2009/09/25

What is/could be a PLE

Just looked through this paper on a conceptual view of what could make a PLE. Struck by how similar this is to what we provide to students at UoP as their "MySite" within Sharepoint. Close, but not quiet - as that doesn't conform to some useful standards.

Personal Learning Environment - A Conceptual Study

2009/09/20

Response to blog Open letter to blackboard

I just posted this response (with a few corrections) to an open letter to Blackboard (http://bit.ly/A878U ) calling on them to embrace current technology and make significant improvements (related to the 'VLE is dead' debate):

Worth a go, and I admire the sentiment to engage with the producer to seek improvements (as I argued for at the ALT-C debate on the issue) - but there are 3 things I'd say you need to consider further:

1) recoding a large application like Blackboard is not a trivial exercise. Even with complete commitment and deep pockets, it will take quite some time to re-engineer
2) There are potential issues with software patents to consider-where 'best of breed' sites out there may already have protection in place which may require license arrangements or very creative re-thinking to avoid issues (a topic Blackboard legal people are all too familiar with!)
3) You haven't yet clearly articulated the real issues, beyond saying that "frames are bad m'kay?" ;)
I envisaged the community working together to produce a VLE design spec which would really meet the needs into the next few years against which any existing or future VLE offering could be measured when procuring. This would need to refer to relevant standards for interworking with other systems, detailed feature sets with priorities etc.

...the other aspect is that of course the Moodle option exists to actually contribute directly to the development/improvement cycle too. I also envisage scope within and across institutions to collaborate on projects to produce legal and technical frameworks to allow the easy use and integration of those 'best of breed' services without waiting for existing VLE systems to catch up, as they are probably better focused on being the glue between institutional information systems and the cloud based 3rf party tools rather than constantly playing catch up.

But who knows, the revolution might be starting here? :)

-- Post From My iPhone

2009/09/09

VLE is (not) dead

Just watched the video of the "VLE is Dead" debate from #altc2009 and realised that James has added this blog address under my name, so thought I'd best mention it in case anyone looks at this blog and wonders what on earth this has to do with anything :-)

While this is one of my blogs, its not one I actively maintain and has mostly been a "place holder" until very recently.

Most of my work related blogging is actually done on an internal University of Plymouth blog (for various reasons), so please don't be too disappointed to not find anything related to the debate here, although I will share my notes for my bit of the presentation here if anyone is interested. :-) This includes slightly more of the points I'd have made if time and the direction of the debate had allowed - still culled down from my initial list of points.



But feel free to follow me @sputuk on twitter for a mix of work, personal and often innane thoughts and conversations.

2009/09/06

My view on music downloads as 'theft'

Watching the Big Question on BBC this morning, I felt prompted to put the following on the forum for the programme (slightly editted to correct some typos I spotted too late):

The music industry persists with the fallacy that copying music is theft. It is not.

Theft denies the owner of an item any access or use of that item. Copying something creates a separate new item without affecting the rights of the owner. It is not theft.

The music industry and artists also mistakenly equate a copy made to a 'lost sale'. This is not correct. Most copies are made by people with either only a passing interest or little money. If they did not copy the music they would live without it.

People copy music for choice. Music is available 'freely' as far as the end consumer is concerned via many routes - the radio, music TV channels, pubs/clubs (people do not percieve they are paying for the music), etc - but usually they don't have a choice in when or where to hear tracks they want to hear.

When you buy music, you are confered a limited right to listen to that track where and when you choose. Downloading music without paying for it is only about gaining that 'any time access' without rewarding the artist. It is not theft and most people for most tracks that they download would rather live without that access than pay for it.

Music has ALWAYS been copied - from minstrals traveling around and having their songs re-sung by others, to modern flawless reproduction. Artists can not stop people resinging their songs or even remembering the song in their own mind- all that is gained with a download is greater fidelity to a particular performance. Again, it is not theft.

Artists have historically made money from the scarcity of the copies of their works confering some value to those copies. This ceases to be a valid business model in the digital age and the sooner the music industry and artists wake up to that and leverage the market in otherways, the sooner we can stop wasting effort and money as a society on this pointless 'crime'.

Downloading music is not theft.

----

Additional comment: I do however personally beleive it is immoral to not reward artists for thier works, for things I enjoy, and currently the only way to do that is to pay for music through traditional routes, but the sooner alternative business models exist to reward artists the better.

Germaine Greer made almost exactly the same points as I'd made in the programme but much more elloquently ;) she made the point that copyrite law exists to protect authors from publishers historically so publishers had to pay authors for each copy they produced. By extension, each individual making a copy of music could pay an artist directly - thus marking the end of the traditional publishing industries; which is of course why they are so vehamently defending the old dated business model- they cease to have the same significance in the digital world, just as newspapers are also struggling.

The cultural shift to recognize that things have changed will be even more important when we all have 3D printers in our homes and can download models to build physical things too. A lot of other industries (spare car parts etc) will also need to be re-considered.