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Bringing the cloud into your LMS

August 26, 2010 – 11:12 am

The Web can be a wonderful place, filled with an un-estimable number of great tools and content that have tremendous teaching and learning potential.  At the same time though, there is so much material on it that is completely inappropriate to have accessable from a learning environment. 

As we move towards digital curricula, more integrated online learning environments, adapt and adopt technologies for use in education, many schools and other educational organisations are implementing Learning Management Systems (LMS’s).  These have been around for quite some time and are mature and very sophisticated applications however they are far from ubiquitous.  This post is for those that use LMS’s and other online learning environments, and those that understand them.

LMS vendors, no matter how good they are and how fast they can roll out new functionality, cannot keep up with the pace of the Web.  New content and services are being introduced at an astounding rate.  There will always be someone who can do something better or something new that is really useful and has great applicability in the classroom.  The best of the vendors recognise this and for some time have allowed plugins, widgets, blocks etc to be integrated into their environments.  Trouble is - they all had their own unique way of doing it so if you are a small tool/service provider, in order to get your tool into their LMS’s, you would have to write custom interfaces for each of the LMS’s you wanted to integrate with (a difficult and costly exercise for small providers).

Enter IMS LTI.  The IMS Global Learning Consortium  (IMS) “is a global, nonprofit, member association that provides leadership in shaping and growing the learning and educational technology industries through collaborative support of standards, innovation, best practice and recognition of superior learning impact.”  IMS has quite a number of technical specifications to support the use of technology within an educational context however three of those specifications form the core of their ‘Digital Learning Services’.  These are:

I will endeavor to look at the broader Digital Learning Services in more detail in a later post but for the moment I am interested in exploring Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI).  LTI allows you to ‘launch’ an external tool from within (typically) an LMS.  There is a great overview of LTI here by Dr. Chuck which is well worth a look at if you want a much better explanation than I can offer.

LTI comes in two flavours (three if Basic LTI Simple Outcomes gets the promotion it deserves!).  These are:

  1. Basic Learning Tools Interoperability
  2. Learning Tools Interoperability

Essentially Basic LTI allows an LMS to ‘launch’ an external tool while full LTI will allow you to launch that tool and return some data back to the LMS from the tool. 

In LTI terminology, an LMS is known as a Tool Consumer (TC). The external tool is known as a Tool Provider (TP).  Tool providers can really be any manner of interesting Web 2.0 style services, content etc, making for great potential teaching and learning opportunities.  A Tool Consumer is not restricted to an LMS either.  An LMS is simply a ‘context’ of a TC.  It could also be a portal or any other type of Web environment that may be used in the delivery of learning.

Security is supported via the use of OAuth.  Using OAuth, teachers/tool providers are able to ensure that only authorised users (eg students) are able to launch and play the tool.

For teachers this is great - often they are restricted in their access to the Web in schools.  You can easily imagine though how getting access to great tools and content and making them available through a safe and secure channel in the LMS could open up the classroom to some fantastic services from the Web.

We have trialled Basic LTI as both a tool consumer and tool provider and are keen to go through the conformance testing from IMS to get listed as compliant.

I can imagine a whole market opening up for small tool providers as they now have access to significant markets via LTI compliant LMS’s that are used by education departments and schools worldwide.

The following is a short video highlighting the experience of one such provider:


Cheers,

Jerry

Posted via email from tech-ed collisions

By Jerry Leeson | Posted in standards | Comments (0)

Common Cartridge in action - some teachers perspectives

July 22, 2010 – 8:57 am

A great video here providing some perspectives from teachers on the use of Common Cartridge and the application of it in Moodle.  The video was taken at a summer school for the ASPECT project in Europe. 


There are some really savvy teachers and others in the support of education in this project.  They really understand what interoperability can achieve and how to adapt content and their teaching/learning environments to meet their needs.  I would love to see examples of their work - I am sure they would stand out as stellar examples of leading practice.  

