Security, identity, voice, opportunity and agency on the distributed web

The topic for the final week of the E-Learning 3.0 course is Agency. Agency is one of those words that, if you work in education, is very familiar, but when it comes down to it, are we clear about what it means? Off the top of my head I would associate choice with the word agency, i.e. learners have the freedom and ability to make choices about their learning. Looking up definitions of the word agency reveals explanations related to business and organisations, but a search for agency in education resulted in the following two definitions:

Agency is the capacity and propensity to take purposeful initiative—the opposite of helplessness. Young people with high levels of agency do not respond passively to their circumstances; they tend to seek meaning and act with purpose to achieve the conditions they desire in their own and others’ lives.

In social science, agency is the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices. By contrast, structure is those factors of influence (such as social class, religion, gender, ethnicity, ability, customs, etc.) that determine or limit an agent and their decisions.

The first definition relates closely to the work being done by Silvia Baldiris, who works with the Fundación Universitaria Tecnológico Comfenalco (Colombia) and Universidad Internacional de la Rioja (Spain), and Jutta Treviranus, Director of the Inclusive Design Research Centre (IDRC) and professor at OCAD University in Toronto. I found their conversation with Stephen Downes this week, very thought-provoking and surprisingly moving, so I think I can understand why and how Stephen’s recent trip to Colombia resulted in him creating a video about what peace means to him.

Silvia and Jutta talked about how they are working to give vulnerable young people in Colombia, who have different and diverse learning needs from the norm, and are therefore marginalised by the education system, opportunities for finding their voice and identity, through shared storytelling. They described the success of the work they have done thus far and their aspirations for future work. It is well worth listening to the recording of their video for details of their work.

I am not going to write any more about it here;  a very good account of their discussion, which covers all the main points has already been posted by Roland Legrand – Diversity, Data and Storytelling  and you can find out more about their very impressive work from the resources listed at the end of this post.

Once again Stephen posted a very helpful Synopsis at the beginning of this topic on agency. This prompted the following thoughts/questions which I will insert (in blue font) into Stephen’s text (in italics).

Each of the major developments in the internet – from the client-server model to platform-based interoperability to web3-based consensus networks – has been accompanied by a shift in agency. The relative standing of the individual with respect to community, institutions, and governments was shifted, for better or worse.

What do we mean by agency in this context?  Do we mean choice and if so can too much choice be confusing? What examples do we have of ‘the relative standing of the individual with respect to community, institutions, and governments’ being shifted for better or worse. Is agency a myth?

Each stage in technological development is inspired by social, political and economic aspirations, and understanding the next generation of learning and technology requires understanding the forces that shaped them. So we close our enquiry with a consideration of issues related to power and control, to peace and prosperity, to hopes and dreams.

This brings up questions around technological determinism. To what extent are social, political and economic aspirations inspired by technological development? What are the forces that will shape the next generation of learning and technology? Is it true that more agency on the distributed web will mean more power for learners, or will power continue to be concentrated in the few that know how to manage distributed learning and understand how to use it?

McLuhan said that technology is a projection of ourselves into the community, so we need to consider how human capacities are advanced and amplified in a distributed and interconnected learning environment. Our senses are amplified by virtual and augmented reality, our cognitive capacities extended by machine vision and artificial intelligence, and our economic and social agency is represented by our bots and agents.

We are the content – the content is us. This includes all aspects of us. How do we ensure that what we project to the world is what we want to project, both as teachers and learners? As content and media become more sophisticated and more autonomous, how do we bind these to our personal cultural and ethical frameworks we want to preserve and protect?

Does projection of ourselves into the community also come with risk – risk to our data and identities? Agency will only be a reality if people know how to do this safely. Power will be in the hands of those who know.

These are tied to four key elements of the new technological framework: security, identity, voice and opportunity. What we learn, and what makes learning successful, depends on why we learn. These in turn are determined by these four elements, and these four elements are in turn the elements that consensus-based decentralized communities are designed to augment.

Is there a hierarchical relationship between these four key elements, i.e. security must be in place before identity and then voice can be realised, and opportunity with agency rely on security, identity and voice being safeguarded. Security, identity and voice will enable the confidence needed to take advantage of opportunity, exercise agency and make safe choices. Is agency a lottery?

Learning therefore demands more than just the transmission or creation of knowledge – it requires the development of a capacity to define and instantiate each of these four elements for ourselves. Our tools for learning will need to emphasize and promote individual agency as much as they need to develop the tools and capacities needed to support social, political and economic development.

Is this referring to technological tools?

It is difficult to imagine a world in which education is not solely about knowledge and skills. But as we transform our understanding of learners from social and economic units to fully realized developers and sustainers of the community as a whole, it becomes clear that education must focus on the tools and capacities for agency along with the knowledge, culture and skills that sustain them.

I find these last two paragraphs don’t quite fit with my experience, in which learning has always been more than just transmission or the creation of knowledge. I have always understood learning to be the process through which learners learn to become the person they want to be. So yes learning is about much more than acquiring knowledge and skills, but it always has been, and yes we want learners to have agency and take control of their learning, but we always have. So what can the distributed web and the latest technological developments offer to make this a reality in everyone’s educational experience?

