January 2005 Archives

This past week was Mo's seventh birthday, and among the many great gifts that came his way was a great version of C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia, sent by my parents. This audio collection is unabridged, read aloud by some superb actors, including Kenneth Brannagh, Michael York, Ian Richardson, and others on something like 25 CDs.

We're busy working our way through the Magician's Nephew, the first of the collection, and we're all entranced. Well worth checking out.

You know things have got to get better when the day starts with the cat barfing into the inkjet printer at 6 am.

And they have, I'm pleased to report.

Kay Pilcher pointed out this CNN article on how phishing schemes are getting more sophisticated.

Apparently these crooks are now installing entries in host files on compromised desktop systems so that even if the unsuspecting person types in their own URL in the browser they can be directed off to the scam site.

And there are even reports of compromised DNS servers being used to redirect people to the wrong place.

If you can't trust DNS, the Internet is effectively over.

Cliff gave a terrific talk on how many places are missing the boat on several fronts with Learning Management Systems. My notes:

Acutely different cultural viewpoints that are now colliding in the realm of so-called 'learning management systems'.

What are the connections between learning management systems and the broader educational landscape? LMS got on the radar of librarians about two years ago, when it was noticed that LMS were getting installed all over the place and being managed in a "policy-free" environment, getting information into them from library-operated systems is difficult, and, as LMS vendors get into licensing content to go into their LMS, raised the spectre of institutions may be licensing the same materials multiple times.

Things become "learning objects" by context. The articles of faith here are highly granular objects with large amounts of metadata and that if we do it right these objects will be highly reused and a whole ecology of these things will evolve. Somehow this hasn't happened - this area stubbornly resists scale-up, and people are constantly inventing new objects instead of reusing old ones.

On the other hand, LMS systems have come from nowhere in six or seven years and been installed as infrastructure. But if you look at what's in an LMS it's mostly not learning objects- exercises, syllabi, copies of lecture notes, threaded discussions, etc. Plus there's no relation between these and the kinds of collections that are used for recording and passing on knowledge to support inquiry - books, articles, photographs, images, scientific data sets, etc.

One of the interesting things in the learning objects space has been the struggle to understand what metadata to apply to objects. In the broader world of digital content the whole metadata paradigm is becoming unglued.

In libraries there is elaborate metadata applied to items. The only reason we've been able to afford that over the past thirty years has been because of shared "copy" cataloging, where only one person catalogs the item and other libraries make use of that.

As libraries and museums begin to digitize their special collections, these are unique, not shared. It's not uncommon to discover that an institution is spending more to describe the collection than to digitize it. Applying metadata is basically unaffordable at this point except in very special circumstances. One of the fundamental problems we're facing right now is a flood of material that is growing much faster than our capacity to describe it.

So we're seeing the evolution of methods to cope - cataloging collections of objects at a time, letting the computer do it (works well for text, but not for images so far).

What's in LMS? The stock in trade is an artificial but large entity called a course. It's not always clear where courses start or end or who participates in them. It's starting to become clear that an LMS is really a collaborative environment with some extra special things glued on to it. That leads all sorts of projects to have to masquerade as "courses" - student projects, administrative efforts, etc. Could it be that this entity of a "course" could be a better unit of object than the highly granular learning objects?

Then there's the content that's generated by the interaction of people over the time period of the course.

Cliff brings up the example of faculty who don't want the course to start again each quarter but to accrete over time, building on the previous record.

This leads to another set of policy issues. The observation was made that LMS collect all sorts of wonderful statistics that will be a boon to faculty in their teaching. The library has never sent this kind of data to faculty - instead has operated on very strict policies about privacy of the data on what users are doing, including students. Libraries now design systems to minimize the amount of data they hold, so they can't be forced to share it by law enforcement. One of the things that's actually happening now is that people are realizing that the web has a long memory. It has amassed enough knowledge of people's history to provide for a wealth of embarrassment. As people move from being college students to political candidates it's often awkward to have this material around.

What does this mean for LMS systems? Are we going to have closed systems where the records live and they'll be destroyed after a year? Or are we going to have very open environments? In many graduate courses the expectation is that student work will get posted to the web for global inspection and review. How long will they stay there? Where does this sit in terms of student policy? As we start to regard LMS as student publishing environments, these issues will become real.

Do we really want to keep everyone's first year calculus problem set for a hundred years?

The trend is towards more openness in scholarly communication. Those will inform the evolution of policies in this area.

