly about the power of semantic document formats, open-source content transformation tools, and well thought out user interfaces for authors. But, I also made an attempt to show the vision from the perspective of a learner, benefiting from the sorts of learning that is possible once their textbooks and courses are available in interoperable formats.