.Edu.Co.Blog

Well, this "thinking out loud" thing is something I'm not really used to (I'm trying to learn), so please bear with me.  I'm not even sure if I'll be able to say what I'm thinking, for that matter...   That said...

Last year I offered my first open course ever, called e-Learning (ELRN).  It was supposed to be an exploration of the present and future (at a local level) of technology in education.  And I decided I wanted it to be open, and also that I wouldn't use a LMS.  I wanted to do something similar to the things Stephen and George did with CCK08, but I didn't have the infrastructure to make that happen.

Following David, Alec, George and Stephen, I chose a wiki as the platform to publish the weekly activities of the course, and blogs as the main reflective tool for students.  The decision didn't have to do with the technology, but with the reflexive processes that it allows, based on my own experience.  Blogs would be the publishing platform of choice.  The discussion wouldn't happen in centralized discussion fora, but in each participant's blog. It would be decentralized.

Also, given the characteristics of my own context (Colombia), where there are not that many education blogs online, and most of us are not power users, I wanted to make access to the info produced in the course as easy as possible.  Participants would be able to get info by e-mail, and those who felt comfortable with it, by RSS.  To participate in the course would not require to login in a specific platform to access content, and it should be a real possibility to send and get information by e-mail.

So all these intentions led me to find ways to collect all the info generated in the blogs, and distribute it by e-mail.  That led me to work a bit with Pipes, something I hadn't done before.   The first product of that work looked like this, and I talked about it in another post:

At the end of that post, I noticed some limitations that I was still trying to figure out:

• How do I analyze all the data coming out of the course? If I wanted to see the progress/evolution of different participants, what kind of tools should I use? Is it possible to do it with the pipe I have now?
• Feedburner is not flexible enough with the mail subscriptions. I'd like every participant to decide whether she gets a daily or real time notification.

As I went through ELRN, something else proved difficult: How could I (as a facilitator) keep tabs on the comments of formal students?  Monitoring every comment in every post was, clearly, a daunting task...

At the end of the course I tried to generate, by hand, some sort of analysis of what happened, including posts frequency and the blog comment network generated along the course, which was possible thanks to the small number of participants.  That network looked like this:

So I realized that such a graph could be very useful to monitor the participation in the course, and to detect (and maybe do something about) people who were not being part of the conversation.  It could be used as a "lurker detector", so to speak.  Nevertheless, I told myself, in order to be useful you would have to get this kind of info not at the end of the course, but along the road.  And, doing that by hand would be very time consuming.  And that leads me, finally, to this post.

So, What if you could generate such a graph (described as a GraphML file) from a RSS feed?  How could you do that?

Last year I started another open course about groups, networks and communities (called GRYC in Spanish), which for several reasons was postponed for this year.  That gave me some time to think about the problem (but not to solve it).  Here's where I am right now:

(Side note:  I used some of Tony Hirst ideas to generate a map from the GDocs form I'm using as registration for the course.  Here's the pipe and here's the map.  Very cool indeed!)

If we go back to the first diagram, we see that I have a pipe compiling feeds from different blogs.  So I wondered how could I get comments from those blogs, given that there were many people using an already existing blog for the course and tagging their posts, and there were many different platforms being used at the same time, each one with its own approach to comments (WP doesn't have specific feeds for comments in a category, while Blogger does.  Some people use Feedburner for their feeds, which makes impossible to discover a comment feed, and so on).

What I did was to create a new pipe (the second one in the sequence), which takes the first one as input and extracts the comment feed associated to each post, and then gets the items included in each one of those feeds.   Also, I'm getting (using YQL) Twitter messages and comments made in the wiki.  Everything is put together and at the end I have a feed including who said what, and where that was said (blogs, twitter, wiki).  It's quite easy to extend this and include other sources (Google Groups, Moodle fora, or anything that can imported into Pipes).  Now, maybe there's a more simple way to do this but, well, I'm still learning to use Pipes  (for example, can all this be parameterized?)..

