Martin Weller’s book 25 Years of Ed Tech is a great people’s history of educational technology, covering the major innovations over the last 25 years. He published it through the Athabasca University Press under a Creative Commons License. As a result it’s been adopted by the edtech community, who have produced an audiobook version, as well as a “between the chapters” discussion series.

Chapter 7 is on Learning Objects, read by Brian Lamb. I was part of the Between the Chapters discussion for the chapter, with Brian Lamb, John Robertson and myself1, hosted by Laura Pasquini.

One of the things we talked about was the permanence/impermanence of online content. I’ve snagged a copy of the discussion .mp3 for the inevitable future when Transistor.fm shuts down. In the meantime…

And the original chapter:

This transcript was automatically generated by YuJa.

Between the Chapters, a weekly podcast discussion focusing on a chapter of the book, 25 Years of EdTech, written by Martin Weller. 

Here’s your host, Laura Pasquini. Welcome. 

We’re at chapter seven, the year 2000, Learning Objects. I’m here with Brian Lamb, D’Arcy Norman, and John Robertson. 

Thank you, lads, for joining the chart today. 

Talk about this chapter. Well, what are y’all thinking about Learning Objects? My thinking has evolved on learning objects. 

I mean, back in the day, we were kind of the advocates for it. We were building the platforms, we were giving conference presentations, learning objects for the future. 

And yeah, I think through our experience, it’s like, yeah, maybe it’s not about content and metadata and copyright, maybe there’s something else going on here. So yeah, I think my thinking has evolved over the last couple of decades. Fair enough. 

D’Arcy, evolution is bound to happen. Brian, you had a really cool title back in the day. My first actual job, so I had taught with some online teaching in Mexico, but my first Canadian jobs were learning objects. So for two years, I was supposed to find learning objects at Tech PC, and then at UBC, I actually had the job learning object project coordinator. And that was kind of my first serious job, so to speak, in Canada. So in many ways, very fortunate because nobody knew what it was and there wasn’t a whole lot there, so in many ways it was an opportunity to really kind of define the job as you went. All right, let’s do the favor for an audience because I don’t know who’s tuning in for whatever purpose. There may not be people in ed tech listening, so what the heck is a learning object? Who wants to take that one? John? Great. 

Great. Okay, so I’m going to hold up a prop, which I’ll always have to explain, but if I was trying to capture the idea of a learning object, 1995, Neil Stevenson, the Diamond Age, has this basic premise in it of this thing called the Young Ladies Illustrated Primer and it is this piece of technology that in the story a young waif picks up and it teaches her everything about the world both in terms of science and technology, but also how to be a better person. If I was trying to capture learning objects, something of the idea and the enthusiasm was the idea that you could create this thing like a piece of shareable code in programming, that could help people learn. And you could have intelligent agents that would stitch it all together, and someone could self-treater themselves, and the world would be wonderful. And there’ll be opportunities, these educational opportunities for everybody. And you just had to build the pieces, like the Lego blocks as mentioned in the chapter, and that will be it. You describe it properly and build it, and then everybody has it, and you don’t have to build it again. How do we break that down for non-technical folks? Because literally this chapter says it’s built and borrowed from software, object-oriented programming. How did you bring that to the layperson at your campus, Brian? Well, as Martin talks about in the chapter, or the most common definitions were so vague. And I think Wiley had a line that literally describes any entity or concept in the known universe. Like it was like anything digital or non-digital that can support learning. Because you had to make it that wide eventually because if you did anything narrower, if somebody could, well, what about, well, what about, and you go, oh yeah, okay, that could be a learning object too. And so that was really harsh. Back then, I don’t know if D’Arcy and John remember it differently, but there was kind of a tension between the quote-unquote kind of serious learning technology people who were about the standards and the structure, and we got to build this thing almost on an engineered, specified kind of rigor. And we got to have learning objectives built into it, and we got to define our average semantic density, which was an actual learning object metadata field that you had to define. And then you had people and I kind of gravitated to these that were kind of more like, no, we just want to share stuff and we want to be able to work together and we want to learn and like, let’s get on with it. And, you know, and, you know, I remember Scott Leslie wrote a blog post called sharing or planning to share versus just sharing. And I think it was because he had been through at three years of meetings where people were like writing documents and stuff to promote sharing, But there wasn’t any actual sharing happening in part because no one could understand the specifications and at the same time we were starting to blog and it was like I was just taking D’Arcy stuff and I was just You know, I was just taking Josie Fraser stuff, you know, see like, you know, I could there’s this person in the UK She does cool stuff I can take her stuff and she’s cool with it and we didn’t need a space this back so that kind of became this uh, kind of divergence there, I think. It was kind of like a friendly skirmish between like the archivists where we must have metadata and it must be managed. And so if somebody’s looking for something, they get what we think they’re looking for and friendly skirmish with the teachers who always have the drawer full of stuff that they share and they don’t care what it’s described or what’s the label on the file folder. And so there’s this culture shock where they hit together. And a lot of the early repository work that I was involved with was very much about, well, let’s make sure as this branch of the semantic density, I still don’t know what that is. But making sure we’re describing, you know, how complex is this thing? Which educational context can it be used in? 

educational context can it be used in? And so things like we had a university in Southern Alberta was one of the bigger users of our repository for a while. And they were publishing things like photos of Richardson ground squirrels and red tail hawks. And is that a learning object? Well, it kind of is, but they’d also add the species name. So you could actually, if you’re looking for, you know, whatever species and genus, it’ll it’ll find the thing. 

They would geotag it. Back in the early 2000s, they would put GPS coordinates in. So you could actually find things near an area, what kind of species coexist, and then those could be used in the context of teaching. 

Absolutely learning objects. 

But yeah, it was like, well, how do you actually describe this stuff? Is there a field that can have it in there? And who gets access to it? Who can edit it? Who can make something new with this photo of a ground squirrel? Can you put that in a presentation and share the presentation and there was a lot of effort spent about that. Who was the copyright for the photo and who owns the copyright of the derivative works and that kind of sucked a lot of the energy into those conversations as opposed to, hey, I’m doing this cool thing with these photographs and look, they’re on a map and we’re doing field trips with it basically, the pedagogical aspect to it kind of got ignored sometimes. ignored, or people tried to define it and limit it. 

ignored, or people tried to define it and limit it. That great thing of, well, how is this going to be used? 

this going to be used? And every possible use end of the sun had to be accounted for. I do think there was a conversation about the impulse to share and building structures to share, whether or not they worked. 

They’d kind of set the groundwork for a lot of things are going to come and leave the chapters with open content or mentioned it to. Yeah, and one of those, you know, kind of hard conversations was interoperability, and that was a thing then. Like, I think we take it for granted now that most things that render in a browser render on people’s browsers. 

I mean, and I think we’ve gotten used to the idea that we can send someone a link to somebody else’s stuff, or we can all be on different kinds of machines and still have a conversation like this one. That wasn’t something you could take for granted back then. 

Even within your own institution, somebody could spend a lot of time building a piece of media and nobody’d be able to run it even within their own groups. This kind of discussion about getting on the same page with what we were doing, it was a hard one because that naturally bounds things and who decides what’s the way to approach it and ultimately some people aren’t going to like those decisions. So, that’s where a lot of those tiresome arguments came out of were very sincere and passionate beliefs about what learning media could be or should be. Now, so this was the early 2000s, the early 00s and we were solving in some sense is a different problem that doesn’t really exist now. You couldn’t drag a file into a browser and have it exist on the internet. Well, slow down. 

For the kids who didn’t hear that, you could not drag and drop your files to go into the place on the web. D’Arcy, tell us more about those times. 

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it was a different era. 

So you have to know FTP, you have to know permissions on Unix service to make sure everyone could read the folder that you just uploaded. What’s the URL for that? All this kind of crazy stuff. Now you literally just drag something in your browser and you’re done. So a lot of the repository work was solving the problem. 

How does a teacher or a student upload that photo of a, of a, of a Hawk. Well, okay. Do we teach them how to use anarchy and the FTP programs, or here’s an upload button, upload it to the repository platform, this application. 

Now it’s online. It’s got a URL and this other stuff happens behind the scenes. So in a sense, it was solving a problem that doesn’t really exist anymore. Although anticipating problems that we still haven’t done very well. Cause the idea too was they were trying to build systems that we would theoretically still be able to use now. 

The idea was long-term preservation too and I don’t think we’re very good at that even now. I mean the number of things that died from two years ago is still a significant issue. 

I think one other piece of it was that I know that the cost of producing you know quote-unquote fancy learning objects or whatever that looks like you know complex simulations that kind of thing. I know the cost of that has gone down and you know now my daughter can you know do stuff that people spent months developing and she can do stuff in an evening, but at the same time it’s like there was there was idea of like, okay, we can build this once and it’s really expensive, but then we can share it and everybody can use it so everybody can have this wonderful interactive. And it’s really interesting both in terms of how that kind of got the problem right and wrong in terms of what teaching looks like. But one of the other things with that that’s really interesting is the way that those projects succeeded. 

So there are still projects, still a initiative in the UK that is sharing simulations around hairdressing. 

It was an incredibly successful project for community colleges around hairdressing and kind of creating these, well at the time probably flash objects to help people learn how to be hairdressers. 

Interesting kind of, one of the problems we’re trying to solve is permanence. So you put something online and we know it’ll exist 10, 20, 30, 50 years from now because we want these things to exist. What happened is we had, in the case of our repository, we had like 30,000 pieces of content objects. When the server got turned off, all those just went poof. 

So yeah, they were permanent until the server got turned off, but there was a single point of failure there. What was really fascinating, so we had this national repository project in Canada called Eddy Source, and there was tons of meetings talking about specifications and interoperability. 

If we have all these things, repositories that you can talk to each other, you can find things all over the place. And I remember Steven Downs at one of the meetings was like, guys, we might be overthinking this. There’s a thing called Google and it actually can access all kinds of things. You can type in something and it’ll just find it. And we’re like, that’s crazy talk. We need to have specifications. We need to have APIs and all of this. Well, we’re not gonna deal with that. The funny thing is Google and people just publishing stuff online is what’s working now, even though the vast majority of repositories are essentially gone. So, all of you have said things that exist in my world of library science. I’m a secret librarian. I know enough to do well with digital preservation, archival, repositories, metadata. Where were the librarians in any of this conversation back in the early 2000s? Because I think you all possess these secret skills as well to do this because you’re thinking about interoperability, you’re thinking about preservation, you’re thinking about long-term sustainability, and that’s really what some of my colleagues back in the iSchool do. So were they in these conversations because I didn’t see them in this chapter So I also at this point need to out myself as a librarian of some kind I Think The two comments the the nicest way to put it is that there were sometimes librarians involved and they tried to solve the wrong problem Okay The the the other way to pick up put it from the time for many educational and learning technology projects, was that the quickest way to kill an e-learning project was to have librarians involved. Because the perspective of something had to work and had to work quickly and had to be just usable, met the perspective from a library standpoint of, okay, we’re planning, we’re building a system that is going to work for, you know, the next 500 years is going to be usable. 

And also apart from that has to fit in with everything we’ve done for the past 500 years. 

I’m exaggerating a little bit, obviously. So I think there was a parallel skill set, but the institutional culture didn’t translate. 

It kind of was an early example of some of the cultural distinctions we still see now like librarians were definitely very prominent actually in that in those initiatives in Canada that edu source initiative one of the uh strands of that was a thing called can core which was it’s we we had our own metadata standard which it wasn’t was actually just a derivation of the dublin core but it was an attempt to simplify it and uh make it a little more practical in the canadian context so a lot of them the meetings were actually led by librarians and archivists And they actually probably did the most they could actually get things out, you know, like they actually did publish things which is more than you can say for a lot of the other stuff and then you had the IT people and they were You know driving a certain set of things and then back then, you know learning technologists This was kind of before you could go get a degree in learning technology there. 

It didn’t exist most of us were refugees from other disciplines or other jobs and and we were a mix of developers and teachers and whatever. And then mainstream faculty, my memory of it, and maybe John and D’Arcy remember it differently, we’re pretty much not part of that conversation. And in fact, where I started to realize things were a problem was I would go to like a meeting and we, like I just sort of, I think actually even gave us like workshop materials we could use in our institutions. And then I would try to deliver these workshops to this normal teaching faculty And convince them why every piece of work they did they had to spend three times longer than they spent to create the media to index this This article and to submit it to this repository It’s all done sell Like the and just I think the body language and the looks on people’s faces You know really was what told me more than anything than any kind of analysis that is this is I don’t know this is going to work the way we’re planning it to. A bit of a deer in the headlights when you express ideas. Yeah, more honestly kind of contempt like, what are you doing? What are you telling us to do? This makes no sense to us. What’s end? What’s the payoff? And because too, there was that, that sense, you know, we didn’t have critical mass of objects. 

that sense, you know, we didn’t have critical mass of objects. I mean, I actually said, was it 30,000 objects in Cario? 

I actually said, was it 30,000 objects in Cario? That was a lot. But when you think about how vast the educational needs need to be and how fast they evolve and how quickly they change. Like my first two years working in Canada was at Tech BC and my job is to find learning objects. And they kept saying, search Merlot and search this. And I go, yeah, I did. There’s 30 things in Merlot. Like there’s nothing there. Like I can get you stuff, but it’s not gonna be out of a repository and it’s not gonna be Meta Tech. Like I can go to the WF&U website and get you this cool audio file of Marcel Duchamp, But I’m not going to find that as a package learning object. And if you want it to be that, then it’s not going to happen. Do you want media or not? And so, yeah, it just kind of the concepts were interesting and there were a lot of interesting people coming to the table and the conversations were really interesting. And I think Martin’s correct to say prefigured a lot of the stuff that became OER and OpenEd. But, man, at the time, practically trying to make this work for a typical educator as a value proposition was not fun. Well, then there’s the question of what do people do with this stuff? So all these things are published in various repositories, and frankly, a lot of it was just kind of digital hoarding. Now we have all these photos indexed in tag that maybe somebody might find and use a handful of it. And so the people that actually was their job to publish stuff would publish stuff, and they would probably find something else, but largely people, at least in our institution, didn’t casually go in and look for stuff. It was something they probably would have been using anyway, just here’s another place to put it. So we did some work on sort of the reusability thing. What do you actually do with these things? And so we had a project where we were working with the New Media Consortium to build a platform based on Learning Object Repositories to build presentations. So you could take all these images and videos and whatnot and assemble them into presentations and that’s where the packet and project came from and there was some reusability there but I mean really that was essentially a bespoke authoring tool where you were slotting content in that you could have done in any other platform. Yes, it was built on top of learning object repositories and metadata and all this stuff but it didn’t really take advantage of that it was still essentially a bespoke authoring platform which I think yeah that’s kind of the pattern of all this right let’s over engineer thing based on the theory of how this stuff should work as opposed to how do people actually do things. 

Yeah, and I think that was said, Martin does get to talk about it before moving to the next e-learning standards chapter, which I talked with a few folks about that is, we didn’t have any kind of roadmap of what that would look like, or what, why would people find value? And I really want to point out what you said earlier was the culture of the factions, like, I have like the sense of Game of Thrones with learning objects, like people had their own little areas that they held on to, and maybe came together, but didn’t really speak the same language even or I don’t know that sounded like culturally they weren’t there or ready for it yet and then it was question of who gets the money and I think just by the nature of where funding comes from especially back then because as far as I can remember this is the final time in Canada that the federal government funded a significant nationally learning initiative this killed it killed federal funding that’s how successful it was but obviously those kinds of structures favor kind of more formal, serious sounding approaches, you know, getting a bunch of people in a room and hacking on a piece of media, you know, an ordering pizza doesn’t sell the same way as say a standard does, you know, I think there’s a reason why Cancor got funded because it, you know, just reads on the page as a serious adult thing to do to have a sustainable project or institutional improv interoperability. 

Yeah, let’s fund that. But I’m sorry, what were you saying, D’Arcy? I just fell asleep there. But that’s where the money is. 

That’s where the money was. I’m not sure which direction we want to take the conversation next, but I do think it’s interesting seeing what survived, what emerged, and those kind of those funded repositories, those funded things are often the things that went away because they needed ongoing long-term from funding, but some of the getting people together for pizza and hacking some objects, that turned into other things. I have a very specific example that D’Arcy played a direct role in, which was, so as part of this project, that’s how I met D’Arcy. D’Arcy was in Calgary and I was at UBC, and we had an instance of his repository. And again, it was a tough sell. So I think our repository, like we bought a really good high-end server and we installed Cario on it and D’Arcy was fantastic. Anytime I needed anything from him, I’d hit him up on incident messenger and he implemented instantly. And that’s kind of how we became friends because he was just such a great fun guy to work with. And, but I think I had 50 objects in this repository. I couldn’t get people in my community to contribute their resources. And a lot of it too, it wasn’t just workload. There was a lot of suspicion that this was some sort of power play to seize faculties, intellectual property. People wanted all sorts of assurances that this wouldn’t be commercialized. I mean, this is the kind of stuff that Creative Commons was kind of came about to address, and this was pre-Creative Commons. 

So this stuff wasn’t really in place. And also, I think people thought they were going to get rich. 

They actually thought, I’m going to be able to my sine wave Java applet you know for you know hundred dollars to ten thousand different institutions you know I think people thought they would be able to do that so anyway so there was this kind of like dormant moribund repository sitting on this really scuba server but D’Arcy and I shared this interest in blogs and wikis and that’s again how we kind of we you know we really talked to each other a lot through our blogging and met a lot of people that were still friends with One day, I think I was just vanting about the lack of activity, and D’Arcy just was like, you want me to install movable type on your server while I’m here? Which was the WordPress of its day. I said, yeah, sure, that’d be cool. He said, while I’m at it, you want me to install the use mod wiki software? Yeah, that’d be cool. 

Thanks, man. Then whenever I would do a workshop on learning objects, I’d be presenting off a wiki and I’d be telling people they could add things and stuff. And people go okay this learning objects thing you’re talking about sucks, but what’s this software? You’re using like what’s this webpage? Yeah, you can start your own go ahead Start a page now. 

You don’t even need to count. It’s like what what what and That literally was the infrastructure and as far as I know those are some of the earliest like quote unquote institutional blog and wiki projects and those are still going UBC blogs is still a thing the UBC wiki is still a thing and So I think John is right I mean, I think, and I think it did, I mean, that funding, it may not have been directed to the exact outcomes they hoped, but it did fund a wave of people getting together and projects and people getting into the field and, you know, kind of probably a very inefficient apprenticeship program. 

It certainly was for me. I mean, that actually subsidized half my salary at my first two years and I was self-funded back then. So that allowed me to have a job in the field and I could well not have been in the field without that support. I love hearing the startings of your bromance with D’Arcy. Those movable objects, yes. D’Arcy, what’s your version of the story? You’re gonna be cute. But yeah, Brian, interesting point about the sort of the crossover with blogs and wikis. I mean, we actually, same thing. We were looking at our other at our repository and like great there’s content. 

So what and so we added the functionality of every Object in the system had a wiki button and it would take take people to a wiki page So they could actually talk about and and add add value to it to the content And a discussion button so there’d be a thread of discussion based on and this was in the early 2000s where this stuff really Wasn’t that that common? So that connection there Absolutely. 

And the irony is the blogs and the Wiki are what actually took over, which fantastic. 

That’s a lot more useful. It’s like cow pathing, right? If you could over-engineer a system or you could sort of build where people are walking, the tools work better when you kind of let go a little bit. So that was kind of, yeah, that was like my lesson. We did so much work. We were trying to maintain control and push things in a certain direction. And it was realizing, oh, if you just let go a little bit and let people just do what they’re gonna do, they do interesting things and it’s then how do we build things to support that and like Brian said the blogging platforms are still going strong. 

We do we still do workshops on ePortfolios which are based on blogging which also kind of based on learning objects. 

on blogging which also kind of based on learning objects. How do you build your collection? 

collection? So all these concepts are related but they’ve evolved, they’ve changed. I love hearing the foundations of what everyone knows to now know, making learning objects social or the social content that was talked about in this chapter. 

Really, this was the time before, like you said, before Creative Commons, before we had interconnectivity on wikis and blogs. 

And then it transferred into probably where you picked this up, John, in the OER a little bit. Is this where we head? Yeah, I mean, I think so. 

I think a lot of, well, OER has got a lot of different routes. And I think it’s kind of the OER and the open textbook and the other, you know, open access generally are where kind of the library community comes you know kind of takes a swerve back in to the conversation and you know has a lot of things that probably kind of more sustained projects from that time but for OER stuff I think kind of crystallizing the frustrations of not being able to share and copyright and the problems with it with a huge kind of okay, well creative commons, let’s find a way to share things. I think one of the other things, a lot of OER projects started off with repositories, started off with we build the infrastructure, maybe we keep doing the standard stuff, but maybe we just go down to something Dublin core-ish. But I think one of the things that was really interesting was as projects started to find other ways to share. 

So the visibility of blogs, the visibility of the Google ability, and Google as the interface, did a lot better in many ways than a lot of the custom kind of search aggregators, which outside of specialist communities, no one ever knew anything about. But then the conversation’s got a lot more interesting around why do you share, how do you share, how do you teach, and how do you collaborate. Yeah, I like how Martin Loops Wiley’s comment is, yeah, the why are we doing this sharing? The why is behind all this, and what it makes it more interesting is who else is doing it and where can we learn from them? And that’s what I found was interesting to build off this. The social objects is how we, and it talks about a little around the interconnectedness of these ideas, and is this where we started to weave the loom of tech and bring people together? I don’t know. I’m just fishing for an analogy here, but is that how some of it you said in early meetings, whether it was EduSource or if Cancord had a contribution or if another group in Scotland had some efforts in the UK, I wonder if this is where we started making those links. I don’t know. There was this sort of evolution of this stuff, right? So it started off with these institutional repositories because it wasn’t possible to do it any other way. And then blogs and wikis came along, it was possible to do that. And it was like this explosion. Everybody started their own blogs. They started an insights. Everybody was sharing stuff. And then in the last few years, that’s kind of trailed down. And now everyone’s just doing things on social media. 

They’re Twittering, they’re Facebooking, they’re Tik talking. And those things are largely ephemeral. 

