Overdue Ideas

SCHoMS

I'm at a session of the SCHoMS (Standing Council of Heads of Media Services) about recording lectures this morning. Aside from some technical problems delaying the start (some amount of schadenfreude seeing AV salesmen struggling with the technology) some interesting presentations - just brief summaries here.

Mediasite

Mediasite is a product from Sonic Foundry (now the only product from Sonic Foundry).

Allows recording, storage, management and delivery of lectures/sessions. Integrates with Crestron panels. Also has API for VLEs or other integration.

Captures all VGA outputs - so video and data. Can put in 'bookmarks' to link video to the data display at that time - so can easily jump through presentation to each slide and linked video (but requires manual process during the presentation to sync these together).

Now concentrating on the content management aspects. Especially concentrating on search and retrieval aspects - currently supports search of any text content - including OCRing any text content under visualisers and document cameras. They are expecting to launch phonetic searching in the next few weeks so that any mentions of words in video or audio files are also picked up.

Anycast

Anycast Station is a all-in-one Live Content Producer. IT takes feeds from cameras or data. Can control up to 16 cameras with presets. Can be mixed etc. on the fly, or, in conjunction with hard disks attached to the back of the unit, can be re-mixed in post production.

Looks like a nice piece of kit, but do we have the expertise and staff resource to use it? However, the presenter is talking about kitting out a studio with Anycat HD Cameras, Anycast lighting, and the Anycast station, for 60k-70k - which sounds quite cheap.

Impact Marcom

Uses Windows technology to deliver cost effective solutions. In terms of product, offering something similar to Mediasite above, but arguing that can be done more cost effectively by using Windows media server, and Windows media player.

Essentially Impact Marcom are not selling a product, but rather offering a consultancy package to acheive the same result. It doesn't look like they have the same kind of content management to offer as media site, but could be a lower budget way of acheiving the recording and streaming - estimates about 10k for equpiment if you don't already have appropriate servers and encoders, then something in the region of 3 days training.

Identity Management and Learning 2.0

Just reading Andy's post of the same title. I think that you could argue (if you wanted to play Devil's Advocate, or are particularly partial to arguing) that Athens has actually been a bad thing in that it has been too effective, and actually held back investment in  other (perhaps more institutionally based) authentication/authorisation solutions in the UK. I've always wondered why solutions like ezproxy have much higher takeup in the US than in the UK - and Athens is surely the answer?

On the Shib front, although it is clearly where we are going with JISC at the moment, I can't help but feel that we really ought to be seeing demand driven from somewhere other than library resources. For access to library resources in the UK HE sector, Shib seems like overkill - it certainly goes way beyond anything we need to do in terms of controlling access to this type of resource at the moment.

Shibboleth was originally championed by the Grid computing contingent in JISC, but this seems to have disappeared a bit recently - or I've just stopped paying attention. For example the ESP-GRID project http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_middleware/project_espgridjuly04.aspx - this was meant to report in March 2006, but the project website seems empty.

Anyway, based on some work I'm currently involved with which is looking at e-learning across 3 institutions, I can see some potential for Shib - at least in the next few years. Here, you can imagine Shib being used to allow access to relevant resources depending on your role in each organisation. I don't think that the 'personal learning' environment will be realised fully in the next 5 years, so some time yet for federated authentication/authorisation to be of use.

Also, there is a question - will 'personalised' mean not hosted? Perhaps HE institutions will be the providers of personalised learning portals (i.e. the environment is personalised, and perhaps transportable, but provided by a single institution) which will allow consumption of relevant material from learning objects etc. across a federation - then something like Shibboleth might make perfect sense.

Just to go back to an earlier comment of Andy's, that he was worried that blogs might stifle discussion. I started to leave this posting as a comment on the eFoundations blog, but ended up blogging it instead. The problem with this is that its a hell of a lot harder to follow discussion when it stretches across several blogs than when it is focussed on a single blog.

eLearning 2.0 - Plus ca change?

Tony Karrer asks on http://elearningtech.blogspot.com, "Is eLearning 2.0 Meaningful?"

