Centre for Educational Research and Development, University of Lincoln

Back in November, I posted a six month round up of Learning Lab activity. Here is a round up of the work I’ve been doing since then.

• WordPress: We’re continuing to work with WordPress Multi-User and have rolled it out under the new and permanent domain of http://blogs.lincoln.ac.uk However, if you click on that link you’ll see that you’re asked to login with a Lincoln university username and password. This is because we’ve integrated the blogs with our university user directory and also added a closed (for now?) BuddyPress social networking layer to WPMU. You’ll find more details over on my personal  blog. Although any member of the university staff and student community can sign up for one or more blogs, I’ve only been quietly advocating their use until WPMU is moved off the Learning Lab server this summer and onto a dedicated machine. Needless to say, much of my work has been WordPress-related over the last few months and I’ve tried to blog about anything I’ve learned and experimented with. My work on WordPress has also led to funding from JISC to develop JISCPress, a WPMU-based community platform for the JISC funding process.
• Training: To support the use of the blogs and advocate the use of Web 2.0 software and services in general, I have been working with the Library and Research Office to run regular training workshops where we cover things like RSS, social bookmarking, blogs, wikis and dashboards. In addition, this month, I am also starting an informal blogging ‘interest group’ for staff and students. I hope that people will join the group to learn about blogging and web publishing in general as well as associated technologies and resources. Recently, (finally!) it has been recommended that…

The time would seem to be right seriously and systematically to begin the process of renegotiating the relationship between tutor and student to bring about a situation where each recognises and values the other’s expertise and capability and works together to capitalise on it. This implies drawing students into the development of approaches to teaching and learning.

I hope to contribute to this process by bringing staff and students together to talk about blogging and working and living on the web.

• Mashups: I had hoped to spend more time looking at how simple mashups could be made to create ‘learning objects’ but unfortunately, have rarely had the time. Some excellent examples of educational mashups can been seen by following Tony Hirst’s work at the Open University. I dipped my toes in the water a couple of times with some visualisations of RAE funding allocations and HEFCE grant allocations. I have also been looking at how content from WordPress can be syndicated to other platforms and services and how WordPress data can be enriched for the semantic web and exposed as RDF for mashing up. Both of these latter examples show how I’m trying to view and use WordPress as a technology platform for advancing my understanding of the web and participation on the web, rather than simply a blogging platform.
• XMPP: By treating WordPress as a platform for experimenting with a wider set of technologies and services on the web, I’ve been led to XMPP/Jabber, commonly known as an Instant Messaging (IM) protocol. XMPP has much wider applications that merely IM, and I’ve gone on to set up an eJabberd server on the Learning Lab for future experimentation. My interests are not only realtime communication and an indication of presence among the university community, but also the use of the XMPP PubSub extension to publish and subscribe to content in realtime between servers and therefore services. With the recent announcement by Google of Wave, a product, standard and XMPP-based protocol, I intend to prioritise my work on XMPP over the next few months.
• Virtual Worlds: In the last round of Learning Lab activity, I mentioned that we’d just started to evaluate OpenSim, an open source virtual world application, similar to Second Life. After some initial excitement and drafting a briefing paper for Snr. Management, my interest waned. As an application, it is/was still under heavy development and too experimental to advocate to staff to use in their teaching and research. Also, I’m still not convinced about the relative merit of virtual worlds. The technology, compared to the world of gaming, is unimpressive and the hardware requirements to really enjoy an immersive environment are beyond what is provided to the majority of the university community. I am interested in evaluating virtual worlds with a very specific remit, but it’s on a back burner until someone approaches me with the enthusiasm to take such a project through from start to finish.
• Access Grid: I led and completed a project to tender for and install an Access Grid node at the university. We were approached by the NHS East Midlands Mental Health Research Network, who offered to fund the first node at the university as they have staff working both in and near the university and use it regularly. It’s an excellent resource, now supported by the ICT department. I was told that the documentation on the Learning Lab wiki is the best example that JANET’s Access Grid Support Centre had seen from any university.
• Open Education: I participated on the six-week Mozilla/Creative Commons/P2P University Open Education course, which allowed me to begin to think about digital identity and access management.  Again, I was keen to show how WPMU could help an institution support the development of a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) that put the learner in control. Although I have sketched out some ideas, I have yet to fully implement a demonstrator prototype.
• Mahara: In the last round-up, Julian posted a comment about evaluating Mahara, the open source e-portfolio system. This work as started and we have Mahara running on the Learning Lab. Julian has started blogging about it and I suspect that it will be provided as an alternative to PebblePad at some stage.
• Scriblio: Paul Stainthorp and I have picked up Scriblio again, the WordPress-based Library catalogue discovery tool, and are now actively working on pulling a demonstration together that will show how it could be used on WPMU to create a union platform of branded library catalogues which could then be exposed as RDF, using something like Triplify. I ramble around the subject of this over on my blog. We hope to demo this at the Mashed Library event in July.