Posted via email from tech-ed collisions

By Jerry Leeson | Posted in standards | Comments (0)

iLust, iBan, iTry, iHope, iReview

June 30, 2010 – 12:49 pm

So this post can only be about one thing - the iPad. As a review, this isn’t really going to be hot off the press and out as soon as the device itself. They have been around for a month or two now so are old news technology wise. For good or bad though, I walked into a store very soon after they arrived in Australia and they just happened to have three left so I bought one. In this post I am going to describe my experiences with it after owning one for several weeks.
When I first read about the iPad on the Web I must admit I wasn’t really that taken with it. It just looked like a ridiculously over-sized iPhone and didn’t appear to offer much more than its smaller stablemate (in fact, probably less).
Then I had the opportunity to play with one. Let me say there is a huge difference between reading about the iPad and having it in your hands. Unfortunately the one that I had to try out was a demo and there were none available for purchase. Here comes the iLust part. After trying it out for about fifteen minutes or so I was sold. I wanted one. At this time I was very fortunate to be attending a conference related to technology and education and it was great to hear the number of educational organisations that were really interested in the device and what potential it offered for education. These organisations were not simply jumping on a new hyped up device but were looking very seriously at whether or not it had the capability to support delivering better outcomes for their students. They were not seeing it just as a replacement technology but as a transformational one.
As a replacement technology however there are a number of benefits. From a very simple standpoint, as a parent I’d rather see my children carrying one of these around than a pile of textbooks and notebooks and/or a laptop weighing down their ridiculously oversized, overweight backpacks. A fairly trite example I know but all the same…
As a transformational technology, multi-touch, web-enabled, go anywhere devices offer so many new ways of exploring, learning and collaborating, with access to so much amazing information and great services.
At about this time I was also reading about other organisations rejecting these types of devices unless they could effectively modify them and lock them down. There are some very compelling arguments put forward for doing so and it is very informative to listen to why such approaches are needed.
More locally we see a number of trials of iPads in schools, universities etc happening - educators are out there trying.
A disappointing aside however can be the media. I mostly read electronic media and it seems education is dammed if it does and dammed if it doesn’t. I have seen posts criticising education departments for whatever approach they take (jumping on the bandwagon and having a go or working hard to provide a safe secure environment). They are never going to please everyone. However, the education system has many people passionate about education and passionate about making it relevant to the 21st Century and the world in which their students are growing up in. Let’s hope they succeed.
So, enough of the hype and big picture stuff - what about the device itself?
Out of the box it offers some great features. Music, video, photos are all fantastic and what you would expect. The quality of the screen is great. The big improvers over the standard iphone applications though are the mail and calendar functions. They are fantastic. Email in particular is now fun to work with again.
If you are going to use the iPad more seriously (beyond entertainment) then you really need to consider some productivity apps. I downloaded the iWorks apps so I have Pages, Numbers and Keynote available. Now these are really stripped down versions of the desktop apps but for the price you would be foolish not to give them a go.
Pages works great for creating and reading documents on the go. The keyboard doesn’t take all that long to get used to and after a few minutes effort you should be really competent in it. The lack of any tactile feedback creates a bit of a challenge but who knows what may happen in future improvements to this type of device (see this article for one possibility).
The first thing I tried to do in Pages was review a document. To do so I wanted to highlight some excerpts of text but this is not possible (unless you make changes to the text itself). Pages on the iPad works great if you accept and can work within its limitations. I imagine it will only get better and the first version was just getting it out the door and onto the iPad.
Keynote is good to for viewing presentations. I haven’t really tried to create any serious ones but just playing with it gives me the impression that you could comfortably create some quite good ones.
Numbers was a bit of a disappointment for me. The interface just wasn’t quite there and it seemed to ‘clunky’ to work with. Perhaps I didn’t persist for long enough.
The Safari web browser looks great and works well for casual surfing of the Web. It really brings the Web to all parts of the house when at home and has been really useful in that respect. The iPad is far more mobile than a laptop so working in the kitchen, finding recipes, checking out what’s on at the movies, television etc are now very convenient, as is access to all your favourite social networking applications.
It doesn’t take long to discover the constraints though. You can’t search within a web page (something I now realise I do quite often). No flash is a real issue (so Apple the entire Web really isn’t available to you, despite what the ads say). Tabbed browsing is not there which slows things down.
The good news however is you don’t need to stick with Safari. I am now using iCabMobile which is looking to be a great browser. It is quite configurable, has tabbed browsing and you can search within a web page. A definite improvement over Safari.
iBooks is a great book reader. I haven’t really got into electronic book readers but can quite easily imagine myself using this app quite regularly.
The battery life is great. You really do get quite a few hours use out of it. I haven’t timed it exactly but seem to have to recharge only every few days. It does take a while to recharge though.
Since this is a personal device for me rather than a work device (although I have been using it for work as it is very effective when mobile), I have put a few games on it and it is a good gaming platform. There are some really entertaining games out there that exploit the features of the device and this will undoubtedly get better as more games become available.
The Youtube app seems to be configured to your location which is really annoying. Featured, Top Rated etc all seem heavily biased to local content and I can’t find any configuration options to change this (I hope this isn’t what its going to be like in a ‘filtered’ world because I really dislike it - but that’s a whole other story). I prefer, by default, to get global, not local content.
The Maps application is great - the increased size of the screen makes this a great interface to interact with.
Of course you can run your iPhone apps on it too. When run in standard resolution they look small on the screen but there is a x2 ‘button’ that you can press to get into full screen mode. Some apps tend to look a bit ordinary when in this mode but overall they are ok.
Perhaps the best measure of how good the iPad is, is the takeup by the rest of the household. Our iPad is a really ‘in-demand’ device and everyone in the house enjoys using it. Its actually become a scarce resource now and I have to compete for access to it.
I (we) have the wifi only version and this seems to be good enough. Given the size of the device (ie I can’t carry it around in my pocket or hand everywhere), almost all locations where I do go with it have wifi so I haven’t felt compromised by not having the 3g version - after all, most phones now have reasonable web/data interfaces for when you are really mobile and need that sort of access.
The one thing that really annoys me about the iPad is the lack of a (front facing) camera. It would have made it a killer device. FaceTime on the iPad would be awesome - there’s enough screen real estate to do quite effective group video conferencing. Deep down I just know I am going to be annoyed at being an early adopter with Apple again as I am sure the next version will have this in it. I just hope we see an addon camera available for 1st generation iPads.
So there you have it. Aside from the lack of a camera, for me this continues to be a great new device and one which I think is going to get even better as new apps come out that fully exploit it.