Like these things, they’re shared and then they go away. And I think we need to get back a little bit more to the sort of the personal repository, for lack of a better word, but collecting things on your blog so that it exists more than three months in the future, right? If you share it on Twitter, it’s gone. Yes, people will see it in the moment, but if they miss it, it didn’t happen. It is kind of interesting, D’Arcy, though, that little narrative you said actually, I think, kind of, went with the rise and fall of a, not entire fall, but maybe decline of a metadata standard, which was RSS. So, a lot of the learning technologists, that was like, we would go, that’s a good example of a metadata standard, because it’s really easy to implement. It doesn’t really put any weight on the user. but this RSS feed can be put into so many different places. And to me, like having an RSS feed on a repository or if there was a collection, I’d look for the RSS button. And to me, that was almost like the button that said, okay, do these people get it or not? Cause this is, and I remember Stephen Downs back then, all of his talks, like he might as well have just had his middle finger up while he was talking. Like he was so belligerent at these events. But I remember one line he had that was really good. and he was talking to the IEEE. He was doing a keynote at an IEEE talk, and he actually said, a metadata standard should enable, not require. And RSS kind of fit that structure. So during that kind of period where Darcie was saying, where the blogging thing really had momentum, it was because RSS was everywhere, and there were all these great aggregators. And I don’t know, I mean, I think RSS hasn’t gone away. It’s the fundamental piece beneath podcasting, which is certainly there. And, but I mean, I think, you know, I don’t know whether it was strictly because we let ourselves get too addicted to Google reader and that particular infrastructure or what, but RSS just isn’t as prominent as it was 10 years ago, uh, at least not explicitly. Well, we know what Google wants to kill it. Human facing metadata, right? So it was metadata, but it was human scale. I controlled my RSS feed. I control what I subscribed to. And that was pretty important. And then, yeah, I think you’re right. Google Reader evaporated and this stuff, people didn’t go find it around the time that kind of, you know, centralized platform, siloed social media, like Facebook and Twitter, you know, really came into its own. I do think that’s one of the interesting connection, which I mean, I, I don’t want to go into this too much, but at the time with the, everyone having RSS readers and blogs and wikis, there was this real sense of what in the UK was called a personal learning environment and this kind of structure that you created. 

And it’s really interesting with my tech hat on now to see the conversations on next generation learning environments, you know, under the future of this. And it’s like, it’s all going back to the idea, the same distributed control of individual tools. 

But obviously, you know, it’s trying to reinvent it. It’s the same thing we’ve been doing for years. 

Welcome to the repeated lesson, Martin that you want to drill into us in every chapter? No, I think you made a good call. I think we let these other systems and platforms dictate how we customize, personalize and tailor some of our information pieces because it’s of their financial profit. 

I think bringing it back to some of the brass tacks of how we would customize it and how we would preserve and archive our own work is pretty relevant, but it’s not relevant to everyone, D’Arcy. So your call-out of like, you’re right, you could TikTok or Twitter, but that’s not even going to be permanent or people may not even see it unless you have it somewhere else. So that’s a great suggestion. 

So thinking about this chapter, there’s lots in it. There’s lots of ups and downs in talking about how learning objects kind of integrated into what we see in Web 2.0 and personal learning environments, which other chapters will talk about. But what’s not discussed for either around this time period or what questions would you have for Martin or the community around what we know of learning objects to now? Well, I hinted at it. I mean, I think we could be a bit more explicit, I think, to how he talks about the transition into OER. But I think, again, I think there was a huge connection out of that culture to what got called kind of self-publishing or mass amortization or what got called back then social media, but which means that word being something so different now that I hesitate to call it that, but you know, back then social media was actually about individual ownership of stuff. 

So I don’t know. I mean, I would probably just underline those connections a little bit more. 

I think it wasn’t just a precursor to OER. 

I think it was also, it was kind of culturally and technologically laid a lot of the groundwork for for blogs and wikis and and kind of alternative ed tech so to speak well I’m maybe making the connection to web 2.0 more explicit too so where the repository solved the problem of gee it’s hard to publish stuff to the internet web 2.0 kind of solved that problem and I think that’s where the there’s a logical connection I think what I’d add is I think that looking at what is still around today I would if I with back of the envelope guessing in terms of what’s publicly accessible, you know, at least 80% of it is stuff that got given an open license and got put out on one or more services that no individual had to maintain. I mean, yes, sometimes those commercial interests, but the learning objects that are still here are the learning objects that people give up control over and shared. 

And I think that kind of definitely prefigures a lot of the We’ll dig into some of those OER in future episodes as we talk of open textbooks is one and open educational resources itself is its own chapter. But I do think I like that you have each touched on copyrights, IP to socialness of it, whether it’s social media or web 2.0 and the platforms usability of where we share. And I don’t know if people would know how to use anything other than drug and drop these days D’Arcy. so I’m not sure if we have to go back and re-educate folks. 

so I’m not sure if we have to go back and re-educate folks. Brian, do you want to come back and become a learning object captain on this? 

this? Oh gosh, now you’re giving me something like PTSD by phrasing that spectacle. 

like PTSD by phrasing that spectacle. No, it’s perfect. I want to thank you, gentlemen, for joining. Do we have any questions we want to ask Martin about this chapter? Do you want to call out? 

out? It’s an interesting, I mean, I think this has come up in just reviews of the book, you know, the idea of taking a concept and applying it to a year. I think people who’ve criticized the book or poked the book kind of point out it’s just hard to slot things that way. But it also kind of does work pretty well. And it kind of becomes almost like, and I appreciate too someone taking the attempt to write a book about ed tech that has such, it’s the kind of framing you would typically see on like a coffee table book or something, or like a time life collection. And we don’t see treatments like that of the field very often. So I almost like how about that meta thought to Martin like, you know, to what extent was he really setting out to write? You know kind of like a popular history As opposed to a scholarly work and did that feel uncomfortable to him and the fact that you know You’re able to do things like this awesome podcast series, you know Around it, you know, it lends itself to that in a way that I don’t think typical scholarly books do So I’m kind of fascinated by that. I don’t know if it’s a tension or if it’s just a decision I guess a similar question, you know, I think that you know repositories and you know there was a lot of there was a lot of money invested and we’ve talked a little bit about you know the impact on the sector in terms of people and conversations. 

I guess the question for Martin would be does he think that both in terms of the money and the time and effort and everything else about in this that we’re having better conversations about teaching and learning as a result. 

D’Arcy you love learning objects still is that? Oh big big fan. 

I mean, like Brian, they kind of got my start in the in the industry. So it’s like, yeah, I’m not, I’m not gonna hate on learning objects. 

yeah, I’m not, I’m not gonna hate on learning objects. I would be super curious though, given what we’ve learned in the last two decades, how would we approach a similar type of project now? Like, would it just be as simple as spinning up a blog and dragging some stuff into it? Or how would, how would we do that kind of institutional sharing and cross institutional sharing? 

What that look like now? 

that look like now? That might be a relevant question as we think about the future of online learning, digital learning, and maybe the internet. 

learning, digital learning, and maybe the internet. So that’s actually not a bad question to pose of what would it look like 20 years out from that experience? And what can we take from those lessons learned? 

lessons learned? Well, gentlemen, thank you so much for taking some time at your schedule to have chat on my secret book club, not so secret podcast between the chapters. 

It’s been great to hear from all of you, and I appreciate your time. Thank you, Lauren. Thanks for pulling this all together. Yeah, thank you. Thank you.

it sounds like I was having bandwidth issues, with Zoom compensating by trying to catch up by putting me into fast-talking-squirrel-mode. I mean, more than usual. ↩︎

The UCalgary Department of Computer Science has been publishing a great podcast series called What the Tech? It’s intended as a way to share some of the work being done by faculty members and grad students, and covers a pretty wide range of topics. I was asked to be on the show to talk about learning technologies, innovation, and some of the things I’m going to be working on for my PhD research.

Paolo Sabater and Lyndon Ando are really good hosts, and it’s great to see students being involved with hosting, producing, and in my case, being interviewed for the podcast.

In this episode we talk to D’Arcy Norman, manager of the Learning Technologies group in the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning, as well as a PhD candidate in the UCalgary Computational Media Design program. Today, we discuss what the tech is up with Ed-Tech (Educational Technologies), and how crucial technology is in the current landscape of teaching and learning.

This transcript was automatically generated by YuJa.

Effective online courses are designed. It’s not just that here’s my face-to-face course and I’m gonna drag some stuff into bright space and then I’ll call it online. What I’m hoping we get to, and I think we’ve got glimpses of it, where the tools and platforms become an ecosystem. You wanna do this kind of a thing, you use this tool or this combination of tools and you use it in these ways and we can support you in that. If we just say go do whatever you want, the experience for the students kind of sucks because they have to learn all these different tools. They’re gonna have maybe 50 different logins and it becomes kind of chaos, right? So, this idea of the ecosystem is how do you find flexibility so that teachers and students are able to do what they need to do without having to battle against the limits of this software that’s provided by the institution. You’re listening to What the Tech, a podcast powered by the computer science department of UCalgary, here to deconstruct complex computer science concepts bit by bit and explain what the tech is going on. My name is Paolo. 

My name is Lin. In this episode, we talk to D’Arcy Norman, manager of the Learning Technologies Group in the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning, as well as a PhD candidate in the UCalgary Computational Media Design Program. 

Today, we discuss what the tech is up with edtech and how crucial technology is in the current landscape of teaching and learning. 

Without further ado, please welcome our guest, D’Arcy Norman. 

further ado, please welcome our guest, D’Arcy Norman. Welcome, D’Arcy, to the show. Thank you. Good to be here. Why don’t we start off with who are you? 

Why don’t we start off with who are you? What are you currently doing? Just give us a quick overview of your current positions and maybe some of the projects you’re working on. Sure. 

I’m D’Arcy Norman. I’m wearing a couple of different hats here on my day job hat. I’m manager of learning technologies at the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning. and my student hat is I’m a PhD student in computational media design and we can talk a little bit about those two actually overlap really nicely in the day job at the Taylor Institute we do a lot of work with so my team is the learning technologies group and we work with instructors who are integrating technology into their courses so it could be face-to-face you’re in a classroom and you want to do a thing with your students with some kind of tech. Well, we can actually help sort of design and do some consultation. 

We also help to facilitate and manage the online learning platforms for the university. 

So Brightspace, D2L, Zoom, where we’re recording this call. 

UDO, which is a video platform for, it’s like YouTube for the university and integrating that with D2L, etc. 

Top Hat for student response system for asking questions during a class. 

We’ve also built a platform, badges.ukilger.ca for awarding micro credentials outside of a course. 

So building the software to do that, working with people to research, is it effective? Sort of providing platforms for teaching and learning at the university. 

So that’s the day job side. And what’s sort of happened over the last many years is these teaching and learning experiences have become really media rich, really technology rich, it’s all mediated by software and hardware. 

hardware. And it’s kind of become difficult to describe. It if you picture university learning, it’s somebody sitting in a lecture hall for 50 minutes, and then they get up and they move to the next lecture hall and they sit for 50 minutes and they take notes. That’s how it was when I was an undergrad, mostly. I had a few really amazing exceptions to that, but mostly that’s what it was back in the olden days. Now, there’s still some lecturing. Lecturing, I’m not anti-lecture, good lectures are amazing. That’s storytelling, it’s powerful. But we also have many different ways of teaching. So what’s called active learning or learning or blended learning And people are doing things so students are coming to class not necessarily to listen to a presentation but to do stuff And that doing stuff is different in each discipline So engineering students do things differently than what has gained students do then nursing then medicine And so that complexity of what happens in the classroom makes it really interesting to describe It’s it’s really rich and deep and buried and so we can’t just say well, this is what a classroom looks like anymore And that’s kind of where my PhD work is coming in, where I’m looking at adapting, it sounds kind of interesting at first blush, but bear with me, adapting research methods for the study of video games. And so if we’re looking at this as a really rich, integrated, narrative rich, media rich, interactively rich environment, well, that’s video games. And so I’m not saying teaching and learning literally is a video game, but the vocabulary and the frameworks, the tools that we used to look at video games to analyze, formally analyze what’s going on. What are people doing? What are their goals? What are they trying to achieve? 

What are they trying to achieve? What’s actually happening within the game? The level design, all that. 

Yeah. We can use that vocabulary and apply it to the modern classroom. What’s actually happening here? Is it just a lecture? Is it a cutscene? Is it a platformer game where you’re just Mario bouncing along? Or is it something where you’re branching and making decisions and taking on different roles during the thing. One of the interesting concepts that came out of the video game studies is a concept called segmentation. So you launch a game and it’s got the logo of, you know, of id, you know, there’s id, you know, you have the splash screen and the fancy music and stuff. And then you get the title screen and you get the menus. And then you pick your difficulty and you start the game. Each of those is kind of a segment. There’s a different thing going on. And then during the game, depending on the difficulty you’ve chosen and maybe the mission you’ve chosen, whatever, you actually get graphics on screen. So you get a HUD, you get a heads up display that shows your health and your score and, you know, your, the compass and the map and all these kinds of things, right? So, you know, it’s a certain kind of interaction and you’re using the controller or the mouse or whatever you’re using. 

You die, or you level up and all of a sudden there’s a cutscene and there’s now we’re in a narrative mode where maybe there’s some storytelling, right? They’re setting the stage for the next, they’re giving you a reward for what happened before and doing this sort of bridge exercise. So there’s another segment and then you start the next one and maybe it’s a different form of interactivity in the next one. Maybe it’s not, you’re running through a maze shooting. Maybe you’re doing, you know, an airdrop from something and you’re doing something in 3D. 

So the segments demarcate what’s happening in the game. 

demarcate what’s happening in the game. And my idea basically, well, we can look at the classroom learning as having segments as well, right? 

learning as having segments as well, right? You get to class and maybe there’s a narrative cut scene where it’s an introductory presentation, right? The profs talking about, you know, whatever the topic is for the day. And then there’s a transition, you’re choosing your difficulty, you’re selecting your roles. 

you’re selecting your roles. You know, you’re in, you’re in the blue bus about to get air dropped in, right? 

dropped in, right? And you’re loading up. And now if it’s a group project, someone’s volunteering or being assigned as the group leader. And someone else is the maybe they’re the, you know, if it’s a code project, someone’s actually writing the code during the thing, someone’s presenting it back to the class, right? So there’s self assigning. A lot of times, these roles. And it’s changing what’s happening in classroom. Okay, so that happens for a little while. And there’s another transition, another end of that segment. 

And maybe they’re coming back to present different roles, different different things happening in classroom. 

And so we’re looking at ways to sort of document and make sense of that, with the goal being not just, okay, cool, we figured out what’s happening, but maybe there are interesting patterns. And then we can find well, if you’re trying to do this kind of thing, here’s some really good ways to do that. And then we can use that to improve of teaching and learning in other classes. So based on coming up with this, what’s called an ontology or a set of patterns, if you’re trying to do this, here’s some really good ways, here’s some good tools. Here’s people to talk to that have done that. Maybe they’re from other disciplines. It doesn’t matter if they’re doing the same kind of patterns. That’s kind of where we’re getting out on the sort of the research side of things. I’m kind of curious, so you, we did a little research kind of on your past and we noticed that you had a bachelor’s of- science. Bachelors of science and a master’s in science. 

Yeah. But the bachelor’s in science was in zoology, I believe. 

The typical pathway for somebody to go into edtech is to start in zoology. Makes total sense. 

You’re our first interview with a completely different. A nail liar. 

It’s interesting. Well, the idea back when I was young, the plan, I was pre-med. My friends were going through meds, so zoology was kind of like the pre-med path at the university. Um, and then I got to a stage where realized, you know, you’re taking the zoology labs and realized I’m kind of too squeamish to go into full medicine. 

So let’s back out and grow. So yeah, you do a little surgeries and procedures. Maybe that’s not for me. And, uh, I went into education. I just got my bachelor of education as an after degree and did my practicum looking at secondary science teaching. 

So grade seven through 12. Um, and that was really cool. At the time we had a new conservative government, lots of cuts, a little bit here, jobs and teaching. So I wound up actually working at the Faculty of Nursing when they were doing in their initial online courses. 

This was back in like 1994 when I started there. 

94-95. So we did the first four credit, what we think were the first four credit online courses in Western Canada back then. 

So it was part of a program that wasn’t just a one-off, it was actually this series of courses of cargo program. So we did that we did a series of CD ROMs, which you guys won’t know this, but they’re just shiny discs that you put inside a computer. And there’s a laser that actually shines on to load your app. 

It’s crazy. Doing a series of these to basically teach people psychomotor skills. 

Doing a series of these to basically teach people psychomotor skills. How do you do a nasogastric tube? 

nasogastric tube? How do you do a central line click care, all that, all of that stuff. So yeah, a lot of early work on that for online and turn into basically online learning. back in the 90s. 

And then I went downtown to work for a couple years at a company called Discoverware, making a media rich learning management system to teach people how to use Microsoft Office, essentially. 

But it was kind of a cool experience, right? So you’re in a downtown in the corporate environment, building this stuff, it was basically a startup. And that was a blast. And then the dot com bubble kind of went, and I wound up back at University at what was called the Learning Commons. 

This was a few generations before what is the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning as a technology consultant. 

So we built things like my major project was a learning object repository. 

So people are creating media. This was before Google needed before you could just you know, drag stuff into the into a browser and you have it up there. So building the infrastructure to let people share content, and to describe the content to apply metadata and schemas. 

And I did things like, you know, this was back in 2002, I think 2002, 2003, integrating a wiki so you could have discussions about the content, you know, integrating all kinds of, you know, community elements. So it’s not just here’s a photograph of a gopher in southern Alberta. 

But you know, what’s the species, you know, there’s a link to a video of it, where can I find more about this, who else is studying this, and sort of providing tools to sort of open that up. So that’s kind of, yeah, where we got from there. And then you have the role just kind of snowballed, I got my masters of science in educational technology. 

Oh, nice. Yeah. Through, uh, through Workland at U of C. 

Yeah. And, uh, both the month after I got that, my current role at the Taylor Institute opened up that required a master’s degree. So it was like perfect timing. I guess I can apply for that now. I’ve been there since, uh, yeah, a few years now. 

So that’s been fun. Yeah. 

So, so it’s, so the masters was kind of like your first moment where you kind of intersected with, uh, with computer science and the computer science world or was there kind of a previous, so that’s the irony. And if any of my computer science, uh, supervisors and whatnot are listening, um, uh, but yeah, I had never taken a computer science or official computer science course to fill my PhD courses, uh, information visualization with Sheila Carpentale, which is fantastic. Uh, it took a human robots interaction course with Adrian Charlin again. fantastic, really, really rich, interesting courses, but it wasn’t like write an operating system. I’ve written code for, you know, 30 years, more than that. 

I’ve written code for, you know, 30 years, more than that. But self-taught, right? 

self-taught, right? You play with, this is before you could just go to, you know, a static overflow and find the answers. You actually had to read the vocabulary and build the thing. But not formally trained, which is kind of a weird thing. That’s why CMD might be kind of perfect. So I come in not as a computer science, but, yeah, we can figure out how something will go. I can might see how that might connect to something that’s completely unrelated. And that’s kind of a fun connection. That’s kind of how it kind of stuff. Yeah. So, sorry, you said you taught yourself code. Yeah. Wow. And so, so when, when was your first kind of moment of like, I want to learn code. I want to, how old do I have to out myself here? So, when I was a, we lad the Commodore VIC-20 came in at the end of the day, came out, right? And this was, I don’t know, it must have been like 1980 or something. 

I had, I think it was 2k of RAM, you have plugged it into your TV and you got, you get a magazine, it was called compute magazine, you’d actually type in the basic programs into, into the computer, save it on tape. 

And that’s how you got your app. That was your app store. So starting that, and then I realized, well, let’s just text, I can write text. And so you’d start writing your own. So I’d write like, choose your own adventure games, or, and this is where it sounds even nerdier than I’m intending, but a D&D character generator, right? So it rolls the dice and it does the thing and then it prints it out on the dot matrix printer, which at the time that felt like science fiction. Here, I’m writing text on a keyboard and it’s doing a thing and now I can play a game, that’s cool. And it kind of snowballed from there, right? So it’s just, it was always jobs where I was like, oh yeah, I guess I’ll try making a thing. And I mean, for a while there, I worked at the Alberta Science Center before it turned into TELUS Spark, but we had an exhibit, oh would have been mid 90s, early 90s maybe, called Backyard Monsters and it was these big robot bugs and I wrote a hypercard stack for it. So we’d have for kids who’d come and they’re kind of maybe freaked out by being in a crowd but they can go in this little it was a Macintosh classic computer over in the side and they can actually maybe explore look through a scene look for look for some bugs and play a game that kind of thing. So you know writing stuff even Yeah, sure. I guess we’ll figure out how to do that. 

Yeah. Yeah, and I love how it’s you know It’s it’s all just like problem-solving within the educational kind of field, which is is you know Your kind of specialty here. 

And so, you know going into Everything that’s been going on here with the pandemic and you know, we we understand that you’ve you you’ve been a a key player, let’s say, in just making sure things run smoothly, I guess, as we transition to online delivery. 

And so, you know, we’re, we’re curious, like what, what were the major challenges and the kind of things that you had to set up here for, for, for the big COVID pivot? Yeah. 

One of the amazing things. So I’ve been doing ed tech for a long time for decades, and this is the first time in my career where I’ve been able to say, I trust that the tools that we use will work. Oh, maybe the server will fall over if somebody has a final exam and there’s 500 students. We haven’t had any of those concerns, thankfully, because all of our stuff really is hosted by the vendors now. So D2L, the company, hosts Brightspace, the learning management system. That’s been rock solid. It’s been amazing. The one holdout we had is we were using a platform called Adobe Connect Meeting for online classes. And that was being run on a server on campus, which worked great. It was, it was good for what it was specced for, but it was specced for up to 500 people. And when COVID hit, we’re looking at a community of 40,000 people all of a sudden needing to be online. That’s bigger than 500. So we had to figure this out. Thankfully, there was a pilot in a couple of faculties on campus who had already been using Zoom for about a year. And they were like, we should use Zoom. Okay, cool. So we actually get a really fast implementation of that, which was amazing. We had, from the time the contract was signed in mid-March, 24 hours later, we had it implemented as the ucalgary.zoom.us environment, integrated with single sign-on, we had it through supply chain, we had support resources up, integrated with D2L, with Brightspace, so it was integrated in courses. 

The fastest implementation of anything I’ve ever seen in my life, and by and large, it basically worked, which we’re still using it, right? But extremely rapid because the infrastructure supports it. So the main limiting factor before, when we host things on campus, so you’ve got a server on campus, depending on where people are. So if you’ve got somebody say in Asia or Africa or Europe, and they need to connect to the server, they have to go through whatever internet connection they’re getting to to get to our server on campus. It works fine when you’re here. It may be problematic when you’re elsewhere. When we’re using our vendors, they’ve got global infrastructure. And all of a sudden, wherever you’re connecting from, you’re into bare infrastructure and then using their broadband connections between their servers. And that takes a lot of the load off. So when we all of a sudden had 40,000 people hammering, we had, it was tens of thousands of meetings per day at one point in just insane levels of load. And I was waiting for something to blow up, nothing did. 

So yeah, we had that. And now we’re actually the biggest problems we had. So what my role at university in this case, I’m what’s called the business lead. So I represent the people who use the software, not so much the IT and security aspect of it, but instructors and students. So I’m trying to make sure that we have the tools configured in ways that support what instructors and students need from it. 

And when I approach a platform, maybe to a fault, I say well let’s leave things as open as possible. Let’s just see what people do. Let’s not lock things down. 

