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Good afternoon everyone
and thanks for joining us.
I'd like to welcome the team from Connexions.
Rich
Baraniuk is the Victor E. Cameron professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University
and is the founder of Connexions.
For his research in the area of digital signal processing, he has received
National Young Investigator awards from the National Science Foundation and the office of
Naval research. His lists and awards are truly
endless. Joey
King. I made most of
them up
actually. [Laughter] Joey King is the executive director of Connexions and previously he was an investment banker focused
on incubating new technologies. He
has extensive background as a technology as an entrepreneur and
was on the founding team of F5 Networks and Zama Networks.
He was also the senior research scientist at the human interface technology lab of the University of Washington and
is a fellow at the advanced telecommunications research institute in Tokyo. He
holds a BA with honors from Southwestern University and a PhD from the University of Washington. Thanks
again for joining us. I'd like to
quickly remind you that our founders have agreed to archive this video on Google video. So look
forward to seeing it there.
Please join me in welcoming the team.
Thank you. [Applause]
I feel like a lounge lizard. Do
people mind if I
stand? Can everybody hear me okay? Okay,
so I am Rich Baraniuk. Thanks for the invitation to be here today. What
I'd like to do is talk a little bit about an education project that
we've been working on at Rice for the last six years called Connexions.
I'd like to tell you a little bit about where it came from, --
a little bit about the ideas behind it and
a little bit about the intellectual property issues and the technology issues.
And I'd like to keep it like super relaxed, to feel free to interrupt me at any time with
questions and about half way through we can go and do a little bit of a demo.
Does that sound okay to
people?
Okay. I
think there's something coming in from off-site. Okay,
so
as
a jumping off point, does anybody remember these? Anybody
have any?
Okay, anybody still play them? Okay,
so -- one of the ways that I want you to think
about the Connexions
is by starting to think about music and the music industry and what it is that's so special about music
that allows
anyone in the world to be able to
create musical information, allows anyone to be able to
rip, copy, that information, make it their own.
Allows people to mix music together in different ways
either on compilations or even in
different pieces and allows people to be able
to burn their own music on to records, right? Either through a record contract or
even just by themselves.
And the three bottom words are basically stole, appropriated from and --
both an Apple advertising slogan and a book by Larry Lessig, okay? And
so the key
thing about this rip, create mix and burn culture is, it's created an incredibly vibrant musical world. It's very interactive where
people are connecting themselves in to communities, connecting musical ideas
and creating music that's completely innovative and always up to
date. Okay?
And the key
thing to
ask yourself is why does this same thing not happen with books, okay?
And educational materials and
course materials, okay? Because I would argue that the publishing industry and the educational industries are anything but vibrant, interactive and community based. And so really what Connexions is about is trying to break through some of the barriers and
allowing people to create, rip,
mix and burn educational content
much in the same type way that you might imagine people creating musical
content. And the
key thing about the publishing industry is it tends to disconnect people, okay?
It tends to disconnect authors from
the so called users, okay? And basically what the publishing process does
is it creates a class of shutouts, right.
People who are not supposed to contribute their knowledge back
to the world's knowledge,
-- commons, if you will, okay? K through 12 teachers are not supposed to become textbook authors, students are not supposed to become authors and just general readers are not invited in to this author community, okay? So generally what we find is the current
practices of publishing actually tend to disconnect ideas, okay?
And disconnect people. And
it's even worse if you happen to speak one of these languages that isn't English,
right?
And increasingly as more and more people get on the net around the world,
fewer and fewer people are going to have English as their first language and they're also being shut out of this
process, okay. So, Connexions came about six and a half years ago
when I and a number of other people at Rice University were trying to think about these kinds of ideas and we were frustrated, right? There was an itch,
-- three itches actually that needed to be scratched. The first was the
difficulty in connecting ideas, right? And in my case as a signal-processing professor
showing how math relates
to science
relates to engineering and applications, government policy, intellectual property, right.
Showing how ideas are all really
interconnected. If
you're a K through 12 teacher, grade
levels are stove piped.
Grade three math, when you're in grade three
you're not supposed to be thinking about grade four math. This
is, -- I would argue this is a problem.