Resources
What Peace Means to Me Dec 20, 2018 video The only path toward peace and freedom from authoritarianism is the path that leads toward the creation and maintenance of the civil society. The just society. The caring society.

The Three Dimensions of Inclusive Design
GitHub, 2018/12/18
The three dimensions of the framework are:

• Recognize, respect, and design for human uniqueness and variability.
• Use inclusive, open & transparent processes, and co-design with people who have a diversity of perspectives, including people that can’t use or have difficulty using the current designs.
• Realize that you are designing in a complex adaptive system.

You can edit this work on GitHub. Web: [Direct Link]

Social Justice Repair Kit
Inclusive Design Research Centre, 2018/12/18
The goal of the Social Justice Repair Kit project is to support youth at risk who have learning differences to re-engage in education through an inclusively designed social justice platform that integrates authentic project-based learning. For youth with identified and unidentified learning differences, the Kit will add inclusive design supports to remove barriers to participation.Web: [Direct Link]

Contando el valor de la diversidad!
Cuentalo, 2018/12/18
These stories serve as a reference to other people who identify themselves in them and who discover in them similarities with their own life story, which in some cases may turn out to be unfavorable, however, in this discovery, possible methods of coping are identified that allow resolving or resignifying adverse situations optimistically. Web: [Direct Link]

Groups of diverse problem solvers can outperform groups of high-ability problem solvers
u Hong, Scott E. Page, PNAS, 2018/12/18
“We find that when selecting a problem-solving team from a diverse population of intelligent agents, a team of randomly selected agents outperforms a team comprised of the best-performing agents.” See also Problem Solving by Heterogeneous Agents, by the same authors. Web: [Direct Link]

A Conversation about Community in the Distributed web

This image created by Kevin Hodgson, a participant in the E-Learning 3.0 MOOC, as Stephen Downes said on Twitter, ‘basically completes the Task for week 8’.

For an interactive version of this image see: https://www.thinglink.com/fullscreen/1129211585894547458

The final discussion about the topic of community in the E-Learning 3.0 course centred on a Google Hangout discussion between Stephen Downes and Roland Legrand. The Hangout was open to anyone and there were a few people, including myself, in the chat, but only Roland Legrand in the Hangout with Stephen. This worked really well, allowing the conversation between them to develop and dig deeper into some interesting ideas. I can recommend watching the video recording, as their discussion helps to clarify some of the issues we have been struggling with in relation to this topic on community in the distributed web.

The discussion started with a review of how the week’s task had been experienced. Stephen had asked participants to create a community through consensus, without giving us any indication of how to do this, or what else to do, and ideally without using a centralised space. Laura Ritchie, Kevin Hodgson  and Roland put forward proposals on how to do this and ultimately we went with Roland’s initial suggestion, whilst also taking account of Laura and Kevin’s thoughts. Stephen pointed out in the Hangout that had the course attracted a larger number of participants the task would have been more difficult, because there would have been more proposals and people would have organised into groups. How then would we have chosen which community to join (the task stipulated only one community)? How do you solve consensus generally?

Roland thought that his proposal only required minimal commitment from participants, but Stephen thought that it could have been even more minimal. Whilst we all (those who participated) reflected on our course experience in our individual blogs, Stephen suggested that all we had needed to do was to provide evidence that we were there, maybe by posting the #el30 hashtag and stating that anyone who posted this was a member of the community. By making the task performative (writing a blog post) did it become exclusive? Roland questioned how posting a hashtag would work. Wouldn’t people be too dispersed?  He asked, ‘Why even talk about community?’

For Stephen (and see his summary for the week for further thoughts on this) the concept of community is important in the context of truth and facts. How do we know we belong to a community? This relates to how do we know a fact is a fact? And how do we know which facts to believe? How do we meet each other to discuss this?

Roland suggested that we need empathy and openness beyond the facts, because when faced with alternative facts our identities are threatened. The first thing people need is to feel recognised and safe. His question was, if we want people to meet each other to discuss alternative facts and perspectives, won’t the distributed web make things more difficult? Stephen agreed that lot of things are harder on the distributed web. It’s easier to build and work on a centralised platform, but as Stephen pointed out, we are already living in a world where information is distributed. For him centralised to decentralised is six of one and half a dozen of the other. He also pointed out that the decentralised web flourishes in the financial community and that there is no empathy in this community.

Roland questioned whether there is a planetary community and thought that the idea of a planet-wide lack of empathy was a bleak vision. He wondered whether we are too negative about it all, saying that humanity is more peaceful today than ever before, and most people can be trusted. But, as Stephen said, whilst most people the world over are ‘good’ there remain bad actors. We have to build resistance to bad actors and that’s why making things harder, through blockchain, encryption and managing our own data, might be a good thing. But Roland suggested that encryption and managing our own data might also be bad for security. Stephen agreed that there is tension between openness and privacy, and that a balance is needed.