People will behave. It’ll be awesome and we did that with Zoom. Let’s let them do whatever they want and as occasionally happens that kind of blew up in our faces a little bit because not you guys but students try to take advantage of the opportunity of a tool being open to to play pranks, right? So we had a lot of zoom bombing incidents and we were looking initially because there’s a lot of press at the time. It was in the New York Times, it was in Washington both zoom bombing, it’s insecure. 

And there were some concerns that they were being mitigated. What we actually found was students were sharing zoom login, URLs and passwords even on internet forums. So hey, guys, come to my class, it’ll be awesome. And they come in and they share video and they do, frankly, horrific things in the class for kids. 

And in response to that, you’ve got to lock things down. And now we’re trying to, you know, unlock things a little bit and sort of see where we go. 

It’s this really difficult position. I really want to have all these tools open as wide open as possible. But we need to do it in a way that’s safe and responsible that students can be in a class and not be worried about what they’re going to be exposed to by somebody pulling a prank. And it was some horrific stuff going on. We made sure we shut it down and we have processes in place to identify the people and deal with it. 

And we try to deal with it not by locking the software down, but by we already have processes in place. 

So trying to find that way if we’re not militarizing these tools, and we’re not, we’re not trying to like weaponize the logs or anything either. And we’re trying, these are teaching learning tools. And that’s the cool thing coming into this, these are, these have to be environments for teaching and learning. You’re not going to learn if you feel like you’re in a police state. Yeah, nobody wants to be there, you’re certainly not going to be engaged, right? So we’re trying to find ways, how can we do that so that the tools, as much as possible, feel like they belong to students and instructors, and involving students and instructors with those decisions, We have a committee on campus called the Learning Technology Advisory Committee. I co-chair that with Leslie Reed, our Vice Provost Teaching and Learning. And it’s an amazing community where we’ve got instructors and students and staff from all faculties. 

And we’re talking about what does learning technology, what do digital tools mean to you? What are you actually looking for? As opposed to, well, we’ve got a license for a thing. Make sure you use the thing. 

Well, we, I don’t care about that. I care about how are you enabled in your teaching and learning. And let’s have those conversations and some really amazing stuff has come out of that. It’s a really fun group to work to work with Yeah, that’s awesome. 

No, I love the the whole like idea of you know using it as a tool to engage and and not like being scared of anything and you know, you mentioned You know the kind of relation earlier to video games and teaching and all that got good stuff you know, I’ve read multiple articles here and there of just like yeah, how how linked video games and education is. And you know, you’ve made some really good connections there. And like ultimately it seems like it comes down to that, that engagement piece, right? Of like keeping passive. You’re watching Netflix. That’s not education, right? People talk to, well, we want the Netflix for education. I don’t want the Netflix for education. I want people to make stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What are like the best kind of like strategies? You know, we talk about zoom here, but are there any other specific kind of technologies or kind of tools that you think are kind of like the most beneficial or most engaging, let’s say? Well, I think one I really want to see us as a university since COVID happened, it’s been getting a lot more use. But UJ is our video platform, video content management. It also does live streaming, which is kind of amazing. 

So anybody who has an account, students as well. 

It can go to uj.ukulger.ca. There’s a, I think it’s a create recording button and that gives you a download. 

And then from your desktop, you can, like we’re doing here in Zoom, you can record your video and your microphones. You can have multiple microphones, multiple cameras, do your screen recording. 

And you can actually produce media really, really easily. And then it’s got a web-based editor. So if you want to do basic editing, like I said, um, four times, and I want to just chop that out, or I want to splice two segments of video together. That kind of editing makes it a lot easier for people to make stuff. And I’m really curious to see what people make with it. So we have platforms that I think could be really useful. 

We’re also we’ve done a lot of work with. 

So right now, if you look at Brightspace D2L, our learning management system for students, there’s really only two places where they can contribute content. They can submit an assignment, they can upload an assignment, so a document, or they can respond in discussion, discussion board posts. Yeah. That’s not a lot of engagement, is there? And there’s also, sorry, there’s an activity stream. If it’s been enabled in a course, it’s like a Facebook wall you can post on, right? Yeah. Not a lot of engagement. So we’re looking at things. We’ve actually run a platform called UCalgary Blogs, which is a WordPress instance. Anybody can go to it, ucalgaryblogs.ca. It’s hosted on not the most awesome server, but it’s what we have available. And it’s WordPress. And the idea is anybody from the university community, you go to it, make a website, do what you need to do. And it’s been everywhere from people have created it for the research projects. Uh, they’ve created it for courses. So you might have a course of say 50, uh, education technology students. So it was one that went in there and they’re posting daily, uh, uh, content to it, right? And discussion and comments, comments and that kind of thing. Technically it could happen in a discussion board and D2L, but tools feel different enough. Yeah. And so it kind of breaks the engagement. We’re trying to provide tools to provide that engagement. We had one actually, the information visualization course I took with Sheila Carpendale. We did a daily InfoViz journal as a UCalgary blogs site. So every day, each of the students in the class had to find an example of InfoViz, create a graphic about it, you know, screenshot or whatever, and share some comments. And then all of the students would sort of cross comment on the stuff. And it turned into this really cool kind of thing. like someone said, it’s close to like Pinterest. Well, okay, it is. 

But without the, without the shopping context, I guess. 

shopping context, I guess. Yeah. But having that flexibility, right? 

flexibility, right? You create a site, you decide who’s going to be in it, not PeopleSoft. I want, you know, five people that maybe some aren’t even at the university, but these people should be in it. It can be public or not, right? Which is something we can’t do in Brightspace. 

So giving people ability to have tools. And yes, they could go off and use WordPress anywhere else. And if they want to, that’s awesome. But there are times and you want things to be managed by the university infrastructure, you want to have some oversight and support and that kind of thing. And that’s kind of where that comes in. So finding ways to provide, try to sneak, so you kind of your blog started where I basically snuck a copy of WordPress onto a server that I managed. Didn’t ask, didn’t tell anybody. This was like 13 years ago or something. 

It’s been there for a while and it snowballed and all of a sudden people are using it and we’re like, oh, we should probably make sure that keeps running. 

That’s awesome. Yeah. That’s around the time you did your Masters of Science, right? I believe you did a whole thesis on the whole using WordPress in courses. Yeah, yeah. So the my Masters of Science thesis, again, Masters of Science in EdTech, and I was looking at, so at the time I was kind of an anti-LMS guy, like we can’t be locking down and we need to do things in the internet, do it, go in the wild. So yeah, the idea of my research was well, let’s take a look at at the time was blackboard We weren’t on bright space yet So let’s compare what happens in a blackboard course to what happens in a course done in WordPress and in the back of my mind I’m thinking okay. We’re finally gonna have data. It says yes, we have to do things in WordPress down with the LMS and We’re gonna have some data or at least in some descriptions around that What would I found is basically students follow orders and if the instructor says do a certain thing and do it in bright space They’re gonna they’re not gonna say oh, but we really want to find we’ll do it I want to get the grade. I want to make sure we follow the rules. So what I’ve found, yeah, the tool is important for engagement, but not for what students actually do. 

So they’ll do the thing grudgingly in whatever you ask them to do. They’ll feel differently about it, but they’ll do it. The goal is to get the grade and get out of the course, not to change where you publish content online. 

content online. Totally. Yeah. Do you think that we’re actually going to get to a point in society where our technologies are kind of creating enough engagement to almost substitute the classroom experience? 

substitute the classroom experience? I don’t know, I mean a few months ago I would have said no. 

I would be looking at things like blended and whatnot but with the whole COVID thing, right, it’s kind of forced everybody to change the perspective on that. 

So what we’re looking at for these, what are, I call remote teaching what we have now. 

This isn’t really real what’s online online teaching and learning. 

Effective online courses are designed. 

They’re not there. It’s not just a here’s my face to face course, and I’m going to drag some stuff into bright space now call it online. 

Yeah, this is almost like an emergency salvage operation, we’re gonna, yes, we’re gonna get stuff out there. So we can call it a course and be done with it. But it’s not a designed experience. And I think what I what I’m hoping we get to, and I think we’ve got glimpses of it, where the tools and platforms become an ecosystem. 

And if you want to do this back to the patterns and things I was talking with my research, if you want to do this kind of a thing, you use this tool or this combination of tools, and you use it in these ways. And we can support you in that. If you don’t need to do a thing, don’t worry about that tool. 

So they come. The concept is from David Weingarten, or the small pieces loosely joined actually did a presentation on that, looking at RSS as the loosely joined part years ago with some colleagues of mine. But that’s the idea I think we need to get to instead of having a monolith or a series of monoliths with these small tools and they could be bespoke, they could be DIY, they could be build your own, bring your own and we connect them loosely together so they don’t all have to be connected to PeopleSoft, they don’t all have to go through that kind of infrastructure. We’re not there yet because I don’t think as the university or as these processes aren’t mature enough to really support that without pitching, go do whatever you want. It’s tempting, but the risk is if we just say go do whatever you want, the experience for the students kind of sucks because they have to learn all these different tools. They’ve got to have maybe 50 different logins and it becomes kind of chaos, right? Right. 

So this idea of the ecosystem is how do you find flexibility so that teachers and students are able to do what they need to do without having to battle against the limits of this software that’s provided by the institution. That’s an interesting thought just because like, you know, we’ve seen in the past, right, technology, right, it kind of catches up to where life is, right. And now we’ve had this massive, you know, global kind of shift in how we go about our daily lives. 

And, you you know, technology will end up catching up to this point as well for us. And, uh, I’m just curious as, as, you know, on your thoughts on like, do you even think that the physical classroom will even be a necessity in, you know, 10, 15 years? Because I think necessary might not be the word for that. I think we will always have classrooms. 

Um, right. We’re, we’re a gregarious species. 

We like to be together. Uh, and sometimes that happens to be, you know, physically with Adams. 

Um, And I think if it makes sense to be physically together, if there’s something that just can’t be replicated online, classrooms absolutely will always be a thing. But I think what we’re finding is the tools are becoming rich enough that we can actually have pretty engaging experiences online. And obviously we can’t, people live online, right? They’re tick-tocking and all these kinds of things. This is all happening. But that’s, a lot of that is kind of ephemeral, right? It’s stuff that doesn’t really matter, right? It’s video the cat or whatever. and yes I saw it and I chuckled and moved on. What we’re finding is now these kinds of media experiences really are becoming more real, more maybe high stakes, more integral in our life, not just ephemeral, not just, you know, the fluff that goes away and nobody cares about. 

So I think we will, especially as the tools evolve, like even Zoom, I mean as a really simple one. 

Five years ago, having a tool that worked at this level was science science fiction, literally science, but you watch a movie and you’d see, Oh, HD full screen video with 25 people in a row. 

Wow. That’s an, now that’s just taken for granted. Right. So we’re getting, it’s almost like punctuated equilibrium. 

There’s a bunch of development. I think COVID is going to trigger a bunch because there’s been a bunch of investment and then things advance and they kind of plateau for a little bit as we kind of make sense of it. Let’s understand what this means. How can we adapt it? And then a new set of needs are identified and there’s another burst of development in innovation. 

I think we’re just in the early stage of a round of innovation and sort of this flourishing of let’s figure stuff out. 

We had that before too, when the internet first came out and it was a research web, it was a military and research web, a network rather, and it plateaued for a bit. It was used to connect you know, intercontinental, but not ballistic missiles. And well, that’s not something that really affects students and teachers, but it was adapted and co-opted. 

Let’s use it for teaching and learning. And then we had things like, uh, what was called a tilde web space. Everybody would log into their server and using text and any files they put in this folder was actually a website. Well, that’s kind of cool. And there was the same thing. There was this big cluster of, Oh, what can I put in these text files? And now I’ve got my course online, or I’ve got my, my research is now online. And that this big, And then what happened is we had these big corporate Platforms come in and kind of suck the life out of that and people are well I’ll just do that in Facebook and I and yes it connected people But I think it really took the ownership of this innovation away from individuals and it’s just well I guess I’m doing that in Facebook or LinkedIn or whatever else and they don’t own it anymore Yeah, and it’s that ownership that I think we’re gonna get back to We’re in this weird uncanny valley now where we feel like we own our content when we push that line. We don’t. Unless you have your own web space, unless you’re managing your own infrastructure, you don’t own your stuff online. A company does, and they’re going to slap ads on it and sell the data about who sees it, all that kind of gross stuff. I think we’re going to get past that, and that’s where things are going to get really interesting again. For the takeaways though, we talked a lot of really good stuff with the teaching and learning and how important technology is you know if you could sum up kind of what we talked about or you know even talk about moving forward here with the fall semester are what are the big kind of big picture ideas that people should be kind of considering here oh yeah well when I’m working with people who are designing courses or integrating technology the first thing I say is do one thing. 

Don’t start with this big thing in your head. I’m going to design the perfect online course and I’m going to integrate all of the technologies and I’m going to do all of the things. No, start with one thing, get your head around that, get some competency, some experience, and then build on that then add another thing or change the thing. 

Having an iterative approach where you’re actually building some expertise and some understanding and then going to the next thing instead of just rushing as fast as you can. 

of just rushing as fast as you can. And it’s exhausting. It’s not sustainable. So that that’s kind of like the theme for everything I’m doing trying to do in a way that’s sustainable, that people aren’t burning out doing a thing that they’re not trying to overextend and then realize after the fact that they’re overextended, and it all collapses. But how do you do things in an iterative approach? 

things in an iterative approach? And trying to be strategic about it? What’s the thing I can do that’s going to make the most impact on my course? Okay, that’s the one thing I’m going to do. And then I’m going to do one more thing. And then one more thing. 

And then that combined with having ownership of it. 

This is your course both for students and instructors as well is your course and having ownership on how are you gonna do this and yeah those two things the the best advice I gave to anybody. 

Yeah that’s that’s really awesome advice yeah really really good and I’m sure that all of the faculty listening will be very appreciative and actually maybe for students like is there any kind of kind of considerations even for students that these students should be a kind of thinking about as we move into the fall semester here. Biggest thing I would say to students is be engaged. 

Don’t be a passive student. Show up prepared. 

And I know this sounds like Dow. Come on, dad. But seriously, that is when I work with instructors and students in classes, that is what makes the difference between the students that do really well and they understand. I don’t know if it affects the grades. I don’t see the grades so that this is not about that. This is about people who take something interesting away from the course are the ones that gave themselves to the course that opened themselves up and actually were participating. 

If you’re going to sit there with your arms across your chest and just kind of like doodling for 50 minutes, three times a week, that’s what you’re getting out of the course. 

So be engaged, ask questions, be a part of the process. 

I mean, for students, this is your course. Like you’re, in a way you’re, you’re paying tuition to be there. This is a huge chunk of your life. If you’re not going to take what you need out of it, well, that’s, that’s, that’s a wasted opportunity. 

that’s a wasted opportunity. Yeah. And that goes for like, have a conversation with your instructor and other students about how do we want to, what do we want to do in this course? Like is it enough just to do a discussion board post in a, in a Brightspace course? 

discussion board post in a, in a Brightspace course? It might be, if you have ideas on how things might be done better, have that conversation with your instructors and TAs and other students. Yeah, yeah, definitely a two-way street there for sure You know just get the most out of it. Yeah, you get what you put in kind of idea, right? I love it really good advice And I guess last piece here is if people want to learn more about you or all of the stuff that we kind of talked About today, where can they go? I know you have a lot of kind of interesting resources here Yeah, so for the two hats so work stuff you Calgary learning technologies That’s through the Taylor Institute of Teaching and Learning, and that’s Taylorinstitute.ucalgary.ca. And we’ve got all kinds of resources on that. For the research side of things, darcynorman.net, and everything is there, so I’ve got contact forms and all kinds of stuff, so that’s how to get along with me. That’s cool. Yeah, and we understand you also have a podcast and a bunch of other cool resources on your website there, too. I do a very occasionally updated podcast. 

I had a good intense and then, you know, life kind of happened. So yes, I appreciate how hard it is. You guys work at this. Yeah. 

It’s a, it is kind of difficult challenge keeping up, but you’re doing a lot of really, really cool stuff apart from the podcast already. So just keep up all the great stuff you’re doing and yeah. 

Thank you again for coming on the show. We learned a lot. We’re done. Thanks both of you. Thanks for tuning into What the Tech, a podcast powered by the Computer Science Department of UCalgary. 

If you enjoyed the show, subscribe on whatever platform you’re listening on. Also, follow us on Instagram at ufc underscore cpsc for more computer science content. If you have any questions or want to suggest future episode topics, you can also visit anchor.fm slash what the tech dash you Calgary there you can leave us a voice message with your questions for a chance to get featured in future episodes thanks again for listening join us next week for another episode of what the tech

The fourth and final part of the Reclaiming Educational Technology series, recorded at the University of Mary Washington after Open Education 2014.

This segment features commentary from:

Direct link to audio file

This transcript was automatically generated by YuJa.

Hello again, my name is D’Arcy Norman and I’m thrilled to bring to you the fourth and final part of the Reclaiming Educational Technology series, which was a series of interviews recorded at the University of Mary Washington after the Open Education 2014 conference. The interviews were conducted by myself and David Kernahan and recorded by Andy Rush. This part, the topic is Higher Education and Startup Cultures, features commentary from Audrey Waters from HackEducation.com, Ben Werdmuller, co-founder of Known, and Aaron Ritchie, co-founder of Known. There’s some interesting commentary on sort of the tension between startup cultures and higher education cultures. And without further ado, part four of the Reclaiming Educational Technology Series, Higher Education and Startup Cultures. My name’s Audrey Waters. 

I’m a writer. I write about education technology. I mean, I think that, you know, this way in which innovation is talked about has become so much wrapped up in Clayton Christensen’s disruptive innovation story, which is very much about markets and market-driven innovation. And I’m just not sure that, particularly when we’re talking about education, that that would be a model that we would really want to think about, right? I mean, of course we want to have new ideas. is we want new ideas. I mean, that’s what education is about, right? We want to be able to expand and grow and build on each other as ideas. So that’s a form of innovation. But it doesn’t fit into this model that we have that’s very much about can you introduce a new business idea or product that somehow displaces other products on the market. I mean, I don’t think that that’s what many of us would want as a goal. I think that actually part of it is to not mimic the discussions around what startups do because I think that in some ways startups, the whole idea around the Silicon Valley startup is that they’re high risk, high growth, increasingly with a sizable cash influx with very few people, a few benefits, long work hours with a potential for outcome, and it feels like the high-risk thing is a little problematic when you’re talking about education, because I think in education, as an educator, you have a responsibility to actually not put your students at risk. You can do experiments, but even then, you have to think really carefully about what What are the ethical implications of experiments that I do? Even when I try something new in the classroom, it matters. The stakes are a lot higher and so the ability to just sort of throw out the rules and try new things and sort of embracing failure and iteration that the startup world really likes, I think that we need to be really thoughtful what it means to fail when we’re talking about other people’s children. 

We’re failing with other people’s children. My name’s Ben Werdmuller. 

I’m the co-founder and CEO of Known. 

And Known is a single website for all your content. So what we’re trying to do is empower students to actually publish all their coursework, their notes, their ideas, everything they feel comfortable with to a space that they control rather than a space that’s controlled either by administration or by some external vendor. 

So if you’re doing something good, you almost have a duty to make you sustainable so you can keep doing it. You know, there’s no point in creating an ethical piece of software that disappears after two months, right? So we have to make it a business, and we are based in Silicon Valley. We’re based in San Francisco. But we take a slightly different approach. 

We want to be completely aligned with our users. We think that gives us the best chance of success. We’re also a small team. I mean, it helps if our users are effectively co-developers. I think if you are mining people’s data or you’re running targeted advertising against them and that kind of thing, it actually pits you against your users in some ways, right? Your users partially become the product rather than actually the people you’re trying to serve. And, you know, their interests, which is really privacy, in my opinion, and, you know, their autonomy end up running against your business and there’s, you know, you end up at the very the least, or rather in the best case, finding an awkward middle ground and in the worst case somebody gets abused, and that’s not great. So what we’re trying to do is offer services that allow us to get revenue for the things that people value. So we’re working with institutions, we’re providing ways to make knowing easier. And the base known, the known profile for individuals, is totally free. Open source, a very permissive license. You can take it and do what you want to do with it. So, my name is Erin Richie, and I’m the co-founder of NONE, and I’m from San Francisco, California. I still feel like an outsider in the startup Silicon Valley culture. I moved to the area just over a year ago from Portland, Oregon, and I had been working in technology before that, and Ben had moved to the area a few years before that. But we, both of us separately, had been involved in open source before that. Both of us separately had done work in the edtech space before that, and we came into this and actually when we started NONE, we started it and joined a startup accelerator, which is a very sort of Silicon Valley thing to do, but the accelerator we were selected into is a public media accelerator, and at least at the time of its conception, it was the only public media accelerator in the world. It’s backed by the Knight Foundation and KQED, which is the NPR and PBS affiliate in the Bay Area, and PRX Public Radio Exchange, which is based out of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Their focus is really choosing mission-driven companies in the greater media space. They have some of these ideas around the companies that they support and work with must empower media, but media is very loosely defined because they’re looking at the future of media and the future of communication. So they want to foster companies that develop platforms that help to connect users and engage people and push the boundaries of communication to sort of start to define what the media landscape might look like in the future. So all of the other companies in that program and all the companies that we’ve become really close to are very much aligned even if our businesses and our products are in completely different areas and we were originally a little concerned being an open-source based company what that would look like today but it’s actually we haven’t got any of the pushback that we thought might be hanging around there’s enough open source companies out there that are well known that people don’t see open source as a red flag anymore and that was really encouraging to us and a number of the other companies just in our accelerator are either based on an open source platform or do a lot of work with open source data and there’s other education companies in our accelerator as well so we’ve had some really nice collaboration and sharing in resources with other edtech based startups who are focused on like completely different aspects of the education space but it’s been so nice to just chat with them and share resources and share contacts and things like that. We have found that just our experience growing as a company, there are people who like to support and encourage and invest in startups in different spaces. And so EdTech is definitely its own space, just like media is its own space and a number of different industries. So we really didn’t have a lot of connections necessarily with people that covered both educational technology and we’re specifically looking at startups, but sort of over the course of the summer and meeting a lot of people that’s really broadened our network of people and we’ve gotten a lot of great advice from entrepreneurs who have worked in and invested in in the edtech space and we’ve gotten a lot of good connections with other edtech companies around the world who’ve wanted to just chat and share strategies and resources and things they’ve been working on and so many of them have been so open and willing to share their knowledge and their experiences with us. It’s been really great. We set out right from the very beginning, sort of one of our goals coming into this was we’re going to create a company and a platform. And because of where the project originally started as a hobby for both Ben and I, sort of us coming out of the indie web movement, creating something for us to have our own personal websites, to control our own data, we were building something that was sort of the opposite of selling user data or adding advertising. And the platform for us was never created for that. So when we turned it into a company, we knew that that was never going to be a component of it. And like we were a little worried at the beginning about it being open source, we weren’t really sure how people would feel about that. That’s because historically people have sort of seen users of software as the product for freemium products, and that’s not the direction that we wanted to take, and we didn’t want to take a direction where the product becomes filled with advertising in order for us to generate revenue. We started right at the very beginning talking and focusing on revenue strategies and different ways that the platform could start to make money, and I think with a lot of companies companies, the focus is so much on expanding that user base and getting it really wide that they don’t think about the monetization strategies at all until a much later point. But we started really just brainstorming in that area from the very beginning and over the course of the summer because, partially through our accelerator, because it’s based on design thinking, they have sort of three key focuses that your company has to focus on really to be successful, and it includes technology and whether you can build the platform yourself with the technology that’s out there, and it includes business sustainability and feasibility. So you have to consider how you can turn this into a sustainable company and what the revenue looks like and who’s going to pay and what they’re going to pay for, and as well as sort of desirability and the human-centered components. So those three areas are things that we focus on a great deal where other companies might just focus on the technology side and leave the other two for a much later period of time.