Looking back at the first six-month round-up, it’s good to see there is quite a lot of continuation and development of work started almost a year ago. WordPress has provided a focus to my work on the Learning Lab, but I’ve intentionally tried to ensure that it did not blinker my vision of available technologies either. Of the work mentioned on the previous update, a few items have been dropped or mutated. The Library blogs are now running on the main university WPMU platform rather than a separate installation. I have dropped bbPress for the time being, partly because integration with WPMU and BuddyPress was quite fragile but also because I’m not convinced we need to run our own discussion forum at the university.

Increasingly, I’m recommending that people use third-party services as there are some good products available for free or at little cost and the notion of the institution providing and controlling the use of technology is rapidly falling out of fashion. It’s a web 2.0, user-centric world, after all.

The Community Guidelines have been accepted as a useful and necessary addition to university guidance and policy and I have worked with the ICT department on ensuring that the use of Web 2.0 applications hosted by the university are covered in the university’s Acceptable Use Policy. I was also instrumental in writing the Notice and Take Down Policy which has been recently approved. These cover a lot of the applications I run on the Learning Lab as well as the Institutional Repository, which I also work on.

Support is still something I need to work on. I mentioned this in November and have spent time discussing this with colleagues working in the ICT support team. My efforts remain a mixture of classroom visits, training workshops, documentation and a fairly hard rule that people should learn to help themselves whenever possible. I was pleased to see Nick Jackson, a student rep, set up a Get Satisfaction site and will certainly participate there. Hopefully, other colleagues will get involved, too.

I continue to work on the Lincoln Academic Commons and this has recently contributed to us winning funding for Chemistry.FM, another JISC-funded project which I am managing. Among the outcomes of this project, I hope that I’ll be able to contribute to the second CERD book, which we’re currently putting a proposal together for. In my work on the Commons, I am still secretary to the Steering Group for the Institutional Repository and provide support to Neo, the forthcoming student journal and the Occasional Working Paper Series. Both Neo and OWPS, run on the Learning Lab using the Open Journal Systems.

Finally, I notice that I included ‘microblogging’ among the things I intended to look at following my round-up in November. This is an interesting case where microblogging, in my case Twitter, has become so embedded in my daily work that I no longer think of it as something that requires experimentation or evaluation. Of course, the use of Twitter and other microblogging platforms is still fairly new in education, but it no longer feels like a technology project. Success! I am following the development of Laconica, the open source alternative to Twitter and am running it on a server but it still feels too early in its development to devote too much time to it and given the popularity of Twitter I’m not sure what else I could offer by hosting Laconica on the Learning Lab. Personally, I am more interested in considering the use of FriendFeed in education and look forward to Google’s release of Wave. Both of these services, have the potential to change much of the way we communicate, identify ourselves and work on the web.

Now, there’s a statement to end with!