Please Please Please write API's for Education!!!!

[Christine Shock]

I can't tell you how jazzed we were when we saw WAVE! However for all
of the developers out there, Google seems to have missed a HUGE market
with API's for Education.

What would take WAVE into the education space is an API for SCORM
compliance for self graded testing, and a secure gradebook API,...If
it could hook into existing Learning Management System using a
Learning Module would be really cool as that way we would not have to
hand roll students into the course WAVE but most of us would be
willing to do a hand roll as the features in WAVE are what we have
been begging LMS providers for for years!

Please Please Please all you coders out there Give us a LMS that
students would actually use instead of hate!

Christine Shock
Program Chair, Multimedia-Gaming-Design/Photography/Journalism
Red Rocks Community College
Lakewood, CO

[Scott Wilson]

Christine,

We've already integrated Wave Gadget APIs with Moodle and Sakai 3:

http://zope.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott/blogview?entry=20090601115357

Also a live Moodle course site with Wave Widgets to play with:

http://getwookie.org/moodle/course/view.php?id=6

(login as moodler/moodler)

Moodle block and Wave Widget Server sourcecode is available for
download (see the first link)

An API at the LMS end, enabling gadgets to pass data back would be
great - its something we're discussing with the Sakai and LAMS folks
in particular.

S

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/-/-/-/-/-/
Scott Wilson
Assistant Director, JISC CETIS
University of Bolton

Projects:
FeedForward: http://getfeedforward.org
Wookie: http://getwookie.org

scott.brad...@gmail.com
http://www.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott

[Victor Maijer]

Scott,

Can you elaborate on what you did with Sakai 3?

Thanks.
Victor

[casey dunn]

On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 1:40 PM, Victor Maijer<vic...@maijer.org> wrote:
>
> Scott,
>
> Can you elaborate on what you did with Sakai 3?
>
> Thanks.
> Victor
>

Ditto, Scott.

I've been working with Sakai for a while; want to kick around ideas?
Implementations?

casey

http://caseyd.badubadu.com

[Victor Maijer]

Casey, Scott,

I think it is a good idea to exchange ideas.
Shall we add start a page within this Google group where we can put
our ideas regarding Sakai and Google Wave?

Thanks.
Victor

[Jack Park]

I would opt to see a different google group on "waves in education" if
that seems reasonable to others.

Jack

[Victor Maijer]

Sounds reasonable to me.

Victor

[Scott Wilson]

There's also Talk About Widgets, which is a more general group for
widget/gadget tech in education:

http://groups.google.com/group/talk-about-widgets

S

[casey dunn]

On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 11:53 AM, Jack Park<jack...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I would opt to see a different google group on "waves in education" if
> that seems reasonable to others.
>
> Jack

Jack - That may keep down the clutter for this mailing list, but a
Page in this group would be help with that too. A little more async
tho.

I haven't seen an HTG wave dedicated to education yet. heck I'll kick
one off this weekend.

On this thread - I'm not so sure there needs to be / can be a specific
"API for Education."

I expect that there will be institutional wave server implementations,
with some kind of shibbolethed tie in for authn. Those would be the
folks hosting SCORM ingestion, for example. No?

So for example a Sakai hosted chat would have a wave publishing
option, which kicks off wave publishing from that specific Sakai
deployment. The site realms / groupz would translate into wave members
at that deployment, and role based editing constraints come out of the
Sakai definitions for that site. Wave riders would be managed by the
robot, restricting access to the Sakai site members.

I don't see how this calls for an extension of the wave API. > but I
am just getting time now to dig into all this <

- casey

>
> On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 11:35 AM, Victor Maijer<vic...@maijer.org> wrote:
>>
>> Casey, Scott,
>>
>> I think it is a good idea to exchange ideas.
>> Shall we add start a page within this Google group where we can put
>> our ideas regarding Sakai and Google Wave?
>>
>> Thanks.
>> Victor
>>
>> On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 5:17 PM, casey dunn<cas...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 1:40 PM, Victor Maijer<vic...@maijer.org> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Scott,
>>>>
>>>> Can you elaborate on what you did with Sakai 3?
>>>>
>>>> Thanks.
>>>> Victor
>>>>
>>>
>>> Ditto, Scott.
>>>
>>> I've been working with Sakai for a while; want to kick around ideas?
>>> Implementations?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> casey
>>>
>>> http://caseyd.badubadu.com
>>>
>>> >
>>>
>>
>> >
>>
>
> >
>

--
----------------------------------------------------
(aggregation account, which means I check it every few days for email
from various accounts)
cas...@gmail.com

[Jack Park]

All good points, casey, though the term "Page" is ambiguous to me,
perhaps through simple ignorance.