Recorded at the University of Mary Washington after Open Education 2014, this episode features commentary from:

Direct link to audio file

This transcript was automatically generated by YuJa.

Hello once again, my name is Darcy Norman, and I’m thrilled today to bring you the third part of the Reclaiming Educational Technology Series, which were a series of interviews recorded at the University of Mary Washington after the Open Education 2014 conference. Interviews were conducted by myself and David Kernahan, and video and audio recorded by Andy Rush. I added them together into a series of themes. This is the third one, Episode 3, Part 3, I guess, flexible and open and it features commentary from Audrey Waters from Hack Education, from Tim Owens who was at the University of Mary Washington and is now at Reclaim Hosting, from Ben Wordmuller who is the co-founder of known which is some software was actually at the heart of the indie web movement as one of the first prototype standalone indie web applications so some really interesting context there and Jim Groom who was at the University of Mary Washington is now at Reclaim Hosting. 

Without further ado, here is Part 3, Flexible and Open. My name is Audrey Watters. 

I’m a writer. I write about education technology. 

education technology. I mean, and there are these other, there are these other practices that higher education in particular has adopted that are sort of counter to, I think, the ethos of the web, right? 

the ethos of the web, right? So we put, we, we publish our research in proprietary closed academic journals that cost, you know, that cost our libraries tens of thousands of dollars a year to subscribe to, that the articles aren’t openly available, and when they are, they’re written in a language that’s, I mean, it’s like the academic language that’s, you know, I mean, I think it’s English in our case, but it’s sort of written in a way that’s really hard, hard to understand, and it’s not, the information isn’t accessible, so we don’t do a lot of the public-facing PR that, you know, that companies like Like Udacity, for example, the technology sector in general, has a huge marketing, has a huge marketing arm. I mean, and I’m not even counting the journalists that just rewrite the press releases. I mean, a lot of what happens in Silicon Valley is hype and marketing around their stuff. It’s not actually a bunch of engineers just making cool things. It’s a bunch of marketers trying to convince us that what they’ve built is really amazing. The project that I’m working on that I’m excited about is I’ve been doing a lot of research into the history of education technology, which is something that, I mean, I just don’t think we talk about very often. I think that particularly in Silicon Valley, which likes to imagine that there is no history. There’s only like the now and the future. You know, Silicon Valley is very much interested in this planned obsolescence, right? Like you buy an iPhone and then in like six months’ time, it’s out of date, right? And they try to convince you that, my goodness, how dare you use such outmoded technology time to buy a new iPhone. So it’s very much history is really not something that Silicon Valley is interested in. So I’ve been looking at what are some of the roots of the technologies that we adopt in terms of the development of education psychology, intelligence testing, standardized testing. How do we end up with these technological practices that pre-date computers, right? Why does the multiple choice, where did the multiple choice question come from, right? Why does it have four, why does it have four choices? How did that get hard coded, you know, now literally with code, but how do those sorts of practices get sort of hard-coded into education so that when we make things digital, we don’t actually address those underlying modes. 

We just sort of replicate them with flashier graphics and on different devices, but we don’t actually ask sort of what’s this legacy that we carry forward with us. 

Again, that turns students into objects to be shaped rather than individuals that should have a voice and a say in what that looks like. My name is Tim Owens. 

I’m from here in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and I work for the University of Mary Washington. 

Yeah, it’s been a really interesting path. You know, we played around with the idea of hippie hosting and the server co-op, and we moved with No Main and One Zone at University of Mary Washington and later with other institutions playing around with the same idea of the server in a box, that everybody got their own space, that their own, as Jim would call it, often you get your own slice of a server. Well, that idea starts to fall away a little bit with these newer technologies. Now it might be a virtual server, it might be multiples. you’re dropped into one of, at the moment, four different servers. Don’t know which one you’re on. Doesn’t matter, right? So it’s an interesting world as you start to break away into the different pieces. And it’s not one box to fit everything. It’s sort of breaking things down into the individual needs. I need Apache for this thing. I need a database over here for this thing. And instead of trying to fit this square peg into that round hole, we’re starting to organize things in many different ways. There’s a newer technology, newer, it’s new to me. It’s probably been out for at least a couple years, but people are really picking up on it called Docker. And the idea behind Docker is it’s virtualization technology, but instead of the virtualization technology that we’ve used up until this point is creating entire servers in sort of a virtualized box, which is fine, and it’s great because it’s hardware independent, but at the same time we’re still taking all of these moving pieces and we’re putting them all into one single thing. The idea of Docker is that you have containers, and so you have your Apache container. You have your files container and your database container. Maybe you have multiple Apache containers running in different places, and why would you do that? Because you can mix and match things and sort of architect something really interesting and make it really easy. You can duplicate the – I don’t need to have multiple operating system containers because all of those other services can rely on that single operating system container. But now when I want to upgrade the operating system, I don’t have to worry about whether or not these other containers are going to freak out or it’s things are going to get overwritten. You know, I can – and that there’s this whole community of sharing, which is important too. I’ve seen that a whole lot with the Docker community, which is something that I’m following pretty closely. You look on GitHub and people are creating Docker images on all kinds of things and putting it out there. Hey, this is WordPress with Nginx and it runs on Google page speed and loads lightning fast and it has a, you know, it has a varnish back end and things that it’s like, in order to tell someone how to install that, it used to be, you know, like, oh, I’ll create a Wiki doc, it’ll be about seven pages long, you’re going to need some Unix experience And now it’s sort of you run like, you know, one command and it fires up multiple containers it breaks all those things into different pieces and fires them up and so and then if they update it with like Hey, we got a new version of this. We’re doing things a little differently. 

little differently. It’s just like Rebuild, you know rebuild this container and and and things start firing up in different places So, you know, it’s really exciting to see that move away from the one big thing to the multiple little things that I need and the ability to mix and match them and stack them as I see fit rather than Trying to to fit all of that into one scenario And then what I might want is not something that someone else wants and you know Or there might be limitations within the technology here And that’s okay, right? 

And that’s okay, right? I think in some aspects. There’s some student agency to that right so that the a student who wants to do X, Y, or Z, the answer isn’t, well, you could do that, but we got an ABC box. We didn’t get an X, Y, Z box. And to do that, we’d have to procure something different. It runs all this other different stuff. 

Now, we can start to get to saying yes all the time. 

Just, yeah, sure. You want to run that? Sure. You want to run Ghost over here and Discourse over there, and you want to run WordPress Multisite over there, but you’re really worried about making sure that it’s up all the time, sure, yeah. Like whatever you want, we can do it because these containers exist and this virtualization technology makes it extremely cheap and fast to fire things up on the fly. It becomes a lower barrier of entry because, you know, there’s no failure here. There’s no danger. You know, I can fire things up and I can make them go away and, you know, I haven’t wasted actual resources. 

I’ve wasted, you know, pieces of a server that can expand and contract as the needs do. 

The big thing for me is Reclaim Hosting. Reclaim Hosting was born, as I said, out of hippie hosting in many regards. 

So, you know, it seems wild, but it was, you know, almost three years ago that we started thinking about this idea of the server co-op. And then we took those same ideas from, you know, that little hippie hosting thing, and I said, we could do it with students, too. Why not? So we did the Domain of One’s Own pilot, which grew into an institutional program here. And we’d talk about that at other conferences, and people would say, that’s great, but, you know, in typical fashion, the biggest criticism was, that’s great for you, but I could never do that. And Jim and I last year sat down, and we were talking and spitballing different ideas, and And he said, I really, really want you to just set up something where other people could do this, too. I know you can do it. And I thought, well, sure, the money’s there. And he said, money’s not there. Don’t worry about the money. So we started playing around with it. Jim had just gotten a Shuttleworth Foundation flash grant, and he said, we got a little bit of money here. Could we build on that? And I said, that’ll get us by for a couple months. And so we thought, well, for a year, let’s allow other faculty to just play with this. We won’t worry about the money. So we only charged for the domain. We didn’t charge for the hosting. We made it as cheap as possible and still try to make it as cheap as possible just to let other people play with this. The conversations that I’ve had from so many different people with that, it’s just opened my world to so many different institutions, so many different faculty doing amazing stuff with their students and it’s a constant joy for me to get to talk to people and help them out and what a breath of fresh air for them you know they’re coming from other places where they say things like oh I used to want to do something like this with GoDaddy and they were no help whatsoever or I could never do this because for my students like it was like $20 a month and that’s a ton of money for them at the time you know you might as well be charging a hundred dollar textbook for a semester, you know, and they couldn’t justify it. And now we’re able to start working with them to think about these possibilities. You lower those barriers to entry, you know, and you try to make it as easy as possible, and people jump on board. And when I get to work with those people and help them imagine the stuff they’re doing, it goes beyond anything that I’ve done at DTLT. You know, like, I love the work that I’ve done at DTLT and continue to do with the faculty here. And for me, it’s like, amplify that, you know, to infinity. And that’s the pleasure that I get of getting to work with all of these different people and think about the projects they’re working on. I was talking to an institution just the other day who was inspired by DS-106 radio. But he thought, I talked to, you know, he said, I talked to my IT department. They think I’m out of my mind. They don’t even know what an internet radio station would look like, much less that they have the resources to support it. And I’m able to say, yeah, yes, yes, let’s do that, let’s play around with it, let’s fire up a server, and let’s play around with that software and see if it might do what you want it to do. So getting those opportunities to just play around with stuff, play around with different ideas, you know, with different faculty from all over the world. It’s been really exciting. 

My name’s Ben Werdmuller. I’m the co-founder and CEO of Known. 

And Known is a single website for all your content. So what we’re trying to do is empower students to actually publish all their coursework, their notes, their ideas, everything they feel comfortable with to a space that they control rather than a space that’s controlled either by administration or by some external vendor. So I think it’s important for everybody. You know, we’ve all lost control of our data and our profiles to companies, actually a really small handful of companies that control all of our conversations. But for students, it’s important for a whole bunch of reasons. One of the clearest is that, actually the learning management systems, which is usually a student’s interaction with learning technology, unfortunately, they’re really designed around administration rather than learning at all. And so what we’ll often see, for example, is once a class is over, you know, they’re forced to use the learning management system in their class to begin with, but once a class is over, it’s often deleted, which means that the student actually doesn’t have any way to build on any of that knowledge as they continue their learning journey. So by publishing to their own space, they get to keep that knowledge, they get to keep reflecting on all the things they’ve done at the institution, and they can choose what happens to it. So they can keep it when they graduate even and continue to build on it and I think that actually is, it’s better not just in terms of software because you get to control who, you know, mines your data and who uses it for profit but also for life, you know, you get to build on all the things you’ve written about, all the things you’ve reflected as you carry on. I think there are, there is room for closed spaces as well as open spaces. I think actually it’s about control and, you know, both the individual and the institution should be able to define what their community looks like and what the connected world around them looks like and how they interact with it. I think the thing about the LMS slash VLE, in the old days we were calling them CMSs, which is horrendously confusing, the thing about all of those is they still have a place. I mean, known, for example, doesn’t replace the LMS, you know, not by a mile. And what it can do is sort of sit alongside it or sort of as a layer on top of it that provides a more personal experience in addition to all the security and administration that that software provides. I think being able to take small, you know, simple pieces of software and kind of string them together to form kind of a suite of tools that is suitable for you, that’s a huge deal. I mean, people have been talking about personal learning environments for quite a long time. It’s important and I think more possible because of the open web than ever before to take all these tools and create an ecosystem that is yours. The most important thing that we’re adding to known is, you know, right now it’s a tool for publishing and for representing yourself online. That’s only half the story. It’s possibly less than half the story. What we’re working on is the ability, you know, for it to be the gateway to your entire community online. So you can connect to other known sites, you can connect to other sites that are running other software like WordPress, other platforms that produce feeds or use the interweb technologies that we’ve based our product on. So it’s not about creating a known-based social network. It’s about creating actually a social network that works like the web where every node is independent but you can all connect together seamlessly. And that’s huge. I mean that’s huge in education because suddenly – I mean the current – what I call the silo social networks, places like Twitter and Facebook, they’re actually filtering your feed. They’re choosing what data, what information you get to see, which in an educational context is horrible because obviously you’re connecting people to people to learn, you’re connecting people to share research, and you need to have that direct connection. You need to have actually a proper communication line to them. And so we’re hoping to provide that. 

That’s one of the reasons we’re doing it. And another reason is really it’s time for social networking to evolve and really to work like email where you can choose your own provider but still interact completely seamlessly without having to care what provider the person you’re communicating with uses. Right now, I mean, I’m excited about what we’re doing with Reclaim Your Domain or Domain of One Zone. It’s got a lot of different names. Reclaim Hosting is another kind of outshoot of this or offshoot of this, is the idea and it kind of came to me and crystallized to me a little bit for today because I’ve been through four of these domain of one’s own or reclaim your domain sections now. And things that are coming back again and again are questions of Amazon Web Services, this kind of virtualized space for doing these things and controlling notions of infrastructure in a very distributed way, GitHub, this idea of a kind of collective sharing versioning software to also start running an infrastructure on top of a third-party service in ways that are just almost alien to how we’re thinking about EdTech. And another one that’s interesting is APIs. And what’s great about them is I don’t understand any of them. Like I’ve come to everyone for the last two years, four times, and every time I’m like, okay, I think I understand what an API is, or I think I understand how GitHub works, or I think I get the idea of virtualized servers, and I never do, but I know that it’s important. And I know that as a group, So we both have to understand the difficulty of the tech and what it means. And I think why DTLT might be particularly good at this or might be particularly interested in this is that because we don’t necessarily live in that world, we spend the time and energy to try and translate how it’s significant for our institution. And so right now I’m really interested in getting back into the work of translating some of that stuff. And it’s hard because we have a lot of projects going already and we have a building to take care of, and we have faculty to support, but I think carving out the playtime, and that’s where that play might be interesting, is carving out the playtime to understand it and do it in a way that’s actually through metaphor or through analogy or through some fun, stupid thing that no one ever thought to talk about Amazon Web Services in relationship to The Wire is a good thing, and it’s A, that’s fun, but B, that starts to break down some of the kind of fetishizing of the tech and also obscuring of it. And usually the fetishizing, obscuring it is for a different reason, a political reason, a reason to kind of keep people who don’t understand it maybe in the dark around what choices you’re making as an institution and why. And we want to really be as open as possible about the decisions we make and about the technology that’s available and around the real politics that drive them. And I think when you do those three things and you do them well as a group, you’ll at least have a kind of dialogue at any given time around the state of tech now, because more and more it’s inescapable for a university to pretend like they can’t engage deeply and have the technologies defining their mission. And a group like ours is an investment in actually kind of thinking through that. And one of the things that made me most proud, and you talked about it, like I was really proud when the president reached out to us and said, what’s this whole MOOC thing? And they had six people who had thought deeply about it and who had thought like really critically, but not dismissively about it. And you know, we were able to share with them what we knew. And we were a resource that they had been paying for and investing in. And I think it paid off, paid off just in how they understand themselves as the liberal arts, the digital liberal arts, a liberal arts that’s dedicated to thinking critically about this stuff, but also to investing a group of people who can help them make a path forward in a time where everyone’s saying education’s over, higher ed’s doomed, the apocalypse is now. And I’m really proud of the fact that we can kind of tone down that rhetoric and have a longer view of the field and of what’s possible moving forward, because higher ed’s not going away. Education is not dead, but how we use this and the choices we make now matter for the next generation of students, which is where our attention should be. You know, let’s get away from this hype and let’s start refocusing on what it means for our students to understand the web, to understand their relationship to these third party services, to understand who they are online, to understand the implications of digital and identity, to understand the questions of how they are a product now of a whole new ecosystem of consumerism. You know, that’s what we did in American studies and history and English and all these other humanities. And the great thing about EdTech is it’s a field of sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities at once, rolled into a field that’s in some way still marginal enough that they can have its doctor oblivions. because no one’s paying attention and I think that’s a it’s a beautiful moment to be exploring that stuff and be both within disciplines and outside of them and it’s cool that our university trusts us enough to a fund us but to be turned to us when big issues arise that really shake the foundations of higher ed so I guess I’m proud of that

This one’s a gem. Well, they all are, but this interview is especially relevant for me because at the time of the interview UMW’s DTLT had just moved into their shiny new digs - and the Taylor Institute at UCalgary was still under construction. There were a LOT of parallels between DTLT and what was becoming the TI at UCalgary. The tension between “Innovation” and “Enterprise” colours all of our work, and it was great to hear from these amazing people about their work and experiences in the field.

Reclaiming Edtech Part 2:  Fostering a culture of innovation, featuring commentary from:

Direct link to audio file

This transcript was automatically generated by YuJa.

Hello again, my name is D’Arcy Norman and today I’m bringing you another episode that was recorded at the University of Mary Washington after the Open Education 2014 conference the series is titled reclaiming education educational technology and I’m realizing this was just under five years ago this one episode that that that’s included in this podcast right now Is actually it’s one I’ve referred to back many many times over those past five years I think it’s probably got some really important insights in there and I think it’s a great discussion of how innovation happened at UMW and how it wasn’t magic. I think that’s an important thing. So we have three people. We have Martha Berdis who was at UMW. She’s now at the Open CoLab at Plymouth State University. Tim Owens who was at UMW now at Reclaim Hosting and Jim Groom who again was at UMW and now at Reclaim Hosting. Without further ado, here is Fostering a Culture of Innovation, part of the Reclaiming Educational Technology Series. I am Martha Burtis. I work in teaching and learning technologies at the University of Mary Washington, and currently I am director of the Digital Knowledge Center, which is a new center in our division that just opened. It is a unit at the university whose primary mission is to help faculty think about how use technology in their classrooms. 

So like in a very simple way that’s what we do. The work that we do tends to be really focused on partnerships with faculty. 

We don’t see ourselves as kind of a production shop where people bring us courses and we transform them. We try and have a really kind of productive partnering relationship with faculty where they come to us with particular ideas or challenges that they’re facing and we present them with different possible options and then work together to figure out how to implement and try it out and iterate on that depending on the successes or problems that arise. DTLT has existed at the university in the form that it currently is in since about 2005. It was in other forms as DTLT for a few years before that, so we had various other staff who ended up moving into different areas at the university. Even prior to that, what we were known as was instructional technology, and that goes back to 1996 here at the university. I think the most important part of the original vision that was always here for instructional technology was the idea of investing in people and investing in as many people as possible to work with faculty. That said, we had our original kind of instantiation here at the university. We were very much sort of like tech support for faculty, so we worked in academic buildings and they came to us with jammed printers and projectors that had dead bulbs and we would try every chance we got to also get them to talk to us about teaching. And that gradually over time, we were able to transition more and more away from them seeing us as tech support and instead seeing us as sort of an asset and a service for really thinking about innovative pedagogy. But that legacy of investing in people is something that I think we’ve managed to continue to sustain and recognize that we don’t get some place innovative by just buying stuff. 

We do it by working together and working hard. My name is Tim Owens. 

I’m from here in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and I work for the University of Mary Washington. 

For us, I think the IT Convergence Center sort of reflects a mindset that DTLT has had for a while, which is this idea of flexibility, this idea of impermanence to things, which I think carries over in a lot of different areas. So for us, the building, you see a lot of furniture on wheels. You see a lot of spaces where it’s like we thought we might do this, but we might do something different. And so we want to have the ability to change things up. And for us as a department, we’ve sort of followed a similar mindset in the projects that we’ve done, this idea that nothing is necessarily so enterprise and so institutional that you can’t in a weekend just decide to do things completely different. It’s a very hard culture to change, but you can sort of build in that idea of not being afraid of failure. You know, we talk about that quite often. 

This idea that, you know, things are gonna break. No big deal. Get ready for them. Get ready for them to break, but you’re gonna do awesome stuff. When they break, we’re gonna fix it, and at the end of the semester, things are gonna be, you know, So you’re just going to be like, how could I ever go back to that consistent, boring vanilla world that we were in? And so for us, this building is so much less than that bland, boring world of this is the way it is and this is the way it will be. Our office reflects that. I mean, we don’t sit in cubicles all in the same squares and do our own thing with standard issue computers and same sets of stuff. You know, we move tables together, we walk across the hall, we move the furniture around. And so for me it’s that idea of flexibility and changing things up on the fly and never being afraid to say, I bet there’s something different out there. I’m Jim Groom. I’m the director of teaching and learning technologies at the University of Mary, Washington. The question of leadership in edtech is a tricky one because a lot of times it starts in ways that you wouldn’t necessarily suggest was a leadership role. A few people had an idea. 

We got domains. We got web hosting. We spun up systems. 

People started to find that attractive. And they started to use them. 

And they started to use them. And it’s funny. It’s at the point where people start naming you as leaders in a field that your relationship to that sense of leadership has to change. And I think anyone in the field now realizes that when the MOOCs broke big, When online learning seemed to be an efficiency or a reality that was going to actually come home, many groups, not just DTLT, but many groups around the country were changed in their relationship to leadership, particularly in online or hybrid or just notions of digital pedagogy. So we were lucky that we had 25 years of investment on part of the university since 1995 about the war that may get 20 years of investment since 1995, of people actually being paid to think about how teaching and learning is affected by the web and what that means. And so I think the latest iteration of DTLT and that notion of innovation is part of a really long road of work, of thinking, of investment on the part of the university, in kind of a broader sense that, you know, we know the web was evolving and developing being as a space to share and to collaborate, but within the last eight or nine years, that really reached a new plateau or a new level. And I think this group just basically was in the right place at the right time, thinking about the right things. And we just had good people, right? Like we had access to technology, we had freedom to do it, and we had a lot of good people who stayed a long time. I mean, if you take our group right now, we probably have between the six of us, between between 60 and 70 years of experience in EdTech. And that goes a long way, because we have people who’ve seen the bigger picture, we have people who know the politics of the institution, and we have people who are willing to push hard upon what it is that’s possible, and what it is that makes sense also for faculty on a very practical level. So balancing the possible and the practical has probably been that sweet spot of innovation for DTLT, and it’s always come back to people, and it’s come back to faculty and it’s come back to students. And we’re not so much R&D in this abstract weapons development, like we’re out there building the next kind of system that will change everything. We’re constantly iterating out pilots that we see that are useful, that we kind of define as a possible alongside a politic. And we see how that works. We see if people like it. We see if it’s relevant. And then we move from there. there. And I think we’ve been lucky. We’ve had a lot of successes. People look to us and I think now so more than ever for a variety of reasons to building where in one of them. And I like that. I like the fact that the pressures are on and that we have to step up to it and that we have to do it in ways that are far more thoughtful, nuanced, and I would imagine kind of definitive for not only us as a group but for the field more generally. That’s a good place to be at. When you’re at the top of your game, how do you go higher? It’s like, well, this is great. What would the next thing do? 