Use environments are not necessarily the same as management environments. As institutions want to manage digital collections over the long haul they're looking at repositories - keeping authoritative copies safe, accessible, etc. These are different from use environments. It's possible that the LMS is the use environment, and things will roll out over time into the institutional repository for preservation.

Persistent references have been a problem for a long time in the networked world. We have not dealt with this very much in the LMS environment. As we want to be able to cite these works we'll need that and it's important to deal with this sooner rather than later.

There's a belief that if you design systems right you can pick up all sorts of useful metadata as part of the process of creation, but if you have to go back to add it later it's very expensive. Like in images, the camera can tell you when it was taken, what the light settings were, etc. If we were simply able to collect provenance information at creation (where it came from) we would be way ahead of the game in understanding how to obtain rights. Wouldn't it be nice to tag items in the LMS when they're added? eg. this is a student paper, this is a faculty contribution, this is a third party piece. Coming up with the right taxonomies instead of sending people back to tag things would be better.

We're gathering a group of folks to go out to dinner and hear music tonight here in New Orleans.

We're going to meet at 7 in the second floor lobby of the Intercontinental and head way uptown to Jacque-Imo's for soul food, and then hit the Maple Leaf to hear Papa Grows Funk.

Maybe we'll see you there!

Bob Kvavik is talking about the findings from the ECAR Survey of Student Technology Use.

They surveyed freshmen and seniors for this.

One of the differences found was that seniors use specialized software (spreadsheets, presentation software, discipline-specific software) a good deal more than freshmen. That's due to the use of those applications in the courses within a major that causes students to use that kind of software.

It's interesting to think about this in the context of John Bransford's talk this morning - students are using these kinds of software to problem-solve, synthesize, analyze, and compose their thoughts within a specific domain where they are beginning to build expertise.

I had a brief conversation this morning with Richard Katz about the state of Web Services and Service Oriented Architectures in higher education.

My going-in opinion was that lots of web services activity is happening in all sorts of places within institutions.

Richard's take is that there's a lack of progress on, or even discussion of, component based architectures for essential institutional services, and that the new large open source efforts like Sakai and Kuali are, to a large extent, rebuilding the same monolithic approach to business systems that we've seen from the commercial world.

These aren't necessarily mutually exclusive conclusions, but I think there's some work to be done to really ascertain what's up with web services and component architectures in higher ed.

Any opinions out there?

This is a panel of students from the University of Central Florida, talking about their experience of higher education.

Good quote so far - "If I can't Google it, it's not worth knowing". Sheesh.

They all agree that all courses should at least have course materials (readings, syllabi, etc.) available online.

John Bransford began by calling attention to the National Academy studies on How People Learn and two new publications, How Students Learn and Preparing Teachers for a Changing World (which will be out in February).

John is a terrifically engaging speaker with great examples.

How have the learning sciences helped us understand teaching and learning?

The Expertise literature is helpful here - an intricate connection between what you know about a subject matter and how that affects your ability to make inferences and synthesize knowledge. Schools are particularly well set-up to produce intert knowledge.

Expertise has an effect on what we notice in the first place - as described by N.R. Hanson in his work on Pattern of Discovery

Beyond "mile wide, inch deep" - good book is Understanding by Design

Start with what the enduring understandings in a field are, and build out from there.

One of the dilemmas is that the more expertise we have in a domain the more it becomes tacit, so that we think what we're trying to explain is perfectly clear. So what is needed is pedagogical knowledge in addition to domain knowledge - the ability to understand what it's really like to be a novice.

Adaptive vs. Routine expertise - in order to innovate, people need to think differently and let go of routine knowledge and be willing to let go of the efficiency of routine expertise.

What do we know about the development of expertise?

The constructive nature of knowing - the only way we learn something new is to build it on what we already know. In teaching we need to address existing preconceptions of concepts.

There are also preconceptions about what's needed for success in the 21st century and what it means to be "lifelong learners".

Addressing preconceptions.
Learning with understanding is very important.
Metacognition - learn to self-assess and actively question things.

They've built courses around this:

- the challenge
- your initial thoughts
- prespectives and resources from experts
- assessment & revision - see how your thoughts have changed
- later thoughts - the next time, here's how I'll apply what I've learned

This has lots of implications for how we do curriculum.

They've developed an architecture for building courses this way. See

Adding adaptive expertise to the picture. Two dimensions - efficiency and innovation. It's not like you want one versus the other - you want the two to complement each other.

The process underlying innovation - what Edwin Land described as "the sudden cessation of stupidity". It's very tough emotionally. We need to help people learn how to innovate in an imperfect world, so innovations don't do more harm than good.

