Lorna’s JISC CETIS blog

Ada Lovelace day is coming around again on the 24th March and you can plegde to participate here http://findingada.com/

The following is from the Ada Lovelace Day pledge announcement but I’m more than happy to repeat it here:

We had an amazing day last year, with over 1200 people writing about a woman in technology or science whom they admire. We got lots of coverage in the national press and even appeared on the BBC News Channel. Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We wanted you to tell the world about these unsung heroines, and you did. Thank you!

But our work is not yet done. This year we want 3072 people to sign up to our pledge and to write their tribute to women in tech. We have the 72, we just need the 3000, which is where you come in. Please sign the pledge at http://findingada.com/ and let all your friends know about it.

It doesn’t matter how new or old your blog is, what gender you are, what language you blog in, if you do text, audio or video, or what you normally blog about - everyone is invited to take part. All you need to do is sign up to this pledge and then publish your blog post any time on Wednesday 24th March 2010. If you’re going to be away that day, feel free to write your post in advance and set your blogging system to publish it that day.

To keep up to date with what is happening:

The Pledge: http://findingada.com/
The Blog: http://blog.findingada.com
on Twitter http://twitter.com/FindingAda

Thank you for your support!

Best,
Suw Charman-Anderson

Rather belatedly we have finally found time to synthesise the outputs of the “Semantic Technologies: Which Way Now” event CETIS hosted at the University of Strathclyde at the beginning of December. All the presentations from the event are available from the wiki page and you can read Sheila’s liveblog from the day here.

Based on the discussions that took place throughout the event we have identified the following activities that could potentially be taken forward by JISC and CETIS.

1. Briefing paper
There is considerable ambiguity regarding the use of terminology in this space, particularly among those who are less familiar with the semantic technology domain. There was general agreement that it would be useful to attempt to disambiguate some of this terminology including: Semantic Web, semantic technologies, linked data, linkable data and open data with relevant examples where possible and to identify the role that different standards play in this domain.

Output
A short CETIS briefing paper targeted at the teaching and learning community and referencing the forthcoming JISC Linked Data Horizon Scan. This briefing paper could be supplemented by a Delicious page linking to a collection of relevant resources.

2. Business cases
Based on the outputs of the JISC SemTech project, the Linked Data Horizon Scan and other relevant resources, develop a series of business cases for institutional senior managers and information systems directors outlining the potential benefits of investing time and developing expertise in exposing semantic data.

Output
Business cases for senior managers and IS directors.

3. Tools and services
Develop tools, applications and services for consuming and manipulating existing linked data sources to show how they might benefit the domain of teaching and learning and to demonstrate how the business cases identified by Activity 2 might be addressed. E.g. a linked directory of teaching expertise as an exemplar of the sort of service that could be built from foaf and doap.

Output
Tools and services for consuming and manipulating existing linked data sources.

4. Affordances for curriculum design and course approval
Exploration of the affordances of linked data within institutions to facilitate a number of institutional processes including curriculum design and course description. Identify areas in the course approval process where open and or linkable data could be exploited. There may be potential to work with existing programmes and initiatives such as Curriculum Design and XCRI to start exploring affordances and barriers in this area and possibly to begin scoping requirements for XCRI phase 2.

5. Developer events
One or more technical events, possibly similar to Google’s summer of code, open to developers, and students, to produce implementations and resources relevant to education based on open and linked data. These activities could potentially be developed around existing JISC and Talis events.

Outputs
Demonstrators, proof of concept implementations, etc.

We would welcome feedback on these or indeed other activities so please post comments below. CETIS will continue to explore the domains of semantic technologies, open and linked date with a view to facilitating further working groups in this area. We’ll look forward to hearing from you!

Many of you who have an interest in open education resources and the Academy / JISC OER Pilot Programme will already be following the development of JorumOpen. JorumOpen will enable users worldwide to search, browse and download open educational resources deposited by UK Further and Higher Education Institutions and licenced under Creative Commons licence. OER Projects already have access to the JorumOpen deposit tool and the service itself, which is based on a customised version of DSpace will be available to the wider community from the 19th of January 2010.

