Joining up the dots
A post by Patrick Murray-John entitled Thoughts Toward a Giant EduGraph is a great primer for just the kind data modeling exercise that needs to happen if the vision behind Project Xiphos is to become a reality. In short, if the community is to effect a step change in the effectiveness of educational technology, then amongst other things we should start thinking about how to join up the various goldmines of data (that often already exist in siloed form) and publish them in an open manner, to foster and encourage technological innovation.
Although Patrick kicks off the debate around the shape of the graph, I’m wondering whether the harder piece of the pie to swallow, for the Universities in question at least, is actually in the specific licensing and rights of what people could do with this type of data. A recent trailblazer in a related area of work is Dave Pattern, who recently announced that Library Services’ usage data from the University of Huddersfield would be available under an Open Data Commons/CC0 licence, and offered a link to download it. Patrick did just that and applied some RDF magic, and we dutifully podcasted the pair of them.
I would also point towards the library folks at the University of Plymouth, who have recently published their course resource lists as Linked Open Data under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license using Talis Aspire.
As a further example of the type of innovation possible with the open approach, I would point to a service called scivee – this takes advantage of content published via open access to allow authors of research papers (and other research content) to freely upload and annotate them with video, supplementary materials and other resources to explain their research. Although not a direct example of innovation over open educational data, you can imagine the possibilities of such a service combined with a global Giant EduGraph.
In summary, its fantastic to see people offering access to education-related, interesting and open data sets, with unambiguous license terms encouraging developers to experiment, interlink and innovate. I look forward to seeing the debate around the “Giant EduGraph” develop and seeing what people can do with it. And to paraphrase Mr. Pattern, in relation to the publication of education-related datasets, I would like to lay down a challenge to every other academic institution in the world to consider doing the same.
Shortly, we’ll be announcing an initiative to help anyone with a public domain dataset to publish, do it for free – get in touch if that’s you.
January 30th, 2009 at 2:05 pm
Chris,
Thanks for the kind mention of the post! And I think you are exactly right–the hard part will be in the licensing. But even before that there is a lot of work to do to educate the administrators about what the possibilities and implications really are so they can make thoughtful and balanced choices about licensing. Partially due to fears about copyright and student privacy legal infringement, many administrators have hunkered down into a “keep it all closed at all costs” mentality. It’s like the silo problem, but with the silo inverted so it’s also a hole in the ground to keep things buried as well. Bringing things back around to the principle that we deal in exposing and sharing knowledge, and therefore have a responsibility to push back against the fears and forces that push us into the upside-down silos, is going to be a difficult push in some institutions. Hopefully, though, as some places do open up their data without the sky falling on them, the others will not only be brought into the light — they’ll have to do the same to keep up.