The importance of quasi-repetitive tasks in spurring innovation in efficiency - students see the importance of building tools to help accomplish tasks multiple times. And, with encouragement, they realize that they can build better tools by working together bringing different expertises to the task. One of the problems we have in education is that we have people working in groups, but they all pretty much know the same things - need to build in ways fto bring distributed expertise to bear.

I'm on a very quick trip to New Orleans for the annual meeting of Educause's National Learning Infrastructure Initiative.

Somehow there ended up being 9 people here from the UW, and the keynote talk is by John Bransford, a UW professor in Education, talking about the Learning Sciences and Technology.

I got in late, so I missed the opening reception, but I caught up with most of the UW gang for a nice paella dinner at Lola's out on Esplanade.

I'll be blogging as much as possible from the conference today.

This is what happens when kids like my (almost) seven-year-old son grow up. Hilarious - thanks, Liz!

Tim Bray points out this terrific (if long) article from Joel Spolsky from last month on software pricing. Anyone who's at all interested in how to price software or online services really needs to read this whole article.

A sample:

And, in fact, you can't even be sure that the demand curve is downward sloping.

You see, people tend to believe that you get what you pay for.

Every time I read one of Joel's articles I wish I was in the market for bug-tracking software so I could try his FogBugz software. Seems like a product from someone who thinks so intelligently and writes so well would at least be worth a good look.

I don't usually think of myself all that nerdy, but -

Hey - if Geoff Arnold can do it, so can I :)

Dan Updegrove sends along this nice interview with Mitch Kapor in news.com

Mitch has become a wonderfully influential person in the high tech Internet community, as well as continuing his role of encouraging social responsibility among us, and it's nice to see him get more widely known.

It's especially nice to see him give Mitchell Baker her props for her amazing quiet leadership work at the Mozilla Foundation.

I think it was like the Harry Potter of open source. You know how all the movies open with him living with his aunt and uncle, who give him no respect and lock him up? People had written off Mozilla on multiple occasions. I felt like and continue to feel like she does a remarkable job in a low-key way in shepherding that project through unique and difficult circumstances. I think the renaissance with Firefox and Thunderbird--without her this would not have happened. Mozilla was like the Harry Potter of open source. I respect her leadership, which is very low-key and not charismatic--the opposite of the Larry Ellison style. She has been effective in the face of real challenges.

Yesterday was supposed to be the second week of ski lessons this year for my almost-seven-year-old son, but we got cancelled yet again.

While the California resorts have been buried in snow, our local Northwest resorts have struggled to open at all. So far this season we've had either wet weather or cold weather, but not the two together. So yesterday Snoqualmie Pass ended up with nine inches of new snow, but that got topped with a quarter inch of ice and a power outage as the warming trend came in. Today the forecast is for heavy precipitation, but the snow levels are supposed to be well above the elevations of our local ski resorts.

Oh, well - we went for a lovely walk yesterday on the trail to Foster Island in the Arboretum. The bird viewing was terrific - we saw lots of winter ducks (buffleheads, scaups, hooded mergansers, goldeneyes), great blue herons, a kingfisher, and two bald eagles - one perched high in a tree as we were playing frisbee down below. Is this a great city, or what?

Last week I attended a meeting of the CalConnect Calendaring Consortium (well, I attended the first day of the meeting and then had to go off to a workgroup retreat of our Learning Technologies group at the wonderful Sleeping Lady retreat center near Leavenworth, WA).

While I'll wait for the official press releases and reports from interop testing so as not to steal anyone's thunder, this meeting saw significant real progress made in achieving interoperability between disparate calendar systems. Several different systems actually demonstrated that they could schedule with each other using the new CalDav protocol. That's the most progress we've seen on this front in years!

It looks like CalDav is gathering a good head of steam to actually be a widely adopted protocol. This is good news, and it's largely due to the efforts of Lisa Dusseault from OSAF, along with Cyrus Daboo from ISAMET and Bernard Desruisseaux from Oracle. Nice work, all!

My old college roommate Jim Goldberg is currently having an exhibit of his photography at the Pace/MacGill Gallery on E. 57th St. in New York.

I sure wish I could go see the show - Jim is an amazing and courageous artist, and he's worked hard at his art for a very long time.

There's a nice brief review of the show in the Village Voice.

If you're in Manhattan, go by the gallery and see the show.

Over time I have managed to mess up my configuration of Movable Type, mostly as I tried to recover from the comment spam floods. I'm tired of dealing with errors, and with not being able to turn comments on.