And even
though I come from a University I would argue
that Universities are great places not of integrating knowledge
and information, but
actually of disintegrating it, putting
it in the Departments that aren't supposed to talk to each other and stove piping information, okay?
So this connectivity was one problem.
The second problem was the problem of making
it so hard with the regular chalk and talk lecture type structure with paper type textbooks, to
be able to engage students in interactive exploration. Because it's really in exploring ideas and doing things that we actually learn and that learning is really reinforced. And
the final thing it, at least then, was very very difficult to build communities around content. I had in my mind this idea of building a
textbook that would connect, like I said, math to
science to engineering
to ethics and government. There's no way I could do that
on my own.
I needed to be able to build a collaborative community of people to work on this content and develop it, okay? And as a result of the fact that it's so hard to build communities around content it's an absolutely glacial pace to develop a book. Has anybody here ever written a book?
Okay, it
can take three to five years, right? From sort of conceptionalizing the book to actually having it come out in print. In
the engineering disciplines,
science disciplines, I think medicine,
often the book out of date by the time it's
actually published, okay?
So these were the itches that needed to be scratched. And
really you can think
of Connexions as a reaction to this and trying
to create both
a technology system and a community system for people to be able to create
rhythmics and burn their educational content. Yes, sir. Was
there any economic consideration given the
current price of textbooks? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely -- yeah. So part of that I'm going
to address in about five or ten minutes, but this is becoming increasingly important.
States across the United States are spending
hundreds of millions of dollars per year in textbooks.
The average community college student spends more money on textbooks than tuition, okay?
And
we're talking about hundreds of dollars for textbooks. Let's
just give out an example. $120 textbook -- an author might make three, four dollars from that book, okay?
So I'll
get back to that
later. Okay, so is everybody with the program here, what we're trying to do?
Okay. So, really
this is related to this idea of the open access movement. And
the key thing is that is derives inspiration from the open source movement. So
the two key ideas behind open source, one modularizing your software so that a community can work on it, a lot of people. And second,
opening up the intellectual property so that it's easy for them to do so. We're applying those exact same ideas to
content, okay?
And so here's the way that you can kind of think of this. Think of a, sort of thought experiment, of
taking every book in the world,
okay? And
imagine ripping the pages out of every book in the world. That
would seem like it's a lot of chaos, but imagine if you could organize these pages in some sort of vast global repository, right?
Where all these
ideas are interconnected; where all of
the information is open for anyone to look at.
It's free for them to look at. It's free for them to contribute. And
not only that, the time scale of interaction with the material
from gestation to actual publishing is on the order of seconds and not years,
okay? So imagine we could do this
and imagine in addition that we could bring people in to the equation, right? Grassroots,
organized, bottom up communities of
people from all around the world in all of the
world languages,
okay? So that's really what Connexions is about. It's trying to create what we call a commons or a knowledge
ecosystem, okay?
I think this would be cool if we could do this, right? This is what we're trying
to do. Okay, so really, you can think of it as a place where anyone in the world
can create, rip, mix and burn and I mean anyone,
right? Their own
educational content.
Okay, so
what I'm going to do is spend
about five or so minutes talking about who's using
Connexions, which is our particular system. Then I'll give you a demo and then I'll talk about some of
the bigger issues. Sound
good people?
Okay. So let's talk about
who's creating content. Here's a group, there's
a group of Electrical Engineering professors from around the world.
The people in this picture are from Georgia Tech, Ohio State, University
of Wisconsin, Michigan. We
also have people at Rice in Cambridge. These
are traditional textbook type authors, okay? But these are people who are unhappy with the status quo, who are pooling their efforts to build one electrical engineering super textbook that
each one of these schools will be able to customize
to their own curriculum and draw upon
and not have to reinvent the wheel on writing these books, okay? So here is a traditional class of authors.
Kitty Jones Is from this shut out class, okay? She's a private music teacher and mom from Champagne Urbana Illinois and
she decided aid few years ago to start contributing here music content for kids
to Connexions, okay? She's
one of these shut outs who's not supposed to be, become
an author.