They then went on to discuss whether we could set up some sort of community/forum to continue to discuss these complex ideas and whether this space should be open or closed, on a centralized platform or on the distributed web. Roland is keen to continue the discussion.

From my perspective the community topic has been very challenging, causing me to question my understanding of what we mean by community on the distributed web, and the role that trust, truth and consensus play in the formation of community on the distributed web. I have not come to any firm conclusions yet about how all the ideas fit together and why they are significant. But as I have mentioned in a previous post, I think it may be necessary to rethink the language we use when discussing how community is formed in the distributed web. A verse from the King James Bible comes to mind.

Neither do men put new wine into old bottles: else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved.

Many thanks to Stephen and Roland for a fascinating discussion.

Consensus and community in the distributed web

The topic for this week in the E-Learning 3.0 MOOC is Community. I struggled last week to understand how the concept of ‘Recognition’ was being interpreted in relation to the distributed web, and I suspect I am going to struggle this week to understand how the concept of community will be interpreted.

In his Synopsis for the week Stephen Downes writes that recent times have seen us shift from an idea of community based on sameness, to a time when society has difficulty agreeing on basic facts and truths. A whole blog post could be written about just this, but I will move on.

Stephen sees community formation, in this day and age of the distributed web, as dependent on decision making and consensus. Consensus is no mean feat, but is essential if we are to counteract the influence of ‘bad actors’ who distribute false information and fake news. A critical mass of society must check and agree on what information we can trust or not trust. In an interesting article by Preethi Kasireddy- How Does Distributed Consensus Work? – decision making and consensus at the level of algorithms is discussed and it is clear that artificial intelligence will have an increasing role to play in determining what we trust and how we perceive truth. But for now we will stick to a more familiar environment in which we can observe how decision-making to achieve consensus is achieved, by real people rather than robots.

This week Stephen’s conversation was with Pete Forsyth, Editor in Chief of the Signpost, a community newspaper covering Wikipedia and the Wikimedia movement.  Their discussion covered what we mean by community and consensus in relation to how ‘Wikipedia approaches questions like managing fake news, reaching consensus, and managing content‘.

I’m not sure that a discussion of how Wikipedia reaches consensus is comparable to reaching consensus on the distributed web, since Wikipedia is built on a centralised platform, but it is a platform used by tens of thousands of people across the world, and therefore provides a good basis for exploring how consensus works across large numbers. According to Wikipedia’s own site an average of 561 new articles are written every day and Wikipedia develops at a rate of over 1.8 edits per second, with editing being carried out by about 10% of users. As of August 2018, about 1000 pages are deleted from Wikipedia each day.

How is this consensus achieved?  What can we learn from Wikipedia about how to trust that the information we are reading is ‘the truth’? These are some of the thoughts shared by Pete Forsyth.

• Wikipedia does not trust in people. There is no mechanism for establishing the authority of the writer in Wikipedia. It trusts in facts.
• Facts must be checked and backed up by sources. (Although this wasn’t mentioned, I think Mike Caulfield’s Web Literacy for Student Fact Checkers – is worth remembering here).
• Trust should always be rooted in understanding. It’s important to check the history and discussion forums in Wikipedia.
• Wikipedia defines a reliable source as being independent of the topic.
• Trustworthiness of sources is on a gradient. Exceptional claims require exceptional sources.
• Wikipedia prefers consensus to democracy, i.e. decisions are not reached by voting but by consent, which does not necessarily mean agreement.
• Wikipedia promotes individuals as decision makers.
• Wikipedia is edited according to Be Bold, Revert and Discuss principles.
• A record of every edit in kept in the page history.
• Open process, open access and transparency are strongly held core values in Wikipedia.
• Wikipedia software is designed to focus on creating a space for interaction and keep the software out of the way.
• Wikipedia provides guidelines for interaction and editing.

Here is a video recording of the whole discussion.

For me the questions that remain are, is Wikipedia a community and what is a community?

Wikipedia is a community for some people – probably for the 10% using it who actually contribute to it, rather than simply use it, although on the Wikipedia page about the community, the community in the larger sense is defined as including: all casual and/or anonymous editors, ideological supporters, current readers and even potential readers of all the language versions of Wikipedia-the-encyclopedia.

My prior understanding of a community is more in line with their narrower definition: the community –  is that group of contributors who create an identity (either a user account, or a frequently-used anonymous IP), and who communicate with other contributors.

This is a better fit with my knowledge of Etienne Wenger’s work on communities of practice.  I mentioned this briefly in a comment that I made on Laura Ritchie’s blog post, where I wrote that in Wenger’s terms a community of practice exhibits the dimensions of mutual engagement, shared repertoire and joint enterprise. Laura identifies her orchestra as a community, which seems to fit with how Etienne Wenger sees a community.

In his blog post Kevin Hodgson wonders whether a community is the same thing as a network or affinity space. I have heard Etienne Wenger say that all communities are networks, but not all networks are communities (see p.19 in this publication).

I also noted when watching the video that Pete Forsyth described community as ‘an amorphous concept of affiliation’.