CETIS have been liaising closely with the Jorum team in order to support the OER Programme’s requirements. One early requirement that has emerged is the need for bulk deposit and a request from some projects that this may be partially fulfilled by ingest of RSS feeds. Sounds simple enough but as with all such requirements the devil is in the detail. And in this case some of the details include which version or RSS to support, how to encode and handle licence information, what metadata to include, how to process said metadata, what is a realistic size for feeds?

In order to kick off a discussion on these and other issues Gareth Waller, Jorum’s Technical Manager (and DSpace wrangler extraordinaire) has written a short white paper titled Issues surrounding feed deposit into institutional repositories which presents the pros and cons of using syndicated feed formats to facilitate deposit into repositories such as JorumOpen. Gareth presents a succinct overview of syndicated feed formats and raises a number of questions relating to: item identification, item updates and deletions, missing items, polling periods, feed formats, metadata formats, local metadata application profiles, handling licences and whether to store links or download resources.

JISC, CETIS and Jorum would like to move towards the development of an agreed RSS profile for open educational resources so we are actively seeking comments from the community on the kind of issues Gareth raises in his paper. If you would like to comment or raise additional issues please post your comments here or on the Jorum Community Bay. You can download Gareth’s paper here or from the Community Bay.

Or the strange case of Drs E. Embuggerance and H. Feisty.

This has already been reported on several other blogs but it’s too good not to share again. Looks like Google Scholar needs to work on its automatic metadata generation algorithm:

Embuggerance, E., and H. Feisty. 2008. The linguistics of laughter. English Today 1, no. 04: 47-47.

This curious incident was originally reported by Stephen Chrisomalis and subsequently picked up by Language Log. The comments on the latter post are particularly entertaining. Mark Liberman helpfully provides Google Scholar’s BibTex citation

@article{embuggerance2008linguistics,
title={{The linguistics of laughter}},
author={Embuggerance, E. and Feisty, H.},
journal={English Today},
volume={1},
number={04},
pages={47–47},
year={2008},
publisher={Cambridge Univ Press}
}

And goes on to suggest

“Perhaps we should continue the tradition of metonymic names for new linguistic natural kinds, and use embuggerance for cases where the automatic tagging of entities and relations goes astray.”

Over on Stephen Chrisomalis blog the comments have taken a rather different turn and degenerate into a rather thoughtful discussion of the relative merits of Google Scholar and JSTOR and automatic metadata generation vz human indexing. One commentor, Laughingrat, is appalled that any academic would even consider using Google scholar:

“…unless your college or university is extremely underfunded, the school library should have access to high-quality databases which contain records indexed by information professionals rather than unqualified hirelings or, worse, computers.”

Another commentor, Dale, puts forward a robust argument in favour of Google Scholar in particular and automatic metadata generation in general:

“Many in libraries and academia are keen to point out all of the warts in Google Scholar, but are less keen to be so critical of the databases for which they pay. That the MLA Bibliography, for example, is years behind in indexing scores of journals, and has incredibly poor coverage in many non-English languages (despite the International boast in its name) is a little known or explored fact in libraries. Other fee-based databases evince similar flaws (Library Literature, ironically, is one of the worst), but it isn’t nearly as much fun to pick on them as it is to shellac Google.”

The last words also has to go to Dale:

“What it comes down is machine indexing vs. human indexing. I cannot get the image of John Henry out of my mind when I think about this matchup. I think the human indexers can only win by extreme effort, and we all know what happened to poor John.”

Amen to that!

Earlier this afternoon my colleague Phil Barker led a fascinating Elluminate session exploring resource tracking issues for the JISC / HEA Open Educational Resources Programme. One approach to tracking Phil raised was the use of unique keys or tag combinations which are embedded in resources and then released into the wild. Googling for the unique key will then indicate where your resource has been reused and by whom, more or less.

Now I’m no authority on tracking technologies but this reminded me of a very interesting article I read in the Guardian today How Belle de Jour’s secret ally Googlewhacked the press. This explains how a blogger known as Derren used some astute guesswork and a unique key combination of two terms associated nowhere else on the web to monitor whether anyone else was coming close to guessing the identity of the anonymous call girl Belle de Jour.

At the OER Technical Roundtable at last week’s CETIS Conference one of the actions participants prioritiesd was case studies and examples of different approaches to tracking. I’m not entirely sure that the above is the kind of case study the projects had in mind but it’s a pretty good real world example never the less! Just thought I’d mention it…..