There is a "dark side" to this.  I still have to do a lot of "maintenance" in the original data, and I have to consider specific cases that made the pipes not as simple as I'd like them to be.  Let's say, someone is using Disqus for the comments, and someone else uses different display names for the posts and the comments in different platforms.  Some comment feeds are not being discovered by Pipes...  It's not nice.  It's not 'clean'...

My basic graph, as shown above, includes people as nodes and comments as edges.  So I still need to know who said what to whom.  I could do this in the second pipe, but I don't want to add any more complexity (that is, processing time) to that pipe.  So, in a third pipe I get results from the second pipe, I process each item, and at the end I have what I need:  I'm putting in each item's title the source and target of the comment (that is, their names) and the date.  Each item still contains the link to the comment, also.

But, where do I go from here?  Some ideas and issues related to the first (blue) bubble:

• I could write some PHP code to get the RSS feed and process each item, generating a GraphML text file on the fly.   Of course, it could be Java as well.  After all, a framework such as Jung includes a lot of utilities now, even to generate the visual representation of a graph...  But I'm not sure if it processes RSS...
• Um, but what happens when I do the same process the next day?  Would it make sense, then, to put all the RSS info inside a DB, so I can have even more flexibility later?
• Maybe having things in a DB will let me include more info in the graph.  Let's say, what if the size of the nodes is tied to the amount of posts generated?  That could be useful too...
• In the end, having a DB will allow me to split tasks.  One thing is to add info from the feed (a daily process, let's say), another one is to generate a GraphML file from that info.  This could be done on demand, and cached for later use.

But what about the second (green) bubble?  The idea here is to go from the text file to a useful visualization.  We could even thing about creating (automatically) animations showing the daily progress of a course, discovering when new nodes (this is, new people posting) appear, and showing new edges as they emerge.

• The weapon of choice would be Jung, clearly (I still don't know if something as Cyclone has anything to do with this problem).  With that we can get from GraphML to images, I think.  Now, if we want to create PNG animations, well, I still have no idea how to do it.
• In any case, I'd have to go back to Java (long time no see!) and learn a lot about a lot of things.  And time seems to be a quite scarce resource...

So, where does that leave us?   You get to extract info from the pipes in "real-time" and generate GraphML files from it (or whatever you want) to show the status of the graph at any given time.  This could help to see who's being left behind in the community (because they're not writing nor commenting, for example) in an easy way, which would help in massive courses.  Actually, you could even send specific e-mail messages based on the configuration of the graph (nice!).

And, where do we go from here?  Well, what if you applied the logic of an Open Course to a whole academic program?  What if participating in a course means just tagging your blog posts with a code for that course?  What if we aggregate everything in something such as Elgg, and keep using pipes to distribute content around (as we see fit)?  Would that look like a more decentralized approach to a LMS? With new monitoring tools, more focused on the interactions? With students having more control of their info?

I just don't know.  What I do know is that this approach, as much as I like it, is not scalable.  And if we want to get more serious about being open we will need, eventually, to provide alternative solutions easy to use for administrators, teachers and students, and analytical tools focused on the kind of things we'd like to observe and foster in our students.

Anyway, keep in mind that I'm thinking out loud here.  This is the second time I'm trying this architecture, so there are a lot of things to improve and many others that make no sense at all.  I'm just trying to figure out if it makes sense to work more on this.  So thanks in advance for your thoughts!  

A excepción de que se indique lo contrario, este contenido está publicado bajo una licencia Creative Commons.

This is the third year I'm sending out a Holiday message. This time is very especial, though, because 2009 was a turning point in many ways. I got the chance to meet amazing people from all around the world, and to enjoy their hospitality, which in itself was a humbling event.

So I want to say "Thank you" to all of you, for all the learning you've made possible, and for helping me to make true so many personal and professional dreams.

May 2010 be a time to ask ourselves what would happen if we're wrong, and to rethink (from there) the things we do, so we can change our world in a positive way.

