tech-ed collisions

identity management for education/HR sectors

The Liberty Alliance group as just announced a new "Public Group Targeting Interoperability Across Education and Human Resources Applications and Services". From the eifel news service:

Liberty Alliance, the global identity community working to build a more trustworthy Internet for businesses, governments and people worldwide, today announced the launch of the public Liberty Alliance Human Resources and Education Special Interest Group (SIG). The goal of the group is to foster interoperability, security and user privacy across online identity-enabled solutions in the global education and human resources sectors. The Human Resources and Education (HR-EDU) SIG will hold its first public face-to-face meeting on October 22 at the ePortfolio & Digital Identity 2008 conference in Maastricht, the Netherlands
More information is available at the project wiki. Looks like an interesting one to follow, given our current interest in identity and trust federations in the education sectors here.

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Filed under  //   identity  

the fifth screen

In his post 'The fourth screen and counting' Wayne Hodgins links to a great ad by Nokia on the evolution of screens, not just how they have evolved technologically but to the way in which they contribute to how we see in, and how we interact with, our world. The ad shows how screens have evolved from the cinematic screen through to the mobile technologies we see today. Wayne goes on to postulate what screens of the future might be like. Immediately I started thinking of 3d / holographic technologies but there is a whole lot more to it than just that. In another post from Wayne, linked to in the previously mentioned article, he discusses senses and the use of bi-directional feedback. If you want to see a really interesting human/computer interaction (HCI), check out Microsoft's Surface. If you want to see what some great innovators in education are doing by mashing up the technologies available to them, check out this fantastic use of interactive whiteboards and virtual worlds. At the recent ECTEL 2008 Conference, there was a fantastic keynote address by Kristina Hook entitled "Mind, mouse and body: designing engaging technologies". Supposedly ECTEL are publishing the video of this and if and when it becomes available, I encourage anyone to take the time to view this speech. We need to get away from the paradigm of fingertips and eyeballs when interacting with computers. Kristina Hook works on projects that engage 'the body'. Have a look at the phenomenal success of the Nintendo Wii for an example of a much more interesting HCI. I am really looking forward to what the next generations of interfaces may look, feel, sound, smell or taste like! Cheers, Jerry

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Filed under  //   emerging technology   interface  

Trends to watch out for

Part of my work for SICTAS is supporting an online event on future technologies (more here) where we hope to engage people in interesting, provocative discussion on what emerging technologies may yield for us in education. As I started to think about this I realised I can't just look at this area in isolation. A while ago I started to read a book entitled 'The extreme future: the top trends that will reshape the world in the next 20 years' by James Canton PhD. While the book seems to be primarily targeted at an American audience, it nevertheless offers some interesting insights for the rest of us too. Canton lists the following top ten trends and dedicates a chapter to each of them in his book:

  1. the energy crisis
  2. innovation
  3. workforce changes
  4. medicine/longevity
  5. 'weird' science
  6. security
  7. globalisation
  8. climate change
  9. the future of the individual
  10. the future of America and China
The book was released in 2006 so you could argue that in some ways it is already dated but its certainly worth a read (2 years is long time in these days of accelerated change!). What it does highlight for me though as we consider what future technologies may impact education, we need to consider them in light of these broader trends.

Filed under  //   emerging technology  

Live coverage of the SCORM 2.0 workshop

For anyone interested in what may be happening at the SCORM 2.0 workshop, I see Mark Oehlert is covering it using Cover It Live here. Cheers, Jerry

Filed under  //   standards  

I blog, therefore I am

Or perhaps that should be 'I think, therefore I (can) blog'. Not perhaps an accurate use of Descartes' method, but it would be interesting to see what great philosophers of earlier times would have made of 'digital identities' or the 'digital self'. Stephen Downes posts a really interesting article 'My digital identity' and relates aspects of identity to e-portfolios. I am keenly interested in e-portfolio services that support life-long learners so institutional e-portfolios, while often serving institutions really well, fall short of my personal ideals from a life-long perspective. Which is why I love to see thoughts such as the following 'borrowed from Downes, who borrows some comments from Helen Barrett, who cites Gary Brown' when he says:

'one aspect of e-portfolio technology is a shift from the idea that a learner takes a course from a particular institution or that a learner has a particular source or a particular authority that is teaching them or representing the state of the world to them. (Grush, 2008) More and more learning is happening online and, according to Brown, 50 percent of students are studying from multiple sources, multiple institutions, often at the same time. So the very idea that any system like a learning management system or an e-portfolio system as something that is created and managed by the institution seems in a way seriously misguided. If people are taking things from multiple institutions, then if we have an application that is a single point of reference for their learning, then that application must be of multi-institutional'.
I consider myself to be an avid learner yet have no current affiliations with any educational institution. Learning takes place formally, informally within and across multiple institutions and outside of any institutions and my e-portfolio should support this. We use Web 2.0 services to attempt to address this limitation on e-portfolio systems but is there anything else the education system can do to better support our needs? While I am a great fan of Web 2.0 services many of them are commercial operations and part of my digital self only exists at the whims of commercial operators and often short-lived services/fads. What happens when Flickr gets taken over by Yahoo! who may or may not get taken over by an even bigger company? For a start, part of my digital self may get dumped, lost, issued with new identities etc. I have no control over it. The article by Stephen Downes goes on to look at how we traditionally try to establish or assert our identities using the principles of:
  • something I know (eg password)
  • something I have (eg card key)
  • something I am (eg fingerprint)
Many authentication systems rely on having at least two of these in place. The article points out flaws in this approach and then goes on to discuss trust and motivation. It suggests that we are thinking of trust in the wrong way. Rather than proving our identity to someone else's satisfaction, we should be asking whether we can 'trust the resource provider'. There is then an introduction to the concepts behind OpenID, a service that helps or seeks to establish a 'single identity' for you across the Web.

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Filed under  //   eportfolio  

on "effective practice with e-Portfolios"

"Effective Practice with e-Portfolios - Supporting 21st century learning" is a recent (September 2008) JISC publication and is well worth a read if you are into e-portfolios. The publication starts out introducing e-portfolios and looks at why they matter, then goes on to look at them from a number of different perspectives including:

  • the learner's perspective
  • the practitioner's perspective
  • institutional perspective
  • lifelong learning perspective
  • audience perspective
These perspectives are illustrated through the use of case studies. Much of the publication is in fact summaries of case studies and so represents analysis and results of real experience with e-portfolios. Hopefully the approach taken with this document will help a number of organisations/people gain support for their own proposed e-portfolio initiatives. Sometimes it can be quite difficult gaining support without having a significant body of evidence for what you are proposing. Such a cautious approach has its merits but by definition, puts you in a position of a follower rather than a leader. The JISC report helps build that body of evidence. Back to the report, the report identifies some compelling uses for e-portfolios including:
"facilitating the transition between institutions and stages of education, and in supporting staff appraisal and applications for professional accreditation. But perhaps the most pressing reason for taking a closer look at e-portfolios is the indication that the use of these tools can promote more profound forms of learning"
Of interest to me are the case studies relevant to lifelong learning and perhaps the models for e-portfolios that can be used to support this area. The impact of Web 2.0, social networking etc gets a mention and I would like to see more information about projects exploring these areas (the report has great links and references to a wealth of material). It is also refreshing to see case studies that "support models of learning appropriate to a digital age". It continually confounds me as to the extent to which this notion is still pushed into the background in many areas. Well done to JISC for providing this overview for what essentially covers a large body of work.

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Filed under  //   eportfolio  

.tel the world a little bit more about yourself

ok - so this is for those of you who just love having an online presence and don't mind being quite public about how people can contact you. In the next few months we are going to see the launch of a new Top Level Domain (TLD) called '.tel'. Unlike websites, this will be only be available to companies and individuals to store and manage all their contact information and search keywords. Think of it as a global contact directory. The types of information you may wish to store includes:

  • phone numbers
  • mobile numbers
  • IM details
  • content links (websites, blogs, social networks)
  • identities (games, social networks)
  • geolocations (maps for work, home, interests)
  • search text
That sounds like a whole lot of really useful information that could be used by others for good and bad so obviously there will be functionality available for you to decide which of this information you want to make public or private. Friends can ask to see information about you via 'friending' requests. To see your private data, they will also need to be logged in. You will also be able to control at a more granular level, which bits of your private data certain people can see. So now, with your .tel name, all you need to give anyone is your url (eg jerry.tel) and all that information is available from any Web browser. There will be a directory that others can search but you will also be discoverable through search engines. All this information and more is available on the telnic website. There is some great information for businesses as well as individuals in a number of short videos on the site. There will be a brief period available where entities with strong claims (like trademarks) can apply for .tel names and then it will be opened up to anyone. Could this be a useful service to incorporate into an e-Portfolio? For example, applying for jobs - it is common practice now for recruiters, potential employers etc to 'google' you to find out a bit more about you. Why not help them along by putting the online bits about yourself that you want them to see into your .tel profile. This may help some of the confusion over identity that I have commented on before and would be a bit similar to claimid. It will be interesting to see how successful this domain becomes (hopefully more successful than id.au). Cheers, Jerry.

