Scott Wilson ::   Blog | Network | | Aggregator | Profile | Page

Widgets at Sakai

Yesterday I gave a presentation for the Sakai working group on authoring about the work we've been doing on Widgets. I'm including it here as its got some more of the technical details.

I think a major implication of widgets is that it challenges the idea of writing tools as plugins just for one platform (e.g. Moodle, or Sakai) rather than as generic widgets usable in any "container", which can include personal as well as institutionally-offered web spaces. For example, a Moodle course can include things like a chat, voting, and forum widget - which you can then drag off into your personal site.

Perhaps make your own personal "dashboard" out of the widgets you've taken from several different courses you are participating in, originally offered in different LMS's by different organisations.

Online seminar on PLEs

Yesterday I presented at an online seminar on Personal Learning Environments. The organisers - the Evolve project - also made a recording of the session so you can see how it went.

Thanks to everyone who took part and asked lots of difficult questions!

To download the recording, you need to click this link and let the Java weirdness happen. I guess a regular movie wouldn't have captured the chat backchannel, which is nice as I missed some of the comments while busy talking.

MUPPLE - Mashup Personal Learning Environments

I'm off to Maastricht next week to take part in a workshop on mashup personal learning environments (MUPPLE) as part of the EC-TEL conference. I'll be presenting a demo of some work we've been doing on integrating widgets into various platforms.

I'll post a link to the paper when I get back, but in the meantime, here is a screenshot to give you an idea of what I'll be showing: spot the Apple Dashboard widgets in this Elgg 1.0 installation!

This is all possible at least partly through the efforts of W3C in coming up with a common Widget specification, but also through many modern platforms such as Elgg, Wordpress and Moodle having a "Widget" concept in their plugin architecture that makes embedding of other bits of web far easier. The combination of these factors made building a generic widget server technology that can serve widgets from existing platforms such as Dashboard, Sidebar, Konfabulator (etc.) into web environments feasible.

We've also extended the widget spec, and enabled stateful collaborative widgets, like the "Natter" synchronous chat widget you see in the image. With no special server-side coding whatsoever - its all Javascript and AJAX calls to standard widget service methods and events.

After MUPPLE I'll be at IMS in Birmingham, quite possibly for a repeat performance, but this time showing this technology being combined with learning design sequences.

More information on MUPPLE here.

Open Web Foundation

I think this one has been brewing for quite some time - the Open Web Foundation is pulling together a number of specifications under the umbrella of a single foundation.

The Open Web Foundation was announced by David Recordon of SixApart at OSCON yesterday.

The new foundation is to "create a home for community-driven specifications" such as oAuth and OpenID as well -if the slides are anything to go by - as the currently very proprietary Google Gadgets.

On the one hand I think this is certainly a step in the right direction for getting these specifications onto a stable footing. On the other hand, what about IETF? What about W3C? What about ISO? What about UN/CEFACT? I'd like to see a good rationale for why none of these existing organisations are unsuitable for the kind of work being discussed. Do they take too long? Are they full of your competitors? Are they too undemocratic? Too democratic? This is a very serious issue, especially as in the Google case, W3C have been working on non-proprietary open specifications in the same areas.

One argument is that the new body should purely focus on IPR management. This is certainly one area of concern with community specifications, and tackling it would be very useful. However, this would then require a very hands-off approach by the organisation, which is maintained without the urge to control the direction of the specifications themselves. Already discussions are taking place about what criteria the organisation would set up as to what projects it would accept, and what processes it will have to develop.

For example, would the OWF incubate a competitor to oAuth? If not, why not, and how would it make that decision?

If the OWF really can pull off a lightweight approach to IPR management for specifications then this could be a useful initiative, but the relationship with, in particular, the W3C and IETF needs to be explained much more clearly, and the role corporate interests are playing (Google, Yahoo!) in its development made explicit, before we know if the OWF is a good place to work on interoperability issues.

If Atom (or Pie as it used to be called) was being developed now, would it now join OWF, or would it still offer its spec to IETF to become an open standard? What would be the difference?

More coverage over at TechCrunch

I'm still here!