I've been involved in eLearning somehow since about 2000, and I'm not sure that eLearning 2.0 is any different from the kind of talk around at that point - 'let's have less shovelware', or 'guide on the side, rather than sage on the stage'. These calls for learner centred approaches to teaching seem similar to the concepts behind eLearning 2.0.

At a recent talk (blogged below) Matthew Pittinsky from Blackboard suggested that eLearning 2.0 was about (among other things) social networks. This, I would suggest, is nothing new - surely the concept of a school, college or University is about a community of learning, where social networks form, and you learn from your peers as well as from you teacher or tutor.

Matthew asked where the scholarly equivalent of Facebook or Furl was - but the truth is that academics have long shared information within their communities via papers, books and conferences. In the virtual world, email is now a mainstay of the academic community.

So - what is different about eLearning 2.0? To some extent I believe that eLearning 2.0 is simply a continuation of what went before - we have to continue to press for learner centred teaching, which engages the students in a dialogue with their tutor and their peers. If we can use 'eLearning 2.0' to sell this, and get the community engaged in the Web 2.0 tools that can support it, then that's great.

Discussion board standards

While taking part in the VLEs: Beyond The Fringe... And Into The Mainstream it occured to me that the discussion group software could be better from the 'reading' point of view.

In fact, had the discussion group had an rss feed, I could have read the postings in a much more convenient fashion, and kept up with the 4 separate discussions that were going on.

I'd got further than this though. RSS obviously doesn't quite serve the needs of bulletin boards (threading, sequencing etc.), but surely it wouldn't be difficult to define discussion groups as xml output rather than html, and have a simple messaging format to be able to post as well as read posts.

It's just occured to me, that, of course, the existing news readers do this - so why are e-learning systems not delivering standard bulletin board formats so I can 'subscribe' in my news reader? On the other hand, does discussion board software from outside the e-learning sphere support this? What are the problems?

It suddenly seemed clear to me that if in the future (as some people suggest) learners will be more picky about where they do qualifications, and they will buy courses online from a variety of sources, they will need some way to 'aggregate' their courses in a single environment (rather than the current practice where each institution is running their own 'learning environment', and if the user is going to take courses from 2 institutions, they have to interact with 2 learning environments).

Since there is also talk of 'exploding' the VLE/LMS into it's components parts, and discussion board system which is readable by a standard news reader seems like a sensible idea? I'm just wondering about how complex it needs to get... Perhaps a bulletin board software supporting RSS is a better idea? I've gone round in a circle on this - obviously needs more thought and research.

To LMS or not to LMS

I've become increasingly unconvinced about the benefits of LMSs - such as Blackboard and WebCT. Basically these environments seem to put unnecessary restrictions on how material is made available, and how it is accessed, without adding much benefit.

It's interesting that these pieces of software are called 'Learning Management Systems'. In the UK, the idea of the Virtual or Managed Learning Environment' took off, and still there is a tendency to refer to LMSs as VLEs or MLEs. This, for me, is to miss an important distinction. Blackboard, WebCT and the like are correctly called 'Learning Management Systems', as they somehow try to 'manage' the learning material. I'm not sure this is helpful, certainly not in the context of UK Higher Education.

So, I believe we should strive to create a virtual or managed 'learning environment', but we don't need an LMS to do so. This should also make it easier to integrate library resources into the material, as there are no artificial barriers to doing this, and you aren't tied into one particular technology.

So what do we need from a VLE? At the moment our needs are pretty simple:

Web space for courses
Ideally we need to be able to restrict viewing privileges to the students on the course. However, this may not be necessary in all cases...
Discussion group/bulletin board software
Email lists for courses
Ease of publishing/uploading material

I'd like to be able to provide tools for easy content creation by academics. Weblog software would seem ideal for this purpose - but I'm not sure about supporting this (if we were to install Movable Type or something). Possibly Microsoft's 'Sharepoint' software would be worth investigating. Otherwise, perhaps we just need to treat this as another area where web content management software is needed.