People who know me, know I am loathed to use self hosted services. Apart from myself forgetting to pay the bill for domain names and poor-service hosting servers, and so losing webpages and files that I didn’t backup, I think it is important for education to be as in touch with popular media and platforms as it can be. Setting up your own, at-times-monolithic systems, entrenching work practices around them, and giving teachers a route that leads to disconnection, dependence and non transferable skills is something to avoid as much as possible.
In saying that though, I remain all on my lonesome and am yet to hear of an educational organisation in (Australia or New Zealand at least) taking advantage of the storage and services on offer at OurMedia and Internet Archive, or using socially networked platforms to any formal status, taking advantage of Blip.tv services and saving 10s if not hundreds, maybe even millions of dollars on their own yet to work alternatives.
But here I go, about to describe a semi in house set up that I think we need. This set up will hopefully inter-operate with the social platforms and take advantage of all the best has to offer, but for mainly internal issues and copyright concerns, we need a system that spans the divide. One that will give us a cake and let us eat it as well.. whatever that stupid saying means..?
A MediaWiki
We need a media wiki with all the coolness and functionality you can get into the thing. It has to embed youtube, google and blip movies, it has to hold widgets and iDevices, take many html tags, it has to be able to hold a Google map, it needs survey tools, flickr badges, slide show, embedded audio, RSS and all the other things I haven’t thought of.
Looking at an impressive list of MediaWiki extensions, there is potentially a lot on offer, and the work of Alex Hayes and Chris Harvey on the Learnscope wiki promises to demonstrate a lot of all this functionality. The wiki we need has to allow for quick, easy mashups, 1 hour before class, by the skin of my teeth! and we need to be able to move that mashup onto other publishing platforms and formats quickly and easily. More a more detailed wish list, see ideas for wikieducator.
Distributed upload
We need to be able to load a movie (and every other file) to our own New Zealand based file server, and have the option to load it to YouTube, Blip.tv, Archive.org and the National Library… maybe more. The first file to load in the embed frame on the wiki is the local one. If that goes missing then the next available one needs to load, and so on. If that can’t be done easily, then at least a list of alternative locations should load if the local file doesn’t. This is what I mean by distributed upload, and it was inspired by the awesome services on offer at Blip.tv. Distribution like this is not just about backup, it is also about networking and collaboration. Distributing files out gets better visibility. Better visibility may lead to more reuse. More reuse leads to attribution and recognition, that in turn leads to networks and collaboration. The Brazilian teacher who has been using your movies in her class (sourced from Youtube – not your server) calls you up to talk about a student exchange idea… you point her to wiki and things get started…
Copyrights management
Our platform will hopefully default to CC BY but enable individual resources to have any copyright license needed. MediaWiki already has good handling of multi license content, so we need data recorded on what licenses are used on how much of our own content, and in the case of external content used on the wiki, we need records of what content is used other than our own and what the copyrights are.
On the file server, we need to be able to turn on or grey out functionality depending on what license is selected for a resource. For example, if I am uploading a video to the file server:
- I need to option to publish or private with the ability to ID users who can see it if private
- I need to be able to set a copyright from all copyright options (most free first and default right down to restricted). If I choose a less free license I start to lose features, like the ability to distribute, the ability to embed in the wiki, the ability to have it reformatted and backed up on other servers etc.
That’s it for now.
Come on Toto… There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place…
Learn Online 
3 comments
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May 6, 2007 at 10:27 pm
bronwyn hegarty
great ideas Leigh and you must have thought long and hard if you are willing to make a compromise on open content and social networking on this scale. However I’m going to throw my toys out of the cot!
What is the difference really between an organisational wiki etc and a Learning Management system with a wiki in it. It will again lead to a series of isolated silos. Maybe we do need this. The local community and the global community. But…….
To me it does smack again of “re-inventing the wheel” but maybe the reality is – we need to make our own unique mark on a system, and contextualise it for purpose. It does bother me though that each organisation employs people to set up and maintain their own unique and no matter how we organise it, isolated, systems (wiki, blog or LMS, eportfolio whatever). Youtube, bliptv incorporated or not…
WikiEducator on the other hand is globally managed and resourced, so surely a better product will emerge. Sure collaboration is hard and sometimes slow, but there are the same problems within smaller organisations.
However instead of moving ahead to develop a superior product with a wider range of global collaborators, we end up wasting timeand effort into developing our own stuff. we tend to spend too much time setting it up and going round in circles and in the meantime wikiEducator will have become a much more superior product…we hope. and we have not say in what happens cos we threw in the towel and went our own way.
In the words of the Rolling Stones (M. Jagger/K. Richards)……………….
“You can’t always
get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get
what you want
But if you try sometimes you just might find
You get what
you need
You get what you need–yeah, oh baby”
Bron
May 7, 2007 at 1:20 am
leighblackall
Right on Bron! You know I agree with you – although there is still a big difference between a free and open wiki resource and all our resources locked up in a learning management system…
But I take your point, and I agree. Its just that so far the suggestions from Wikieducator as far as copyrights management is concerned, is not workable for us IMO. If we use our own wiki, using a service in Auckland that is very much in touch with Wikieducator, I hope that we will remain closely aligned with Wikieducator. We coudl develop up resources to a point where it meets all our needs, then copy them into wikieducator where it will go in as Share Alike. We may not be able to do much with it once it goes in in that Share Alike status, but at least we can observe its further development, make contact with possible networks, and probably negotiate small adjustments on our own version.
The Share Alike license is a sticky issue for Wikieducator because I don’t know if it will then go on to affect their decision to enable “mashup” functionality on their platform. It may take some time before they can work that one out, while in the meantime we could start using it (the functionality is already there for MediaWiki) and demonstrate its usefulness to Wikieducator.
But, as I started out in saying in the post.. I agree with you. But I’m willing to accept that our own free and open wiki is that “small first step” we keep getting told we need to do by our teachers…
May 10, 2007 at 1:53 pm
Alexander Hayes
I’m in a quandry.
We have spent countless months hosting our own MediaWiki and guess what ?
The ideas actually getting some traction. SIT has installed it’s own PHP 5.0 server and has a statewide wiki operational.
I meet with the head of TOL 2 on Monday to discuss my need for the same in Western Institute in Orange. Our many months and your advice and others help like Chris has enable our learners to have an ad. free world wired wiki.
The emails have remarkably lessened. The blog complements or discussions and some consolations have been made for the ludites who would otherwise seek to lord over what is seen and unseen.
We are battling and winning. It is very very important that your organisations see the benefit’s of pulling the PHP trained IT people out of their dens and get them operational. Your node needs to be linked to ours.
LearnScope is unfolding some amazing imbededment already and the infrastructural changes are having immense pedagogical impact.
I’m all for free ranging however when Google tells me at every turn that I need to find a perfect lover then I reckon it’s time to stop buying 100 redundant PDA’s and host our own servers instead.
Google is filling our learning spaces and places with crap. We dont need an LMS rather a wiki and a repository to drill from that has extensibility for PLE retractions.
Thats what we are building at http://www.nswlearnscope.com/wiki
Please register your own space and help us unfold the next level of learning to be had.