And Stephen in a comment on Laura’s post writes about ‘natural as opposed to organised communities’. I will copy his whole comment here as I think in it we have the essence of how we are to understand community during this week of the course, and for considering how community might be thought of on the distributed web:

When we look at (what I’ll call) natural communities (as opposed to organized communities) they have two major features: lack of trust, and lack of mutual engagement, shared repertoire and joint enterprise.

Think of your average city. There may be a lot of what we call ‘trust’ (eg. people stopping at stop signs) but in nearly all cases there’s also an enforcement mechanism, because we don’t actually trust people (eg. to actually stop).

Similarly, while in a city we can talk about engagement, repertoire and enterprise (and we should) in most cases there is no engagement, repertoire and enterprise that is _common_ to everybody in the city. Cities are polyglot, factional, disjointed. Yet, still – they are communities.

The challenge (indeed, maybe even the challenge of our times) is how to understand and improve communities where people are *not* engaged in the same enterprise as everyone else.

From all this I am beginning to think that the word ‘community’ has too much associated history to be useful when considering how to communicate, interact, make decisions and reach consensus on the distributed web. It leads to a set of expectations that may not be useful in this context. On the Wikipedia page about community is written: The essence of community is encoded in the word itself: come-ye-into-unity. That’s a lovely way to describe community as I have always understood it. But my understanding of this week’s topic is that we no longer want or need unity. Instead, we need consensus on what is true.

I don’t believe that the traditional idea of community or a community of practice will be lost. We will all interact in communities of one sort or another; Laura in her orchestra, Kevin in his classroom, me in the village where I live, and so on. But we will probably need to think differently about community when considering what information we can trust, and what is true, on the distributed web. A new way of thinking about it may become more obvious the more we interact on the distributed web.

The idea of a distributed Wikipedia was briefly discussed by Stephen and Pete, with reference to Ward Cunningham’s Federated Wiki. In 2014, I explored the potential of FedWiki with a few others. It is a wiki with no centralised space i.e. each person has their own site, from which they can link to other people’s sites and select or reject edits of their own pages. Looking back at my blog posts, I see that I found it intriguing but not easy – a bit like this course, which seems to challenge a lot of my prior understanding about learning on the web.

Mike Caulfield described Fed Wiki as a ‘neighbourhood’, not a community, nor a network. Would this be a better word than ‘community’ and if not what would? I think a different word would help with the change of mindset needed to understand all this.

Resources

How Does Distributed Consensus Work?
Preethi Kasireddy, Medium, 2018/12/05
The brief basics of distributed systems and consensus. Nakamoto Consensus is truly an innovation that has allowed a whole new wave of researchers, scientists, developers, and engineers to continue breaking new ground in consensus protocol research.

What is Blockchain?
Lucas Mostazo, YouTube, 2018/12/03
Blockchain explained in plain English Understanding how blockchain works and identifying myths about its powers are the first steps to developing blockchain technologies.

Education Blockchain Market Map
Stephen’s Web ~ OLDaily, 2018/12/05
HolonIQ, Nov 30, 2018 Though dated last June this market map appeared in my inbox from Holon only today. It reports five sectors of the education blockchain market: credentials and certifications (the largest by far), peer-to-peer ecosystems, payments, knowledge and marketplace. The website describes each briefly and links to some representative startups. The site reports, “Blockchain’s significant potential in education – from powering efficiency to collapsing costs or disrupting the current system – is becoming clearer to technologists, educationalists and governments alike.”

Consensus decision-making
Wikipedia, 2018/12/04
Consensus decision-making is an alternative to commonly practiced group decision-making processes. Robert’s Rules of Order, for instance, is a guide book used by many organizations. This book allows the structuring of debate and passage of proposals that can be approved through majority vote. It does not emphasize the goal of full agreement. Critics of such a process believe that it can involve adversarial debate and the formation of competing factions. These dynamics may harm group member relationships and undermine the ability of a group to cooperatively implement a contentious decision. Consensus decision-making attempts to address the beliefs of such problems.

Wikipedia:Consensus
Wikipedia, 2018/12/04
Decisions on Wikipedia are primarily made by consensus, which is accepted as the best method to achieve Wikipedia’s goals, i.e., the five pillars. Consensus on Wikipedia does not mean unanimity (which is ideal but not always achievable), neither is it the result of a vote. Decision making and reaching consensus involve an effort to incorporate all editors’ legitimate concerns, while respecting Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines.

How Wikipedia dodged public outcry plaguing social media platforms
Pete Forsyth, LinkedIn, 2018/12/05
Wikipedia has problematic users and its share of controversies, but as web platforms have taken center stage in recent months, Wikipedia hasn’t been drawn into the fray. Why aren’t we hearing more about the site’s governance model, or its approach to harassment, bullying? Why isn’t there a clamor for Wikipedia to ease up on data collection? At the core, Wikipedia’s design and governance are rooted in carefully articulated values and policies, which underlie all decisions. Two specific aspects of Wikipedia innoculate it from some of the sharpest critiques endured by other platforms.