And if you look just in December of 2005,
her material had had over 600 -- basically averaging about 600,000 page views per month on
this music
material, okay? And getting to your question about the cost of materials,
a large share of these are actually coming from United States K through 12 institutions.
Because it's the music curriculum that's the first thing that tends to get cut out
as schools are cutting budgets across the country,
okay? So tremendous amounts of usage and
she is again an example of one of these shut outs. Okay, that's example of ripping content, making it
your own? So there's
a grassroots organized
bunch of graduate students actually in University of Texas, El Paso, who
decided that they wanted to translate a bunch of our engineering content into Spanish. They
called the project DS Spanish.
Within a week of some of this material going up is became some of our most popular material
and making large penetration into Latin America, used
at Monterey Tech and a number of other institutions across Latin
America, okay?
About the same time a translation organization from Taiwan called Oops and Texas Instruments Japan
started a project of translating our Connexions materials into
Japanese, Chinese, Thai and
a number of other
Asian languages with Vietnamese and Korean rapidly coming on
board. So the idea
of having content in a myriad of different languages,
having people be able to keep the content continuously up to date in all of these languages.
Okay, the idea of mix is
the idea of being able to generate your own customized course. So, your own
customized textbook, okay?
National instruments is a company in
Austin Texas who
are actually contributing a
lot of their technical training materials to
connections and
they're actually building much like the Adobe, Acrobat Player allows you to view PDF files for
free on web pages.
NI is actually developing a
free lab, what's called lab view player. It's going to allow anyone in the world to be able to manipulate and play with their really,
really interesting simulations that can be used to teach science and
engineering, okay? So
that's kind of exciting. So they're mixing that stuff in
with our Connexions content.
'Teachers Without Borders' had been involved with us for about
six months. They're in 84 countries around the world. They do teacher certification and teacher training. They're
going to be putting their entire repository of
teacher certification materials into Connexions. And
the key thing here is they're going to be able to do localization and translation of these materials so
that they can be used in all of these different countries.
So other people who are putting content into this comments,
UC Merced. Has anybody heard of UC Merced? It's
the new
University of California School in the central valley. They
are, they've committed to putting much of their science and engineering curriculum
into Connexions. They actually have
a facilitator at UC Merced to
develop this content. We're
also working closely with AMD. Anybody heard of the 50 by 15 project? Very interesting. They aim
to bring 50
percent of the world Internet connectivity by 2015.
And so,
they're basically going in to remote parts of the world bringing Internet
connectivity and also computer hardware
to remote communities. And we're
partnering with them to deliver a lot
of educational
content. We also have a whole bunch of
other projects that you can read quicker than I can say. Some of
the more interesting ones, we're going to be developing
the top ten
community college courses in Connexions and
a number of other projects. Yes, sir. The
sort of big one that doesn't seem to be getting mentioned, the MIT -- project. Yeah, absolutely, so I was going to get to that. They're one
of the projects also supported by the Hewlett foundation. And
basically you can think of Connexions as a logical extension of the MIT project in that MIT
open courseware contains only MIT material. Where as in
Connexions it's a global repository
where people from
all Universities, all walks of life, are welcome to contribute. So,
is MIT contributing to Connexions? So
they're currently focusing primarily on pushing content into MIT open courseware. However
there are a number of faculty who are interested in getting involved. There
are some very interesting questions around licensing,
intellectual property, XML
things, like this
that I think are going to become clear
later on. But,
yeah, any other questions at
this point? Some of the -- sort of maybe just more interesting ones that are coming
up. The government of Vietnam is going to be deploying Connexions across the country
to support
engineering and science education in that country. They want to use all the materials in English.
But they actually want a link to sort of Cliff Note versions of
all of these materials that are translated in to Vietnamese. So
the students can actually learn in English, but they can
have basically materials that help them learn quicker in their native
language. We're also going to be developing a project in North
Korea. This sounds bizarre, but
there is actually a Pyongyang University of Science and Technology
that is being developed on a beautiful campus in downtown Pyongyang North Korea and
we are
actually going to be deploying Connexions there for
supporting their curriculum. And a lot of that content is actually going to come from South Korea and
I'd be happy to play that. Okay,
burned, so
this is where things get kind of
-- interesting
and different
from some of the other open content projects out there like MIT open courseware. So burn to us
means the ability to generate a physical object. It
means the ability to generate a CD or DVD ROM from your, from your course
that you've mixed together. It
also means the ability to make
a paper textbook, okay,
from the material, okay?