So now I've completely reinstalled MT, using version 3.14 (the latest and greatest) at a new address: http://staff.washington.edu/oren/weblog2/

The RSS feed also has this new address: http://staff.washington.edu/oren/weblog2/index.rdf

I exported the database and imported into the new installation, so absolute URLs to previous entries have changed (this must be the result of having deleted some old entries over time).

Comments are enabled, but you'll have to have a TypeKey identity to leave a comment.

Other changes include moving my list of blogs I read to a different page, which also includes a list of the latest links I'm interested in enough to bookmark in del.icio.us but not to write about. That page uses RSS Digest to generate the html dynamically from the del.icio.us rss feed, and the list of blogs is generated automatically from my subscriptions at Bloglines, which is the web-based aggregator I use to read weblogs. It is extremely cool that there are all of these services out there that can be used in this building-block fashion to cobble sites together - definitely an example of Levi-Strauss' bricolage:

To elaborate on his definition of mythical thought, Levi-Strauss drew an analogy to "bricolage": "Mythical thought is therefore a kind of intellectual 'bricolage'" (p. 17). The French verb, "bricoler," has no English equivalent, but refers to the kind of activities that are performed by a handy-man. The "bricoleur" performs his tasks with materials and tools that are at hand, from "odds and ends." He draws from the already existent while the engineer or scientist, according to Levi-Strauss, seeks to exceed the boundaries imposed by society. "The scientist creating events (changing the world) by means of structures and the 'bricoleur' creating structures by means of events" .

- from Janine Mileaf on Levi-Strauss, "Science of the Concrete"

Update

I realized when I looked at the link to my old home page that I hadn't changed anything there in years, so I removed the link to my old home page from the weblog, and I've made the weblog synonymous with my home page. I guess that means the blog is my online home. Well, duh.

I've just perused the announcements of the new Apple gear that Steve Jobs must've announced this morning at MacWorld (why did they decide not to broadcast the session?).

The coolest new thing in my view is the Mac Mini - a G4 Mac that's 6.5 inches square and 2 inches high for $500 - wow! (no keyboard or monitor included). I think this will sell a whole bunch for personal media servers, low cost web servers, etc.

The iPod Shuffle is a flash-memory based iPod with 512 MB or 1 GB of capacity. It's got features that many people may like that grab random tunes from iTunes playlists and play them in random order. The feature that I really like is that it plugs right into a USB port.

iWork is the bundling of the new version of Keynote with a new word processor called Pages. These might be useful for lots of folks. I'm still astounded that Keynote doesn't export html files, though the new version exports QuickTime and Flash in addition to PDF. I'm sticking with BBEdit and Eric Meyer's S5 web standards presentation software.

There's also new versions of the iLife programs (iTunes, iPhoto, Garageband, iDVD, and iMovie) and of Final Cut Express.

We had the usual Westwood Advisory Board meeting this morning. It was good to touch base with the OSAF folks, and I finally got to meet Ted Leung face-to-face (after all, he only lives just across the Sound from us on Bainbridge Island).

The agenda from the meeting is here.

Some points of interest were work on Chandler 0.5 is proceding, with a March release planned.

There's a lot of progress on the draft CalDAV standard, and there is an upcoming CalConnect interop test and roundtable meeting in Seattle next week (that we're hosting. We expect to actually see some folks testing initial implementations of CalDAV at that meeting - now thats exciting.

OSAF is working with ISAMET (formerly Cyrusoft) to develop a version of the Apache Jakarta Slide WebDAV server to be a CalDAV server. The intent is that this will end up as part of the main Slide distribution as much as is practical over time.

The Chandler folks are working hard on making it possible for Python developers to develop applications and extensions to Chandler - Ted's experience on the Apache project is particularly relevant in that effort. The plan is to do both a Sprint and a Chandler development tutorial at Pycon 2005.

There was a spirited (if inconclusive) discussion of what the relationship is between Chandler and the current Mozilla calendaring effort which is also working on CalDAV. This is an interesting set of topics, particularly given Mitch's recent blog posting titled When Browsers Grow Up.

It was nice to see Chao, Mitchell, Mitch, Lisa and the rest of the gang - we're likely going to schedule another Chandler-Higher Ed calibration meeting before the next CSG meeting.

I've written before (here and here ) about Duke University's Center for the Study of the Public Domain and their Arts Project Moving Image Contest, where entrants were asked to "create short films demonstrating some of the tensions between art and intellectual property law, and the intellectual property issues artists face, focusing on either music or documentary film."

Jennifer Jenkins from the Center wrote while I was on vacation to tell me that the finalists have been announced and are available on the web here. They can be viewed online and you can pick your favorite entry too.

