idea for a microgrant proposal
Joe Corneli
We would like to make it possible for P2PU users to interact on other
sites and associate activities that take place on these external sites
with the user's P2PU account. Two examples of relevant external sites
are planetmath.org and github.com. The idea is that activity in
"compliant" sites could be slurped into P2PU and, where relevant,
comments or interaction about this slurped-up content could be sent
back to the external site. There are two relevant protocols to work
with: see http://activitystrea.ms/ and
http://www.salmon-protocol.org/.
The concrete proposal would be to hire a summer intern for around
$5000 USD to implement support for this communication link in P2PU and
PlanetMath.org. Since ActivityStreams are used very widely on the
internet, a significant degree of activity *importing* can take place
from sites like Github that provide ActivityStreams (the Salmon
Protocol would be useful for bidirectional communication, but it isn't
yet implemented as widely as ActivityStreams). The plan would be to
implement both sides of this connection in a way that would be readily
portable to other sites that might join the network in the future.
This would address a specific and strongly-felt need at SoMF, namely
to get learners into environments with strong content-specific support
for learning mathematics. But at the same time, there is a much
broader need across P2PU for effective integration with external
communities and services.
Please consider this note to be discussed further, then shared further
to other relevant P2PU lists before fully formalized as a "proposal".
Another thing to note is that I am, in parallel, applying for funding
for the Planetary project with Google Summer of Code, which would help
us deliver the "strong content-specific support for learning
mathematics". Comments on the GSoC proposal are also welcome:
http://piratenpad.de/kwarc-soc -- the main point of relevance for the
current draft proposal is that we're not expecting this to be an
entirely off-the-cuff project, but rather something integrated into an
existing workflow and with additional support from other parties.
There are a number of further questions to consider in further
developing "use cases" (P2PU courses!) that exploit such a
bi-directional communication link, and I will forward to those
discussions.
Regards,
Joe
Stian Håklev
great idea. I've been thinking a lot about this myself -I've been meaning to write up a bunch of my architectural ideas for the new P2PU platform, but never got around to it. That work will probably intensify now that a new tech lead has been hired, so this is very timely.
I think this is very important - for the entire P2PU, not just SOMF. Basically, there are two main concerns
- accessing user statistics (postings, interactions, contributions etc) for statistics - we've talked lot's about having "dashboards" that show user activity across courses to enable "early warning systems", and in the future possibly data mining to see what kind of variables are predictive of user involvement etc. When a bunch of courses have most of their activity happening outside of P2PU, the numbers become quite useless. (One improvement is that hopefully the new site will have a flexible enough forum system with full email integration that people won't need to use Google groups) - but there will still be lot's of other sites which we want people to use - from Twitter, to Flickr, to Github. And even internally in P2PU, we'll have OSQA, Big Blue Button (how many people participated in a meeting), the wiki, etherpad, etc.
- pulling user contributions back into the P2PU platform, or linking to it - this both enables P2PU to act as a hub and give an easy overview of all the activity that happens - sometimes it might even be valuable to pull certain contributions into the platform for archiving (a blog might go down, a ning site might become unavailable). this is also important for building portfolios, peer-grading, badges etc.
My idea was to create a kind of plugin architecture where people could write "connectors", for example I could write a Google Groups connector, which would enable a course to link up a Google group, someone else could write a Flickr connector etc. These could be very simple, using an existing API (RSS or activitystrea.ms), but could even be using screenscraping or some other mechanism. The important thing is that we wouldn't have to build all this into the core code, but just make it available for people who wanted to create them for different services.
This is also something that would make our platform much more interesting for others to run their courses on.
I think we should definitively integrate this discussion into the larger p2pu-dev discussion - maybe we'll need a "reward" for people to implement it, maybe we can get a google SoC to write it (feeel free to help John Britton on his proposal!), or maybe it can be done in other ways.
Also have a look at at edufeedr from Hans Poldoja, I think he is trying to achieve something abit similar.
Stian
http://reganmian.net/blog -- Random Stuff that Matters
Joe Corneli
On the technical side there are quite a lot of ideas here, some easier
and some harder to implement.
A rich bi-directional link between PlanetMath and P2PU has some vital
differences from lighter-weight content sharing. I think with
appropriate design for this link, we would pave the way for in-depth
collaboration between these and other online communities. I'd really
like to get some use cases figured out: on both the social and
technical level, what does PlanetMath need to provide, and what does
P2PU need to provide?
The way I'm envisioning it now, PlanetMath would provide a place to
work on problems (similar in some ways to the current problem solving
space at Kahn Academy, but more open, more integrated with the
existing encyclopedic knowledge base). Someone studying math in this
space will kick off an activity stream which could be pulled into
P2PU. I'm interested in what happens after that: comments from a
course instructor, or from peers in the course? An overlayed
certification layer through P2PU's "badge" system?
Starting from the P2PU side, I can imagine a course organizer wanting
to use PlanetMath as a place to run the course: they could pick a
number of tasks that learners would be advised to work on, and
PlanetMath would help provide the needed structure ("tasks" from
PlanetMath could potentially be imported into a "syllabus" on P2PU?).
Activity associated with the P2PU course would show up transparently
in PlanetMath (because it would *be* PlanetMath activity) but it would
also appear in the P2PU course in a transparent way as well. This is
similar to what you said about "post by email" for Google Groups. We
want to have "post by email" in Planetary as well -- maybe forum-level
mirroring is as simple as adding a CC to some email...