And the key thing about these paper textbooks though is that they're modularly organized. They can be authored by a community and just drawn together by the person who wants to make the
book. They can be personalized for a particular class and they can be completely up to date. So you can imagine
a scenario where a community college instructor on the
first day of class, gives their students a test,
finds out all the remediation that's necessary for the class,
goes in that afternoon, pulls their book together in Connexions and has it delivered to the class the next day by Fed Ex, okay? So
I'll hand this around. This
is an engineering textbook. You can have a
look at it. It's got lots of mathematics in it.
Completely automatically generated with
the table of contents, index
and all of that stuff. This is a music book, okay?
Similar, I'll just hand these around. So if you
want to hold up that engineering textbook for a second, get to the last point here, this is a book that would probably cost a student about a 122$,
okay, in a Bookstore today.
Any guesses how much that would cost a student?
Five. Wow, that's a bit
low. That one cost five. 22$
to the
student in hard back, okay? And that 22$
includes not only a profit for the on-demand publisher, who's called
Coup who is the on-demand press that's making the book.
But a sustainability revenue stream that goes to Connexions to sustain the non-profit aspect of project
and a revenue stream that goes
into a pot that allows anyone in the developing world to able to get this book for
free, okay?
So we're kind of excited about this basically
we believe that this idea of publishing on-demand
is going to change the economics of publishing,
okay?
And
basically what it's going to lead to is the impending eBayization, right? Or dis-intermediation,
cutting out of the middle man of
academic publishing, okay?
Because the only difference between
this 122$ textbook and
a 22$ textbook is a
couple dollars to the author
that might get royalties in a traditional accomplishing scenario and
a very large profit
and costs for
the academic publisher, okay?
Very important though, that
we're dealing with this long tail. We're
not talking about publishing Harry Potter books here, right, -- that sell millions an millions of
copies. We're talking about small run books. Books
on hyper geometric partial differential equations, right,
that might sell 200 copies. It might sell 2000 copies per year.
But the key thing is that there's tremendous area under this
curve, right? That's sustaining
--
it has tremendous sustaining possibilities for projects like Connexions, okay?
So we're kind of excited about the ability
to be able to burn this
content.
So currently within Connexions
we
have about 145 courses and
as far as usage statistics, just
going about to January 2006,
we were logging about 16 million hits per month.
That's about 500,000 unique visitors
from 157 countries an growing by about 12 percent per month. So
that just gives you a sense of the thirst out there for --
free and open content. Okay, so let's talk quick about
the enablers
behind this and then I'll give you a quick demo.
How am I doing
on time?
Yeah, okay, so enablers. The
first is XML. How many people know
about XML? Okay, this is a big difference
between as and other projects in that Connexions
is not a collection of PDF files that
are impossible for something to download and customize.
It's basically these pages that we've torn out of these
textbooks are
encapsulated in XML that turns every page
into a Lego block,
right? Whether
the nubs allow us to recombine the material in a myriad of different ways, okay?
So the key thing is that we can take this ecosystem, right, all of these pages in their primordial soup state, right?
And we can organize them into very powerful learning machines, okay?
And these are learning machines are courses, they're web courses, they're paper books and
these can be customized for each individual,
okay? So you can imagine and world in the not too distant future where every person can have their own customized
learning materials. And these materials can be used in many, many different ways. If you think of writing a module on how to invert a matrix, right? That can be used in hundreds of different kinds of courses, right.
Not just the one where the author originally intended it for, okay?
The other
thing that is really neat about XML is the power of semantic mark up. How many people have heard of things like Math ML? Okay?
So the really neat thing and I'll show you more in the demo, but the cool thing is, all the formulas and Connexions are encoded in something called content Math ML,
which means they, they actually encode the semantic content of the formula. It ms not a picture of math,
it's actual math.