As usual, this is a small "homemade" message. A short video, including some quotes and ideas important to me:

Thank you everyone for making 2009 a year even more memorable than the previous one! Here's to a 2010 full of great surprises for each and every one of you!

Happy Holidays!

A excepción de que se indique lo contrario, este contenido está publicado bajo una licencia Creative Commons.

(Disclaimer: Please be patient with my English. I'm open to suggestions for improvement )

Last week, the Ministry of Education of Colombia held the National Forum on the Pertinence of Education. This is an annual event focused on a different area each year. Given that 2009 was declared the "Year of education for innovation and competitiveness", there was a discussion around things that make education pertinent, and an interest in presenting innovative experiences.

As part of this event, I wanted to organize a TEDx session, but as it turned out, TED requires TEDx events to be independent from any other event. This is unfortunate (and I really think it must be reconsidered), because in many places (at least, in our case) the purpose is not to use TED's brand to get people to come to some event (on its own, our Forum congregates over 1500 teachers from all over the country), but to spread ideas included in TEDTalks. So, bottom line, I can't use the TEDx name, even if I'm using TEDTalks and I want to recognize that.

This situation (and a look to the Forum agenda) made me think about the need to give participants a place to talk about what was being discussed at the Forum. There were a lot of presentations, expert panels, and not enough time to bring those discussions to the context of every person. So I decided to change my approach.

My initial idea around the TEDx session was to have 2-3 sessions, 1.5 hours each. I wanted to have local presenters and several TEDTalks per session, related to global issues. However, most TEDx events are based on an auditorium format, which is not very useful for discussion. Happily, I could take advantage of a large space we would be using during the Forum to do an EduCamp workshop, so I decided to put more focus on conversation and less on presentation.

Enter the World Café, which ideas I had use in the past. Our new design included two sessions: The first one called Reboot and the second, Engage (which, by the way, were the names of the first and last sessions of TED2009).

The first session was devoted to think about the way global issues reflect on our context, and to try and find the critical issues at hand. As a conversation starter, we used talks by Al Gore, Charles Moore and Arthur Benjamin. Because of the setting, we decided to limit the time of talks, because it would be quite difficult to capture people's attention for too long. So all the talks would not last more than 20 minutes. After this, we had a one-hour Café session, with 3 rounds.

The second session was devoted to explore concrete ideas/actions that each participant could develop in her own environment, in order to address local effects of global issues. Once again, a TEDTalk (this time by Seth Godin) was used as a conversation starter. Once again, we had a 3-round session.

During each conversation, we had music from different sources playing in the background: TEDTalks, Playing for change (I still have doubts about if it's even legal to play from YouTube) and Kutiman. I mentioned the last two were an example of new and creative ways to create collaboration between people who never met before.

Each participant received a "program" including the different talks and music we would be using, which she could use also to write down the contact info of other participants.

At the end of the session, we reminded everyone that the talks available online and the World Café ideas could be used by them to do these kind of sessions in their own institutions.

Some bad things:

• The time: The session was scheduled on day 2 of the Forum, at 4:00p.m. I think it would had been better on the last day (which was not possible for reasons beyond my control), and earlier in the afternoon. 4:00 was too late for a lot of people and, even worse, there was a delay in the whole event, which meant we started around 4:45. In the end, there were not as many people as we expected (we were expecting 200, 97 arrived). Because of this, some part of the space felt empty.
• The weather: There has been a lot of rain in Bogotá in these days. Last Wednesday was no exception. Around 5:30, it started to rain and the temperature went down. The spacious setting is way too open, so it was really (really) cold for a lot of us. Even with coffee, the rain (and the huge traffic jams that it creates in the city) helped to reduce the amount of people at the end, which at the same time made very difficult to get a good closure.
• Because we had to change the name of the session (we moved to the name EduCafé at last minute), there was a "communication failure", I'd say. It was not that easy to communicate the purpose of the session to some people...

