I was looking for something like this tool ever since I discovered Van The Man on YouTube: with Tubesock, you can download YouTube videos, put them on your video ipod, add them (or the sound only) to your iTunes library, etc.
Finally, I will be able to make good use of all that space on my video ipod!
(Suggestions for additional YouTube music welcome!)
The folks at SlideShare are trying to build an equivalent to YouTube for presentations rather than movies.
The site is still invite-only (got the approval in minutes!), but you can see what the uploaded slides look like at TechCrunch, or you can have a look at the slides I presented at the OpenEd conference.
The main problem with SlideShare at this moment, it seems to me, is that it doesn’t enable you to repurpose existing presentations: that is the focus of our work on embedding repository, share and reuse support in powerpoint. Seems like there may be some complementarity here? (Is that even an English word?)
The nice folks at TED bring a TEDtalk of Majora Carter: the passion and indignation of this young woman is where politics should have its root. She’s great on slogans too: “Green is the new black”. Make sure you don’t miss the part where she talks about her conversation with Al Gore!
Then again, once elected, politicians should make sure that ratio takes over and think about their strategies for change. This evening, it seems that the mayor of my hometown, Antwerp, has proven that he did exactly that: after many, many years, he has been instrumental in finally delivering a defeat to the extreme right-wing Vlaams Belang… Thanks, Patrick!
And, finally, there was the workshop on openness in research that I helped organize at the EC-TEL conference.
Most conferences and workshops report on success stories only. This is somewhat perplexing:
* Isn’t research supposed to deal with challenging approaches?
* Aren’t we supposed to take risks?
* Doesn’t that imply that things should occasionally not work out as hoped?
* If nothing ever goes wrong, then maybe we are not taking enough risks?
* If things do occasionally go wrong, then why do we never hear about those failures in conferences and workshops?
More importantly: what can we learn from failures in E-Learning projects? How do we utilize failures to improve our work?
The funny thing is: I’ve rarely gotten more positive reactions on anything I have helped organize. It seems like everybody agrees that this is an important issue. Yet, the number of submissions was surprisingly low. To those who did submit: THANK YOU – you deserve a medal of openness! Several people remarked they felt it would look a bit funny on their publication list to have a paper in a workshop on failures…
The discussions at the workshop were VERY interesting (no, really!). If we care about disruptive innovation, then maybe “users suck” is not a bad attitude: people can be so conservative and we shouldn’t always give in to their first reactions. Oh. and by the way, users most of the time don’t know what they want anyway.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that users are not important. It just means that things are a bit more complicated than just asking them what they want! We can find out what works by analyzing what they do – much in the same way that we can observe where people walk in a new campus in order to find out where to put walkways.
The one thing I still don’t understand is why we, as a community of researchers, seem so reluctant to share our failures… If we try something and it doesn’t work, doesn’t that present a great opportunity for learning? The issue is of course that we so seldomly analyze why things failed. In fact, we often don’t analyze successes very well either! Maybe I have too optimistic a view of how things go in other domains, but it seems to me that this is much less of an issue in medicine or physics?
Of course, the papers will be openly available shortly 
on the What Went Wrong wiki, where you can also contribute your own ideas and materials. We’re contemplating how to continue this conversation beyond the workshop meeting, so drop me a note if you have any ideas on how to do that…
And then there was the political dimension of openness, with the 0110 initiative in Belgium…
For those who would need some background: it seems like there is a growing rejection of openness in Belgium, and particularly in Antwerpen, my hometown. Much of this is directed towards the community of immigrants (or rather the kids and kids of kids of immigrants!). This has been going on for a while now, but things have considerably escalated over the last 6 or 9 months or so. The saddest highlight so far is that, a few months ago, a teenager went on a killing spree in Antwerpen and killed a two year old and her nanny, and wounded another woman, … because of the color of their skin. This happened a few 100 meters from where we live, and I’m still having difficulties to understand how this could happen. In a way, this has been sort of my personal 9/11: I guess that I think differently about responsibilities and priorities since then…
Even the level of tolerance for this sort of thinking is deeply disturbing to me: “Eigen volk eerst” or “My own people first” is the slogan of the largest political party in Antwerpen! In order to try and counter this evolution, a number of Belgian musicians decided to organize an event to promote tolerance, a week before we have municipal elections. We took our kids to the event, and I was very impressed with the celebration of diversity that it turned out to be: in total, more than 100.000 people attended the distributed event. (Oh, by the way, the music was great too!)
I do know that this may be old-fashioned (as one of the leading Flemish political commentators opined) and that it may not be very effective (how many people will change their minds because of this?), and I also know that there are real and serious issues with diversity (my youngest goes to a school where most parents do not understand Dutch), but I felt it was extremely useful to make the point that diversity is a positive thing in the first place: isn’t it GREAT to be able to eat Chinese or pizza, to listen to music from any place in the world, to read Latin-American or Egyptian literature, to drink African or Australian wine.
A big THANK YOU to all who made 0110 happen.
The theme of openness has been very much on my mind lately, especially over the last few days…
Last week, I did a keynote at the Open Education Conference (thanks once more for the invitation, David!) on the “technology of open learning”.
I was very much struck by what seemed to be a prevailing notion at the conference that all content with a creative commons license is “good” and all other content is “bad”, that CC is “open” and everything else is “closed”. Frankly, this is a rather myopic view in my opinion…
Openness for me is about removing barriers. All too protective copyright restrictions can be a barrier and CC is certainly one of the better ways to avoid such restrictions. Yet, the lack of findability can be another barrier, so we need to make sure that things can be found. And money can be an issue too, so making things available for free (as in free beer) is also important.
But almost completely overlooked, and at least as important, is openness for repurposing! Even if you make all your material available for free, under a CC license, and in a way that makes it easy to find, it may be of little value to me if you make it difficult to change. That is where the value of content models and SCORM plays out, as they make scaleable repurposing possible.
Again, this seems to be overlooked by most open content initiatives, and I worry a bit that they will just create a Really Big Pile of irrelevant content if they don’t address open, scaleable repurposing as well. Being the eternal optimist, I’m sure that we’ll find some way of doing this a posteriori if that happens, but it will be so much more clumsy and can be avoided if we pay a little attention…
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