So, encoded inside this math ML is the fact that C is
indexed by this index and equals some integral of
some function times a Sine wave? Okay? That's very powerful. It means you can cut and paste
formulas from connections into mathematic and they work, okay?
So you can start to manipulate formula. It means you'll able to interact and explore every single
formula in your science, engineering and mathematics book, okay?
Which we're pretty excited about. There's
also a bit
less well developed, but move along, chemistry mark up languages that actually understand
how
chemicals are organized,
music XML that understands how the musical scores are organized,
okay? And this is a tremendously powerful tool for the future
that allows you to be able to reuse
content very easily, okay?
The other
thing that's really powerful about XML is the fact that we have very rich metadata behind all this content that
allows us to connect and show the inter-connections between ideas. So
that when you're in a course and
the professor talks about, oh, you remember L'Hopital's rule from Calculus? We're going
to use that now, and
basically four fifths of the class, their eyes glaze over because they forget L'Hopital's rule. Well, they'll have right at their fingertips there, links
lack to this prerequisite material that they might have forgotten,
okay? And it also links forward
to information about material that they might
be, that might excite them or illustrate the concepts, okay?
And this
is precisely,
really, what was driving me when I wanted to show how some of this
somewhat seemingly dry mathematics in the area of signal processing actually relates, right,
to tremendous range
of different ideas that are floating out there in the world. From
really cool technology,
to the business world, to government and the intellectual property world.
Okay, is second big enabler is
intellectual property, okay?
And, if
you remember back to, I
started everything with this analogy with music,
right, and nobody brought up
the fact that
we can talk about create, rip, mix and burn. But
in fact a lot of that is
illegal, right? It's called Napster; it's called file sharing, right?
So it's critical
that if we're going to do this for educational content we have to get it right from the start. We have
to set things up in a way that
it's not illegal to share all of this content. So we have to make content safe to share. And
in a sense just like XML of gives us a common vocabulary for
how to connect ideas together,
we need a common legal vocabulary for
how to share content. And the inspiration here again
is back towards things like the GPL
and the BSD licenses that make open source software work, okay? And
we were all ready to
develop our own licenses back in 2000 or so
when we were really happy to learn about the Creative Comments. How many people now about
the Creative
Comments? Perfect. You might not know that Glen Brown is on staff here at Google
who is the second executive director of
the Creative Comments, okay? And
the key thing is that at the bottom of every
page in Connexions, every resource or course in Connexions, there's a link
that says --
when you click on it, it tells you exactly what you're allowed do, right?
In fact it tells you that you're allowed to share this content
in many, many different ways
as long
as you attribute
the original author,
okay? And people often ask,
usually ask before this point, they'll say, "Well why are
authors actually interested in getting involved in Connexions?" In particular if
they're not going to make royalties off their textbook that would be sold by a tradition publisher. And
the key thing is that if you ask a professor or an
academic why they write books and course notes,
they're not writing it to make money. In fact they're writing it to
make an impact. And the critical thing about things like the creative comments license, in particular, this attribution license,
it is
allows their content to
make the
broadest possible impact in the world. Including people making textbooks out of they're material, people weaving together web courses out of their
material, et cetera,
okay? And
critically, behind the creative comments license, the easy to
read stuff, there's a very
carefully crafted
legal verbiage
that's being translated and moved to jurisdictions around the world.
And this is really taking
off. So there's probably by now over 50 million instances
of the Creative Comments license out there.
In a lot more than just
text and simulations and the kind of things that you would find in Connexions.
Also in the video world and in the music
world, and this
is a very important movement that I think we need to support.
Okay. So maybe at this
point I'll move to a demo. Any questions that
this point? Yeah. [Question] Oh you're good. Okay, so let me defer that for
five, ten minutes.
Yeah. So maybe I'll just
hop over and show some things here. Just
to give you a feel, can everybody hear me okay? I
feel like a keyboard player.
Okay,
so this is our, the Connexions site. It's at CNX.org. All of
the content is freely available for anyone in the world to look
at. In fact about 95 percent of our hits actually come in from Google, okay?