Hacking History: Redressing Gender Inequities on Wikipedia Through an Editathon
Nina Hood, Allison Littlejohn, International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 2018/12/05
This article explores the “experiences of nine participants of an editathon at the University of Edinburgh on the topic of the Edinburgh Seven, who were the first women to attend medical school in 19th century United Kingdom.” The authors argue “it was through the act of moving from consumer to contributor and becoming part of the community of editors, that participants could not only more fully understand issues of bias and structural inequities on Wikipedia, but also actively challenge and address these issues.” It makes me think of the slogan: “no knowing without doing.”

Wiki Strategies. Making Sense of Collaborative Communities – https://wikistrategies.net/

Digital Badges as Recognition of Success

Looking back through this blog, I am reminded that in 2012 I attended a SCoPE seminar on digital badges and wrote two posts about it. Reading back through these posts I see that at that time I had some reservations about badges.

In the first post of the two – #digitalbadges: SCoPE seminar on Digital Badges I raised these questions:

• Will badges promote quality learning or will they simply encourage people to ‘jump through hoops’?
• Will badges be ‘recognised/valued’ by employers – will they need to be?
• Will badges stifle creativity and emergent learning?

In the second post – SCoPE Seminar: Digital Badges Implementation – I reflected on the credibility of these badges, their value, their integrity, their status, what and who they represent. I wondered whether the badge system would promote the ‘completion of tasks’ approach to learning, more than a focus on developing a depth of understanding. And the discussion of the design and implementation of badge systems made me wonder whether this could ultimately disempower learners rather than empower them.

It will be interesting to see whether this week’s discussion in the E-Learning 3.0 MOOC, on how the distributed web can change the way in which learning success is recognised, will answer the questions and concerns I had back in 2012.

The task for this week is to:

Create a free account on a Badge service (several are listed in the resources for this module). Then:

– create a badge
– award it to yourself.
– use a blog post on your blog as the ‘evidence’ for awarding yourself the badge
– place the badge on the blog post.

To assist you in this, you can see this blog post where I did all four steps with Badgr. (I also tried to work with the API, with much less success).

Before I started on this task I found that I had already been awarded a badge by Matthias Melcher for completing the task he set for participants earlier in the course. He posted this task on his blog – el30 Graph Task – and I describe how I completed his task in this post.

Matthias’s award was a great help, as it functioned like an advance organizer  enabling me to know what I could expect to see and what I should look out for.

Here is the badge I received by email from Matthias via Badgr. I really like the design of the badge.

Clicking on download (as in the image above) took me straight to the Badgr site, which was used to create this badge, and by following Stephen Downes’ instructions, which he outlines in this post  it was quite straightforward to create an account and award myself a badge.

I now have two badges in my Backpack.

Clicking on a badge provides details of the evidence for the award, including links to the sites where the evidence is held. See image below.

Finally I created an E-Learning 3.0 badge collection.

Using Badgr is a straightforward and quick way to create badges, but it does seem critically important to ensure that the evidence of achievement is comprehensive and that the evidence boxes are completed.

The question that I hope will be discussed in this week of the E-Learning 3.0 MOOC, is whether and why digital badges are the way to go in terms of recognising success in learning on the distributed web.

Resources (provided by Stephen Downes and copied from the E-Learning 3.0 course site)

OpenBadges.me
2018/11/27

Free tools to issue Mozilla Open Badges. Design and award your own open badges: credential skills, recognize learning and create bite-sized rewards to support micro-credentials in your eportfolio.

 

Open Badge Factory
2018/11/27

“Open Badge Factory is a versatile platform for organisations wanting to create, issue and manage Open Badges. Suitable for any organisation, big or small, Open Badge Factory is a user-friendly and cost-efficient service to start issuing Open Badges and building sustainable Open Badge ecosystems.”

 

Open Badges
2018/11/27

General information page about badges. “Open Badges are verifiable, portable digital badges with embedded metadata about skills and achievements. They comply with the Open Badges Specification and are shareable across the web. Each Open Badge is associated with an image and information about the badge, its recipient, the issuer, and any supporting evidence. All this information may be packaged within a badge image file that can be displayed via online CVs and social networks.” See also the IMS Open Badges specification.

 

Badgr
2018/11/27

Application for creating digital badges. Badgr is open source software based on open standards.  Here’s the community website. Here’s a sample of me creating and awarding myself a badge on Badgr.

 

Blockchain Diplomas Land In Virginia At Ecpi
Stephen’s Web ~ OLDaily, 2018/11/28

Jacob Demmitt, The Roanoke Times, Nov 26, 2018  It was only a matter of time. “Virginia Beach-based ECPI University has joined a group of early adopters that distribute student degrees through the same kind of decentralized computer networks that power Bitcoin… The concept behind the technology is virtually unchanged, except ECPI is using the blockchain to issue digital degrees instead of digital currencies.” The plan does have a definite upside: “It’s on there for life. They never have to call the registrar’s office and order another diploma.”

 

WhatIfEdu

Viplav Baxi, 2018/11/28

What if teachers learned to perform to transform rather than be a guide by the side or a sage on the stage? Teachers perhaps need to be an equal part performer who enact and ‘live’ the subject in their interactions with students.

