e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Stephen-Downes

  • The Perils of Prediction

    As we watch the spectacle of the jackasses in the mainstream media blithely continue to pretend to know what they’re talking about after being repeatedly and stunning wrong in the predictions of the U.S. Presidential primary, it’s worthwhile to look in the mirror. Stephen Downes has a good report card up for those of us who had the audacity to make predictions in last year’s eLearn Magazine‘s annual crystal ball reading. After giving each of us (including himself) a grade, he muses:

    So that’s it. What did I learn from all this?

    First, that there are two major types of predictions: one, which identifies a current trend, and says it will continue; and the other, that identifies something novel or unexpected. It seems clear that the former predictions are easy and safe and not especially useful. The latter, while not as safe, were much more useful to people.

    There are also different types of predictions. Some predictions speak to attitudes. Others speak to trends (including a subset of these that suggest a trend will go mainstream). And still, others speak of technological or system-wide advances. And finally, the most useful predictions identify side-effects – the result of some unexpected event and development. For example: predicting people will want video is one thing, predicting that it will become popular is another, predicting that Flash video will help video become accessible is another, but predicting YouTube is most useful of all.

    And third, scale is a tricky issue. There were many predictions that will probably come true – some day. But they did not come true in 2007. We want to reward such predictions, because we feel they are accurate, but unless it happens, it’s just another false prediction. Another trend was a slew (the perpetrators won’t be named) who correctly predicted last year’s event or trend.

    Good points all. I try make predictions about areas where I have some personal knowledge of events that maybe not everybody has and to be as aggressive in my predictions as I feel that I realistically can, but I do tend to err on the side of caution.  Sadly, I don’t think I’m nearly smart enough to predict something like YouTube so I generally don’t try to shoot the moon, so to speak. I think it’s good to know one’s own limitations.

  • A New Article Out

    I’ve been so busy lately that I haven’t even had time to post notice that I have a new article published in ALT-N. I’ve been having conversations on and off with Rob Abel about ways to ensure that educational technology standards (and, of course, the educational technologies themselves) are more effectively informed by our developing understanding of best practices in online teaching and learning. More recently, I’ve been having somewhat similar conversations with Seb Schmoller, except in the context of ALT rather than IMS. Coincidentally, Seb sent me an issue of ALT-J that talks about the use of pattern languages to make sure that accepted best practices in online learning are more effectively informed by various cognitive and learning theories, and vice versa. (Longtime readers know that I have a fondness for notion of pattern languages and have even created a category on my blog about applying the concept to education.) As I read the article, it occurred to me that use cases serve a similar bridging function between software users/practitioners and software developers. If you could form a bridge between a pattern language of educational best practices and a body of use cases that describe how software could support those best practices, then you might really have something. Hence, the article.

    As usual, Stephen Downes as a few nits to pick.

    To begin with, he complains about the use of the word “praxis,” which he describes as “just the word ‘practice’ with an attitude.” It’s true that “praxis” is often incorrectly understood as and used interchangeably with “practice,” which is why I usually avoid using it. I chose to use it this time for two reasons. First, the authors of the article on pattern languages used it, so if I chose not to use it I would be creating an inconsistency in language which I would have to take significant word count to explain. More importantly, though, they had used it correctly. Praxis, properly understood, refers to the set of best practices that is empirically derived from practice (as opposed to being the practice itself). It is a kind of experiential-derived theory and is meant to be contrasted to more classical scientific theory. So principles of physics are theory while principles of engineering are (generally) praxis. Or, in this context, principles of education derived from cognitive psychology are theory while principles of education derived from teaching experience are praxis.

    His other complaint is…well…I’m not sure what it is. He writes,

    I’m uneasy with this – it’s hard to articulate why, exactly – but I don’t think software should be designed to ‘do things’ so much as it should be designed to ‘create capacity’. I know that’s not a very clear distinction. But it’s like the difference between ‘process’ and ‘creation’.

    He’s right about one thing. It’s not a very clear distinction. In fact, I have no idea what he’s talking about. The only thing I can think of regarding “creating capacity” is Don Norman’s concept of affordances. But affordances are entirely consistent with use cases. In fact, use cases are an excellent (and commonly used) way to ensure that your software is designed to “create capacity” in the way that users want.

    So I guess I’m still in the dark. If Stephen (or anyone else) wants to couch his criticism in concrete terms that are consistent with the…um…praxis of user-centered software design, then I’ll be happy to respond further.

  • The Blackboard Patent Pledge

    I’m late to the party on the pledge news for a variety of reasons (not the least of which is a recalcitrant DNS server out there in the ether that denied me access to my new blog site for the better part of the last two days…grr). It is gratifying to see that my absence really didn’t matter much. A lot has been written about this in the past few days and I don’t really have anything new to add.