What would the next thing do? I can remember every year I would sit down with Jim for an annual review, and he’d be like, oh my god, you’ve just been doing awesome stuff. 

In the first year, it was just like, DTLT Today, gangbusters, awesome. It’s so cool to be sharing all that stuff out, and you figured out the live streaming to the web and stuff. And I was just like, Yeah, I mean, it was just sort of like, you know, for me it was picking a passion at the time. And then the year after, it was like, oh my God, Domain of One’s Own, like this idea that we’ve dreamed about, you know, and now we’ve got Domain of One’s Own and we’re giving students web hosting, like, holy crap, what’s next, you know? And I said, I have no idea what’s next. I never do. You know, and I think for me it’s about worrying less about whatever’s next, whether it will be bigger than the last thing. Who cares? It doesn’t have to be bigger. It just has to be relevant to others. It has to be relevant to others. It has to meet an individual passion, I think, because I don’t think real innovation can come without an inert passion. And so for me, it’s about following the things that I’m interested in that I see a potential to make better and make more meaningful for a lot of different people. So for the makerspace is another great example. So you know working with faculty and and and starting to play around with 3d printing and it’s like wow This is great. How do we get students involved with that kind of thing? And the makerspace idea was starting to grow in other places other libraries were starting to maybe think about it so we talked to our library and just created one and and you know don’t don’t ask for permission and you know It’s just you just like you know beg borrow and steal to create something and and throw everything against the wall and some stuff works and some stuff doesn’t and you make it work. But I think when you’re engaged with something, as we know from students, when they’re engaged by something and they have a real passion for it, great stuff’s going to come out of that regardless. And whether it continues to build on or is better than the previous thing, who knows? I mean, Domain of One’s Own might be like the top of the game, But, you know, I think the stuff we can do, you know, with Reclaim hosting at other institutions, with Docker and newer technologies, even on a much smaller scale for the individual application and the individual user in very meaningful ways, making cPanel better on those kind of things. So sometimes it’s more about just building on top of the existing work and continually refining it rather than this worry that I have to create something completely different that’s really big and that’s going to be the next big thing. I just continually look around and there’s never a lack of problems because things are always getting better. We’re getting newer technologies all the time and with that comes efficiencies, with that comes possibilities and so you know pick the passions and and jump towards the needs and we got it. 

Every time I ever whenever I talk to schools about the work that we do the question I always get is some variation on what you just asked me just kind of like well how do you do that and and what’s different about about what you have and and the end question being well how can we do that and like how do we replicate that or how do we make that happen and so I’ve spent a lot of time over the years trying to come up with a good answer so I don’t really have one but but I do think like you’re kind of you’re hitting on it is that it isn’t it isn’t a recipe it isn’t there isn’t steps it really is about an ethos and a philosophy and a set of values that we all have the first one being what I already mentioned which is that it’s about people and it’s about like respecting and honoring the people who work here and giving them the space to experiment, and try new things, and to fail, and then try again, and not to always think that the solution is something that we can buy, but instead imagine that the solution is something that we build. And that doesn’t mean that we all code, but I mean, building can come in lots of different forms. Sometimes we build it through relationships, and sometimes we build it through bringing people in from other schools, and sometimes we do code it or, you know, make it. So that’s one part of it. But the other part of it, which is something like I kind of hit on just like in the past year or so, because I would go visit people at other schools and realize that the way they worked was so different from how we worked. So I think that maybe part of it has to do with that too, which like you can’t see it in the camera, but like our office is right over here and it’s not a traditional office. We have desks that are all kind of like pushed up against each other, it’s sort of a bullpen and we can’t escape each other in there. But it also means that we’re constantly bouncing ideas off of each other and working through things together. We’re not isolated. 

We’re not in our little offices. To solve a problem, we don’t have to schedule a meeting. We just yell across the desk and we work on it for a few minutes and we solve it and we fix it. And I think there’s something about that that’s been pretty special in terms of how we work. We’re really close as a result, we drive each other crazy sometimes, but it also allows us to be really agile and really adaptive, and I think to make people feel like this is a kind of a welcoming, vibrant place to come into. So I think those are some of the things that make us different maybe, and maybe that’s part of why we are the way we are. And that’s a tension we’re constantly playing with, and it’s a really good question. You know about it very well. And that tension between, you know, student-centered technologies and approaches and maybe institutionally scalable and sustainable approaches is usually the fact is that most places the question starts at institutional, scalable, sustainable. That’s it. And if it’s not that from the beginning, then oftentimes it doesn’t, it’s not possible. Hence the, you know, proliferation of the LMS. It was that at once. But for us, we often started with smaller pilots that actually centered around the question of we’re a liberal arts school, we believe in small, focused teaching and learning experiences, and we could actually abstract out from that focused technologies that promoted that idea. And through that, we were able to do that, right, we were able to bring up blogging and but at the same time suggest how that’s not just you know this one-off, it’s also scalable. 

And it’s scalable because you know people are scalable if they’re interested. 

People are scalable if they’re learning together and it’s what makes the web so awesome. 

So we’ve constantly used the web as our template for innovation and it’s like well if the web could have made this dramatic impact in the last 25 years how can we model the work we’re doing as much as possible on the web rather than these closed monolithic systems, which serve their purpose, but oftentimes get us away from where the most interesting teaching and learning happens. And so we made a really focused point to support the LMS, but not to be defined by it. And that’s really how we’ve pushed forward, and I think the great effect, I mean I think some of our best work actually pushes back on the notion that the LMS is a foregone conclusion. 

And not that it’s not necessarily a part part of what you do, but it’s not that it has to be a conclusion. And there’s a lot of thought right now that’s going out there like, the LMS is kind of inevitable because faculty want a grade book, or faculty want this and they want speed greater. And I don’t think it’s inevitable. I think what’s the problem more times than not is there’s not relationships between people who spent the time thinking about this and helping faculty who have a million other things to do to get their head around some of these possibilities and to be in partnership for some period of time, to think about the web in ways that might really be constructive and redefining for their approach to teaching and learning in some very focused ways when it comes to technology. So we have the support to do that. And that’s that long tale of investment that we’ve seen since 1995. That’s still paying off. And so it could come like, you’re a leader in this group and there’s a lot of leaders in this group. There’s six of them. And there’s six of them, and there’s been another probably 30 or 40 of them before us. And that matters, and it matters because it’s a cumulative effect of decades of work that we’re starting to see the fruits of, but we don’t need to be kind of confused that we’re defining it, you know? It’s helped define who we are in our jobs now. And I think that respect for the past and that hope for the future is what’s kept us in a situation that’s been both humble, well not me, but the group humble and also focused, right? So I want to think that’s it. 

And I think leadership is a tricky, tricky thing, like, because once you’re, it’s not like you can define your leadership just like you can’t, you know, erase notions of power, but you can get caught up in the notion of, hence, leadership means, you know, that this is the way it’s done or Or this is kind of follow me and you will. And I think leadership often has more to do with listening and learning and what most of what we’re doing over the last three or four days has been about. Like sharing out what’s happening in the field so that we can come back, we can take stock, and we can rethink how we’re working it. So just the kind of collective sense of working together to understand the bigger issues in the field rather than looking to one person to be the guiding light because that’s oftentimes you know it’s oftentimes a dead end you know at least in my estimation you find me in a period where you know we moved into a whole new building so you know for years we were in a very different space and I’ll even take you over there to see it like this kind of old you know half the size of this room beat up you know fabric walls they’re kind of peeling up as if someone and put them in the washer, and it’s just ugly. But it was a space where we came together and we just did stuff on the cheap. And we were kind of outside everyone’s view. Whereas here, we’re a lot more focused. There’s a lot more attention, and we’ve talked about that. And I think the play in that regard was really powerful because we were pushing on our notions of what’s possible, what we can afford, what we can do, and we just have a really good relationship as a group. I think for the last three or four months, we’ve been in a different space because we have a whole different convergence of resources and possibilities. And I know me personally, that’s a little scary and it’s a little kind of like, I feel a lot more comfortable when we don’t have many resources and we have to do stuff with a little. The point about creative play and the work DTLT has done, I find that’s because we’ve had a very interesting office set up and that why I want to focus on the office is We had a bullpen and we were always there together at a series of desks shooting ideas around and so Dr. 

Oblivion, for example DS 106 to summer of oblivion. 

I was doing this. I shaved my head My wife was like, what are you doing making it was also like you look weird stay away from my kids I don’t come near me because you were not you and And I actually really went through this identity crisis, right, like I was like, who the hell am I? And I go there through them often and breakdowns often, but this was a particular one. So come Thursday night, we had done this class for three days and I was really in the office after I’d done it. I was like, like, distraught. This class is ridiculous. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know who I am. I’m stopping. I’m going to just be Jim Groom again and be done. And Martha’s like, yes, you should and Dr. 

Oblivion should go missing. And then you should have a narrative around that, and then the rest of the office started picking up on the narrative and writing it. And it wasn’t about Dr. 

Oblivion or Jim Groom. It was about a community sharing ideas and building. And I think that’s a very good example of what DTLT has done for a long time. It’s a group of people who put their work out there, who put their ideas out there, and the rest of us pick up on it, we riff on it, and we share on it. And it’s been a good, you know, it’s tricky, because it’s like working with your family sometimes. And you know how family relations go, you know how work relations go. It’s not always easy, it’s not always clean, but we’ve done a real good job of focusing on what we do, which is bring innovative teaching and learning to our faculty. And we thought the best way to do that is to make it fun. Because if it’s too serious, like a lot of these issues are, sometimes they’re hard to approach. 

But if you couch them in a fake professor that can only lecture to the camera and then goes missing, people are like, what the hell are you doing? And it piques a certain amount of interest that otherwise may get lost. So it’s also been a kind of, for lack of a better word, a marketing approach. 

You make things fun, you make them approachable for faculty and students, and maybe they’re a little bit more interested in the work you’re turned the camera back on our faculty and students. We’ve actually promoted their work. You know, how often when the faculty members working with students and students do great work or faculty do great work, does anyone in the university say, that was awesome work? You know, they forget it, they don’t mind it, it’s there, but when we had the blogging platform, all that became visible. And so rather than us just sitting to the side and saying, you know that, I made a pointed effort of us going in there and actually promoting it, featuring it, saying look at the awesome work our faculty is doing and I think that really paid dividends forward for years and it’s something that the blogging platform we lose in that kind of discussion is it exposes work that’s often the best happening at the University and a group like ours could also play that strange marketing role that when our marketers is saying look have you seen the great work they’re doing in chemistry? Have you seen the awesome work they’re doing in foreign languages. Have you seen the amazing work happening in history? And if you haven’t, come to our group and see it. And that’s a really weird role. The thing is, is none of it’s scripted, none of it’s planned. Like you could say, you’ve been detailed, he’s been a strategic force of innovation for the last 10 years. And I think if you ask anyone in the group, they’d be like, yeah, it kind of worked that way, but there was no particular plan. We just got lucky that good people stayed for long enough to have a sense of institutional history, but also had a shared ethos that open student-centered and faculty-centered learning was important. 

important. And we tried to circle back everything we did to ask them, how does that match against that ethos? 

And I think That was really our guiding principle everything else could be an experiment on top of that It could be as silly or as serious as long as it in some way took that principle that guiding principle seriously Or held some of its truths dear if that makes any sense the sense of community within UMW is pretty strong I think and I don’t want to say it’s like all faculty because it’s not we have about 200 faculty and And we did an initiative recently for the domain of one’s own project, which is a project where we give faculty, staff, and students their own domain. And so we did calls out for faculty to actually come and work with us for six weeks to kind of get up and running with their own domain. And in the last two years, we worked with close to 50 faculty, which is a quarter of our faculty. And we were able to kind of work with them to think about how they use this stuff to get them thinking about how this is a personal space, how this helps them manage their personal Brand, for lack of a better word, it allows them to think about their discipline and how discipline is engaged with the digital. Questions of digital sciences, digital humanities, digital social sciences. Questions of portability of their data. What is big data? How is all of this stuff changing the very fields they work in? And that conversation on campus started to make our group less of, you have a problem, let us fix it and we’ll fix it with a tool. and more of a conceptual, disciplinary-specific group that can speak to them about the changing nature of their field in relationship to the digital. And that gave us a real different approach to notions of partnership. And we do deal in tools, and we do deal in technology, and the technology does matter, but we’re also really embedded in the concepts around that and the thinking around that and the broader implications for that stuff on what we call the liberal arts. Like, we’re knee deep in that, like we’re all thinkers, and EdTech is a space that needs to be interrogated just like their spaces do, and just like they do in their disciplines. And I think we have a lot of respect from that group because we don’t blindly suggest that any one thing we do or provide will solve their problems, or make their jobs easier, or make them better looking. It’s not going to happen, right? I think that higher education does an abysmal job of contextualizing for students why online spaces in the digital world matters. And I think because we invest in these big tools and systems, we think that that’s what we should be talking to our students about, and that’s what matters, and those systems and tools are really somewhat irrelevant outside of the walls of our schools. So for me, what matters is that we’re recognizing the importance of this for our students and our faculty and that we’re doing the hard work to make sure that they have opportunities to really explore and interrogate these spaces. So, I just started this new center this fall and that’s something that I’ve been kind of dreaming about for years and the opportunity to make that happen is really, really important to me because we’ve worked with students for years but it’s always been through the kind of channels of visiting classes and working through faculty and this is a way for us to one-on-one, helping them through a peer support mechanism and I really hope that it allows us to get at some of these issues at a more grassroots level at the institution where students see that other students care about this and this matters. We have like an amazing group of student workers now who work in the center and who work with their friends and peers and I think that kind of modeling and that kind of dynamic isn’t something we can easily reproduce from where we sit, but it is something we can enable and we can encourage through something like the center. So that’s, to me, that’s the thing I most, that’s where my head is completely right now.

It’s time to re-reboot the podcast, starting by resurrecting the audio from the Reclaiming Educational Technology interviews that were recorded during a hackathon event hosted at the University of Mary Washington after Open Education 2014.

I keep coming back to these episodes, even 5 years later, as they are full of amazing insights by incredibly passionate and interesting people. I’ll be posting the audio from all 4 episodes shortly…

This episode features:

Direct link to audio file

Interviews were conducted by D’Arcy Norman and David Kernohan.

Video and audio were recorded by Andy Rush.

Amateur editing by D’Arcy Norman.

This transcript was automatically generated by YuJa.

Hello and welcome to the Taylor Institute Learning Technologies podcast. My name is D’Arcy Norman, and I’m the host for this series. After a very long hiatus, I am kick-starting this podcast and starting with actually repurposing some audio from some interviews recorded shortly after Open Education 2014 where a large group of people gathered at the University of Mary Washington and kind of a EdTech Hackathon. 

And so David Kernahan and I were able to interview some of these people. We thought we’d take advantage of having all these amazing people in one place and sort of pick their brains on a few topics. The video and audio were recorded by Andy Rush and I added them together into some semblance of coherence. 

So we have four episodes. This one is episode number one. The topic is the business and politics of EdTech and features commentary from Audrey Waters from hackeducation.com, from Kin Lane from theapievangelist.com, and Martha Burtis, who was at University of Maryland Washington at the time and is now at the Open CoLab at Plymouth State University. So without further ado, here is episode one of the Reclaiming Educational Technology Series, The Business and Politics of EdTech. My name’s Audrey Waters. I’m a writer. I write about education technology. and I think contrary to what a lot of education technology journalists do, I think I’m actually, I try to be critical and ask questions about what we’re doing and why, instead of just sort of cheerleading, cheerleading tech. I think that one of the things that education technology does is it has in many ways reinforces some of the really traditional practices of education. It doesn’t have to, but that’s sort of what we’re faced with, right? So we see education as a process in which traditionally education is a process where students’ minds are filled with knowledge from above. The teachers, the administrators, the university sort of decides the curriculum, tells them what they need to know, open up their brains, pour the information in, craft them as sort of models in a particular discipline or for a particular profession and send them on their way. It’s sort of a traditional typical view, stereotypical view, if you will, of what education does. 

It sort of churns out students as objects. And I think that there’s, you know, a different tradition that sees students as having more agency, that in order to really, that we should recognize that learning is something that should be self-motivated and driven by your interests and your passions and that you really understand things when you construct knowledge yourself instead of sort of being told what to know that you have to make this process of discovery. And so, you know, how do we use technology to generate and foster that? I think most of the time what we see is technology used and technology that positions students as objects. So I’m really interested in the projects that make students at the center, that give students the power and the agency to build, construct, make their own connections, do their own work, be in control of their own learning, instead of just these cogs in the university or in the school wheel. It’s interesting to see how a lot of those phrases get picked up by Silicon Valley, sort to brand their thing as sounding more progressive, right? And I think that there’s something about technology that we see it as being futuristic, right? So it’s somehow necessarily progressive. Doesn’t mean it’s politically progressive, but I think, particularly in the United States, we see as anything that’s technological means that it’s future facing. So more technology is towards the future, something that’s moving towards the future. I see the tech sector that they talk about being user-centric, but that just means I think that it’s easier for them to get you to hand over more data to them. I think that they talk about openness, but really that means that the sign-up process is easier so that they get you onboarded more simply. They talk about free, but it’s not free as in freedom, it’s free as in, again, like how much of your data can you hand over to these companies. So I think that they’re used, I think they find ways to make themselves sound like they’re doing students, doing society a great service, but I’m pretty skeptical if that’s really what the motivation is. So my name’s Kin Lane. I’m the API evangelist. What I do is I’m a software engineer by trade, but for the just been studying this phenomenon known as APIs, or Application Programming Interfaces, which is a feeling, you know, not just many of the websites we use on a daily basis, the Amazons and Googles and Twitters of the world, but rapidly driving all the mobile apps that we use for those same platforms, but also, you know, other mobile-specific applications. So I study, pay attention to the technical of it all, but also what I consider the business and politics of APIs, which cover a lot of ground, but definitely some hot button topics that are really pressing today. So for me, APIs are about access to resources, whether it be your tweets on Twitter, your wall posts on Facebook, and these APIs are providing ways of building applications, mobile applications, on top of the resources that are generated by these platforms and these resources are basically the exhaust of the citizens, all of us, you know, all of us Facebook users, Twitter users, Google users, every search we do, we’re generating resources for these companies and that’s how they make their money. So the business of APIs is about well how much do I actually allow for accessing of these resources so that I as Google, can still make money, but I can allow other people to build applications for my users on top of this data. So there’s a fine balance there in how you open up access so people can build things, innovate on top of Google searches, Twitter data, but then how much do you restrict that access so you’re not giving away all of your value as Google or Twitter. 

Twitter started as a very open platform. It was just a text box that you could put tweets into and follow friends. And they opened up an API and everybody came and built everything we know as Twitter. 

The iPhone app, the Android app, the hashtag, everything you know as Twitter today was built by the community by APIs. 

But over the course of the last seven years, Twitter has slowly tightened the screws down because they have investors to the tune of 1.4 billion dollars that say, well, we have to start generating revenue from this exhaust that you’ve created and your community’s created. So the business, the technology of that is opening up the APIs and people building things. The business of it is people building things for you for free on top of this and people generating these resources for free. The politics of it is, well, how do I now change my terms of service so I can resell this data to other companies? I can rate limit developers who are building things that may threaten me as Twitter. So I can rate limit. I can change my terms of service. I can adjust my privacy policies. I can adjust my pricing. 

So those are all the politics of APIs. and they’re very subtle and unless you’re in the industry studying it you really don’t know these things are going on and and especially on platforms like Twitter that don’t actually have a business model besides advertising you are the product you know and people don’t realize that I am Martha Burtis I work in teaching and learning technologies at the University of Mary Washington and currently I am director of the digital knowledge center center, which is a new center in our division. I think that higher education does an abysmal job of contextualizing for students why online spaces in the digital world matters. And I think because we invest in these big tools and systems, we think that that’s what we should be talking to our students about and that’s what matters and those systems and tools are really sort of somewhat irrelevant outside of the walls of our schools. 

So for me what matters is, this isn’t a couple of lines, for me what matters is is that we’re recognizing the importance of this for our students and our faculty and that we’re doing the hard work to to make sure that they have opportunities to really explore and interrogate these spaces. We’ve worked with students for years, but it’s always been through the kind of channels of visiting classes and working through faculty. And this is a way for us to work with students one-on-one, helping them through a peer support mechanism. And I really hope that it allows us to get at some of these issues at a more grassroots roots level at the institution, where students see that other students care about this and this matters. We have like an amazing group of student workers now who work in the center and who work with their friends and peers. And I think that kind of modeling and that kind of dynamic isn’t something we can easily reproduce from where we sit, but it is something we can enable and we can encourage through something like this. I mean, I think that this is a real challenge, and I think that this is always, I think, going to be a challenge around education, right? How do you balance an individual’s needs and individual’s desire to sort of explore and make connections with a community and with society’s expectations of what you need to know, whether that community is a community of scholars or sort of society at large. I mean, I think that that is always the balancing act around education, because it is not just about intellectual development, but it’s about your social development as well. I think that right now we’re seeing a lot of the effort being on being more and more individualistic. So what matters is, what matters are your own individual needs so that when you graduate from college you can make a lot of money. And the value of education is changing from being, we’re all going to participate in this thing because we think it’s a public good. So I think that there is always going to be that tension between the expectations of a community, an institution, as a scholarship, and the individual. I mean really, you know, A, just helping higher educational institutions understand this, whether it be from a top-down level like I’m doing with BYU, straight out of the CIO’s office, going through and making sure every system across campus has an API, so that other departments and faculty and students can access course catalogs, schedules, buildings, staff directories, every aspect of campuses. operation should be programmable and accessible to students in a safe and secure and privacy sensitive way. So that kind of work at BYU from a top down is very important. I would say I’m doing similar work with folks at Berkeley, but it’s a more bottom up. The students have demanded APIs. You know, IT has no interest in opening up systems, which, again, is a very common political problem that we face. But the students are like, no, we’re going to scrape your catalog. We’ve made our own API. You might as well just give us a real one, because we’re building apps that students are using already to plan their education. So why do we have to scrape it off the website and do it in these insecure ways? Give us the actual resources. So those top, down, and bottom up are very important to me.

As part of Open Education Week at the University of Calgary, Richard Zach and Aaron Thomas-Bolduc gave a presentation to introduce the concept of OERs, where to find them, and how to make them. Lots of love sent to BCCampus’ Open Textbook initiative and Pressbooks.