So
we thank you very
much. Somehow it turns out, I think due to the interlinking of the material, the
fact that it's so interconnected with each other and with other web resources around the world,
our Google karma is really quite high. You
can click on these various tabs to learn more. We have an entire suit of open source software
that people
are helping us develop from around the world. You
can browse through all of our different content. Let
me just give you an indication
of who out there is developing some of our
developing stuff.
I'll make the font really big be and I'll just sort of scan down here so you can get
a sense. See this is
a critical thing about Connexions. lt allows all of these different institutions, right,
and people to get involved contributing
content, okay? And that's something that you're never going to be able
do from a institution only
open courseware type site, okay? So well we intend to be
really cross-institutional, okay?
And let me just,
let me go in and show you an
actual course here. Okay,
it's actually a course on our
XML language
called CNXML,
which is a mark
up language. It's very similar to just HTML and people
who know LaTeX. But
it's very, very easy to use. This is
a course. A course is just a collection of modules. Let's
just jump in and have a look at one of
these modules. This is a module on XML itself. Sort of being
a little bit self-referential here. There we go, okay.
So let me make
the font go down a bit.
So this basically looks like a web page. What
it is is a very fancy web page that's encoded
in XML.
It has all kinds
of information. You can learn more about the content here at the
bottom, who wrote it,
who owns it, who
is maintaining it, who
has the copy write. We
have a version control system.
So, like CVS, so we keep every version of this, of all
the content in Connexions all the way back through time. This
is very useful for both tracking the changes of content.
And also,
some instructors might want to lock in at
a particular
version. We can also easily generate automatically, tell people how to cite this content.
Because increasingly, much like Wikipedia, people
are using Connexions content in scholarly work. We
also have this
idea of interlinking is very important. So here we have sort
of text-based indication that this XML basics module is but one link in a big vast graph, okay? And
these are some of the first neighbor
nodes that are linked to the nodes in this graph.
And they have metadata associated with them. For
example, these are all examples of XML and
these are all -- contain supplemental information on XML. And the key thing is these
can be
overridden and customized by different instructors or authors. Yes, sir. Have
you considered something along the lines of Gardener's seven different intelligences of the same material but written from different perspectives? Oh absolutely. So we actually envision that this kind of thing is going to
actually happen
sort of in
a grassroots kind of way. That people are going to take the content and rewrite it from these different perspectives.
Yeah, that's a really
neat point. It
would be neat to do some examples of that. [Comment]
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And actually these are free-form sort of content. The
author of a module, of a course, can actually customize all of the information that they want to appear over
there. Okay?
And we also can pull out of hour repository all of the similar content,
related content. This is much like going to the library and you have a card catalog number, pulling up the book, realizing it's not what you want, right?
But looking around or scanning around the shelf to find all the material that's sort
of closely related,
okay? So that's like this course is using this content.
And then
finally, because it's in
XML, it's trivial to restyle, right,
restyle the content
to have a different,
right, look and feel
of the content,
okay? And this is critical,
-- let me just bring up
my bookmarks here. Critical to allow other people
to be able to have, sort
of take ownership over the content. So, for example, when
a person is pulling together a course and teaching at Georgia tech, they'll
be able to have a Georgia Tech style sheet. So
even if they're using my content in their course,
it will have a holistic feel of Georgia Tech,
right?
Or --
of -- Stanford, right? So
that's critical for us, the ability for organizations and
institutions to able to style the content
and sort of make it their own. And this is also related to things like quality control and
portals that I'll get to in a
couple minutes,
okay? Any
other questions at this point before I plow on? Okay
we also
have a
facility, basically a scaled down, same scaled down facility that we use to generate the textbooks, that
can basically generate a PDF file of each individual module for printing. I
won't demo that now but you basically go up here
and click print.
That's critical. Has anybody here ever printed a web page? Have
you ever had problems printing a web page, right? The beautiful thing about this is it actually generates an equivalent of a page
in a book,
okay?