    If you’re playing catch-up on the issue, you’ll want to start with Blackboard’s own page on the patent pledge. Equally important to read and read carefully is the joint statement by the EDUCAUSE and Sakai Foundation boards in response. In posting the letter to the Saki listserv, Sakai Foundation Board Chairman John Norman introduced it with the following warning:

    Bb announced an Open Source Patent pledge today. www.blackboard.com

    In their press release they refer to ‘collaboration’ with Sakai and Educause. Our ‘collaboration’ was to try make it as useful as possible. Since Bb quote selectively from our statement, I reproduce it in full below. It will go up on the Sakai website later today.

    I recommend taking John at his word and read the whole letter, in part because it is very well-crafted and encapsulates a lot of the sentiments–both postive and negative–that have been expressed about the pledge since the announcement. For your convenience, I have reproduced the letter in its entirety “below the fold” in this post.

    Inside Higher Education has a good piece on the story this morning, with quotes from many of the usual suspects as well as a few unusual ones. THE Journal has some good, in-depth quotes from Sakai and Blackboard representatives. Slashdot has picked up the story as well, and includes a few interesting and informative comments. Not covered in any of these are comments from the bloggers you’ll always want to read on this topic, including (but not limited to) Seb, Barry, and Stephen. Also interesting is Elgg developer Ben Werdmuller’s (re)assertion that Bb’s patent wouldn’t cover Elgg anyway.

    Since the community as gotten so good at responding to these issues, I think we should take better advantage of the whole RSS thing and consolidate the various comments for easier consumption. If people blogging on this topic would include “edupatents” as a tag or somewhere in the body of their post text, I would be happy to set up an aggregator on e-Literate that scoops up those posts (and would encourage others to do the same). Let me know if there is interest in this; it would be pretty easy for me to do.

    Now, if you haven’t seen the EDUCAUSE/Sakai statement, keep reading:

    (more…)

  • Blackboard CEO Responds on the Patent Issue

    The gents at EdTechTalk ran a terrific Skypecast discussion last night (archived here) on the Blackboard patent and DOPA. I’ll leave it to others to comment on the discussion itself. What I find interesting is the letter that Blackboard CEO Michael Chasen wrote to our hosts in response to their invitation to join the talk. The full letter is on web page for the Skypecast archive, but here’s an excerpt that I find interesting: (more…)

  • In Defense of Walled Gardens

    I’ve been seeing the phrase “walled garden” a lot in the edublogosphere, and always with a negative connotation. It is a term that seems to carry over from more general usage referring to either media content or wiki pages that are not open to the public. Of course, Walls are Bad, Open is Good. (“Two legs baaaad, four legs gooood!”) I am a general advocate for Openness, particularly when it comes to education. But I think we are in serious danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. (more…)

  • When Worldviews Collide

    About a year and a half ago, I made a plea for people with two very different worldviews–one from an enterprise perspective and the other from an internet perspective–to start talking to each other regarding application design goals. I’m delighted to see that conversation happening right here on this blog. There is a great conversation going on as the result of the little squabble Stephen Downes and I just had. On the one side, you have the proponents of the internet worldview who want less system control and more freedom in their learning environments. On the other side, you have proponents of the enterprise worldview, who want to be able to assure their users of stability, consistency, and privacy.

    This is precisely the tension that the LMOS aims to resolve. By providing a flexible framework based on a solid enterprise architecture and adhering religiously to open, low-barrier-of-entry interoperability standards, we hope to, on the one hand, create an ecosystem in which specialized teaching tools can be developed rapidly in a grassroots way and, on the other hand, enable organizations to selectively lock down parts of the environment as needed based on sound policy drivers such as privacy rights and security.

    Yummy!

  • Stephen Downes Missed the Point

    OK, so Stephen Downes doesn’t like the LMOS:

    I have been sort of sympathetic to the concept of the learningmanagement operating system (LMOS) because, after all, the concept includes things that I favour: distributed resources, user access to the underlying system. But I began to falter when Mark Feldstein said “We don’t just want to offer many different affordances. we want to orchestrate them.” And following his link to Bernie Durfee has sketched out a first use case implementation sent me over the edge. I’ll say it bluntly, and apologize later: this is the most ridiculous thing I’ve seen. Durfee is describing what the rest of understand as ‘upload a file and base a discussion thread on it’. Something I did right here in about 10 seconds today. But he requires J2EE containers, portlet containers, service integration agents, native Java interfaces, a whole mess of stuff. Ridiculous. Absurd! That’s it – if that is what is meant, toast the whole LMOS concept.

    I’m going to ignore the fact that he got my first name wrong. Frankly, I think language like “ridiculous” and “absurd” is unnecessarily hyperbolic when used in reference to a plan that simply articulates a language-specific implementation of fairly widely established standards for enterprise systems in general and enterprise learning frameworks in particular. It’s also not terribly collegial or respectful. And finally, it doesn’t reflect a grasp of the problems we are trying to solve. (more…)