Direct link to audio file

This transcript was automatically generated by YuJa.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Taylor Institute learning technologies podcast Today’s episode is a recording of a workshop provided by Richard Zach and Aaron Thomas Balduq from the University of Calgary’s Department of Philosophy as Part of Open Education Week They talk a little bit about what open education resources are How to find them how to make them and then go on to give examples on how to actually edit? What we are textbooks in real time So, I’m going to start here and tell you a bit about what open educational resources are, why we might use them, why you might want to make your own. We’re going to focus mostly on textbooks, because that’s where Richard and my experience mostly lies. After I talk about that, I’m going to pass the mic to Richard, who’s going to tell you where you might find OER, that you might want to adopt for your classes, and how you might put together an open textbook yourself, or completely write one from scratch, if you want. And he’ll wrap that up with a short demonstration of how to remix a textbook using press books, which is a common platform for creating OER. So, first of all, OER stands for Open Educational Resources. The sorts of educational resources that we’re thinking of are things like syllabi, your lecture notes and your handouts, classes, tests, quizzes, group work activities, also videos and podcasts, and of course textbooks. books. So I taught a logic class using this book. I also made some podcasts, or some screencasts, rather, to go along with it. Eventually, all of those materials will be released once I have time to do some editing. So what then makes a resource like that open is that you’re, if you’re taking something from somewhere else, you can keep it and you can reuse it in your course, in future courses, but you can also make changes to it. 

So convert it to your own needs. Could be small changes like changing the spelling from British English to Canadian English or major changes like using half of one text book and half of another. And that would then fall under sort of remixing, which we have here is you can take bits and pieces from lots of different open resources and put them together yourself to tailor it to exactly what you want to do. 

And finally, and crucially, you can redistribute these open educational resources that you’ve created or that you’ve found so that other instructors at your university or elsewhere can use them and remix them and revise them for their own courses. So how do we ensure that we’re allowed to do this? Generally use Creative Commons licenses. So this is a way of establishing a particular copyright paradigm that’s recognized internationally. 

So obviously some things are in public domain. In Canada that’s 50 years after the death of an author. You have to be careful with this because the time frame varies quite significantly in different countries. 

But you can also, if you create something yourself, release it as public domain yourself. 

as public domain yourself. More commonly when we create OER, we use slightly more restrictive licenses. The preferred license in this community is called the CC by or the attribution license. So it allows people to basically do whatever they like with something you’ve created, as long as they give you credit for creating the original thing. It’s nice to get credit for work you’ve done, some of this can take a lot of time and a lot of effort, but it doesn’t restrict otherwise what they can do with those resources. You can restrict that slightly more by saying that anybody who uses something you’ve shared and created has to, can only share it with the same license. This is also fairly common and still a very open license. To that, we can add a condition that things can’t be used for commercial purposes. This isn’t really a big worry most of the time. Companies trying to make money from educational resources aren’t going to make money on things that can be found for free elsewhere, right? And Creative Commons also has no derivatives license. That’s generally not considered an open license anymore because it doesn’t allow anyone to change the resource that you’ve shared. So I won’t go through this, but this is sort of how the different licenses interact. And if you have questions about how these licenses work, this will help us later. So why might you want to adopt or create an open textbook? 

So why might you want to adopt or create an open textbook? Well, the obvious reason is the cost. So they said we created a textbook for the Logic One course here. 

This is it. The most common book in use in Canada, as far as I know, is The Logic Book, which costs about $150. This book was free for my students to download or $12 and change for a printed version from the bookstore. So I’ve listed there as well philosophy of science book that’s very common in survey courses, which again runs $100 or more. That’s a lot of money, and that stacks up very quickly. And those textbook costs tend to affect underrepresented students more. So first-time students, poorer students. And it’s been shown that using open textbooks increases enrollment and helps students finish their programs more quickly. Partly because they feel more comfortable taking more courses because they’re not worried about paying hundreds and hundreds of dollars for all these textbooks. There are other reasons you might want to adopt OER. You can adapt them freely. You can do what you like with them. You can change things around. You’re not forced to use new editions of books being released by textbook producers every couple of years so that they can keep making profits. And if you’ve ever been in this situation, either in a class or as an instructor, where you sort of, well, we need, you know, chapters one, two, and seven from this book and chapter three and nine from this book, well, if you’re using OER, you can take those chapters from those open resources and make them into one coherent book that fits exactly your needs for your course. And open educational resources also add pedagogical value to your course. You can have your students add new material or create new material, whether it’s examples for your textbook or problem sets or videos or podcasts even. They can then be used for later classes or by other instructors in other settings. And having students engage that way, I found anyway, so we were using, I taught this class, I was using this book for the first time, so there were some typos in it. And the students seemed very pleased to find little mistakes in my book. and so I encourage some of them to read more closely as well. Anecdotal, but seem to be the case. They seem happy about this. Students also don’t have to worry about, you know, somebody buys a textbook and three of you are sharing it and who has which textbook on which day and who has to work with whom on what assignment because the textbook is free. 

So, like I mentioned before, you can include exactly what you need, both in your textbook and your other resources, and you can make sure that all of the resources for your class are accessible. 

I’ll say a bit more about that now. 

So, traditional textbooks, you’re just going to have the one format, maybe it’ll be available as a PDF or more likely an e-book, but that will probably have to be purchased separately. 

If you’re using OER, you can have your materials available in a number of formats so students can choose what works best for them. 

You can also do things like ensure that your PDFs are optimized for screen readers for students with visual disabilities. Optimize your fonts and spacing and things for dyslexic students. 

So we’re currently working on an edition of this book that’s particularly optimized for dyslexic students, but that can be a different addition than the ones for other students, so students can choose which version is best for them. 

You can also use hyperlinks both within the book and to other resources that you’ve created. 

It’s nice to just have that ease of going back and forth between things. 

And you can provide transcripts and other things depending on what other resources you’re using without having to worry about a copyright. 

So we pass it on to Richard who’s going to tell you a bit about where you can find books and how to make them. 

Yeah so the now you know what they are and get some reasons why you might want to use them, adopt them, promote them, make them. 

There’s one main problem with with open educational resources, especially open textbooks, is that when you use a commercial textbook, the commercial publisher comes to your door and tries to sell you things. Or at least it’s very easy to find what the textbooks are in your area of expertise. You probably have used them yourself as an undergraduate or as a graduate student when you first taught them. So if you want to switch to an open textbook, for instance, it’s comparatively harder to find out where they are. So that’s what I’m going to talk a little bit about, where you go to find these things. So the best places to find open textbooks is a number of repositories, which I will mention some of them and show you. But of course, lots of these things are sort of labors of love of individual faculty members who just put the textbook that they wrote, or the lecture notes, or the course handouts and so on on their own website and then you know maybe it’ll have to be something that you find out from either from them directly or through social networks you might ask on Facebook or on Twitter or something does anyone know of a free textbook for the class that I’m going to teach next next term that sort of thing for non textbook OERs so things that you might use for in making your PowerPoint presentations or assign in addition to the reading for your students or maybe videos or things like that. Many of the, many of the usual places where you find content, YouTube for videos, Flickr for images, Wikipedia of course, will have, will have in the search You can, for instance, in YouTube, you can search for videos on a particular topic, but you will be able to restrict it to, say, only creative content or only public domain. And then, of course, you always have the option of making your own, and I’m also going to talk about that a little bit. And please, of course, interrupt me if there’s anything that you want me to explain more or elaborate on or so on. So first of all, some repositories. So we brought in a bunch of free open textbooks that are available. There are a number of initiatives that are well-funded and that are underwritten by either universities or university consortia to produce textbooks for commonly offered courses. So the first one is OpenStacks, and I think it’s one of the ones that have been around for the longest time. And if you look at an open textbook from OpenStax, that looks like a regular textbook. But PDF of this is free. You can read it online for free, and it doesn’t cost $250. Another one, which is perhaps more relevant to us, is BC Campus Open Ed. So BC Campus is obviously the British Columbia higher or education, the provincial body that deals with all of that. And they have an open education initiative that also produces open textbooks. And their approach is a little bit different. So instead of basically hiring and paying people to write textbooks for particular courses, they’ve encouraged faculty, especially especially in British Columbia, to author textbooks or to take textbooks that other people have offered and made available under an open license and change it, adopt them to the Canadian context. So for instance, we got Canadian history textbooks but we also have psychology textbooks in a Canadian edition and I’m not sure exactly what the research methods in psychology, where that came from, but they for instance they used some of the open sex textbooks and then turned them into Canadian editions. 

All the things that they have produced and also things that they vetted, so the initiative is not just to author and and to vet them according to some criteria. So many of the things in this repository will tell you not just where you can find the textbook, but also who’s using it, so who’s adopted it, that’s sort of an indicator of quality. It will have some reviews from faculty members, usually at British Columbia universities. And sometimes it will even have a seal of approval that it has been reviewed for accessibility and meets the standards BC Campus Standards for, being accessible open resource. So it’s available in different formats, for instance, it’s optimized for screen readers, the electronic formats, the pictures will have alternative texts that someone with a the screen reader will read out the description to them rather than just having a picture there that doesn’t have an alternative description. There’s some other repositories. So for instance, the OER Commons is basically a big search engine for open educational resources, not just textbooks. And the Open Textbook Library is also sort of an aggregator of various different sources where you might find open textbooks. textbooks. 

There are some disciplines that have, yes sir, yes, I’m not sure. 

I know that Manitoba and Ontario, they just use BC’s system. 

So there’s an Ecampus Ontario search engine for open textbooks. It’s the same as BC’s. It’s just rebranded. I think we were going to do the same thing. 

And in the original OER funding pilot, when you produced something that was funded by Alberta, you had to provide it in a format and they would give it to BC to include it in the search engine. 

So some disciplines have gone and for some disciplines There’s a specialized initiative, so for instance, the NOBA project provides open educational resources and textbooks for psychology. Libra texts is also one of the first open educational OER initiatives out of UC Davis. This is especially for chemistry, and in fact, I think Mondrawa University uses it for their chemistry courses, and they’ve now expanded their model. So the model is basically, it’s like a Wikipedia. So all the individual parts of the textbooks are basically Wikipedia pages. And they’ve used a lot of the kind of approach, pedagogical approach that Aaron mentioned, namely engage students in producing material for future classes. So it’s grown very big, and it’s also grown very fast. And now they’ve sort of expanded into other disciplines as well. But it’s mainly historically, at least it’s been focused on chemistry. And they also sort of not just have the individual pieces sort of modular so that you can rearrange them and sort of use them as you see fit, but also many of the things that they provide are provided for different levels, right? so you might have an anorganic chemistry, something or other, for first-year students, for an interclass, but then also for advanced undergraduate students, and then the same material in even more depth for a graduate course, for instance. Mathematics, the American Institute for Mathematics has also a list of open math textbooks that they’ve reviewed and sort of provide links to and reviews off and so on but if you’re right so of course there are the usual places that you could look you could ask a librarian you could ask Google so so these are just some of the some of the places where you could go and look now most of these most of these places provide you with the with the textbooks in some kind of electronic format and sometimes you might want or usually some students at they still prefer printed things. So then there’s a question of how do you get a printed copy of that PDF that you found on the internet. So if you’re looking at an open text that’s produced by some of these initiatives, so for instance, the BC Open ones, you can just go to the website where you find the book, and there’s a link to order it online. And you can work with, for instance, our bookstore. So our bookstore has, in the past, for instance, for the ones that we’ve made. So what we’ve done is there’s a service that Amazon offers where you just upload the PDF and they make it into a nice paperback copy that’s still relatively cheap. So I think this one was $12, this one was $9. And you just have to talk to the virtual manager and they will just order 20 of them and sell them to your students, or you can just point your students to Amazon or to other print-on-demand services. There’s, of course, difficulties with that, right? So for instance, one of them is that you can’t really, the bookstore, I don’t know if the bookstore will buy them back, probably not, right? Because they can’t return it to the publisher, but for $9, it’s probably not such a big deal. And, of course, you can also use other venues for producing them. You can just go to bound and copied, for instance, to take the PDF and turn it into a course reader kind of bound version. But actually, if you send it to Amazon and have it printed, other than the shipping costs, it’s probably cheaper than to go to binary copy and have it duplicated there. So that’s for printed textbooks. How do you make it available to your students? You can share it simply by link. But the beauty of the OARs is that one of the first R, the retain and the redistribute, gives you the right to just take the thing and put it on D2L if you want to. You can email it to your students. You can go and get it printed without paying anyone royalties or without getting copyright clearance because the license says as long as it has the attribution and as long as it has the link to the original source, it’s okay to do with it as you please. So that’s really one of the important things about when you pick something like a textbook, that you pick an open one and not just a free one, because if it’s just free, whoever offers it now for free might decide later that they’re not going to host it on their website anymore. And now you’ve built a course around a textbook that is no longer available, but that can can happen with an open textbook, because as soon as it’s available under an open license, you have the right to retain it in perpetuity and also redistribute it in perpetuity, even if the original author decides later that, you know, I don’t want to make it available anymore. So, you can adopt it and make it available to your students. You can remix it. you can rearrange the content, you can add content, you can change content, you can fix mistakes in it that you couldn’t fix if it was just a free PDF or if it were a commercial textbook. Of course, when you do that, you always have to be careful to use, for instance, if you add things, right? So you can obviously add things that you’ve written yourself or pictures that you’ve taken yourself for diagrams that you’ve drawn yourself, but if you take them from somewhere else, then it becomes a question of, do you have the right to use this? Do you have the right to redistribute it as part of your course material? And you have to make sure that you use only things that are also available under licenses that are compatible with the thing that you’re doing. Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, no, that was my sign. So I’m sorry to suggest in a moment, but so I don’t know if this would affect other people, but centuries, one reason that I felt compelled to use a commercial anthology is that they have really good annotations. And so, how would I deal with that? Because I know I can get a lot of the checks from Project Gutenberg, et cetera, but it won’t come with the annotations, and it seems like pretty onerous. And also, I’d be probably, like, I know I’m not allowed to steal the annotation from Norton, which is what I want to do. So, yeah, what would you recommend, Dirk? Well, so I guess the first thing that you can do is just think about it as a sort of a long-term project to, you know, you’re going to start with the project Gutenberg thing, so copy it from the public domain, and then just sort of commit, you know, every time you teach it, you’ll maybe make some more handouts on the things, and every time you’ve made the handouts, maybe then you’ll actually put them into the system. But that seems also like the kind of thing that you could involve your students in. Everyone take a stanza of this poem, and then go and look and see what the references are, or things like that. One of the cool things at BC campus, because they might already have a textbook, but they’ll have a new student that’s going to have it. How do you make them? So this, again, of course is always a long-term project. If you want to write one yourself, let me point you to the textbook self-publishing guide that BC Open has also put out. We don’t have a copy of it here because I think it just came out. So it’s the new edition. So obviously, writing a textbook or collecting primary sources and editing and annotating them is a major undertaking and if you don’t put it out with a commercial publisher maybe you don’t get credit for a promotion and so on but it is definitely something that you can get money for first of all right so you can possibly get a grant for it for instance but it’s also something that you can as we just discussed right involve your students in and you can think of it as a like not a like I’m gonna write a textbook in the next year but just sort of something that you start doing and you build over time and every year it’ll be there might be one more chapter or one more set of problem sets or one one more set of questions that you can use for for your test bank and so on and eventually you’ll have enough stuff to actually send it to Amazon and not be embarrassed and actually call it a book, right? So I teach another logic course this term and I’ve done that. 

So these are now about a hundred and fifty pages. It’ll probably be a thing like that, a paper-bound copy at the end of the term. But it’s also something that other people of course, right, so once it’s not the thing that you need to keep control over because eventually you want to send it to the publisher and you want to have your name on it and you want to get all the royalties for it, right, so once that pressure is not there, right, then you can take contributions from other people. 

You can collaborate. It makes it much more of a collaborative effort. So for instance, the first textbook that we that I did this one, actually started as sets of lecture notes from three friends of mine, that I sort of edited into one coherent whole, made sure that all the notation and terminology was the same, added more detail and so on. And five Five years later, it’s something that looks like a commercially published text with all the problems, the problems and the chapter summaries, and doesn’t have an index yet, but maybe it’ll have an index soon. And for these kinds of things, there’s also initiatives. So BC Campus, of course, does some of these things targeted, right? So they will say, we need a textbook for a particular first year class and get a couple of profs together from various universities and then sort of get them to work together on a book. But there’s also a more distributed initiative called the Rebus Foundation. One of their goals is to also produce open textbooks for various disciplines. And this is more of a, you know, everyone who wants to volunteer for it, you can write a chapter. That can be your contribution. You can edit or review a chapter. and can serve as an editor or as a reviewer or just project managing, finding texts that can be included and so on. How do you share them? That’s another thing. If you do this kind of thing, it will be something that you will have to worry about. But if you go through a publisher, the publisher will do everything for you. We’ll distribute it. We’ll make it available, sell it, advertise it, and so on. So you’ll have to do some of these things probably yourself. The first thing to do is to pick a license that you put on it, because otherwise it won’t be an open textbook. It will just be a free textbook. And then you have to make it available somewhere. Usually the place to do that is your own website or an institutional repository but of course there’s other preprint servers for instance for various disciplines so a mathematician might make it, might put it on our key for a philosopher would put it on full papers and so on. When you do that make sure that you also include the editable formats because one of the important advantages of open textbooks is that you have the right to edit them, but if you only provide the PDF, for instance, even though you have the right to change it, it’s very hard to do that. You first have to convert it into something that you can edit and then redo it into a PDF. So when you share it and you intend it to be used by other people, make sure that you share it in the right formats, and then make it discoverable. So I mentioned these search engines for open educational resources at the beginning. and these are systems that usually take submissions. So even the BC Campus open text book repository, you can send them, if you have something that you think is of the right quality, you can send it to them and they will review it and then they will approve it and put it in. And some other search engines, they will just make sure that the link isn’t broken and then put it in and your OER will be discoverable from then on. So this, of course, there’s also a number of places that you can go to and look for help or to get involved in proselytizing for the importance of OER, for instance. So in Alberta, we have the Alberta OER Community which is sort of a network of teachers, authors, librarians, learning center people to work together and provide sort of feedback and help each other and organize things like this. Then there’s the Rebus community that I already mentioned and if you want to, if you need money or research assistant for this kind of thing, then of course keep your eyes open for grant opportunities like the OER pilot. And I think that was it for sort of the theory stuff. Any questions so far before I sort of show you things? Yeah. I was just wondering what sort of recognition it is because for faculty they can write a textbook as you said, and they can get royalties for the merit points. I put it on the annual report. 

I got merit for it, I think. But yeah, I don’t get royalties. As a grad student, it’s a great thing having my teaching dossier that I helped create this textbook and redesign this course to use newer methods and open materials. But it’s in their movements to sort of make this more of a central thing for things like tenure and promotion, but it’s early days. So I have two more or three more slides. So this is sort of the authoring tools. Obviously probably all of you know Google Docs, right? So if you’re going to do something and you’re going to write something and collaborate with other people, you need some kind of way of doing that. Sending back and forth text files or Word documents is a bad idea. So you probably want to have some mechanism for doing this. Google Docs is sort of the low tech version. The system that BC Open uses and that Veebus community uses is called Pressbooks. In fact, I think the person who founded Pressbooks now heads the Rebus community, so let me show you what that looks like. 

There, okay, so Pressbooks is a plug-in for WordPress, so WordPress is one of the most popular blog and content management systems, so it’s a plug-in in the sense that they use all these sort of infrastructure that WordPress offers, like edit like online editors and and mechanisms for rearranging things on a website but it’s then also has a book publishing backend so to speak so it basically press books use this in press books you can design a book the way that you would design a website and then push a button and get a PDF that looks like a book or push a button and get a MOBI file that you can upload to Kindle and then people can download it to their Kindle or Kobo or iPad and so on in some electronic format. And so one good thing is that it’s really user-friendly and it has this sort of publishing aspect to it. It does a lot of things. The other thing is that the textbooks, many textbooks that exist, in particular the ones that are being done in British Columbia, they all use that format. So for instance, if you want to find a textbook, this is the search engine from BC OpenText. So for instance, I was going to use an English textbook for Faye, but now Faye is not here anymore. So for instance, English literature, Victorians and Moderns. So that’s an anthology. You can look at it here. It comes in two volumes. It’s very pretty. So, if you find a text in the repository, it will tell you obviously what’s in it. It will tell you who it’s by, if it’s been reviewed, so for instance, this one has two reviews already, and it will be provided in many different formats. So, for instance, you can read the book on the BC Open website itself. And that’s the kind of thing that Pressbooks does. It provides a website for the book with a table of contents, with navigation features, links, will display all the images in a nice way and so on. So this one, for instance, is for this particular book. Here’s the table of contents. All right. So you got Browning, Tennyson, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Wolf, and so on. So someone has gone to all this trouble and converted all of these things from which are all in the public domain. So gone to Project Gutenberg, downloaded everything, and turned it into a nice book, written biographies of the authors, put in annotations, and so on. So suppose you’re an English prof and you want to use that, But you notice that your favorite author isn’t in here. Let’s say there is no Charlotte Bronte. And you think that would ordinarily rule out this book as a textbook for your course because you can’t bring yourself to teach an interesting English literature without doing that. So what you’ll do is you will download the right format here and then we’ll go to where dashboard. 

to where dashboard. So you will just say tools import already downloaded it I I hope it’s here somewhere. There it is. In WordPress format, upload file, begin import. I hope this works. And there it is. So we’ll select everything and import it. It might take a while, but there is a, So this Pressbooks is also, like their business model is, this is a self-publishing platform. So you can sort of upgrade to a version of Pressbooks where the PDFs that you download won’t have a watermark on it. So you can self-publish your books here and have them produced in versions that you can then upload to Amazon, for instance, and then sell for a profit there. But there’s also an educational version. The entire thing is actually open source. And I think we’re planning, right, Darcy? We’re planning to have a version. We’re hoping. And so Pressbooks is a plug-in for WordPress. There’s a plug-in for Pressbooks for textbook publishing, for open textbook publishing. One of the things it does is you don’t Pressbooks itself will have a list of all your available open textbooks, and you just say, I want to clone this one, and then you will have your own version of that textbook, and you can start editing it and so on. If you’re really tech savvy and have server space, you can also install it yourself because it’s free and open. Not recommended most of the time, but it is possible. I’ve been trying, I’ve almost got it working myself, but. So that’s a big book. Let me, while we look at this, let me also show you the Rebus community. So these are the people who are doing new textbooks. So, for instance, here are some of the active open textbook projects. The format is basically someone will volunteer, will be volunteer to do a textbook on X, and they will be in charge of recruiting people, planning the writing of that thing. So what are the chapters going to be? Who do we recruit? Individual chapters will then have a person assigned to spearhead the development of that chapter. There will be a timeline in the end. The idea is to have an open textbook like that. So for instance, here’s an open textbook introduction to philosophy? 

introduction to philosophy? Yeah, so Christina Hendrix at UBC has decided to put together this open introduction to philosophy textbook. It’s going to be massively long when it’s done, but each chapter is being run by a different person, different philosopher, and then each section of that chapter is written by a different person, or potentially a different person. I’ve not had time to contribute anything, but I’m signed up to edit the logic and metaphysics sections when they’re written in to consult on those because I have expertise in those areas. So I can help out in that way without committing myself to actually writing a chapter of a textbook while I’m trying to write my dissertation. Good. 