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Filed under  //   Internet  

Specifications for Repository Federations - Part 1

Our company has been providing search/discovery services for repositories for over 10 years. The first project that we were involved with was EDNA (EDucation Network Australia) - Australia's gateway to education resources. Edna, as it is now known, is still providing search services for content that it catalogs, and also other useful collections of content on the Web via its distributed search. Distributed, or federated search, as it is often called has a number of challenges. Searching multiple collections in real time can have performance/scalability problems but also many repositories and collections use different methods for accessing them. Specifications (and adoption of them) helps federated search implementers. However, just as there are many different search solutions with different interfaces, there are a number of relevant standards and specifications to select from. The edna distributed search mentioned earlier in this article uses some open source distributed search software (openDSM) that we have developed and which utilises a number of these specifications to access different collections. Real time searching of multiple collections provides one way of searching multiple repositories in a single query. Another approach is to 'harvest' information about resources from many repositories to a central repository and to provide a search across that central collection. There are specifications available for this approach but one in particular is very widely adopted. When we have a number of repositories to search across (loosely speaking, a federation) it is useful to be able to describe those repositories (what they contain, what protocols/specifications they use, intended audience, metadata profiles etc) and store that information in some sort of a registry. This gives us at least three types of specifications to look at:

  • federated search
  • harvesting
  • registries
In upcoming posts I will start to consider some of these specifications as they relate to one of the initiatives that I participate in called GLOBE which is a federation of federated searches providing access to education related repositories. GLOBE uses a number of search and harvesting specifications and is looking at developing Registry services. Cheers, Jerry (comfortably back in Firefox after a brief foray into Chrome)

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Filed under  //   standards  

My first post using Google Chrome

So this morning when I fired up my browser (Firefox) for the first time, Google's home page had changed again - yesterday the stump jump plough, today a whole new browser is available. I started to read about it yesterday on Google's blog and obviously there is a stack of posts all over the place now. Now, being a bit of a Web tragic, the first thing I had to do was download it and check it out for myself so I clicked on the link and off I went to the download page. Unfortunately for me there it was: "Google Chrome (BETA) for Windows" followed by a big button which said something like 'Sign up now' for news about Mac. Bummer! Not to be deterred, I quickly located a Windows machine and promptly downloaded Chrome and started it up. The user interface, well you just have to see it and judge for yourself. The first time its kind well...I don't know! The first task I thought of doing was to write a blog post and that is what I am doing while I am experimenting with it. The next thing you notice is it is blindingly fast! The performance seems to be fantastic. As I started writing my post (in Wordpress using the simple editor) I came to the point where I wanted to insert my first link and.. wait a second - where have all the editor buttons gone? Some stuff just isn't working yet. Ok, it's a beta version and Google seems to be following its philosophy of 'launch early and iterate' but having to code html tags in my blog posts is not something I am keen on. What did a link tag look like? So there is only one link in this post and that is all there is going to be because it's just a pain to do. I guess this post won't be picked up in too many places. As I write the post I am checking a few things so hit the new tab button and now things are starting to look interesting. On the 'new tab' page my history is starting to build up and I am getting a nice graphical display of my most visited pages and other history. The next thing I do is go to the home page but where is it? I can't find a button for it. This is interesting! Back to the Google Chrome site and I can see that there is information telling me that I have to set a home page before I get a button. Ok - here goes... and a little bit later its done (from the customise and control Google Chrome button select 'options' and away you go). But where's my home button? Back into the options and I can now see that it is a two step process - I have to set a home page and then tick a box to tell Chrome to display it. Now I have a home page button and I am happy. Old habits die hard and for the moment I just need a home page! Alright I have had enough playing with this new browser, what would make me want to use it? I can see why Google would like me to use it and Larry Dignan covers that in his blog on ZDNet (Oh no, now I have to code another link!). Here it is. The thing that immediately came to my mind was all the websites and services that I have trouble accessing because they require Internet Explorer. Recent examples for me include Vivaty and Google's own Lively (and I am not going to link to them). Why do they insist on developing them for IE? If Google could integrate all of its products (including Lively), I might be tempted. As I write this I am conscious that I should be checking what I am writing about so of I go to Lively and I find out that it will work in Firefox (woohoo) but not the platform I am currently on (Chrome). As I continue to navigate around I am still impressed with the speed of this browser however speed is not the only thing that counts - functionality is key too. I probably picked a poor task to do first but writing this post in Wordpress has really highlighted for me that there are some things in a browser that just must work in order for me to use it. I know its only BETA and as such, would be staying away from it in many educational settings but I can see that moving forwards, it has real potential. I look forward to the other half of the 'launch early and iterate' mantra! Cheers, Jerry

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Filed under  //   Google  

one from (the?) left field

Not the usual sort of technology that I comment on but the stump jump plough would have been the iPhone of the 1800's (that's probably doing it a bit of a dis-service). Anyway, its nice to see the local Google team recognising this with a bit of a local flavour on their home page today. For a brief summary of it, see the Google blog. Cheers, Jerry.

Filed under  //   Google