The finalists include films on topics like:
A documentarian trying to cover army recruiters in the North Carolina Piedmont...
A Polish animator's science fiction vision of music's apocalyptic future...
A college student's efforts to make a Public Service Announcement about the Civil Rights movement..
A dissection of the law behind "Super Size Me"...

I haven't had a chance to view these yet, but I'm really looking forward to checking them out.

Ben Teitelbaum is talking about "From Ma Bell to Your Bell: voice, VoIP, and the Potential Role of Internet2"

The slides are available on the CSG web site.

Ben notes that Voice is the dominant real-time communications medium among homo sapiens - that's a good and worthy observation!

VoIP is not just a cost-saving hack - open standards and the Internet are revolutionizing telecom, forcing new industry structures, architectures, services and applications.

The trends are toward greater empowerment not just of campuses and institutions, but of end users.

There are many ways we can do better than conventional telephony - in fidelity, privacy, presence (who's available now), mobility, integration with IM and video, etc.

Today, campuses using VoIP are talking to each other across the traditional PSTN telephone network. Some campuses are starting to use Internet Telephone Service Providers (ITSPs) for some of this traffic, but that's basically the same thing - aggregating traffic before it goes to the PSTN. There is a fair amount of p2p VoIP traffic with people who've downloaded various software packages like Skype and are using them over Internet2 between campuses.

One possible future might be end-to-end IP transport over Internet2, avoiding the PSTN altogether.

There is an Internet2 committee called VSAC (don't know what it stands for) that is considering whether it makes sense for I2 to provide voice services to its membership - that committee will be issuing a report shortly.

Options they have been considering have included:

- A VoIP routing registry, with gateways at each campus and a centrally managed private directory of phone numbers at each campus, routing intra-I2 calls across the Abilene backbone.

- An exchange point for ITSPs. That might encourage the proliferation and success of smaller ITSP players.

- I2-Mobile (Cellular-WiFi) - work with Verisign, which provides a cellular roaming clearing house used by most of the little cellular providers, They can make the campus WiFi network look like cellular roaming. This could enable people on campus to receive inbound calls through the campus network on their cell phones.

- Voice Disaster Recovery - where surviving members provide PSTN connectivity to school with TDM voice failure.

It will be interesting to see which of these scenarios get recommended in the final report and how this progresses.

Denis Baron
SIP (IETF RFC 3261) - is a Voice Over IP protocol that runs over http. It's an application layer protocol for session initiation and management.

SIP components include User Agents (the usual clients and servers). Gatewaother addresses, like ISDN or H.323. Gateways also tend to translate audio.

SIP is very lightweight to set up conversations, which can then enable SIP agents to communicate directly with each other.

Session Description Protocol (IETF RFC 2327) describes sessions - used for bodies of SIP messages. Used, for example, to specify which codecs are preferred, in which order of preference.

While the SIP REGISTER dialog includes authentication (using http digest authentication) that is typically used today to hard code your user name and password into the phone device, which provides the same level of identity as do traditional telephones, but don't really identify the user. Denis note that the Pingtel phones register themselves as a device and that the future is likely to be in systems that maintain individual user accounts on the phone devices themselves. There's a draft proposal for SIP authenticated identity management.

I'm down at Stanford for the winter meeting of the Common Solutions Group.

Last night Bob Morgan and I went to see the UW Huskies play the Stanford Cardinals in women's basketball. Our colleague Bruce Vincent from Stanford somehow finagled us great courtside seats - unfortunately the UW lost, 74-61. Kayla Burt, one the Huskies stars, sprained her ankle in the second half, and was back playing a few minutes later - how do they do that?

Today's long workshop topic is Voice over IP. I'll be blogging bits I find interesting, but for those who are really interested the workshop is being webcast. From the CSG web page you can find the webcast link by clicking on Next Meeting and then clicking on CSG Workshop Video.

Here's Bob at last night's game.

I like the fact that Microsoft Office 2004 for the Mac has an auto-updater that notifies me when new updates are available. And, being the cautious type that I am, I always click on the "tell me more" button to get some information about what's included in an update.

What do I get?

This update to Microsoft AutoUpdate in Microsoft Office 2004 is part of Microsoft's continued effort to provide the latest product updates to customers.
System requirements

Processor: Mac OS X-compatible processor that is a model G3 or higher.
Operating system: Mac OS X version 10.2.8 or later.
Memory: 256 MB of RAM.
Hard disk: 2 MB of hard disk space.

Absolutely no details about what's included in the update, or why I need to update at all.

That's not good.