Some interesting things:

• In my experience, I've found that many teachers, when given paper and markers, decide that they are supposed to use the paper to write. Not to draw or doodle, but to write in a clean and organized way. This happens even when they're told about the purpose of the paper on the tables. I wonder if this reflects the way they use those tools in their environments; if so, it's a reason of concern that we have such a strong beliefs about what it means to put thoughts on paper. I had to remind some of them, every now and then, that they were not meant to create organized lists, but to draw and connect ideas. I wonder if we just have a hard time trying to register our ideas visually (and we had no graphic recorder).
• There were some groups (especially one from the Atlantic shore) which had a hard time splitting up. They arrived together (later, also), and it was very difficult to get them to join other tables. I wonder if the group turns into some kind of "safety net", in this case.
• Because of the selected talks, some people concluded that the session had to do with environmental education, even though they were supposed to know in advance about what we would be doing. This was not a problem, though, because this served as a starting point for other kind of discussions.

Some good things:

• The environment was fantastic. I just loved what our support staff did with it, because the first time I saw it, it felt quite gray, quite cold. We even had flowers on each table!
• The conversations were very interesting. I was really happy to see how excited people was about having the chance to finally speak to each other (like I said, this year the event was way too formal), and it was great to see some of the things that came up in the tables.
• TEDTalks are a great discussion starter. Obviously, it depends on the talks you select, but in this case, even some of the staff guys were asking about the talks, which was unexpected. Even though they didn't participate in the discussions, they were engaged enough as to take with them several programs, after we finished.
• At the end of the session, a lot of people expressed their satisfaction with it. For some of them, it was something that helped "to break the mold" of the Forum. We are convinced that, if we had started at, let's say, 2:00p.m, we would have had more people and a richer conversation.

More pictures of this EduCafé:

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

And the slides I used during the session:

I guess we'll have to wait a little bit to see what happens after this, but I'd say it was a very good beginning. I felt sort of like when we did our first EduCamp. A lot of things to improve, a lot of lessons learned and, hopefully, an excuse for people to bring new conversations to their environments. I have to say I just loved the experience!

This week, we’ll have our Annual National Forum on Education, organized by the Colombian Ministry of Education. This year, the main theme is the pertinence of education, given that 2009 was declared the year of education for innovation and competitiveness.

As part of my small contribution to this event, I wanted to collect some ideas from people attending the Open Education Conference, and in fact, going around with a camera asking a few questions was one of my purposes there. It was a great opportunity to get some thoughts about a couple of questions: First, is education relevant? Second: If so, how can we make it more relevant?

Clearly, those were ambiguous questions, but that was the idea: To try and get some insight on the views of different people about this, starting with an ill-formed question .
The short time allowed for just eight people to answer this question in OpenEd. Here are those eight answers. As you will see, there are very different approaches to the same thing, but I’d say the whole picture gives a great view of a challenging issue. So, there you go (in the order they were recorded):

Brian Lamb

Sylvia Currie

Gardner Campbell

Leigh Blackall

D'arcy Norman

David Wiley

Stephen Downes

Tony Bates

I have to say there are a lot of people I didn’t get to talk with (the first names in my head are Scott Leslie, Chris Lott, Alec Couros, Dave Cormier, George Siemens, for example), but I would be glad to include here any new ideas about this, and about where that lead us.

Right now I'm in the middle of translating all of this (via DotSub) to Spanish, but I'm having a hard time to get what Leigh says at 1:23-1:28. Any help will be appreciated. UPDATE: Thanks to Gardner for helping with "rhetoric"!

Thanks to each and every one of you, who accepted to answer this question out of the blue!

Like always, I'm having a hard time making myself to write in English, even though I know how important it is, especially after OpenEd.

This post is meant to talk about the first Spanish Open Course that I get to offer (actually it's the first one, no matter the language ), which came from an invitation by University of La Sabana, in Bogotá. They contacted me a few months ago, inviting me to do a course on their master on educational informatics program. I accepted on one condition: It would have to be open.

So here I am, a few months later, after thinking a lot about its design and discussing it with a few people (I *really* need to learn about creating/designing in public), and obviously getting ideas from the work of people like David Wiley, Alec Couros, George Siemens & Stephen Downes and Leigh Blackall.