Phil’s slides from the Elluminate session are available on Slideshare and no doubt there will be blog posts to follow.

Cast your mind back to the CETIS Conference 2007 and you may remember a session on Semantic Technologies for Teaching and Learning. This session sought to introduce current developments in semantic technologies, explore their potential application to the domain of teaching and learning and facilitate discussion between these two apparently disparate communities. The case for the relevance and potential of semantic technologies was ably presented by a range of international experts through a series of short position papers which formed the basis for a wide ranging discussion. Following this discussion there seemed to be general consensus that it would be valuable for JISC to facilitate further exploration of the affordances of semantic technologies to the domain of education.

JISC responded to this requirement by issuing an ITT for a scoping study to:

“…investigate how applications which use semantic technologies can add value to learning and teaching.”

This study was awarded to the SemTech Project at the University of Southampton and at the same time CETIS established the Semantic Technology Working Group. The remit of this group was firstly to act as an expert working group for the SemTech Project, and secondly to develop recommendations for potential future work based on the outputs of the project.

The SemTech project successfully concluded in July 2009 having undertaken an extensive survey of semantic technologies relevant to learning and teaching and an investigation of the use and uptake of related tools and services by UK HE institutions. In addition to producing a comprehensive report the SemTech Project has also drafted a roadmap for semantic technology adoption by the UK F/HE community.

Semantic technologies appeared again at this year’s CETIS Conference, this time in the guise of linked data which was discussed in both the Find and Seek and Giant Global Graph sessions. The latter session has already generated a number of blog posts by Adam Cooper, Paul Walk and Andy Powell.

In order to disseminate and discuss the SemTech roadmap, the outputs of the CETIS conference and potential future activities in the area of semantic technologies for teaching and learning CETIS are holding a public meeting of the Semantic Technologies Working Group on the 10th of December at the University of Strathclyde. This meeting will:

• Review the outputs of the SemTech project.
• Consider the roadmap and recommendations to JISC.
• Respond to these recommendations and explore future directions.
• Investigate ways that CETIS can raise awareness of the potential affordances of semantic technologies to the teaching and learning sector.
• Discuss future activities in this areas that CETIS could potentially engage in.

The meeting is open to all those with an interest in semantic technologies and their potential application to the domain of teaching and learning. We will be actively seeking comments and feedback from the community and would encourage colleagues to join the discussion.

To register for this meeting and for further information please visit the CETIS events page.

The CETIS conference always strives to address current and cutting edge issues in the domain of education technology, however the OER Technical Roundtable session was arguably more timely than most given that it coincided with a Guardian article on open courseware and open educational resources: Any student, any subject, anywhere.

The session was attended by over thirty participants representing a wide range of projects and initiatives, all of whom brought a plethora of technical issues to the table. These issues were ably captured by my colleague R. John Robertson using some recalcitrant mind mapping software which he is still fighting with. John has already posted the raw list of issues on his blog and on Slideshare.

As expected the range of issues was considerable but the following broad themes did emerge:

• Tracking – metrics, Google analytics, statistics to support advocacy.
• Usability of repositories – deposit and the role of SWORD, discovery and use.
• Streaming large media files.
• Licensing and rights encoding.
• Resource description – metadata and JorumOpen, portability and interoperability, tagging, automatic metadata generation, identification of derivative works, SEO, Google discovery, how to users search for resources?
• Aggregators to manage distributed resources – metadata aggregation, resource aggregation, iTunes & iTunesU, OER broadcasting, batch upload, Flickr & Slideshare APIs.
• Granularity – disaggregation and reuse, content packaging, dependencies between resources.

Participants voted with their feet and broke into groups to discuss tracking, resource description, aggregators and granularity. We’ll try to synthesis the outputs of these breakout groups in later blog posts but in the meantime here’s a summary of the potential activities the groups identified that JISC and CETIS could take forward to benefit both the OER Programme and the community more generally:

• Develop an agreed RSS / Atom profile for open educational resources.
• Undertake research to analyse how teachers and learning actually search for educational resources. What terms do they search for and what metadata is actually necessary to facilite their searches? Synthesise data from projects, including Jorum and Steeple that are already gathering information about search terms, techniques and characteristics.
• Investigate how successful commercial systems such as Amazon and iTunes create and manage resource descriptions. What can we learn from them?
• Opening access to analytics and anonymised user data. Encourage the sharing of Google analytics data between projects.
• Set up shared Piwik or Google analytics accounts for each JISC programme.
• Share and synthesise good practice in resource tracking. Record and disseminate case studies.
• Identify requirements and minimum recommendations for resource tracking.
• Fund mini-projects on esoteric approaches to tracking.