By Jerry Leeson | Posted in Educationau, YouTube, technology in education, Apple | Comments (3)

Privacy, a continual vigil

March 30, 2010 – 9:09 am

Just read an interesting post on ZDNet entitled “Facebook’s privacy changes: When will it go too far (and will you even notice)?“. Now I had kind of been aware that Facebook has been tinkering with privacy settings and knew that I should check mine out to see that everything was in order.

One of the reasons I use Facebook is to share photos with my family of my family and I want to protect their privacy (maybe I am kind of foolish to use Facebook to do this). I thought I had locked down my Facebook account enough to be able to participate in networking with friends, colleagues and family at the levels that I wanted. However, the continual changing by Facebook seems to have eroded that completely.

For example, while I thought I had protected my family with the initial basic settings that Facebook used to have, there is now a myriad of privacy settings and the default options for them are anything but private and bear no resemblance to the settings I thought I had in place.
Today I found out that friends can share the following about me through other applications and websites:

* Personal info (activities, interests, etc.)
* Status updates
* Online presence
* Website
* Family and relationship status
* Relationship details (significant other, looking for, etc.)
* Education and work
* My videos
* My links
* My notes
* My photos
* Photos and videos of me
* About me
* My birthday
* My hometown
* My religious and political views

The only option that was turned off was my photos however inspecting settings for them I was surprised at the number of levels I had to lock down to really keep them private too. The last thing I want is for Facebook to allow anyone or any application to share my birthday as that is a major identity risk but there it is. Other personal identifying information that Facebook has should be fully and very clearly under my control. Location information too is something that I want full control of over when and how I share it however any number of other services seem to have this information available to them without my knowledge or approval.

There is an option to edit blocked applications but I can only see what applications I have blocked, not what others are accessing my information that I don’t know about, have forgotten or otherwise.