Its been quite a while since my last blog post, for which I place them blame largely on Twitter, so here is a brief roundup of what I've been up to lately.

XCRI

I've been really busy with XCRI recently as part of the efforts to harmonize the different specifications for course advertising and syndication across the EU. There is no a draft model out for consultation that we intend to submit for a European standard. There's a lot of enthusiasm for this (see my post on the XCRI blog about the Athens Declaration) and so I'm pretty hopeful that not only will we see a new lightweight EU standard for course advertising, but we'll also see all national initiatives adapting to it in a relatively short period of time. Certainly as soon as the standard is agreed we're planning to make the changes to the XCRI spec needed to conform to it.

ARGOSI

This is an Alternate Reality Game project I've been working on. The first rule of ARGOSI is you don't talk about ARGOSI.

On The Horizon

If you haven't already done so, check out the series of blog posts on Mark Feldstein's blog. These are all about the papers we're writing for a special issue of OTH, and I'm writing one of these with Kamala here at Bolton. I think this is going to be a really good journal issue and well worth getting hold of - I'm just worried about making sure our contribution is as thought-provoking as some of the other papers.

Widgets & Wookies

We've been working on using the W3C Widgets spec as the basis for making and delivering collaborative widgets that can be distributed across lots of platforms, both personal and institutional, using a piece of OSS we've developed called Wookie. Some more info in this interview. I'm really excited about this work, and we hope to have some really good stuff about it online soon.

FeedForward

My partner on the project, Kris, had to take some extra leave so we had to put back the release of the next version of the application. We're still planning to get out a new version before the Autumn. Thanks to erveryone whose got in touch asking about how we've been doing!

Conferences, unconferences and so on

I've recently attended EUNIS 2008 in Denmark, and the JISC Innovation Forum at Keele. I've also been along to the CRIG barcamp. However other people have written far more timely and informative posts about all of these things! Next up I've got:

• ALT-C (are especially the Fringe, F-ALT)
• the IMS Quarterly meeting here in the UK
• MUPPLE

There has been a lot more going on, but those are the headlines for now...

Ignore this post

No really, its a technorati claims thing

Technorati Profile

Pachube: Connecting things that sense things

I'm not sure what I'd use this for, but its certainly cool and very cybernetic. Pachube is a service for tagging objects that share data from their sensors.

Services like Pachube could be useful for some kinds of very high-level business intelligence, particularly analyses that cross organisational or national boundaries.

At the moment, however, it does have the feel of a webcams site with graphs and XML, but as more objects, places and devices get wired (or wireless) then something like Pachube becomes an inevitable evolution.

Perhaps someone will find some interesting way of using some of these sensors in one of the many mashup competitions making the rounds currently.

oAuth: Putting users in control of service-to-service communications

I've been talking about oAuth a lot to colleagues recently; I'd had it vaguely on my radar for a while, but a conversation with David Recordon from SixApart at EduServ last year convinced me to take a more serious interest in the specification. oAuth is essentially a user-centric authorization mechanism for enabling services to talk to each other.

Currently some services enable interoperability by getting the user to delegate authority to the service to interact with another, essentially by enabling it to impersonate the user. For example, you give Flickr your LiveJournal account details so it can cross-post your photos.

With oAuth, the same functionality is enabled without the security, trust and privacy compromises: the user talks to both services and explicitly grants permission for the services to talk, but without revealing any account details.

There are a great many service-to-service contracts that could benefit from this user-centric approach: employers and universities, for example. Or between employers and applicant's portfolio services.

But is oAuth actually being adopted? Well, the evidence suggests it is, with Google announcing adoption, and discussing integration with its OpenSocial and Google Gadgets technology. For Google this replaces its proprietary AuthSub mechanism with one that can be shared across providers.

For eLearning, the oAuth spec is an important building block in developing distributed as well as federated elearning architecture. With oAuth, users can choose to connect together services that have no existing relationships using a common authorization method.

Even better, oAuth is completely agnostic with regard to identity and authentication protocols and models - it doesn't need single sign-on or any kind of shared identity or authentication model between service providers.