I do not have any anticipations of an "Education API"; rather, I
personally cast learning as a particular brand of "sensemaking", and
teaching as 'learning facilitation', so I am much more interested in
the variety of gadget/robot pairs necessary to change forever the way
education is handled everywhere. Open text books as waves clearly fit
in that concept space.

Specifically, I am interested in many of the tools of sensemaking that
also relate to learning; argumentation, knowledge organization (topic
maps), tagging, annotating, and connecting. I point to two resources
[1] and [2] that relate to some of that. [1] is an open source
dialogue mapping tool that really "wants" to be loosed in a Wave
framework. [2] is a Web based (not yet open source) system that allows
you to use a bookmarklet to annotate (lift ideas and questions out of)
web pages, then go back in and wire those ideas with coherence
relations; a kind of storytelling that would work wonders -- just as
concept maps now work wonders in classrooms everywhere-- for kids
doing WebQuests. The rubric I use to name all that is "knowledge
gardening".

SCORM objects and any other educational standard object for that
matter, seem obvious.

Whether we see the ability to drop the likes of really cool stuff like
Sakai into Waves, or just use Waves as drop ins through the portlet
facillty remains to be seen, with all the blessings I can offer to
such projects.

Still, I'm suspicious that we could ramble forever on this list and
end up cluttering the real issue here which is the wave api itself. We
are just now succeeding by remaining under the same subject line; were
we to use best practices and change the subject line, things could get
hairy (IMHO).

Jack
[1] http://compendium.open.ac.uk/
[2] http://cohere.open.ac.uk/

[Bruce D'Arcus]

On Jun 12, 2:53 pm, Jack Park <jackp...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I would opt to see a different google group on "waves in education" if
> that seems reasonable to others.

+1 to this.

My suggestion, though: try to think outside the box a bit, and don't
worry too much about things like SCORM (which I don't know much about,
which seems like a classic case of a horribly bloated, overly complex,
spec; talking about this with people who have implemented suggests my
hunch is right).

Bruce

[Jack Park]

In a Bohmian dialogue, conjured up by David Bohm, people are
encouraged to check their agendas and biases at the door when first
entering. They can name their interests, then take the time to
understand those interests, where people are coming from, before
tossing out their concerns. When the dialogue has allowed people to
know each other and the field of interest better, then a transition to
Pask's conversation theory starts, where people bring to bear their
thoughts, such as SCORM is this or that, and take the time to justify
the bombs they lob--create an image of what is entailed in the
position taken.

I think it's too early to worry about which concept is or is not
appropriate to education; we don't even have a convenient place to
convene such a dialogue without interfering with core wave api stuff.

Not that I'm either agreeing or disagreeing with comments about SCORM.
Let's have that dialogue later. I would offer a conjecture that we
don't yet know which box we are stepping outside of. Wave appears far
too game changing a concept to be defining boxes anytime soon IMHO.

Jack

[Jack Park]

Further thoughts on collaborative efforts related to waves and
education bring to mind that an email list such as this, alone, is
unlikely to create the kind of mutual understanding necessary. There
is little structure or discipline found in the average email list;
just notice the number of people who don't take the time to find the
signup page for waves and ask for a signup in random places here.

It seems to me that a structured venue might make more sense, and it
might be something akin to an email list coupled with blogs or other
places where people can take more space to fully explain positions,
beliefs, experience they have to offer. Say, use an email list to ask
a question, or point to a blog post where that question is posed, then
use the email list to advertise responses to the question. A
structured way to do this is found at http://debategraph.org/ where it
is free to sign up and start a conversation. Several such
conversations could be started, then advertised on an email list.
Another venue would be the collaboration platform ning.com. One
instance of a ning platform in which I participate is found at
http://www.globalsensemaking.net/

Note that platforms like ning bring their own brand of infoglut to the
table; there is yet to be a collaboration platform that solves all the
infoglut problems.

In any case, I am offering a challenge to "think outside the email
list box" to see what else is available. Bringing waves to classrooms
seems worth the effort. That effort probably will break out into
different classes of inquiry, such as an "education api",
"collaborative learning platforms", "educational objects (gadgets,
experiments, etc)", "educational materials (open text books come to
mind)", "librarianship", and more.

Jack

[Bruce D'Arcus]

On Jun 13, 11:18 am, Jack Park <jackp...@gmail.com> wrote:

...

> Let's have that dialogue later. I would offer a conjecture that we
> don't yet know which box we are stepping outside of. Wave appears far
> too game changing a concept to be defining boxes anytime soon IMHO.

To clarify my meaning, the "box" I was referring to is the traditional
LMS (in which SCORM is bound up).

Bruce