So this is what happens when it’s done there. Everything is in here. 

Let’s click that. 

Okay so here’s my own version of that textbook. Everything that was in the original one is now also here. Looks a little different because the theme for for press books is different from the theme for BC Open textbooks. 

for press books is different from the theme for BC Open textbooks. But everything is in here and if I wanted to change something, say for instance I wanted to reorganize things or delete things, I would just go into the organization and say I don’t know like I’m not going to use Browning so we’re gonna just not show him in the online version of the book but I want to add something so I want to add a chapter on Bronte okay I don’t know how to do that thing on my thing, right? 

thing on my thing, right? So for instance, you maybe add a new chapter and what you want to do in that chapter, let’s say you want to put in a Charlotte Bronte, a poem, let’s All right, so there, let’s take my Mentos, my Charlotte Bronte, this is text, all right, so I got my Charlotte Bronte, my Charlotte Bronte poem, would be nice to have a picture, so I don’t know, let’s go to the National Portrait Gallery, this is a classic, let’s to use this one, okay. So National Portrait Gallery doesn’t like it if you use your, if you use their things just without permission, but they’re very nice about educational uses, and it’ll tell you that you’re allowed to use this under a Creative Commons license. As long as you do two things, namely you use a low resolution version and you agree to the terms, but then they’re okay with it. Download it. 

There it is. Extract. There we go. So in my chapter, I’m going to add a picture, upload a file, and we’re going to make sure that we follow the rules. So this is under the Creative Commons, attribution non-commercial no-derivatives license. So it’s not technically an open license because they don’t allow us to make any changes, but they’re okay if we include it in something and say that it’s used according to this license. So we’re going to do that. We will link to the picture, copy link address, comments, attribution, non-commercial, non-derivative of 3.0 license link. This is not the best way of attributing a Creative Commons licensed piece of work, but that’s sort of the bare bones thing, right? So you have to say, what’s the title? Where is it from? Who’s the author? What’s the license that you’re using it under? But that’s basically, that’s more or less all you need to cover, that’s all you need to do in order to not be in violation of a copyright or a license. All right, so now we got our new chapter. Create. So you didn’t have to click it? No, because it’s public domain, right? So that means anyone can use it for whatever. I mean, I guess it’s nice to say thank you to Project Gutenberg who scanned all of this and made it so easy. If you’re making a textbook you can just have that sort of at the beginning or the end those these things were from Project Gutenberg, these things were from this other repository. And now here it is. 

That is a chapter in this book. It should show up in the table of contents. Yeah, so I probably should move it under the Victorian era first, but yeah, so you sort of see what how this goes and how relatively easy it is or it’s basically just editing a website. I think we’re out of time, more or less, so. Do you want to just mention that there are a couple of other ways of doing this? Other ways of? Making books. Oh, other ways of making books. Well, there are a number of other things. So this is not what we use, for instance, to do it, because we have a lot of formulas. There’s a typesetting program called LaTeX that mathematicians like to use, which is what we did. Many of the open math textbooks, for instance, use something called pretext that’s also relatively new. And in order to facilitate the collaboration, we basically just use an off-the-shelf software system called GitHub to keep track of revisions that various people are doing. Libertex, as I mentioned, concentrates on chemistry, but there’s not a lot in the humanities section, but if you wanted to populate the humanities sections with open books on history and literature and so on, I’m sure they would be happy to, I want to. I think those are the only things that I wanted to say. I think that was about it. It’s worth mentioning, again, the two textbooks on open textbooks that BC Campus OpenEd has made. 

Richard talked about the self-publishing guide. 

self-publishing guide. There’s also an accessibility toolkit, so I mentioned that this allows you to make sure that your resources courses are accessible for all your students and this book sort of guides you through all of the considerations you might want to have when you’re making your, if you’re creating things for the first time you have these in the forefront of your mind so that you can, as many students as possible can use your resources. And before I forget, all of the people who are working on these kinds of things on campus, who are originally funded from the province or funded through the pilot project that the Taylor Institute is running now, there will be a showcase tomorrow between two and five out here, so you can look over there, right? 

So you can go back tomorrow and look at all the things that people on campus are doing. More questions? Just about out of time, but I imagine we can stick around for a few minutes if you have extra questions. And thanks for coming.

It’s time to kick off the Taylor Institute Learning Technologies (TILT) podcast series. I was fortunate to be invited to chat with Brian Lamb and Royal Roads University’s LRNT 525 class, nominally to talk about institutional change management and decision making, but it turned into a wide-ranging discussion of innovation and the tension between creativity and enterprise-scale.

Direct link to audio file

ps. I’ll be moving these podcasts onto UCalgary media servers, once that’s a thing. For now, self-hosting to get things started…

pps. Some of the links mentioned in the webcast:

This transcript was automatically generated by YuJa.

Hello, I’m D’Arcy, and welcome to TILT, a Taylor Institute Learning Technologies podcast. This is the beginning of what will become a series of informal chats with people doing innovative things with learning technologies. In this first episode, I’m talking with Brian Lamb, Director of Innovation at Thompson Rivers University, and the LRNT525 class at Royal Roads University. It turned into a wide-ranging discussion of how we’ve explored innovation at our institutions and how to balance that with the need for sustainability and running at enterprise scale. So Darcy, actually we once had you out to TRU to talk about the process behind this report you’re looking at because we, to an extent, tried to emulate it at TRU. We didn’t do it anywhere near the same amount of rigor that you did. But maybe just before we get into what the actual stuff is about, But could you just give a little background on what this framework was meant to do? Yeah, absolutely. I can maybe go ahead and just leave it just a few steps before that. So you threw the picture of us from 2004. That’s back when we were actually doing, I think, really cool, innovative stuff. And it was, this may sound bad, but without having to worry about the rigor and the formality, but we just got to play and do cool stuff. And what happened is we stuck around and eventually the institution started dropping expectations and we sort of now you have to you know dress a little better and you have to write reports and that kind of thing. So you started off kind of playing and having fun and then all of a sudden you get dropped into these other things. 

The strategic framework for learning technologies was actually something that was started by our our provost, Vice President Academic, and she was trying to say we’ve got all these kind of uncoordinated, that’s not her words, but all these sort of initiatives going on and get them all kind of pointing in the same direction. And so she struck a working group. I was one member. There was about 25 people in it. Some were associate deans from various faculties. There was a dean of one faculty. There were students in the room, both undergraduate and graduates. And there were staff members from key units across campus. And we were like, what kinds of things are we doing for implementing and supporting learning technologies? And what should we be doing? How do we get there? and that’s kind of how this got going, but it started from a very, you know, a whiteboard. Let’s start with a whiteboard and flesh out ideas and brainstorm. And then it turned into the institutional rigor, which you might be seeing in the document. So that was a learning experience for me. But one thing we found is having it come from the top down with the provost saying, this is important. That is a different message than Darcy playing off in the corner of campus where nobody actually cares what happens, and if cool things happen, it might or might not affect other things. So this was a large institutional working group. And when they collaborated on writing this thing, it went through many revisions, there was a writing subcommittee of it. So it was very formal with roles and responsibilities and terms of reference and all that super fun stuff. We use this in my role. 

So at the time, I was, the role was called an IT partner, which is a strategic position that reports to the CIO and to a dean and a faculty or director of a unit. And so that was my role there. I’ve since moved on to a role where I am managing our learning technologies group and our Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning. In my new role, I’m using this strategic framework basically as my marching orders. These are the things we need to do and I’ve got the kind of institutional mandate to do it. 

So using the this big report as kind of ammo to describe what you’re going to do and it gives you a reason to do it and kind of get away with doing stuff without having to ask so much permission because the university has agreed this is important. 

So it’s kind of some of the background on the framework and sort of my job description is actually written largely from what came into this report. 

So when you started having these conversations Darcy, so it ended up being this really, really wide range of viewpoints. Did you have any surprises come out of that? Well, not really surprising. I mean, in hindsight, it’s totally obvious. We thought it was going to be, well, let’s list the technologies we need to buy or build or whatever. And it turned out, yeah, that’s important. But what’s more important is how are you going to support it? How are you going to teach people to use it? How are you going to help people teach themselves to do it? The other conversation that came out of it was how do you use it for academic promotion, credit and promotion? So if a prof is gonna spend a ton of time building a tool or integrating in technology into the course, redesigning the course, so what? Is it just for the fun of doing it or is it something to actually get credit for? We’re a research university, so before we went through a rather significant change at the university, we were focused almost entirely on research as what they used for promotion. How many research dollars did you get, how many publications, you know, the usual. And so people who spent their time wasting it on teaching were basically hamstringing their academic careers. And that came out in this report. This stuff is fun, but so what, it’s a waste of time for my career, why would I do this? And so this led to a major change where we’re actually changing the academic promotion system at the University of Calgary to include innovation and learning technologies and pedagogical approaches and all that kind of thing, sharing with the community. 

So finding how… You identified a problem and then there was follow-up. 

Was there steps of how you elevated that to the decision makers? Like, how did that come about? Because I’ve heard, I mean, I’ve been in tons of meetings where people say, oh yeah, you know, spending time on this is just, you know, you got to change, change your review, and everyone just kind of nods gravely. Okay, we’ll do that. Well, no, more like, no, that’ll never change. And then everyone just kind of shakes their heads and then we move on. Well, this is the part where it sounds like I’m kind of gloating, but the, the leadership of the university of Calgary right now is absolutely fantastic from the president to the vice provost to the vice provost teaching and learning to my director, they’re all absolutely fantastic and they are actively engaged in this stuff and they’ve come from the teaching ranks. So they get what the issues are. They get what’s it like to be an instructor designing a course for 600 students? How do you do all of that? So the leadership is absolutely fantastic. We’ve also thankfully got resources available. So we have funds, we have staff, we have units. We actually, as part of this strategic framework, it was done at the same time as designing our Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning, which started as a virtual organization because we didn’t have a home. Designing what groups do we need to be together to support this. 

So my group, the learning technologies group, we have an instructional design group, we have educational development consultants, we have curriculum people, we have scholarship of teaching and learning, and we have all of the support units above it in our that one institute, which is fantastic, as well as collaborating with information technologies and libraries and cultural resources and other groups. 

So having that, I don’t know, that’s that momentum of we need to do this and having an institute set up to help supported, we’re absolutely, we’re blessed to have this. 

But it’s not it wasn’t an accident. It was deliberate by the leadership. 

And it was deliberate by feedback from instructors and students saying this is something that’s important. And this is where institutional resources need to be spent. I’m just gonna jump in Darcy before Brian asked you because there’s some questions. 

So Lori asked, did you centralize things or did you assign certain things like a simulation, certain fields so that’s maybe something you were talking about earlier and then John was asking about how did the wider faculty react to the change I think for and I’m guessing that’s around innovative technology like the actually promotion and tenure piece. Yeah sure so I guess I’ll start with Laurie so did you did we centralize or did we do decentralized kind of both so we realized we needed centralized resources for things like support for things like supporting key innovation. 

supporting key innovation. So where does an instructor go to learn how to redesign their course? Well, do we want each faculty have 13 faculties? Do they want to reinvent that 13 times? 

times? So we decentralized some of that stuff around that. We also realized that there are signature pedagogies. 

So each faculty teaches things in different ways for a reason, not because they like doing something differently, because it’s the best way to do things. So our faculty of veterinary medicine is deeply using simulations, both software based, they’ve also got a lot of fiberglass models of cows that you get to do things with and it’s they’re very deep on simulations. They’re also very deep on distributed learning through video conferencing because they are spread all around Alberta. They might be at a farm, they might be at the zoo, they might be at all these different places. So technologies are unique to each faculty but supported centrally. 

Our faculty of nursing does an insane amount of simulations. 

They’ve got a multi-million dollar simulation center where you get to play with mock patients. 

We can’t do that centrally because, you know, But where it makes sense, we do centralize, so things like the learning management system is centrally managed and administered. Things like video conferencing, we’re working on getting that set up. Web conferencing, online classes, those things are centralized because things can be used across all 13 faculties. But supporting discipline specific things that are distributed around the university. How do the wider faculty react to that? Yeah, that’s kind of a weird one. So I think in general people were yes, we need to be supporting, you know, academic promotion and all that But there’s also a lot of distrust because they’ve heard this before They’ve heard that yes, things are going to change and hallelujah. 

We’ve got it figured out and nothing happens so there’s a lot of hesitation a lot of distrust and what happened is things actually started to change and Slowly and it hasn’t happened to all the instructors yet all the faculty members But they start to they start to buy in they see the change One of the really cool things we did is we started a university-wide teaching awards program. And so there are awards for, you know, sessional instructors and TAs and full-time professors and adjuncts. And you name it, there’s categories for all kinds of stuff. And giving recognition for interesting things. And that shows that the university is actually giving value to what they’re doing, that then they can use on their CV. They can use it for APR and all these other things. So actually showing that it’s being valued is super important. We also have a very large grants program. So if an instructor wants to redesign a course or, you know, do a functional MRI of something while they’re evaluating learning, there’s actually funds to buy them time on an MRI to do that and evaluate it and share it. So showing that we’re supporting interesting research on this stuff, the university is stepping up and doing that. That’s key. You can’t just talk about the stuff. You actually have to do it. It sounds obvious in hindsight, but it doesn’t always happen. After the pilot, and I’ve certainly been in this situation, I mean, the way funding tends to work, not just at institutions, but a lot of times from organizations that support either innovation or development, certainly open education stuff, is that you get this kind of one-time burst of money to make something happen, or maybe you just come up with a good idea and you’re able to start it you know on a small scale for a few people and you support it on a more or less personal level and then you sometimes it just doesn’t work and then nobody cares and then the con and the thing just dies and you delete the web pages and you try to move on and hopefully you’re not too starred by the experience but then sometimes through those experiences where it gets just enough uptake that people start to depend on this stuff and really want to keep it and maintain it and then of course and if it isn’t like a massive huge success that you know where you’re guaranteed the follow-up resources to come along or now you’re expected to come over the business plan or sustainability model to use a word you hear a lot about an OAR. 

hear a lot about an OAR. I don’t know what to do with that but I mean that must be a dynamic you’ve seen a lot. Oh, absolutely. I mean, the perfect example of that is, um, I mean, you mentioned that I, I, I recently turned off Wiki.com at RCA, um, a copy of media Wiki that I installed. I kind of snuck it onto a server 13 years ago and it had a lot of activity. It was awesome for many years and then it kind of petered out and there was kind of like the long tail and it got to a point where maintaining it, updating the code and PHP became more of a burden. And if nobody’s edited in many months, it’s time to turn it off. That was one that hadn’t quite reached the critical mass. The other one that I snuck onto a server about two months after that, so it’s almost 13 years old, rather, is UCalgary Blogs, which is a WordPress multi-user installation that is almost 13 years old now, holy smokes. It has reached critical mass. It’s the one where if I was to try to turn it off, it would cause huge problems across the university. It sounds like this should be a big institutional initiative. There should be big money behind it. It’s still supported entirely by me. It’s run on an IT managed virtual server, but they know nothing about PHP. They know nothing about MySQL or WordPress. So IT can’t be expected to support this stuff. So how do you go from something that you sneak onto a server because you think it’s cool and interesting when you’re in a small role that doesn’t, you know, you get to experiment and play and 13 years later, you’re in a role where you really don’t have, I don’t know, the latitude or the freedom to do that kind of thing without balancing. How do you do sustainability? These things that you didn’t have to worry about 13 years ago. But now it’s this thing. There are thousands of users. There’s thousands of sites on it. If it disappeared, it would break many courses. It would break. Our entire Taylor Institute has many of its initiatives published on UCalgary Blogs collaborative publishing. So if it disappeared, it would cause huge problems. It’s still, the budget for it, I think, is $600 a year, which is what it costs for our WordPress developer license for some of the plugins that we use. There’s a commercial system, WPMU dev license for that. That’s the only cost, which is kind of crazy. How do we transition from that? And that’s something I’m still coming to grips with. I don’t think anybody really knows how to do that. Things wither and they get replaced by a big enterprise system. I want to avoid that if I can, but that’s kind of what we’re out there. So before we go back to some of the questions, I can see a couple more maybe coming in and maybe Michelle will do that, but beforehand that, just to sum up, if you try something ambitious, maybe it just won’t work and people won’t care and won’t want to do anything with that and it’ll just die or what’s even worse is people might actually like it and start using it and building it in and I guess I mean I I’ve always thought that that more organic kind of you know do a skunk work see what happens makes more sense than you know trying to get a lot of upfront money and a lot of structures and to pre-plan everything because those tend to be the to me the most disastrous things I’ve been involved with. But even those small organic ones have their own perils as well. And of course, there’s a personal dimension to that. I don’t know if it’s the same with you, Darcy, but usually the people, like the first few people to try WordPress, for example, when you work with them, and you can give them a lot of attention, and you kind of ease them along, and they come to depend on you, and then they find it this very satisfying kind of human scale existence. And then, of course, when things grow, that’s harder to maintain. And then suddenly you gotta kind of transition it into some kind of service. Yeah, absolutely. And that’s exactly what happened with this. I mean, it started off with literally there was maybe five users the first semester. And it was used for an English Lit course, I think it was, and a couple other little things in my little test blog. And then over the years, it just blew up and it was crazy amount of activity on there. We had our environmental design faculty decided to do e-portfolios on UCalgar blogs before e-portfolios were a cool thing. With gigabytes of files, they do large PDFs of sketches and stuff. And how do we do that? And now all of a sudden, oh my God, the server’s falling over and smoke’s pouring out because it’s being used so heavily. I can’t afford a new server, what do I do? So that, I think if it had started with, let’s do an RFP for a campus blogging platform, it would have died. It would have not, who’s interested in that? 

have not, who’s interested in that? My god, that’s, by starting organically, I think this was the right way to go. We start organically, we grow, it gets to a point where it’s interesting and useful and embedded, and it’s a good problem to have now to figure out how do we shift into a sustainable model. 

13 years later, that’s, some would say, sustainable already, but right now, because it is is entirely me running it if I win the lottery, what happens? So I don’t buy lottery tickets anymore. No, that’s good for all of us in that type of person. The Yukonaga Blog is actually by a deliberate decision. I didn’t integrate that with campus authentication. So it is a completely standalone thing. It doesn’t talk to anything, except it’s a web thing. So it does web things. You can link to it. You can do iframes. So all that kind of stuff is there. But the integration with legacy systems, because they started as sort of Skunkworks projects, you don’t care about legacy systems. So you’re starting fresh, and now maybe they become the legacy system. So new stuff, are they done as plug-ins for WordPress, so they’re available in UCAG or blogs, or do we do it in D2L as an alternative because everybody else is in that? But yeah, I don’t think when these start, these sort of Skunkworks things, legacy stuff wasn’t a consideration for me. Maybe it should have been. I don’t know. I think that might have sucked the fun out of it. 

That’s kind of maybe the unspoken thing about edtech. A lot of the innovation happens when it’s fun and interesting and it’s a pet project as opposed to an institutional mandate, thou shalt build national repository of learning objects, which dies after a couple of years and several hundred thousand dollars, a million dollars, I think it was. 

We didn’t see that. You think that the Skunk Work Model is workable in smaller organizations? We have a lot of students in the class that aren’t even in post-secondary, per se. So we’re looking at smaller companies. And I’m just wondering if the Skunk Work Model, you know, that you’re funded to play, it’s not maybe something that would be possible in a lot of smaller groups. I don’t know. I mean, I think it’s possible anywhere. I mean, if you’re looking at is technology the constraint, I still do a lot of my skunk work stuff on my own server that I rent for $15 a month, not on a university server, because I have more control over it than the university is willing to provide me. But the time, how much time in a day can I devote to these other projects? That comes, I guess, down to the leadership thing. As a manager now, I basically, I expect my team to spend a bunch of their time just playing and being creative and come back and share with the rest of the group what they’re discovering and making and what cool stuff. 

And that we actually did a project last year and every an hour every single day I think it was two to three in the afternoon I blocked a meeting in their calendars and it was creative time. Whatever you’re doing you have one hour that you know nobody can grab you’re not going to be in meetings you’re not going to be doing whatever. So from two to three I expect you go play go do something creative read a journal article build some software make a video whatever and then at the end of the week we come back and share what cool stuff did you do and it was inspiring it was amazing having that freedom to be creative yeah it cost productivity but really the job we’re doing isn’t measured in you know ticket resolution we’re we’re meant to support innovation as opposed to that transactional how many people did you talk to today oh you need to increase that tomorrow you didn’t issue quota we’re not like that and I think it’s important not to be like that so you have the freedom to do this and amazingly creative things came out of that and we actually built as a result of that an entire series of workshops based on the tools and even just the concepts that were discovered during that creative time. 

So I think that’s extremely important and sorry Laurie was asking do people relate the creative time back to work? Some did, some did completely weird things. 

So Kevin our EdTech developer built a basically a snapshot clone that put spiders on your head using a webcam as a website, not directly related to educational technology, but he learned some new tools that are directly related to educational technologies. For him to play without having to worry about, am I gonna break this campus tool? No, go play something cool, learn and come back. 

One of the problems with that was people, when they get busy, this was one of the first things to go when we get swamped before our conference season. So this right now we’re in conference adjudication, grant adjudication, award adjudication. So all the staff in our unit are in that. And this is our busy season. This creative stuff was the first thing to go because it doesn’t feel productive. And I struggle with that. How do you make it feel productive? Because this, I think, is more important than reviewing a PDF for a conference submission. Seeing the observation come up, you know, talking about how, you know, Skunk works in enterprise, can they happily coexist? And, and I, and Clint suggests, you know, both need to coexist. I’m just going to try to share a really short anecdote, but it kind of, partly, hopefully we’ll explain why I was so laudatory and genuinely grateful to Darcy about the early days. Because so when we were doing this learning objects project, which, you know, on the one hand, it, it didn’t achieve its goals. I mean, the site, you can go back on the Wayback Machine and you can see it was going to be this nationwide network of open sharing resources within the British or within the Canadian context. 

And there were all these quite bold claims and it garnered this quite significant amount of federal funding. It was kind of the last big federally kind of guided learning technology program that I can remember. 

I think shortly shortly after this program, there was a federal review of Canary, and I think they were kind of remandated to kind of just focus on pipes and not worry so much about community applications. And I think organizations like BC Net and BC Campus, at least in British Columbia, were expected to kind of step into those kind of application gaps. Anyway, so, you know, Darcy has this repository called Kerrio and it was a nice tool and Darcy did some really nice design work on it and it worked really well and I’m here at UBC and I’ve got it installed and Darcy’s doing my tech support. The only problem is we barely get anyone to use it and nobody would willingly put their resources in this thing and partly because the whole model of how how we what we expected users to do and then the benefit that they would ultimate get were completely disconnected they were expected we were expecting individuals who had no stake in the project itself to put in all this extra work change completely how they think about and work and then with the idea that if everything went right in two or three years we would kind of Metadata wonders. But interestingly enough, though, I don’t know if it was as big a waste as it is, I mean, weirdly enough, I mean, that, that, that, it’s interesting, I see someone joining. The whole generation of us actually had our jobs funded from that inadvertently. 