Access to E-Learning 3.0 and the Distributed Web

Stephen Downes has once again written an excellent summary for the work we did last week on open educational resources.

He has tweeted:
Downes  @Downes

Friday’s #el30 newsletter is now available. el30.mooc.ca/archive/18/11_… If you are at all interested in the future of open educational resources, please do take the time to read the feature article.

I would support this. Here is the direct link to the feature article.

Feature Article E-Learning 3.0, Part 5 – Resources
stephen@downes.ca, Nov 25, 2018.

The task for this week was to create a content addressed resource. Although I found the Resources topic interesting, I failed to complete the task and discussed this in my last post. But, as I noted in the post, some of the course participants (those with more technical skills than me) have completed the task and found it quite straightforward.

Stephen himself completed the task declaring on Twitter:
Downes  @Downes

I hereby declare dat://502bdf152d00a35f9785f78d107b9037b5eca9354bcf593e7b4995f9be97a614/ (the NRC vision statement, illustrated by me) to be the first Content Addressable Resource for Education (CARE) #el30 @nrc

The irony of this has not escaped my notice. Since I did not have the skills to install the Interplanetary File System or Beaker Browser, I am not able to access or see this first Content Addressable Resource for Education (CARE) – or experience this example of the distributed web in action. Effectively, this open resource is closed to me.

This has made me think about how the distributed web will be introduced to the population at large. Presumably there will be a period of time when access will not be equal, and open will actually mean closed for a proportion of the population.

Before Stephen declared the NRC vision statement to be the first Content Addressable Resource for Education, I noticed that he asked, on Twitter, whether anyone could check it for him. Matthias Melcher responded.

Downes
@Downes

Anyone out there using Beaker Browser, could you test and see whether my first ‘Content Addressable Resource for Education’ (CARE) for #el30 is accessible? (Working form home with Bell’s tiny upload pipe) dat://502bdf152d00a35f9785f78d107b9037b5eca9354bcf593e7b4995f9be97a614/

Matthias Melcher @x28de
Replying to @Downes

Yes, I see a welcome and 6 slides.

Downes  @Downes

Perfect, that’s what you should see (as well as another six slides in french from the welcome page)

I am now wondering what I am missing by not seeing these six slides. It has reminded me that when I was teaching in HE, in one of my classes there was a visually impaired student. In order for this student to follow the class we were required to make special provision for her, e.g. provide handouts and copies of all slides and notes we distributed in extra large font.

It has occurred to me that the move to E-Learning 3.0 may need to make similar provision for those who do not have the technical skills to access the distributed web, i.e. alternative provision is made at least as a temporary measure.

Update 27-11-18

With a bit of gentle pushing from Stephen, I have now succeeded installing Beaker Browser (it really was quite straight-forward when I overcame the mental block). I have also viewed Stephen’s slides, and created my own site (see comment to Stephen below). I would need to know more html to get much further! Is a good knowledge of html considered an essential digital literacy?

Source of image 

Failing to Create a Content Addressed Resource for the E-Learning 3.0 MOOC

Montaigne’s opening words in his essay ‘Of Books’, seem so apposite to my experience of trying to engage with the task of creating a content-addressed resource for this week’s E-Learning 3.0 course. I quote them here to serve as a disclaimer for all that is to follow 🙂

This is how the task was presented by Stephen Downes.

Create a Content-Addressed Resource
Create a resource (for example, a web page) using IPFS, Beaker Browser, Fritter, or any other distributed web application (see some of the examples here). Provide a link to the resource using any method you wish.

To help prepare for this task, watch the video ‘From Repositories to the Distributed Web’ as well as these videos on IPFS and Beaker: installing IPFS, making a website with IPFS, installing Beaker. Due: Nov 23, 2018

Having just read it again, I see that I have already missed the due date, which is perhaps just as well, but was unavoidable since I have been away this week on another completely unrelated course.

I have watched the videos Stephen has created to support this week’s content and task. I am sure I heard him say something to the effect that we shouldn’t worry about not being able to understand all the technology, just aim to get the gist. Did I dream this?  Imagine my surprise to find that this task clearly requires more than just having got the gist! I hope I have shown that I have understood the gist of what this is all about in my previous post about distributed open educational resources on Web 3.0.

Despite this surprise, I thought I would give it a go, but here is a further quote from Montaigne’s essay, Of Books, which explains exactly where I am coming from.

So here is ‘my method’.

When I saw that at least three other participants had already quickly completed this task, and that Stephen had created videos showing us exactly how to do this, I thought what can be so difficult? I will just do exactly as he says.

On watching Stephen’s video, How to Install IPFS on Windows, I quickly realised that since I work on a Mac this video was of little help to me.

No matter. I had already seen that David Maloney also works on a Mac, so I went to his post and thought I would try and imitate what he had done.  Here, it didn’t take me long to see that David has skills and understanding that I don’t. In his post he writes:

The first task I set about was downloading and installing the go-ipfs distribution implementation of the Inter-Planetary File System (IPFS).

I unzipped/extracted the go-ipfs download into my home directory (davidmoloney$ in my case). It isn’t as easy as double-clicking on the .exe file in the directory and following an installation wizard I’m afraid! You are the installation wizard! 