And so maybe at this point I will ask if there's any other questions an then maybe I could just show you quickly how you actually contribute a module to Connexions. Yes, sir. Can you page balance a printed version? Can I? Can you page balance printed versions so that things line
up at the right
line? Oh, yeah, so in fact we're developing a range of tools for the print. One is
the idea of completely automatic printings for basically from XML to a book. But
the other possibility is export into any number of formats like
Word format, LaTeX
or PDF, so that you can basically rearrange things however you like. Yeah,
absolutely. In
fact those books that you saw right
now were generated XML to LaTeX or
Tech to PDF and print.
Yes, sir. [Question] So, good point.
So, the base software is open software package called Zope and Plone.
We are huge fans of both of those.
And then Connexions is basically built on top of those. We've
built a lot of extensions and other aspects to them. And
if you check out, like the software tab,
all of our software that we've developed is all open source and available and
actually being built on.
Pardon me?
[Comment] Yeah, yeah,
exactly. Other questions? Yes. [Question] Right. Do you crawl the
web for
that and index it yourself? Good point. Yeah, so the question was, do we crawl the web and
link to other content?
That's
-- So not currently.
Currently
we think of Connexions as a repository, right?
Where people
come to
put their content in. I
think in
the future what we're going to see, and it is already starting, is the
emergence of portals. What are called --. Hewlett foundation is very interested in portals
where basically they will crawl the web
and then able to index material from various open courseware sights, connections et cetera. Okay?
Could be in the future that Connexions also develops a portal like that. But for right now we're happy to
let people like Google and these other portals
help us index all of this
material. Yeah, good
point. Other questions? So, okay, so a
last little thing to show you is the idea of how you develop content in Connexions, because it's XML. And
until a couple years ago this was a big barrier
to content creators.
Because we'd say everyone is welcome to contribute to Connexions
as long as you write in XML, okay? And there's really two very important things that have moved forward in the past couple of years. The first is
we have just started beta testing the world's first wysiwyg
XML open source editor. I
didn't get all those in the right order. But it's called Etna and
if you go to the software link you will actually be able to find it.
This is something we are starting to collaborate with a bunch of people on.
And so this will basically be the
equivalent of like a dream weaver type thing for XML editing. We're very excited about that. The
other is, we
have a Microsoft Word or open office converter, okay? Actually it's
an open office converter,
Microsoft Word converter.
So I'll just show you quickly
how this works. So here's a word document. You see it's
pretty simple but it's
got a
lot of different stuff in it. It's got some hyper links. It's got some pictures,
some bullets, right?
This is
fairly typical of a lot of educational type content. And
now what I'm going to
do is log in. Anyone can get an account; it's like getting a
Gmail account.
And in Connexions we have a number of different workspaces. So, first every individual gets their own workspace where you can put content, right?
In order to work on it. No one in the world can see that stuff accept you. And
then we have a collaborative work groups. For
example, if all of us in this room wanted to get together, form
a work group so that we could have a collaborative workspace where we could work together, that's
very easy to set up. Very soon we're
going to have work group forums, so
it's very easy to organize for groups to work together on content.
Let's just,
I'll show you
though right now, how we just create
a new
module. And here you can really see the sort of
Plone feel. So
we're going to add a new module to
the repository. This is
clicking through
to basically agree to the creative
comments license. Sort
of like the sight license aspect. And now I just
have to say whether I'm going to use some math ML. I might so I'll just keep that on there. And now all I have to
do is give it a title --
and, --
oops, okay. So
now this has basically tricked me into
creating a bunch of
metadata and now
the module will be
created. It's going to be blank.
And it drops us out into a nice little editor down below here. But I'm just going to go
straight into importing
this word open office document. And basically all I have
to do is just browse over to it. Usual
kind of thing, uploading something like an Email attachment. Now,
what it's actually doing is piping the word document through open office,
exporting his XML, running a parser over it to convert into our CNXML.
Takes about, oh
I don't
know, ten seconds or so,
here we are. And
it drops you off into a little editor that
you can edit. But I'll go straight to showing you that in
about two minutes, right,
you are able to generate,
right, content. It
figured out
all the sectioning, right?
Figured out the figures, hyper links and
even that table there at the
bottom, right? So it's getting increasingly easy to contribute material
to projects like Connexions. Even in something
as powerful as XML,
which we're pretty excited about. Because this
is much more usable and reusable
than anything in PDF for example.