The course already have 14 for-credit participants, and about 20 more participants taking it without certification. We have people from Spain, El Salvador, Mexico, Peru and, obviously, most of the participants are from Colombia.

For now, I'll talk about the technology I'm using, because I think maybe it could be useful to someone, and also it would be great to get feedback on it. There are two things I wanted to achieve with technology: First, I wanted to do something that could be replicated by each participant (which means only non-paid tools and no hosting); second, I wanted to facilitate access to people who are heavy e-mail users. Also, no walled gardens but a public approach (bye bye Moodle), trying to get participants to work on their own personal learning environments throughout the course.

So this is a view of the things I'm using. Detailed info below:

Participants are asked to create a blog on any available service. It is suggested to find for ways to do e-mail publishing, so they don't have to go to any website or use any additional tool.

Once the participant has a blog, she has to register it in the course wiki, which has a Google Docs form embedded. They have to include in their registration the RSS feed for their blog.

The GDocs document is then plugged into Yahoo Pipes via a CSV output. The pipe gets all the feeds and create one single feed, which I'm sending to Feedburner. I'm using Feedburner, actually, to create the possibility of an e-mail subscription, and obviously, to get a little control over subscription statistics.

This way, participants think about RSS aggregators only if they want to. They can have an e-mail subscription, which sends a daily message with a compilation of the posts compiled by the pipe during the previous day.

I'm getting the final RSS feed and I send it to twitter via twitterfeed. There's an user (elrn09) which publishes this feed and also the things compiled in a Diigo group created for the course.

There's also a Google group created, which is not being very popular at the time. I kind of understand this, because participants are not necessarily heavy Internet users, so even creating a blog can seem a daunting task for some of them.

Some interesting thing about this:

• The pipe (a very simple one, actually) can get input from any set of RSS feeds (For example, I thought at some point about asking people to get Google Reader accounts and then sharing the posts they found interesting. I could get all the RSS feeds from those Shared items pages, and change the pipe to find the "most read" items in the course. Of course, this faces the problem of getting valuable items lost if they are not shared enough times. In the end, I decided it would be a new layer of complexity for most participants, so I forgot about it)
• After setting up their blog and subscribing to the feedburner feed, people can go back to use the tools they're used to (I'm guessing e-mail is a weapon of choice for most of the participants), both to publish and consume information from the course.
• I "cloned" the whole set-up for another course I was starting, and it was a reasonably quick process. So it is easily replicable.

Some limitations, and things that I'm still trying to figure out:

• How do I analyze all the data coming out of the course? If I wanted to see the progress/evolution of different participants, what kind of tools should I use? Is it possible to do it with the pipe I have now?
• Feedburner is not flexible enough with the mail subscriptions. I'd like every participant to decide whether she gets a daily or real time notification.
• I can't do something like the CCK09 Daily, where some items get to be commented before reaching the participants. That would be nice.

So far, so good. During the first week, I had to keep looking at the feeds that were registered, because some participants would write their blog URL, not the feed URL. Also, some of them registered feeds from existing blogs, so I had to suggest them to label their posts, in order to retrieve just those entries. To "keep clean" the feed, I had to go every now and then and update the source for the pipe, extending the cell range to include the URLs that had been verified already. Some maintenance work that can't be avoided, I guess.

But after that, everything works perfectly. I guess a OPML file could be generated (and it would help later with analytics, definitely), but so far is something I don't think participants are really needing...

Anyway, I have to confess that I still need to understand much better the way Pipes works. I feel that I'm missing a lot of interesting things that could be done, because of my limited knowledge. However, I'm happy because it looks like it works!

Later, some thoughts about the way the course goes. Definitely, there are a lot of limitations created by our context, and the level of actual use of several technologies that seem common-place in other countries. I'll get to learn a lot about what's possible and what kind of things can be done to make these kind of experiences good learning opportunities.

We'll see how it goes!