Open education/July 2010

Notes taken at the July meeting about Learning, Freedom and the Web.

Badges and backpacks

Phillip and Mark : working on a prototype of badges from different educational settings, putting them into a single backpack, with a way to verify you hold that badge. Related blog post by Mark (and Aza's earlier thoughts).

The idea is to turn badges into something a web user can take with them around the web. Possibilities:

• server-based 'Data vault'
• browser-based 'Browser wallet' system

(what about a distributed github-like system?)

Trying to avoid a single place for this - decentralizing avoids the 'single point of truth' myth.

Currently (09:32, 12 August 2010 (PDT)) the format of what's passed around is being deeloped. What format should we be using, and how should we make it visible to other groups (users, say) who want to use it to understand what a cert says, and then verifies it? We want to allow verification of single badges without involving the others.

Options: something like 'checking with the granting org' or using a digital signature from the org's private key. The latter works better if the granting institution goes away; but is susceptible to key hacking and doesn't allow a granting org to change its mind (if the badge changes with time).

Other people are working on interfaces and formats; hopefully there will be running code to bounce things off of (attribution and the like?).

Questions

Will the granting org be its own institution? How many badge givers are out there? Current thinking: badge granting is associated with a domain. So you need a reputation? system for granters and domains as well.

Who to trust?

This is something resolved on the receiving end, it's hard to resolve this technically. Receivers may differ on who they trust.

Future thoughts

Remix Learning and P2PU have similarities and differences re: how they recognize achievement. We want new innovators to provide badges, but all providers must build up their own reputation. (as RL starts to work with larger organizations it needs to demonstrate the usefulness of its certs)

Perhaps badging organizations can recursively use this system for certification and badging -- and current bodies that certify or accredit can be convinced to publish their accreditation in this format. Sj

Cloud apps for education & Google Apps APIs

Developers can use apps for these apis into their own cloud-based services. They can then develop their own distribution channel, monetized or not. Edu groups are some of the biggest adopters of third-party tools.

Consider this an open platform; there's no specific ed app, but a desire of seeing various apps integrated into G! apps. What are touchpoints of integration, and problems people want to solve?

Examples:

• single sign-on, interactions embedded in (or rendered in) gmail.
• various proj-mgmt and productivity apps
• some national projects, such as access through libraries @ Carnegie, want to integrate G!docs better into a remix platform - outside the apps marketplace
• a nice feature of Marketplace APIs: you can integrate data across all G! properties, such as a list of docs from a user's portfolio, rather than making the user gather it. The spreadsheet API is better than that for docs.

Libraries, equity of access

Work with libraries: access and discovery, reference. Systemic bias, women in technology. Needs an update.

Engaging academia: Wikimedia's Public Policy Project

The Public Policy Initiative (preliminary overview from March, Wikipedia project page) is working with a consortium of universities in the US to improve information about Public Policy online by improving related Wikipedia materials.

We have a college ambassadors program to help the teachers and students involved get their bearings, and an alternative assessment model set up, paralleling the models used by the long-running "Wikipedia 1.0" initiative.

It is being used as a model for how academic and University collaborations could help improve any topic area, perhaps through Wikipedia directly, but more generally by working through and improving free knowledge projects online.

The general idea of making the work of university classes contribute to universally available materials like Wikipedia articles is interesting to lots of

Interest:

P2PU might join the consortium and run courses. Carnegie works with many community colleges and universities that might be interested in getting involved. There is general interest in how this serves as a model for other subjects, and groups that can't work with the "public policy" topic want to contribute to the larger picture.

Comments

On assessing the cultural and educational value of different types of knowledge - Think about evidence of success, validity of assessments, and value of learning. When applying empirical evidence we [currently] tend to rely on intuitive professional judgement. So think about how we assess learning for which learners under which contexts.

Open web for teachers

There's a course for teachers on using the open web planned; but it's not in motion yet. P2PU is developing better orientation processes and support seminars for newbies, working on a link to broader communities of teachers. Help welcome. This was a popular topic of discussion at Drumbeat NYC last weekend.

Variations on traditional assessment

There are lots of reviewing activities such as stackoverflow and WP review, which if you look at in detail are powerful assessment mechanisms, perhaps better than what we use in formal ed (more time, more focused attention). We're bringing together people studying these sorts of communities, to view them as related to education.

This sort of crowdsourcing of reputation and transfer into education/credit is being discussed in September. (Sep 20-21 @ Carnegie)

Open web for creation and collaboration

Wikipedians have clear ideas about what toolchains are needed to create and collaborate on different types of knowledge -- audio, video, animations, 3D renderings, musical scores, family trees, various types of structured data.

Tools for collaboration, review, and annotation

We need better cloud services for this as well.

Ex: The National Writing Project in CA works with 14k teachers around the country to improve writing and criticism; a part of this might be review and editing of [Wikipedia articles] or other free knowledge online. In which case better tools for review may be needed. (Possible crossover: this is a badging for content similar to the badging for individuals suggested above.)