We intend to discuss these recommendations with JISC in the not too distant future with a view to taking some of them forward. Hopefully we’ll be in a position to discuss progress in some if not all of these areas at #cetis10!

Damn few and they’re aw deid!

Famous deid people namechecked at #cetis09

Charles Darwin

Clarence Darrow

Marshall McLuhan (second year running!)

Les Dawson

Aldous Huxley

William Shakespeare

Joseph Schumpeter

Stieg Larsson

Famous deid programmes….

The MAC Initiative

And a couple of deid bands…

The Clash

Lindisfarne (thanks Oleg!)

Only four days to go until the CETIS Conference and we’re already starting to draw up a list of issues to explore at the OER Technical Roundtable. The aim of this session is to give OER Projects techies and other interested folk an opportunity to come together to discuss technical issues that they have anticipated, encountered and possibly even resolved.

Issues we expect to turn up include:

• Metadata, resource description and tagging.
• Version control - Does it really matter? If so, what can be done about it?
• Tracking - What? How? Why?
• Working with different repositories.
• Aggregating and linking resources distributed across multiple services and applications.
• Using and managing feeds.
• Bulk upload.
• Encoding license information.

The Steeple Project have already raised some additional issues:

• Subject classification - mapping between proprietary subject classification codes and JACS.
• Approaches to describing “levels of difficulty” and “intended use”.
• Consistent CC license description in audio, video and feed metadata.

We want to know what works for you and what doesn’t? What technical problems have you banging your head on the desk in frustration? Or have you discovered an elegant technical solution to a thorny problem that you’re willing to share?

Members of JISC, CETIS and other community experts will be on hand to offer advice and explore potential solutions.

We would welcome more suggestions of issues you’ve encountered so please add your comments here and we’ll add these to the list of topics to discuss.

Conference tag #cetis09
Session tag #cetis09oer

A tweet from @FindingAda this week brought my attention to a blog post by Cate Sevilla of WITsend asking “Are Women in Tech Their Own Worst Enemy?” Cate summarises the lot of women in technology neatly and with some accuracy before going on to bemoan:

….another little ingredient to add to the recipe of female-tech-doom: petty, ridiculous cattiness amongst other women in tech.

She then goes on to ask:

Have each of us done all we can (within reason) to help and encourage our female peers in tech? Or are we fiercely and unnecessarily competitive? If there’s a younger women that’s asking for what tech events you go to to meet new contacts, do you tell her? Bring her along? Or at least point her in the right direction?

@FindingAda described the post as being:

….fabulous, and brave, …. something I’ve seen too much of myself.

While I can identify with being:

….a woman standing in a sea of men at a tech conference….

I can genuinely say that in the domain of educational technology and interoperability standards I have never experienced the kind of attitudes from female colleagues described by Cate and @FindingAda. I have certainly had plenty of arguments and differences of opinion with lots of colleagues regardless of gender, however I really and truly and never experienced this kind of bitchiness.

As evidence of this I’d like to point you to some of the posts that have appeared online to commemorate Rachel Heery.

Sarah Currier commented in response to my own blog post:

I always looked forward to seeing Rachel at meetings. You always knew you had an ally- not an ally in the back-room handshake sense, but in the cut-the-crap, ‘let’s work out what’s best’ sense. She was fun and funny and an excellent role model for younger women coming through.

To which Lorcan Dempsey responded:

….(Rachel) was also very conscious of being a woman in a male-dominated, often techie, environment. I think she would have been very pleased by Sarah Currier’s remark on Lorna Campbell’s blog entry.

This has been my over whelming experience of working with other women in educational technology and other related domains. They may not give you any easy breaks but they are endlessly supportive and encouraging, even while questioning your opinions and picking your argument to pieces!