Anyway, I'm hoping to have ONE summer intern working on this. Whether
they are funded through a Schools microgrant or through some other
source isn't a major concern for me! I was thinking that the Schools
microgrant would subject the idea to the right sort of critique and
vetting. I'm not sure if it would pose too much of a challenge for
one intern to be responsible for getting code into these two software
packages (Planetary and Lernata), but as you indicate, there are
others who can help with this. I think the (broad) project of "P2PU
integrations" overlaps but is not equal to the (deep) project of "P2PU
and PlanetMath integration". The latter is the one I'd like to make a
bid for -- but if *everything* is funded, maybe we'll have a couple of
interns working on these different tasks who we could conceivably get
to talk to one another :).
Joe
Stian Håklev
thanks for clarifying. You are right in that they are a bit different, but overlapping, and specifically I think that the kind of design of Lernanta that I am proposing would make the kind of special integration that you propose much easier...
Anyway, I think it's definitively important to get these ideas into the discussion on the site architecture (I'll ping you when I figure out how that discussion will be structured).
Great ideas
Stian
zuzel.vp
If understood correctly what you were discussing in this thread
(correct me if i got something wrong), I think that the next version
of P2PU (Lernanta -- which is based in the new software behind
http://drumbeat.org) will make easier to share content with PlanetMath
(using atom or rss). You can see an example of how this could happen
in the drumbeat site. I am going to use my profile as example but the
same applies for the page of a course which will be the equivalent of
what drumbeat calls projects.
If you take a look at https://www.drumbeat.org/en-US/zuzelvp/, you
will see that I added to websites related to me in my profile (at the
left-bottom of the page): my homepage (http://zuzelvp.com), and a link
to my github account (https://github.com/zuzelvp). After adding those
links, my profile automatically started to grab my activity at
http://zuzelvp.com/?feed=rss2 and https://github.com/zuzelvp.atom and
that is what you can see at the right of the page. At the same time my
profile is associated with https://www.drumbeat.org/en-US/zuzelvp/feed
which other web sites can read. PlanetMath seams to be providing rss
too: http://aux.planetmath.org/doc/rss.html (e.g.,
http://planetmath.org/rss/latestadds.xml), but I don't know if it has
something similar per user (the links listed on that page seam to be
posting the activity happening in all the planet).
Will this kind of interaction fit what you had in mind? What do you
think will have to be added above this to enrich the bi-directional
link between PlanetMath and P2PU?
--
Thanks,
Zuzel
zuzel.vp
http://groups.google.com/group/p2pu-mathfuture/feed/rss_v2_0_msgs.xml
Stian Håklev
thanks for jumping in.
I think you are right in that RSS will play an important role, however there are some complications.
In some cases, we might get the RSS feed of an entire mailing group (as you suggested), and we'll need to link identities in google groups with identities in P2PU - who posted what? (Otherwise, we can have a gadget that displays the newest posts on the site, but we cannot use it for tracking user activity, portfolios, etc). If everyone used the same mailing address that they used when signing up for P2PU, it would be easy, but I'm not sure we can count on that.
In other cases, we might get individual feeds for users, for example the feed for a given Flickr user. In that case, user attribution will be easier, but how to know which entries are for a given course? (User + tag? Similar if we syndicate someone's personal blog).
Talking about blogs, one of our earlier problems was how to syndicate both the blog and the comments - and how to show this in a clear way. (I know many blogs have RSS feeds for comments too, so possible).
And I'd love to be able to log which members of a course attend Big Blue Button sessions - or edit a file in Etherpad...
(Part of this for the tools that are "integrated" with P2PU is to offer single-sign-on anyway, which I know we will work on).
:)
Anyway, it will be fun to think about how to do this.
Stian
Maria Droujkova
How do we aggregate and index live interactions?
A MOOC (massively open online course) I follow, CCK11 aggregates Twitter, blog posts and blog comments using gRSShopper. However, the tool captures neither their rather active Facebook group, nor the cool Elluminate sessions beyond date and time. I saved the latest daily newsletter for the course here, so you can see how the output of the aggregation looks: https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1Y7LokxCbohm1fvUSnFjWeEF1L_ef9Uma5EiAnj5fEAI
WiZiQ platform requires membership to attend events, and as a result, links participants' accounts. You can see how nicely it looks (this is my presentation, just because I have a link handy): http://www.wiziq.com/online-class/442661-co11-intellectual-consumerism-in-mathematical-learning-dr-droujkova
Elluminate indexes the number of participants and the nicknames they enter. However people who disconnect are counted again when they enter again. Flattering for event organizers, but...
Here is how LearnCentral (which is made on Drupal) frames its Elluminate events: http://www.learncentral.org/node/137001
Note that the calendar they have talks to automatic calendar aggregators through iCal protocol. This is crucial for live event aggregation, and far from standard for event-centric sites.
Moreover, there is no way that I know to cull, say, non-math events out of the general iCal flow of a large group such as Classroom 2.0 (dozens of events per week) - in the way you can do for blog posts or Twitter by a hashtag.
I see something like LearnCentral's event form, but with extra fields the organizer can fill by hand, if needed: paste the chat for text search, the number of participants and so on. Then the even thus tagged can be aggregated by gRSShopper or something similar.
Cheers,
Maria Droujkova
Make math your own, to make your own math.