dkeats.com

Response to Steven Downes on email and old people Tweet
713 days ago

I tried adding a comment to Stephen Downes comments on my blog post "I only use email to talk to old people". His blog has an open comment box, but when I submitted I got:

Error
Permission Denied (Check Status Error)
 
Fortunately, I had kept the text in a text editor just in case something went wrong, as it often does with this kind of thing. Stephen's comments are at http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=46480

Stephen wrote

At no stage did I say that students should abandon formal communication, and fact ended the short post with "As academics embarking on an eLearning Journey, we need to spend a little time learning about the culture of our students, and get to understand the mediums and language they use to communicate. Embracing their world will go a long way towards helping them bridge the gap in to the world of formal learning and knowledge construction."

I think that makes my point clear. It falls in the real of the "oh duh" that they need to enter the world of formal learning and knowledge construction and the communication that goes with it. What I was attempting to say was part of an attempt to get professors who have only recently graduated from chalk to ink markers to think about other technologies, and to find ways to embrace the culture of their students to help them to "bridge the gap in to the world of formal learning". I will be following this post with some examples of what we are doing, technology wise, to provide means for bridging the gap, and hope that there will be some engagement around the 'pedagogies' thereof.

Perhaps you, Stephen, work in a world where saying that young people communicate differently is cliche. I don't. I work in a world where a tiny bit of change is an uphill battle. I work in a world where, in many cases, national policies have so messed up access to technologies that even in one of the top three Universities in the country 80% of the professors have never heard of the most popular social networking technologies, fewer than 1 in a hundred have used them, and almost none have ever thought about using Mixit or SMS (the two most popular technologies among young people here) for educational purposes.

Cliche's have context. What is cliche in New Brunswick may well be innovative and new in South Africa. Many of our professors think that these observations apply to North America, that our students - over 50% of whom grew up in conditions that do not exist in Canada - are somehow different. There is a belief that poorer students have escaped the technology revolution because of poverty.

The fact is that they are not different at all. And even if they have not had access to a world replete with technolgy, they join it very soon when they enter university, because the other 50% helps them to do so even when we as their university do not. If I can get 2% of professors in my university to think about how they can embrace hw stdnts cmcte n our cntxt, thn smthg wl hv bn achvd. Especially if they can think beyond 'Wy wrnt U N cls 2day?"

I guess I should have made the context clear, but the original post was made on the University of the Western Cape eLearning site, and copied to dkeats.com as I sometimes do. I have to think about how I do that in future, so that I take the context with the post.

Regarding how they communicate in 20 years, when I am 83, being humans, I expect via some method and formula that we have not even thought about yet.The current youth will be us, and no doubt they will be lamenting the death of the SMS, the loss of Facebook, and the final bankruptcy of Mixit. I expect that there will be a lot more voice and video, and a lot less in shorthand. SMS/Mixit shorthand is an evolutionary response to a very short term phenomenon, where communications are limited by cost. I would expect that in 20 years, with more widespread access to big computing via ubiquitous networks, the elusive speech to text might even have arrived. F nt, I grnT tht ths wl nt be th way.

I have logged a job to get RSS autodiscovery added automatically to pages that have RSS feed.  The blog already uses RSS autodiscovery in the posts, but it works with the older way of doing autodiscovery, which is still very widely in use. Give us a week or so. Its not quite a simple as adding it to the template because the template is also used to render pages that do not have RSS.

Regards, derek

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Creating a presentation repository: capturing knowledge otherwise lost Tweet
603 days ago

Every year, in Universities all over the world, hundreds of thousands of conference talks are given, most of them based on presentation technologies such as PowerPoint, KeyNote, Open Office Impress and others. Seldom do these presentations find their way into institutional repositories, and most institutional repository tools are not designed to accommodate them in any kind of useful way. There are sites, such as SlideShare and Scribd, that allow you to post presentations online, but they are not institution based. However, they do offer some 21st Century features that repository software does not generally offer as far as presentations and collaboration potential is concerned.

We have the basis for building presentation repository already completed and ready for use. In what started off as a small project with San Jose State University in California over a year ago, we built a presentation sharing facility on the Chisimba framework as a means to develop further semantic technologies for engaging with presentations. The machine learning work has not been done, but the technology has evolved into an excellent system for sharing presentations in a Web 2.0 presentation repository manner. You can view the UWC installation of it at http://chameleon.uwc.ac.za, although it is not being used at UWC as an official institutional presentation repository. The Chisimba module that provides this functionality is called WebPresent, and it integrates with a set of realtime tools that provide realtime presentation capability over the web.

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Chisimba is a Web 2.0 distributed application framework developed in the African Virtual Open Initiatives and Resources (AVOIR) project. Being distributed, having an open API, and being extensible, it is quick to plug in new funcitonality from other applications.

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Chisimba's WebPresent module allows users to upload presentations, license them, tag them, blog them, and build a community around them. They are also inter-converted into other formats automatically, and can be downloaded in those formats, including PowerPoint, Open Document, Flash and PDF. Dublin core metadata is included, as are Creative Commons licenses. Filter widgets and code snippets are provided that allow the presentation to be embedded in any webpage that supports Chisimba filters or allows the use of HTML snippets. There is even a Chisimba filter and code snippet that allows you to embed a live presentation into a blog or other webpage.

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It would be interesting for an institution such as Wits or UWC to build an institutional presentation repository around this tool. It might start to create a sense of what a 21st Century repository should do, as well as provide some basis for promoting this often neglected form of research output.

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Like all software that have produced in ICS at UWC and in the AVOIR project, the tool is Free Software (open source) and available for anyone to download and use to set up an institutional repository. It incorporates a number of technologies that make it scalable from a few hundred to a few million users, given suitable infrastructure on which to run it. It also works in the Amazon Cloud, and other cloud computing technologies.

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Get Chisimba from http://avoir.uwc.ac.za

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