I urge all Facebook account users to check their privacy settings out just to ensure you understand what information you are giving away and try to think about the implications of that. The same applies for other social networks that you are using but Facebook does know a lot about us.

There are some that would say we lost our privacy sometime ago and just need to accept it. However, our society is far from perfect and there is a need for us to be aware of the implications of how information about us can be used in ways that enhance our lives or to harm us. We need to manage that information to the best of our abilities and ensure that those who are custodians of information about us, protect that information and only use it in ways that we understand and approve.

By Jerry Leeson | Posted in Educationau, social networking, facebook, privacy | Comments (0)

Review of IDEA10: “Learning Futures: Technology Challenges”

March 15, 2010 – 10:12 am

I was fortunate enough to attend this year’s !DEA conference (IDEA10) last week and my first impressions of it were ‘what a long way it has come over the last few years’. What started out as a lab where content and application developers got together a few years ago to test how they could move learning content from one application to another, along with some presentations on areas of interoperability has now emerged as a very important conference. As some of the speakers stated, discussions on interoperability and technical standards can cause many an eye to glaze over but when you look at what they are enabling, and the fantastic outcomes for education that they can and are achieving, you realise just how important this work is.

Day 1 of the conference was the IDEALab Workshop. In the morning we looked at the Systems Interoperability Framework (SIF) and the work that is happening around the country as school education jurisdictions work together to solve common interoperability problems.

After lunch we looked at the consultation work Link Affiliates has been doing for DEEWR in supporting the DER. These areas included:

  • 21C Curriculum Content
  • W3C Accessibility guidelines
  • Curriculum description
  • Lesson Plans
  • Content discovery and exchange
  • E-portfolio technologies
  • 21C Learning Environments

Following this we had a detailed session on Accessibility and the WCAG 2.0 (Web content accessibility guidelines). A demonstration on accessibility really highlighted for me just how much consideration really needs to be put into making your web content properly accessible.

The ‘Technology in Education Open Forum’ began on day 2 and this was a really interesting day. The scene was really set in the panel session from a group of educators talking about what they want from technology to support and enhance the work that they are doing. Following this session a number of panels looked at how they, as infrastructure developers, providers etc are working towards providing the types of environments that our educators need. Another panel of educators then responded to the earlier sessions and discussed what was needed so that they could use these environments. Following this was a session which looked at some of the amazing work that is taking place - unfortunately I missed this session as I had some other duties to attend to.

Finally, we had the IMS GLC Learning Impact Awards Regional Finalist Showcase. A number of initiatives were showcased and I would love to have seen them all however I was representing one of those initiatives and there was no time for me to get to see the others.

On day 3 we had an international perspective from IMS GLC and ADL. These two standards organisations are doing some great work and gave fantastic insights into the work they are doing at the leading edge. What came through for me is that standards really do provide a platform for innovation.

Finally we had the Winners of the Regional Learning Impact Awards and congratulations must go to Peter Higgs and his team at the Tasmanian Polytechnic and Skills Institute for the work they have done on Mobile Assessment and Online Recognition using QTI solutions. They are very deserving winners. I am also really pleased to say that we were runners up to them and took out the “People’s Choice Award” for the work that we have been doing developing personal and professional development social networking environments using our tool - Fused. A big thank-you to all who participated.

By Jerry Leeson | Posted in Educationau, interoperability, standards, SCORM, innovation, IMS GLC, accessibility | Comments (0)

a global infrastructure for sharing learning resources

February 24, 2010 – 8:41 am

Here’s a great little article on working towards creating a ‘global infrastructure for sharing learning resources‘. The article, on the Creative Commons wiki, discusses what you, as a repository or content owner might like to think about should you want to make your content discoverable and sharable as open education resources (and why wouldn’t you). Of course, it isn’t necessarily limited to OER - it outlines good practice and considerations for other types of resources.

Firstly, you need a consistent way of structuring the information about your resources (title, author, description and so on). This descriptive information, known as metadata (data about data) should be created conforming to one of the many metadata standards. The OER team who put the article together recommend Learning Object Metadata (LOM) or Dublin Core Metadata (DC). LOM metadata is used to describe a particular type of learning resource known as Learning Objects while DC metadata is a more general purpose metadata specification used to describe a wider variety of learning resources.