The bottom line - if you are developing an application that needs to talk to an external service API on behalf of the user, then you may need to start looking into oAuth.

More Social Metadata: APML and ULML

While a lot of recent attention has focussed on the issue of social graph portability, there are a couple of other interesting developments in social metadata I've come across lately.

APML (Attention Profile Markup Language) is a means of sharing an individual attention profile. While other specs (such as the seemingly-dead AttentionXML) have focussed on the tracking of attention in terms of individual clicks, APML is concerned with the mobility of a more coarse-grained profile, consisting of a collection of weighted concepts, either self-asserted or aggregated from services.

The spec is generally simple enough to implement, despite a few odd design choices, consisting basically of a list of "concepts" (keywords or labels) and "sources" (URLs) that are of interest to the subject, all of which have a weighting from 0 to 1 and some additional metadata about where the weightings come from.

APML is currently undergoing revision to reach 1.0 status, and so we can see quite a few possible changes, but its worth having a look at if you're thinking of developing applications that make use of individual interest profiles for personalisation. It should be fairly trivial to support users exporting or importing such a profile.

ULML (User Labor Markup Language) is a specification for tracking the metrics of user participation in social web services. A ULML document provides statistics on a user's interactions with the service; as the developers put it:

"User labor is the work that people put in to create, improve, and maintain their existence in social web"

ULML provides a way of presenting the volume of user activities such as generating content, tagging, voting and commenting. It also allows for the sharing of metrics concerning reactions to their participation - incoming views, comments, bookmarks and so on. Overall the intent is to quantify in some fashion the economic value of social participation, potentially to enable greater transparency about how user's participation with a service is valued to advertisers and other services that support (typically free) social web applications and to power things like meta-markets.

Some rather simple metrics are already used on forums to rank the value of contributors and encourage more participation - typically based on the number of posts alone. Using the more comprehensive - yet still quite simple - metrics available in ULML may allow better comparisons of relative levels of commitment, engagement, and value generation with multiple social web services.

Its an interesting concept, and could possibly have some use in evaluating engagement and participation in more general terms for services without such an economic rationale such as elearning applications. For example, to quantitatively compare the relative commitment of students to VLEs versus Facebook, or to measure the value generated by staff in shared services. It may also be possible to find a way of using it to quantize the work of researchers who share their work by blogging and using social networks as well as by traditional academic publishing.

I think its fair to say neither APML or ULML is going mainstream anytime soon, but are sufficiently simple to implement that they may be worth exploring if you're developing applications that have a social angle.

Beginning of the next memory S-curve?

How about an iPod that holds millions of songs. In fact, why not all of them? Want to replace that hard drive with a solid state one with 1000 times the capacity? Oh, and everything stays nice and stable when the power goes off, for far longer than today's flash memory. Like to guess how far away this is?

Technology development often exhibits an S-Curve pattern; first you get the slow buildup as it takes time to get an idea of the ground, then increasing growth, and finally a slowdown of diminishing returns. Then eventually you hit the start of the next "S" and you're soon back into exponential growth. Sometimes you're lucky enough to spot the next "S" starting, and I think recent developments are pointing to a new "S" in computer memory.

(S-Curve diagram by Laird Close, University of Arizona)

The last few weeks saw three major announcements on the development of memory and solid-state storage.

First of all, IBM Research announced it was close to cracking 'Racetrack' nano-magnetic memory. This proof-of-concept technology would eventually replace flash memory and hard drives, with vastly greater capacity.

Next up, researchers from Daresbury and Glasgow have announced developments that could increase memory capacity even further, to "hundreds of thousands of times more capacity" using innovative nanotechnology (Nature Nanotechnology, 3, 289 - 233 (2008) ).

Finally, HP Labs have added the "memristor" to the basic building blocks of electronics. Memristors are resitstors that store information even after losing power, and do so for longer than conventional flash memory. Whats more, memristors are in principle far simpler and easier to make than flash memory, which could also accelerate the trend towards ubiquitous solid-state memory.

Now, whats our plan for when students start turning up with something the size of today's Google sat in their pocket?