I now have the go-ipfs downloaded, but I am no wizard. He lost me on his following instructions which for me went ‘under the hood’ more than I know how to go.

No matter. I thought there must be a video on Youtube for Mac users who need a ‘dummies’ guide. After a search I found one – IPFS – Getting Started.   I thought I’d cracked it until about 5 minutes in, when all of a sudden the creator of this video began to talk a foreign language, i.e. technical language I didn’t understand.

I found solace in Montaigne again.

So at this point I recognised that I had reached the point Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams recognises, where it was ‘too difficult to get my head round’ all this and gave up on the task. I have understood the gist of what this is all about, and I can see the importance of developing a distributed web with distributed open educational resources, but I think I will follow Montaigne’s advice when meeting these types of difficulties and ‘give them over’. Hopefully sometime in the future it will all become much more user friendly and relevant to web users like me who are unlikely to ever want to get ‘under the hood’.

For those who do want to have a go at creating a content addressed resource – here are some posts from other participants, describing how they went about it.

Kevin Hodgson – http://dogtrax.edublogs.org/2018/11/24/one-click-publishing-with-the-beaker-browser-on-the-distributed-web/

Matthias Melcher – https://x28newblog.wordpress.com/2018/11/22/el30-two-tasks/

Davey Maloney – http://daveymoloney.com/el30/el30-resources-task/

Frank Polster – http://frankpolster.com/blog/elearn30/e-learning-3-0-resource-task/

Laura Ritchie – https://www.lauraritchie.com/2018/11/28/el30-resources-task/

Roland Legrand – https://learningwithmoocs.com/decentralized-web/blogging-with-the-beaker-browser/

Lou – https://learningreflections.wordpress.com/2018/11/30/week-5-task/

And here are the videos which have been provided by Stephen Downes to support this task.

Videos
How to Install IPFS on Windows
Nov 22, 2018 video
This video demonstrates how to download and install IPFS on windows using PowerShell. For the Resources Module of the E-Learning 3.0 course.

How to Add a Website to IPFS
Nov 22, 2018 video
This video shows how I used my previously-installed IPFS node to upload a website to IPFS. It also explores the IPFS Companion plugin a bit more and shows how now everything is working perfectly just yet.

Installing Beaker Browser and Creating a Page on the Decentralized Web
Nov 22, 2018 video
In this video I install the Beaker Browser, a browser that accesses the decentralized web using the dweb:// protocol. After installing and exploring a bit we create our own site on the dweb using the Beaker browser.

Sharing Dweb Content with Dat
Nov 22, 2018 video
In this video I work with Dat, a node application that creates a Dweb node and shares files, websites and data across the distributed web. A bit long, not everything works, but a way to watch the process in action. This video is an hour and 24 minutes – I could have made it a lot shorter but I wanted to show the thinking process as I worked with this.

Open Educational Resources and the Distributed Web

In this video, posted for the fifth week of the E-Learning 3.0 MOOC, Stephen Downes makes the case for open education. He claims that open education can change the world and is a kind of social literacy that can transform society, connect us across the globe, and enable each of us to believe we have the capacity to become an important person in society. Being open in such a society means being accepting of other people and being willing to share. It is about being in a conversation in a community.

Open educational resources in such a society are like the words in this conversation. We are forced to think about the words that are used; they can either block us or liberate us. Creating open educational resources is more than giving the resources we have created away for free. It also helps us to develop ourselves.

Of course there are challenges for education in taking this approach, in which it is expected that we will embrace the idea of open sharing of our resources and ourselves, and there have been, as you would expect, mistakes and failures. A criticism could be that it has made the rich richer and the poor poorer, but, as Stephen pointed out, the benefits to the poor can still be identified and it can make the poor richer more quickly. Another criticism that is often levelled at open education is that it has a colonising effect, propagating the voice of Western society, but Stephen also pointed out that if you create your own open educational resources, you can promote your own culture. Open online education, using open educational resources, can reach those who can’t access education in any other way. This is the promise of open education and open educational resources.

To date, open educational resources have been thought of as content (a product) which are stored on the web, often with creative commons licenses which may allow for free re-use and adaptation. But these resources have become increasingly locked down in content silos and behind paywalls. The distributed web, Web 3.0, is a kick-back against this. On the distributed web, new file-sharing systems, such as the Interplanetary File System (IPFS), do not rely on internet addresses to locate content. Instead they ‘use the hash of the data or content as an address, enabling the data to be distributed across the cloud’,  thus creating a content addressable resource. In the traditional model the server is in the middle (see image below), but in this new model, a network of servers is geographically distributed, meaning that when you click on a website you will get content from the local server;  it will be accessible from the nearest convenient source.

Source: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/07/introducing-the-d-web/ via From Repository to the Distributed Web 

Gradually, but definitely, we are moving towards a distributed web. But I suspect we are some way off fully realising the dream of the distributed web.  Cheryl Hodgkinson -Williams and Sukaina Walji, both from the University of Capetown, were Stephen’s guests this week.