Once you have described your resources you need to make them more discoverable. There are a few ways you can do this. The OER folk suggest that you allow it to be ‘harvested’ (collected by a special computer program and stored in a centralised repository along with metadata from other repositories). This is similar to the way Google and other search engines collect information about your website. There are standards for harvesting too. The Open Archives Initiative - Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is perhaps the most well known specification for harvesting while more generalised Web specifications such as RSS and Atom might also be worth considering in some situations.

Harvesting your data into a centralised repository is one way of making your resources more discoverable. Another way may be to participate in a real-time federated search whereby a search service will make multiple simultaneous search request over a number of repositories. The OER article recommends harvesting over federated searching and there are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, it is more efficient and more scalable, but also helps enable richer search functionality (it is easier to develop and implement advanced search features in one place than potentially many).

GLOBE, another initiative dedicated to making educational resources more discoverable and sharable also recommends the approaches and specifications put forward in the OER article. GLOBE however does recognise that there are instances where there may be business rules in place that prevent harvesting and is looking at the SQI specification. A number of GLOBE partners have implemented SQI.

By Jerry Leeson | Posted in Educationau, search, metadata, standards, Creative Commons | Comments (0)

Are you living your education or recording it?

January 28, 2010 – 12:02 pm

In the first post related to this topic, I started to think about the impact that lifestreaming may be having on our lives. I was particularly interested in some of the psychological aspects of what might be occuring. For example, are we ’stepping out of the now’ and simply becoming observers of our own lives and not experiencing them to their full potential? Is the way we want to be perceived by others having an impact on what we do and how we would like to be observed behaving?

That post was primarily concerned with the broader aspects of our lives and lifestreaming. Now I would like to look at the impact on our education, our lifelong learning journey. How many of us are on Twitter and regularly receive tweets from others who are pushing out little snippets and highly abbreviated quotes from lectures, conferences, seminars etc that they are attending? Do you do it yourself? I have tried but when I think about it, how was it really helping my development since that was what I was there for?
How much of an impact is tweeting from a lecture theatre really having on other people’s development? After all, those followers are getting mere snippets from an ‘observer’ in a lecture theatre somewhere who is living a different context to them with different understandings - terms, ideas etc may be clarified in the lecture that aren’t passed on by our avid twitterers.

The term ‘deep learning’ often comes up in discussions I hear on the benefits of collaborative learning and ‘constructivist’ approaches to teaching and learning with avid Web 2.0 colleagues but really how much deep learning is taking place by our twitter friends sitting in a lecture theatre tweeting away on their mobile or laptop. Are they absolutely engaged in a (collaborative) learning process or acting as some sort of heavily filtered conduit to a broader audience that itself, is more than likely only passively and intermittently engaged as those tweets briefly flash across their Twitter client along with all manner of inane observations of other partiallly experienced events?
As Professor Barry Schwartz, professor of social action and social theory at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania is quoted as saying in the CNN post ‘Do digital diaries mess up your brain?‘,

…Constant documenting may make people less thoughtful about and engaged in what they’re doing because they are focused on the recording process…

OK, so you’ve attended a lecture or series of lectures and at some point in the future you need to review it - supposedly you really do want to understand some of the important concepts ‘delivered’. What do you do? Rather than taking notes you had posted a bunch of tweets but that was sometime ago in your prolific lifestream, which by its nature is in chronological order - not necessarily the best for what you need to do. If you were lucky you may have used some hashtags but were they related to a concept you are interested in, the subject, the course, the conference hashtag?

Not trying to bag Twitter here but just trying to point out that possibly we are not as immersed as we could be when we are trying to learn. Twitter is after all just one example and there are many others that take us ‘out’ (to an extent) of our learning experiences. We maybe recording it using any number of devices - cameras, phones etc. First-person point-of-view (POV) devices may be an exception here as they interfere less with the experience (ie you don’t have to be consciously engaged in the act of recording as well as learning/experiencing) and a number of educators are experimenting with these devices to support learning and assessment. They do seem quite well suited to supporting some forms of assessment - but that is demonstrating competence or prior learning rather than the learning itself.