I don’t know, Darcy, I assume your job there was funded out of that project? Absolutely, and my job, for several years after that, was funded by an offshoot of that. at that time at UBC my job was self-funded I had actually write grant proposals but there was matching funds from that fund like there was money sloshing around and someone who just dumped it jumped in Les Nesman I know who that is I happen to know that that fellow his early jobs in ed tech were funded from this stuff so it actually and you know the work that happened there I I remember this day really well. We were sitting there, kind of bemoaning on instant message chat, the fact that nobody was really using this quite nice system that we’d installed, and I was realizing I was on a self-funded temporary contract that was not going to get renewed on any sort of its own merits, and I actually remember Darcy going, well, nobody’s using this beautiful server you bought, you want me to throw movable type and a wiki on there for you? Maybe you can at least use it for that. And I went, yeah, sure. And movable type was kind of the WordPress of its day. WordPress at that time didn’t exist. And so I started using this blogging platform and the wiki platform for my workshops and stuff. and I remember very quickly going into workshops and going hey look you know there’s this thing called learning objects and you should do this and this and this and that would be just faculty would be looking bed-eyed and then at the end of the session I’d go oh by the way this page I put together it’s a thing called a wiki and you can go in you create a page yourself and any of you can edit it right now you want to try and people go well I don’t care about the learning objects but that tool you used is pretty cool. Can I use it for this? Can I use it for this? And it ended up having this really organic growth. And of course, I started to realize that through our blogs, you know, myself and Darcy and this guy out in Levine and Scott and other people on this call, kind of the early generation, we were thinking, well, what’s learning objects supposed to do? It’s supposed to provide platforms that allow us to share resources, communicate with one another, and maybe provide some of the technical framework to support sharing and maybe something like an emerging community of practice. That was the objection or the objective. And I think it was about a year into it that we realized, holy cow, we can do this without money. Like these tools allow us to share resources. We’re using our each other’s stuff. We can collaborate, we can communicate in real time. We actually don’t need a network of federally funded learning object repositories to at least meet these initial goals. And that actually was, that initial thing I showed was how we started working together because we just started sharing that fairly obvious bit of learning. So I guess that’s just, I don’t know what the lesson of that is other than, you know, unimagined consequences. But I think it does speak to the one specific question where I think people have been saying, well, can you do this at smaller institutions? And I would, yes, I see, by the way, Scott’s making reference to one of the classic posts in the field called Stop Playing to Share. He wrote a post called Planning to Share versus Just Sharing. And if I wasn’t in the middle of a rant, I would link to it right this minute, which kind of just sums up that whole dynamic I just described. If you’re at a small institution and you don’t have an IT department that’s ready to work with you, I can say that there are ways around it. 

It helps if you have friends at other institutions, like I don’t know if this was strictly proper, but Darcy effectively was my IT department, even though he was at University of Calgary and I was at UBC for about two years. And we’re supposed to be competing. Well, this is the thing I’ve always found about edtech. I’ve never found that people who actually do the job really compete with me. I’ve always felt like we’re all in it together. And then I guess if you were to start now and you don’t have a friend like Darcy, there is kind of an emergent community out there of people and it’s quite remarkable actually what you could run with a with a shared hosting budget of a couple hundred dollars a year and there’s a certain vendor that’s essentially made this their business model and I’m sure there are hundreds if not thousands of ed tech departments that are running their innovation pilots and skunkworks off of a shared platform that’s actually you know shared hosting that’s geared to education departments. 

So anyway, I think I’m just gonna jump in. 

So if you’re not at a institution, but a small organization that might be doing, you know, trying to do e-learning, do you think that’s an option if you’re more in the business sector? I personally think having a reasonably robust, even just instance of WordPress multi-site and knowing how to provision sites and manage a certain number of accounts does just gives you so many options. 

And so I do think it’s viable. I know there’s a learning curve there. And I don’t want to overstate the ease of it. 

Hard lessons I’ve learned that makes sure your backups are rock solid. 

But I think I absolutely I mean, to me, that’s one of the cores. 

I you want to do anything outside of your learning management system I think that the most kind of obvious and viable way of kind of providing alternative kind of more flexible and especially open web options would be something like a WordPress multisite I don’t know if anyone else has recommendations for that I was absolutely say WordPress multisite because you can add plugins and names you can make it basically do whatever you want which is a cool starting point there was a question I have been lurking on Twitter I’m not active, but I did learn there’s a question about So what how do you balance enterprise versus this skunk work stuff? I think it’s important to note that enterprise doesn’t necessarily mean PeopleSoft or Oracle or you know, the big vendors I view enterprise as campus-wide things. 

So you Cogger blogs by now is an enterprise thing It’s used by people in all 13 faculties. 

It’s used by thousands of people. So that is enterprise by almost any definition But we also build tools because we’re a central a service unit at the Taylor Institute. We actually build tools for various things. And what we’re actually able to do is tie them together. So we build tools for curriculum mapping. We’re actually building a brand new tool that is streamlined based on what we’ve learned over the last several years on mapping curricula in various faculty departments. So we’re building that tool. We’ve got a tool for ePortfolio, which is WordPress. We’ve got a tool for what we call a teaching challenge, which is a website where people can actually go, instructors can go, or our students. And it gives you a challenge, you know, try making a video, flip your course, you know, whatever it is. And you get points, you share what you did, and you reflect on what you did, and you get points for completing things. And there’s a leaderboard. You can take what you do there and put it in your portfolio. And then you can tie it in. We’ve got a badges platform that we built that ties into all kinds of various things. But by connecting all of these things, you have a way for instructors to learn a new thing to test it out and get feedback and reflect, to build a portfolio of their learning over time and to get credit for it, and then to tie it into institutional curricula, which is absolutely amazing. 

They are separate tools. They’re not connected by hard lines. 

They’re loosely joined, as we talked about earlier, but they’re absolutely enterprise. 

Not from PeopleSoft, not from Oracle, not from a large LMS vendor, we built it and we get to do that. 

We’re lucky that we have amazing developers within my team who are doing this. 

And so if you don’t have developers, obviously, that’s difficult. 

obviously, that’s difficult. The other risk we’re seeing is once these tools hit critical masks, same thing that happened with Uglogger blogs, how do we scale it up? How do we make it sustainable? 

it sustainable? I don’t want my developer to be supporting all of these tools that he builds over the year, I wanted to be focusing on building the next thing. And so we have to figure out how do we transition these things from the Skunkworks to an enterprise launch, to a full support, and how do we do that? And we’re still figuring that out. So the nice thing about, you know, a lot of the open ed tech that’s out there with tools like this is you don’t necessarily have to know how to design and structure and program all the functionalities that you see out there. If you look at someone like Alan Levine, you know, he develops a template for a simplified blogging tool where people don’t need accounts or logins to learn how to author it and they don’t have to learn how to use WordPress. They essentially fill in a form, put your title here, put your text there, hit post. 

It’s a little harder than that, but not a lot. And someone like Alan, you know, if you go to splot.ca, he posts all the templates. You can just install it like a WordPress theme. And, you know, if you go into Alan Levine’s blog, not only does he share the code for all these things, but he goes into incredible detail about why he did it, what he’s learned as he’s implied at what’s not quite working as well as he wished. I don’t know, to me, that’s still the most fun way to work. And to be honest, certainly for effort to pay off ratio, the most effective. So yes, Darcy, Alan is absolutely inspiring on the way he does it. Like Alan, like you said, he narrates everything that he does and he shares everything. 

And not just the code, but he narrates the thought process and the trials and what works and what didn’t work. So everything is in there. It’s absolutely amazing the way he does it. 

Yeah, I follow everything he does. I don’t necessarily use it all, but it’s very cool the way he works. and I think more people if more people work that way. The cool thing about Allen is he’s always worked that way since the day we met online and then in that cringe relief photo. 

He’s been like that all along he shares everything and you can see the train of thought you can see how he’s connecting disparate ideas and that I think is an amazing way to work as an educational technologist you’re not looking you know at vendor acquisition and product placement and all that kind of gross stuff that is kind of part of EdTech but it’s not it’s not the interesting part of EdTech. And Alan really kind of lives the hey let’s just play and have fun and let’s do some cool stuff and be interesting and connect it to other people and it’s yeah it’s amazing he’s inspiring. So just to look to bring that back to Laurie’s question because I’m looking at the teaching challenge site did you actually use one of Alan’s themes for the teaching challenge or did you just No. 

So that was something that was absolutely inspired by the DS106 Daily Create. 

But it was because we wanted to integrate different ways. And actually, frankly, my developer wanted to build js. 

a tool in Node. So he actually built it from scratch to do that. 

It could have just as easily been done as a WordPress thing. But we decided, well, let’s try this. Here’s a sandbox environment. you can you can you can build this app absolutely based on the DS 106 daily create which is the same thing it gives you a challenge not on necessarily teaching specific stuff but you know go take a photograph of something that’s square go draw a picture of you know whatever and so we just extrapolated that well what if that was specific to things that are related to teaching and learning you know make a video for your class get feedback from a student on something and so that’s sort of where that came from it was inspired by Alan’s amazing work and sharing and creativity. And we just took it and ran with it in our context. And I think that’s the interesting thing. We’re not trying to say everybody has to use the same things. Take the idea, localize it for your context and see where that goes. Laurie’s got a very good followup. So yes, once you got it built and you know it’s a good idea, how do you promote it? How do you launch it? What are the challenges that come up there? Yeah, so if you start and say like the big announcement to all staff at University of Calgary, the email list, here’s this new thing, go use it, nothing’s gonna happen. 

So we decided to do kind of a soft launch with it. And basically what we did is we baked it into all of our workshops and programs at the Taylor Institute. So if you come and do anything with us, likely you’re going to wind up building any portfolio or you’re going to be earning a badge or you’re going to be doing a teaching challenge as part of it. 

We just baked it into what we do. 

And it’s kind of a soft sell. And people are like, hey, this is cool. And they see them show up on a leaderboard on the teaching challenge oh no I want to get more points I want to beat the other guy in my department or whatever so that’s yeah the soft launch and kind of letting it grow organically but baking it into what you do we actually we do the challenges ourselves I was the top on the leaderboard for a while I’ve kind of fallen off the wagon I need to get back in there I just now linked to Scott Leslie’s post and I’m glad he reminded me of it I think if you want to kind of look at the I mean it’s it’s a very it’s definitely taking a strong position it’s Not trying to find a middle ground, but I think if you kind of wanted to try out what are the lines between front loaded planning and kind of the more emergent, like just get on with it and prove as you go. That post is a classic of the genre. Which sort of ties into Carrie’s question about the project management model. If you start with, well, we must follow ITIL and we have to get a project charter and we have to get a sponsor and let’s do a racey to see who’s responsible and accountable. If you start with that, it just sucks the life out of it. Sometimes it needs to be done, but don’t start with that for the love of God. Start with being interesting and creative and play. Have fun with something. When it gets to a point where you have to worry about sustainability, that’s when you start the project management and the Gantt charts and all that, maybe even avoid that. They just they suck the soul out of everything The fun thing I have is working with people on the other side, so I’m not in in IT anymore I’m in our Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning We work very closely with people in IT and in a previous leadership in IT. 

They were very much about ITIL specifications, and is this you know certified? Are you a certified project manager, and are you not using the right protocol and the huge culture clash? Thankfully, we’ve had a change in leadership there and they are completely on board. Let’s do this. This is important for teaching and learning, for innovation. We need to play and we’ll figure this stuff out. And again, it comes down to leadership. Having the leadership being supportive of this stuff changes everything. But then there is a bit of a transition path and I think that’s where enterprise stuff can be handy. I have to say, just to give a shout out to our IT department here at Thomson Rivers University. 

I mean for a while I was essentially running blogs and kind of standalone what I would think of as innovation projects off of WordPress multi-site install that I to be honest I was paying for out of my own pocket out of that unnamed from that unnamed vendor I described earlier for the first year or two that’s not sustainable not just because of the finances of it but when my boss found out that that that I owned the domain and that it was I was actually paying for it out of my own pocket. It was not pleased to hear that. 

And it urged me to move this thing in house. 

But the nice thing is, is when you have 25 or 30 interesting viable projects you can point to, I was able to take that to our IT department here in our CIO. 

And that led them to allow us to move to what a very worthy initiative in British Columbia called EduCloud, which is essentially trying to provide a lot of the cloud-based hosting services that services like DigitalOcean and Amazon Web Services provide, but doing it in British Columbia and being compliant with our privacy laws. 

Just a quick note too, Amazon Web Services and DigitalOcean both now have Canadian and based hosting, we won’t get into the legality of whether how much safer that makes it, but it does seem to tick a box on privacy policies. 

So it’s actually a nice, so I’m, this is where I sound like a heretic. I’m thankful to have the enterprise tool. I’m glad we have an LMS because all of this enterprise privacy grades, personal identifiable information, that can go in there and we don’t because there’s a place for all that sensitive data to go. So I’m thankful that we have, in our case, it’s D2L. Put that stuff in D2L, let the vendor worry about it. Great, awesome. Now go play in the cool stuff because you’re free to do that. So I’m thankful that we have a place for the sensitive stuff to go and a place for the sort of more fun innovation stuff to go. And they can connect. And Darcy, I’ve abused you over the years for saying things like that. So allow me with a certain amount of shame and regret to acknowledge, now that I’m actually theoretically responsible responsible for supporting campus users institution. I feel somewhat the same way about Moodle. I still don’t get excited about Moodle and I still don’t really like answering grade book questions when they come my way. And there’s lots of things that frustrate me and I wish more instructors would take the risk and step outside the managed walled garden of the learning management system because it just, I think, does, but some things it does very well. And if all that instructor wants is a private space to share a document or a place to transmit grades or manage class lists, let’s remember what that name is. 

It’s a learning management system. 

So if you need a system to manage tasks associated with classroom management, it does those things very well. 

it does those things very well. And I’m grateful for it too, because if we were trying to do those types of functions in a kind of wide open environment like WordPress, we would just be and creating headaches for ourselves everywhere. Hey, while you’re at it, Darcy, on the subject, and I hope this is important to other people, but you have something you call the iron law of online learning. Do you wanna talk about that? The iron law? Oh, Darcy’s law of in tech. Yeah, so this kind of embarrassingly has turned into the most cited blog post I’ve got. And it basically, to sum it up, is any tool that you use, you could start with the most open, awesome, free tool ever. By the time you use it a few semesters, by the time you get a bunch of other people using it and having their use cases embedded into it, it basically turns into an LMS. So the short version is any technology with enough use cases becomes an LMS. So you can take WordPress after people use it eventually, well, this should have a grade book. Oh, awesome, let’s add that in there. Oh, it should have attended, did you? and boom, you know, you eventually slowly rebuilt an LMS. So this is why I’m thankful to have an LMS, so there’s no pressure to build that stuff into all these other cool tools that we do. It’s a great post, and I think it actually reminds me a lot of in those early days, being in a focus group session for some people that were developing a learning system that was designed to share. And if you sit down before you go to design and you get a room with 20 people together and you say, what do you want this to do, you end up with such a long list of features and requirements. And so to get back to the idea of the splots is, you know, the splot, to take Les’s point, splots don’t pretend to manage, they don’t pretend to have a gradebook, they don’t do anything other than, in the case of the writing tool, it’s a way to contribute writing and read it, or it’s a way to submit images, or it’s a way to share sound files, it does one thing very clearly, very simply, and then when people in the community will use that, and they’ll go, oh this is great, I love it, but could it do this? 

I love it, but could it do this? We just say no. 

You know, at that point, no, this tool doesn’t meet your needs anymore. 

And that’s That’s why I think we are trying to diverge from your law. I see somebody put this learning technology platform, Jay pickup. That was me. So that was about 2014 when we were going through this LMS transition. I started listing what tools are used across faculties and what level of support and that kind of thing. So these are all the crazy things that people use in summer enterprise, summer individually. So some prof licenses, a pen opto server, all that kind of stuff. So this is what we’re talking about. And if all of these things need to have grade books and all these other things that make LMS, no, we don’t want that. Can we have LMS that does that so these other tools can focus on being the best thing, whatever the thing they do, the video hosting thing focuses on that and not activity tracking and whatever. 

Yeah, 278 requirements are LMS requirements for the RFP. 

We started with committee. We asked faculty members and students and everybody, hey, so what should we have in this? And we wound up with this ungodly list of 278 things. It was ridiculous. And then how do you score it? And then the vendors respond on that and they had to build responses to this. How does their product do on each of these 278 things? And then we had to make sense of their responses. And basically when you have that many items at that level of detail, the responses become meaningless. They all sort of regress towards the mean and what are you gonna do with that? But don’t do that. Don’t have 278 requirements. has picked the few things that are important to you for anything. Pick what’s the job that thing has to do. I just shared a link from Anne-Marie Scott, who I forget her exact title, but she’s essentially the one of the lead people on the technical side of learning technology, University of Edinburgh, and she was putting some thoughts forward about this, this thing you’ll hear about called next generation digital learning environments, which I think claims to kind of slide past this conflict. because it’s like well you don’t have to choose one tool you can just kind of have your LMS and then you just link things in you just kind of hook them up in this and it’s kind of an interesting thing because it seems to almost want to say you can do you can have both you know you can have all that you can use be as flexible as you want but you can still have this seamless integrated environment so the NG DLE next generation digital learning environment I can’t That’s loosely coupled, right? I sometimes think that this idea of seamless experience and seamless integration is problematic because I think it’s an unreasonable expectation and it’s not how the web works. And if we think about what we typically do in our day-to-day lives to complete an online task, it’s very rare we start with one tool and finish with one tool without ever going anywhere else. We, you know, even if we’re just writing a Word document, chances are we pop over to our browser and then we go to however many sites and we use sometimes we’re looking at a video and then you know I mean we do this stuff all the time and we move from one environment to the other one platform to another and we don’t expect them to be you know integrated you know super tightly in the seamless way like they’re all just one thing but one thing why I think that post is really great is I mean Anne-Marie’s actually implemented a lot of the NG DLE type principles and use this specification called the Learning Technology Interoperability Specification, which is very promising. And we want to do more of it here. She makes some really good points as somebody who’s actually done it. And one thing she points out is if you do this stuff too much you end up with a real nightmare of maintenance over time. Because anytime one component changes you’re essentially creating ripple effects through all the interconnected systems. So integration is one of those things that isn’t just a motherhood statement I would suggest. 

It’s something, again, you got to make a decision, how important is this to your needs? I think this one from Lori is important. 

How do you deal with change management? There’s all these changes here and they’re fine when they’re skunk work things and nobody cares and most people don’t even see them. But once you get out to, you know, the masses, we have over 40,000 people using our learning management system at UCalgary. So any change there, even if you think it’s trivial, affects some people severely. 

There’s new interface about to be released for D2L and literally it’s a style sheet change that makes it whiter and the changes the font and they move the position of one of the buttons and I came back from their conference I think it was almost two years ago saying great we’re going to click the checkbox and be done with it and I was talked out of it by our IT department said do you realize the support load that’s going to get we can’t just do it right now we have to time it right okay so pause we’ll wait until after then the next break was actually almost a year later and then we looked at it and realized, well, there’s all a support documentation and people have built screenshots and videos and all these kinds of things showing people how to use stuff and they’re now invalid because they’re based on the old design and oh, I have to be rebuilt. And so it turned into a multi-year project, probably tens of thousands of dollars, hopefully not more than that, my God, in people’s time to document what resources need to be rebuilt and who uses what and how’s the for literally what looks like a style sheet change. Um, so I, in my previous life as a tech developer, I would have just hit the button, boom, we’re live, deal with it. Now that I get the, I rate emails from people, oh, you broke my thing because the button is four pixels to the left and I have no idea what to do with that. It makes you pause and you think, well, do we really want to do that? And part of me kind of hates that there is that sort of hesitation to make a change for something, because it’s going to annoy somebody enough that they’re going to write an email to the provost to complain about their pixel there, the button is now four pixels over and it’s a different shade of blue and they have to retire now because they can’t deal with that change. Literally, we had somebody threaten that I have to retire because of this. 

Crazy, but it’s stuff you have to deal with at, at scale of these these tools. 

That was an eye opener. 

So yeah, that having to pause and hesitate about this stuff was something I would have never predicted in my, my early days of let’s just build something, throw it against the wall and see if it sticks. And now it’s, oh, who’s who’s going to be affected by this. 

And so there is instant institutional change management plan, there’s communication strategies, there university newsletter articles about it, there’s meetings, there’s presentations for a style sheet change. 

And that’s, that’s what life is now. Well, I think, Darcy, it’s good that you talk about all those, like the communication strategy. How do you overcome that idea of the resistance? And you talked about it earlier about, you know, the teaching, you know, getting people to adopt things early. It’s like you workshop it and then you continue to build all that documentation around everything. So I guess that would be one thing, like, in your experience, and Brian, jump in. how do you get, you know, over that resistance piece? No. 

I’m still figuring that one out. It comes down to trust. I mean, people are irate about stuff because they don’t trust the university. They don’t trust the process. They’ve been burned before. So they think, oh, here comes another change. It’s being forced on me. Here we go again. This is going to suck. And there’s that hesitation and distrust. And when you come from the place of distrust, any change is a major, is a big deal. So the big thing is building a sense of trust, having a community, having people brought sort of into the fold and yes, we’re in this together and we’re not doing this to you, we’re doing this with you. And it’s just software, it’s not gonna kill anybody. And you’re gonna be okay after the style sheet changes. So that’s that sense of trust and engagement and that’s the big part. And we do it just we go out to each faculty and we work with instructors and they tell their friends and so on and so on um, that’s the big thing getting out of that that that place of distrust and it’s hard because As academics work for many years they they learn And they’ve got a memory And if they remember the last time something went off the rails and they got screwed because this didn’t work And they looked like an idiot in front of the class Um, and that’s not going to happen again And so yeah, trust is absolutely key I think no matter how many focus groups and prototypes and evaluations, you can spend a year doing that. There’s still somebody who is missed, and they are going to be irate by whatever change you make. And you have to be okay with that. How do you deal with that? How do you reach out with that? And make them feel loved, and they’re part of the community, and it’s okay. That’s the key, not fixing it so that there are changes in there, and they can use the old-fashioned. At least I got an email the other day, they wanted somebody, they wanted us to go back to Blackboard because they liked it better. We’re not doing that, but let’s go have coffee and talk and what are the actual issues and how can we do that differently in whatever tool or maybe it’s not even about technology, there’s a tirade about something, they don’t feel valued. So I’ll go and have coffee, I’ll sit and talk with them and then they’re okay and they’re still not loving the tool, it’s not about the tool, it’s about being involved and everything comes out of that.