Cheryl and Sukaina had their feet firmly on the ground as to what can realistically be achieved in the creation and sharing of OERs and the development of open educational practices at the present time. In conversation with Stephen they explored the topics of open educational resources and open practices, considered some of the challenges around re-use of OERs, and discussed the potential of new resource networks (like the distributed web) to address those challenges.

This was an interesting discussion. Cheryl and Sukaina shared information about the research project they have been working on, together with groups from across the global south, in which they have been investigating how OERs are being developed, shared and used, and also exploring new methods for distributing OERs using the distributed web. I appreciated their focus on process rather than product, i.e. on the practices surrounding the creation of OERS and the constraints associated with these practices. They were well aware of the differences between the ideological intent related to the creation of OERs and the practical steps needed to ensure an ethical approach. As Cheryl said they have to be pragmatic despite their intention to openly share their practice, process and product.

I also appreciated their recognition that many people, whilst able to create a resource, do not have the digital literacy skills to apply a CC license or upload the resource to a site or repository, nor the confidence to openly share their resource with the whole world. Cheryl asked, ‘At what point is something too difficult to get your head round?’ and went on to say that we need a really easy interface, that is more user-friendly. Technology needs to be an enabler. Technology on its own will not enable change.

These are important considerations in the further development of the distributed web. It is easy to see that something needs to be done to counter the tyranny of the centralized web and that the distributed web seems to be the way to go. As with all such developments, it will take time for these developments to become sufficiently user-friendly to be accessible to the average internet user.

Resources (provided by Stephen Downes for the E-Learning 3.0 MOOC)

Feature article on The Future of OER by Stephen Downes – https://el30.mooc.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=68554 

The Learning Portal OER Toolkit
College Libraries Ontario, 2018/11/19
Have you heard about Open Educational Resources (OER) and want to know more? This module presents an overview of what they are, why they matter to post-secondary education, and how to get started on your OER journey.

OER World Map
2018/11/19
A couple years or so ago UNESCO launched an OER mapping project. It has now come to fruition. “Using local knowledge to describe the OER ecosystem, the OER World Map will visualize the world of OER and support a range of widgets and tools, including powerful statistical analysis.” Here’s the OER World Map blog.

Models for Sustainable Open Educational Resources 
Stephen Downes, OECD, 2018/11/19
It “seems clear that the sustainability of OERs – in a fashion that renders then at once both affordable and usable – requires that we think of OERs as only part of a larger picture, one that includes volunteers and incentives, community and partnerships, co-production and sharing, distributed management and control.

Dimensions of open research: critical reflections on openness in the ROER4D project
Thomas William King, Cheryl-Ann Hodgkinson-Williams, Michelle Willmers, Sukaina Walji, Open Praxis, 2018/11/21
Using the Research on Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) project as an example, this paper attempts to demonstrate the interrelation between ideological, legal, technical and operational openness; the resources that conducting Open Research requires; and the benefits of an iterative, strategic approach to one’s own Open Research practice

Introducing the Dweb
Dietrich Ayala, Mozilla, 2018/11/20
What’s the “D” in Dweb?! The “d” in “dweb” usually stands for either decentralized or distributed. A few examples of decentralized or distributed projects that became household names are Napster, BitTorrent and Bitcoin. Some of these new dweb projects are decentralizing identity and social networking. Some are building distributed services in or on top of the existing centralized web, and others are distributed application protocols or platforms.

Beaker
2018/11/20
Beaker brings peer-to-peer publishing to the Web, turning the browser into a supercharged tool for sharing websites, files, apps, and more. Beaker adds support for a peer-to-peer protocol called Dat. It’s the Web you know and love, but instead of HTTP, websites and files are transported with Dat.

Inter Planetary File System
2018/11/20
IPFS is the Distributed Web, a peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol to make the web faster, safer, and more open. Each file and all of the blocks within it are given a unique fingerprint called a cryptographic hash. When looking up files, you’re asking the network to find nodes storing the content behind a unique hash. Every file can be found by human-readable names using a decentralized naming system called IPNS.

A Social Justice Framework for Understanding Open Educational Resources and Practices in the Global South
Cheryl Ann Hodgkinson-Williams, Henry Trotter, Journal of Learning for Development, 2018/11/22
In this paper, we endeavour to move beyond social change and social inclusion to develop a framework to make apparent the relationship between social justice and the adoption of OER and OEP. Drawing on examples from the ROER4D project, we propose a slightly adapted version of Fraser’s (2005) social justice framework as a way to map how and under what circumstances the adoption of OER and OEP by students and/or educators may counter economic inequalities, cultural inequities and political exclusions in education.

Try Dat
Dat Project, 2018/11/22
This is try-dat, a tutorial that teaches you how to work with datasets using dat. In this tutorial you will play around with data versioning and syncing workflows, and play with some awesome tools to publish or share data over the peer-to-peer web.

A bit more about Dat… Core pieces of the web shape how we communicate and organize. However, these pieces are increasingly controlled by large monopolies. In building Dat, we envision a future of community-driven tools backed by nonprofit organizations.