As we, as either educators or learners (not that educators are not learners themselves) become more embroiled in technology, it is important that we consider and understand the impact of how we are using that technology and its effect on our learning. We do not want to become mere observers and/or recorders of learning experiences. I am not saying that this sort of thing is a bad thing - merely that we need to be aware of the impact of what we are doing and whether we are really achieving all that we want to. As John Sutter found, it is important not to take on too much and he advises ‘tracking one thing at a time’.
If we are careful about how we go about it, understanding the implications of what we are doing, then ‘lifestreaming’ parts of our education could turn out to be a very useful part of our lifelong learning journey.

By Jerry Leeson | Posted in Educationau, Web 2.0, Twitter | Comments (2)

Are you living your life or recording it?

January 27, 2010 – 2:53 pm

In this, the first of two posts on the subject I am going to examine the impact that ‘lifestreaming’ may be having on some of our experiences. I have been thinking a bit about this in relation to education for some time but a really interesting post on the lifestream blog on the psychology of lifestreaming and the effect that it may be having on your brain/your life has rekindled that interest. In the second post, I will concentrate more on the implications for learning.

So what is lifestreaming? From the lifestream blog:

In it’s simplest form it’s a chronological aggregated view of your life activities both online and offline. It is only limited by the content and sources that you use to define it.

The lifestream blog post basically reviews two interesting stories by CNN on lifestreaming. “Do digital diaries mess up your brain” starts to discuss the impact such services may have on your brain and then looks at some of the psychological implications of it. It seems there are both positive and negatives. The psychological aspects discussed are quite interesting. There is the view that the act of lifestreaming ‘takes you out of the here and now’. You stop experiencing life and start recording it. An example is given of people tapped into their mobiles (twittering, messaging, snapping photos etc I guess) as they are at a concert. Many of us have seen this and I am guessing quite a number of us have done something similar. What are we doing here? Are we really experiencing our lives as best we can or have we stepped to one side and are now some sort of observers of them?

The CNN article also looks at further implications such as potential benefits from lifestreaming for Alzheimer patients. After all, having a secondary memory to call upon when your primary one is not doing the job sounds quite good!

What about your own experiences? Have you forsaken the full benefits of experiencing events etc in your life so that you can record them or tweet about them? If so, do you think stepping out of those experiences so that you could record them or communicate about them, in any way detracted from the experiences themselves? We have probably all been doing this (on occasion) for most of our lives (eg taking photos at parties, on vacation etc) but now we have these ubiquitous technologies that enable us to instantly let the world know what we are experiencing (or at least recording) wherever we are.

So ‘taking us out of the here and now’ is one aspect of what we are doing. We become less engaged and immersed in these experiences as we strive to record them or tell the world (at least what miniscule parts of it could be bothered to listen) about them. What is the impact of that diminished involvement? Are you affecting just yourself or others who are also sharing that experience eg what do your family, friends, colleagues etc think and are you in any way diminishing or altering their experience?

What about your behaviour? If you are streaming to the world all sorts of information about you, is that in any way going to affect what you do? You may want to be perceived in a certain way so you might have to adjust your behavior to create that perception. How do you choose what you ‘tweet’ about. Many social networks and Web 2.0 services allow us to publish and expose parts of our lives. For example, books that we read, goals and ambitions that we have. How we want to be perceived will impact what we express in these networks.

Do you try to separate your personal self from your professional self? For example, I know quite a few people who struggle with who they should let into their Facebook network (personal friends, family, work colleagues and other professional contacts). What is the resultant impact on your behaviour - are you living completely as you or as the ‘you’ that you want to be perceived as? How do you or do you even feel the need to draw the distinction any more between personal and professional? (some do and some don’t).

The other CNN article that the lifestream blog mentions is ‘My week of recording a ‘digital memory’. In this article the reporter aims to document every moment of their life for a week. This is right at the extreme end of lifestreaming but is also quite an interesting experiment. On his experience, John D Sutter says:

My issue is that when you set out intentionally to create an e-memory of everything, you end up with too much stuff — and you miss out on living.

