Team Elgg: David Tosh, Misja Hoebe, Ben Werdmuller (l-r).

I’d say this was a productive conference, all things considered. It was great to meet Misja and have a face-to-face discussion between the three of us; it was also nice to meet all these other people who for the most part have been disembodied names and ideas floating around the e-learning sphere. We’ve come away rejuvinated and eager to implement our second roadmap, as well as to solidify some of the contacts and relationships we’ve made. There are exciting times ahead.

I will not be resting: as well as fulfilling my technical duties, in a month I’ll be attending the JISC/CETIS e-Framework 2005 conference, and there are more to come.

(This entry was live-blogged during Dave’s talk at ePortfolio 2005 in Cambridge.)

Most people running eportfolio systems seemed to think they were social software – an interesting development! I’m not sure this would have been true this time last year, but as more people actually implement these systems and learn the problems and discover what engages their students, I think more people will come round to this idea. However, as it is, less than half of the audience had heard of RSS – we have work to do in order to share the knowledge of what’s going on in the wider web. Dave says “let’s learn from social practice” – if e-portfolios are social, we must adhere to this I think.

Dave sums it up: in the learning landscape you can make it do what you want it to do when you’re ready to make it happen, and you can do it in the way that’s best for you.

Some audio of him talking about the learning landscape: {{file:1744}}

Some video: {{file:1745}}

Questions: “There is so much ‘them’ and ‘us’” – what about the idea of a university? How can we flatten the landscape and all engage together?

A thought: e-portfolios are different from learning management systems.

Simon Grant: perhaps a critique of current social practice would be useful. He doesn’t think blogging will ever become a majority activity – I think I disagree, but it’s a useful to think about the vast majority of people who currently haven’t even heard of blogging, let alone use it. Regardless, however, Elgg is not a blogging system.

Did anyone else see the Newsnight story on Web 2.0 just now? It’s interesting to see the mainstream media frame these technologies in a way that the unaccustomed can easily understand. It might be worth discovering more of these in the future – you can build the coolest tool in the world, but it’s no good at all if you can’t get the idea across.

(If you missed it, you can watch online for the next 24 hours.)

Today has been interesting to say the least. Lots of people (a capacity audience) talking about all kinds of different issues surrounding e-learning and e-portfolios.

I’m very interested in topic maps, which have come up several times; the trick is going to be creating a friendly user interface for them. This kind of thing – you’re basically asking a user to create directional graphs – is necessarily complicated, but they need to be streamlined down as far as possible. They’re not going to be useful if they scare people off.

There was also a lot of talk about aggregating from all kinds of disparate sources where a user might have created content in order to draw everything together as a true portfolio. I think this is definitely the way to go, and has been a part of the learning landscape vision from the start; Dave is going to underline that tomorrow during his presentation. I’m looking forward to it.

From a personal perspective, the presentation from France Telecom R&D explaining how they’re using Elgg to experiment with new methods for facilitating knowledge management was very interesting indeed. One of the wonderful things about open source is seeing people take your tools, modifying them and harnessing them for new purposes.

Meanwhile, it’s been great to meet up with Misja Hoebe. The three of us outlined some ideas for the future development of the system that I’m very excited about. On top of that, he’s a really nice guy, and I’ve enjoyed hanging out during the conference.

The ePortfolio 2005 conference starts in earnest tomorrow – today we were all talking about how different e-portfolio systems can interoperate, and in theory demonstrating working implementations. The instructions we were sent months in advance dictated no PowerPoint presentations; I knew exactly how the day would pan out after the first three speakers whipped out their slides and started chatting away.

Not that it wasn’t interesting – I discovered a lot, and as ever at these events the networking between sessions was arguably the most useful. Although the event itself was timely and infinitely useful in terms of getting people to think outside their institutional box, there wasn’t a whole lot of working interoperability and, in all honesty, at least from my perspective, I feel like a lot of people are missing the point. It’s all geared to the institution as the end user. The institution is not the end user; the learner is.

During the discussion at the close of the day, Helen Barrett pointed out that there was an issue of purpose. What are people building e-portfolios and e-learning systems for? This struck a chord with me, because during the duration of Elgg development it’s always been a question of building something that can be assessed vs something that users will use to learn. We’ve always been fighting a battle with Elgg: as soon as you show them the system, and explain the learning landscape model of learning through connections, communities and reflection, they all come back to one question. How can we mark it?

Towards the end of the session consensus was building that yes, in fact a lot of learning is to do with reflections and the comments that arise when connected people comment on each others’ thoughts. The question then became, how can we incorporate this into IMS LIP in order to make it a standard? Of course, there are already standards for representing connections between people and objects – FOAF/RDF – and their reflections – RSS – which software used by millions of people already supports. It’s seriously time that the educational community broke out of their introverted shell and started looking at the wider web for inspiration. People have been reflecting and representing their body of work on the web since 1989; perhaps we should be taking that experience into account.

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Interesting mention of deriving test systems from UML – first time I’ve heard that standard discussed at an e-learning conference.

“Driven by the needs of users”, “Give priority to methods currently in use” – absolutely!

{{file:1716}}

There was some talk of alternative RDF bindings as opposed to IMS – it’s worth mentioning that FOAF is one such binding, which Elgg supports today.

I’m not the first person on Elgg.net to be blogging this – check back through the day to see our reflections.

Tea and coffee at the reception:

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Fabrizio Giorgini’s Giunti Labs presentation in progress:

{{file:1715}}

I’m going to keep this short, because it’s late and I’m tired – however, there are several things of note:

• I’m in Cambridge, ready for the ePlugfest tomorrow – exciting stuff!
• I’m posting this using a generic Windows blogging client (Zempt, if you must know), using Misja‘s great XML-RPC module
• If you would like to configure an XML-RPC capable client – Misja’s module does Blogger, MetaWeblog and Typepad APIs – then the XML-RPC capable URL you’ll need to pass the client is elgg.net/_rpc/RPC2.php

If you’re in Cambridge this week, please say hi! Coming out and meeting people is one of the best (and, ok, one of the most nerve-racking) parts of doing all this.

Vaguely related to my post about training, Bill Thompson @ BBC News points out a new web safety campaign starting this week. Get Safe Online is “a joint government and private sector initiative aimed at helping consumers and small businesses to use the internet safely.”

Unfortunately the website isn’t quite up and running yet – but on the positive side, they do have eleven corporate logos for you to gaze at lovingly. It remains to be seen whether this is PR or has any real meat to it.