One of his tips is not to record everything:

I used an iPhone to record most of the week’s activities. The phone’s built-in audio recorder proved particularly annoying to my friends. I put the recorder on the table at lunches, flipped it on during car rides and stuck it in friends’ faces at bars.
In every instance, the recorder changed the dynamics of my conversations.
It made them weird.
One friend became so nervous about the fact that I had recorded him talking about relationships that he later texted me in a panic — asking me to delete the file.

This affirms my previous concerns about affecting the experiences of others.
From his experiences, Sutter also recommends only tracking one thing at a time. Taking on too much is too difficult and left him feeling ’scatterbrained’. The post is an interesting read and he has some nice little insights into the experience.

While it is unlikely that any of us are streaming so much of our lives into the digital world (yet), it is still very useful to perhaps sit back and reflect on what we are doing and the impact it may be having on ourselves and others around us (and then blog about it ;) )

By Jerry Leeson | Posted in Educationau, Web 2.0, social networking, Twitter, privacy | Comments (1)

Only 10% of IPV4 addresses remain unallocated!

January 25, 2010 – 1:09 pm

From the Internet Society of Australia (ISOC-AU), comes this important message:
‘ISOC-AU has been requested to help publicise the following
announcement from the Number Resource Organisation, that the Internet
has reached the point where less than 10% of IPv4 remain unallocated.
Please circulate this announcement as widely as possible.’

‘ISOC-AU has taken a leading role nationally and
internationally in raising awareness of IPv6 and supporting discussion
since we established the ISOC-AU IPv6 Special Interest Group in 2005.
Since then, it has pursued the following major activities to help
build understanding of IPv6:

  • annual Australian IPv6 Summits - http://www.ipv6.org.au/summit/
  • IPv6 for e-Business - http://www.ipv6.org.au
  • supporting development of the Australian Government IPv6 transition strategy which will provide for full implementation of IPv6 on Australian Government services by 2012
  • participation in the international IPv6 Forum and global IPv6 Summits and events representing Australia
  • membership of the Asia Pacific IPv6 Task Force representing Australia
  • regular updates to the National ICT Industry Alliance on IPv6 - see http://nictia.org.au’

So…. what to do about it. There is quite a bit of information on the Web about IPV4 and IPV6. TCP-IP is the commincations protocol that the Internet uses - you may have occasionally seen numbers like http://66.102.11.99 appear in your browser instead of domain names (www.google.com). IPV4 is the addressing system in place at the moment and what the Number Resource Organisation is telling us is that only 10% of those addresses are left available.

What is potentially problematic is determining exactly when they will run out. Geoff Huston has developed an interesting model for predicting when we will run out and you can see the updates on that prediction here. So, at the time of this post, it appears to be somewhere between 8th September 2011 and 31st August 2012. This isn’t an exact science though and there are many factors that could impact this.

Governments and other important Internet related organisations around the world have been working on this problem for a long time and are looking at implementing a new addressing scheme (IPV6) which greatly expands the number of available addresses. What we need to do now is start monitoring these developments and planning migrations to the new environment. Most likely your technology providers will know about this and have strategies or plans in place. You might like to check with them at some point though.

By Jerry Leeson | Posted in Educationau, IPv6 | Comments (1)

Tweak the tweet: a lesson in standards development

January 20, 2010 – 8:36 am

This should be interesting for all those interested in standards development. Standards development for me is all about consensus building (to state the bleeding obvious) but the way consensus (or at least more or less general agreement) is reached on many of our standards can take months or years even. A justification for the standard may be developed, use-cases created, issues are examined in intricate detail by experts. There can be ‘raging’ academic debate over minor nuances in terms and expressions. Email lists play host to (sometimes) furious and boisterous? discussions between leading proponents of obscure points of view. Drafts are published, votes are taken, there may even be a face-to-face meeting in some exotic location. Editors are engaged to produce faultless works of academic excellence and the standard may eventually be published (with an appropriately important looking version number) to some obscure website tucked away behind a payment gateway and safely out of reach of its intended audience.

Actually, some standards are even open (need to carefully define what open means here) to the ‘public’ - or at least free to access if you can find them. Using, or implementing them can also be a major challenge. The pursuit of academic excellence and absolute correctness leaves us with documents that are incredibly difficult for us mere mortals.

OK- enough of the satire, but hopefully it illustrates a point or two. Many of our standards do take quite some time to develop and experts have to be employed to ensure that this often difficult work gets done correctly. Usability is also a concern for some of us who have tried to implement various (not all) standards and specifications.

Now, getting to the point of this post - crowdsourcing and the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ is becoming quite well accepted. The ability to get things done very quickly using the power of the Web and the enthusiasm of the crowd is amazing to watch. What has this got to do with standards?

Well…take a look at what is going on over at Project Epic. From their website, Project Epic are:

information scientists, computer scientists and computational linguists at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of California, Irvine. We specialize in societal transformation in conjunction with technology use; computer-mediated communication studies; software engineering and architectures; information security; network security and computational linguistics with a deep commitment to understanding the domains for which we design and study.

So what are they up to and what have they done? The ReadWriteWeb blog has this great post on Project Epic’s ‘Tweak the Tweet’ initiative where they have got together with a bunch of hackers from around the world to create a new hashtag syntax for Twitter for use in emergencies such as that in Haiti. From the RWW post, the syntax is pretty easy to learn and gives a few examples:

Every tweet should contain at least one main tag like #need [explain need], #offering or #injured [name]. You can find a full list of main tags here. In addition, tweets can also have data tags like #name [name], #loc [location] or #contact [email, phone etc.]. These tweets can also contain often used keywords that don’t need the hashtag sign like food, supplies, road, hospital or help.
Examples

Here are some real-world examples of this new syntax being used in Haiti:

* #haiti #need security #loc General Hospital PAP #contact @thehatian
* #haiti #need water #loc Orphanage Foyer de Sion #contact @robinbauer #src @AnnCurry
* Can you deliver beans rice water to orphanage? #Haiti #Need Food #Contact: @childhopeintl #Loc: Delmas 75, Rue Cassagnol #14, PaP BLESS YOU

The Project Epic website has more details on the initiative here. This ’standard’ of course is not a real one as it hasn’t gone through all the ratification processes by formally recognised standards bodies yet, like many other examples, may become a defacto standard - one which the crowd actually intentionally uses. The Twitter hashtag itself and other elements of Twitter (eg DM, @ etc) are other great examples.

Now, it should be said that we use standards and specifications all the time without even knowing it - I wouldn’t even be able to count or identify the number of standards in place to support the writing of this post for example - but I am not intentionally using all of them. Like many great standards they are just there, implemented somewhere in the background enabling me to post something that could be read almost instantly in almost any place in the world. However, in writing this post, I have only used two bits of a standard (I should say that for this post I am not distinguishing between a standard and a specification) intentionally and overtly - the rest are behind buttons etc in my wysiwyg HTML editor. They have been the italic tag and the break tag in HTML.

Back to the twitter tags, something has to be said about the willingness of the crowd to intentionally and quite willingly use those ’standardised’ tags, and that is their simplicity and usability.

‘Tweak the Tweet’ looks like a great initiative and it will be interesting to see how it is adopted. In a disaster situation it will be interesting to see if those involved have the poise to remember its syntax when they are sending out their tweets. I guess the real use will be by applications that may be developed to support their use. They have been developed so that computer applications can easily interpret the tweets so we need applications that can support both the creation of the tweets and the reading of them (I feel an iPhone application coming on).

So now to the really important point of this post - how long has it taken to develop this ’standard’? Really it has happened ‘in the blink of an eye’ when compared to general standards development. Likewise with Twitter tags in general. The crowd is able to build consensus incredibly quickly when the need arises and as can be seen, it is quite good stuff. It is relevant, easy to use and can have amazing adoption rates. The RWW post even mentions the word ‘metadata’ - Amazing! Normally I would expect any standard or specification involving ‘metadata’ would take an age to develop. There are some important lessons to be learned here for standards developers. While many standards and specifications require enormous amounts of rigour and examination, it is interesting for us to look at what can be achieved in a very short period of time when the need arises and we have a motivated ‘crowd’.

By Jerry Leeson | Posted in Educationau, metadata, Twitter, standards | Comments (1)