Okay, so let's just go back, talk about a last couple things.
Let's talk
about protecting the
comments, okay?
So we have an
open
inclusive open contribution policy, right?
So that means anyone can put things into connections, right? So
it means there's going to be
all kinds of stuff in
there, okay? Including stuff like this that took as a while to
find, which
is in fact a beautiful -- Well, okay, this is great stuff. It's on lingerie. The
problem is, is
that in fact this, --
all of
the content was actually plagiarized from a
very well known French historical
journal, okay? So
this is plagiarized content and
not only that when you link
off to the supposed course website, it's
this person's
lingerie selling
website, right? So we have to
figure out how we're
going to deal with content that, like on the bottom is illegal. It's actually plagiarized. Or
on the top just merely sort of dodgy, right? So how are we going to do
that? Well, the
way that this is done traditionally in the academic world is there's some kind of peer review procedure, right?
And this is a very slow time-consuming process,
right?
And the problem is
that peer review -- you could pretty much easily say at this
point that the traditional academic peer review system is
broken, okay? It takes
so long to get a paper peer reviewed,
traditional academic paper and out, in most journals it very often, the material is obsolete by the time it appears in print, okay? Much like with print textbooks.
So what we want is some sort of new scheme that both can
keep the
new peer review up to date but also be inclusive and scalable. That's really, really important. So
the issue then is how could we find good content? And how do we direct users to good content?
Google is one way, certainly, right? If you Google for it, you're
going to find stuff that Google thinks
is good,
right? But then there's the question of what is quality, who is going to decide what's high quality and even the lines are blurring between who is an expert, right? And things like Wikipedia and Bloggers are really putting
a lot of pressure on both
the media out there and
other types of academic presses, okay? So what
are we going do? So in Connexions
we're developing a social software approach.
So we have an idea that we call lenses and
the critical thing of a lens is that any user can
go in to the entire Connexions repository, but
they can also go in via a
lens. For example,
if someone types in a
search that, -- like a Google search, they're going
to find some content that rises to the top of the search and
other content that goes to the bottom of the search. So if you will, Google is like a lens on
Connexions. But we can have
even more formal lenses. For
example, institutions that put their content into Connexions will be able
to have their own portal. For example, if there's a bunch of University of Michigan
content in Connexions you'll be able to go to umich.cnx.org
and find all of
the content that University of Michigan has put in.
By definition this is content that this University of Michigan thinks is
good enough, right? It's good enough to teach at the University Michigan,
okay? Similarly professional organizations like ACM or the IEEE could also get involved
and develop their own peer review processes and have these lenses.
Okay? And the
inspiration
here
is social software ideas like delicious, delirious, flicker, okay? And I think increasingly we're going to
see things like this even creeping into the academic space, okay? Any questions about this peer review idea? Yeah.
Okay, well,
aside from
that, usually
when we get to the very cutting edge it's like this equation is accepted. Yeah. We get to do
more social and humanities, get into, shall we say more interesting personal debate --. Absolutely, absolutely. [Question] Absolutely. Exactly. So classic example. The University of Cambridge
philosophy department versus the University of Oxford philosophy department, right?
Yeah. Two
very different
points of view. So
the key thing here is that we don't want to exclude either of those communities from partaking. So what you can have is
a Cambridge lens, right? So
all this content can be in Connexions. But when you go in via this Cambridge lens you'll see the stuff that's their point of view. And when
you go in via the Oxford lens you'll
see the stuff that they think is important from their point of view. [Question]
Okay, excellent point. So
Connexions is
a little bit like a Wiki but different, okay?
The key thing in Connexions is, there's a bit more --
You are
technologically able to edit anything that anyone has contributed. Because the creative comments license allows you to do that.
But what we do is we put
sort of,
things in place to try to enforce collaboration
above
the kind of wars of editing over the same piece of content, okay? So what you
would do in that case for example if there was
-- I'm sorry to pick on Cambridge and Oxford.
But you would,
basically the Oxford people would be able to fork a new
copy of any Cambridge material and change it the way that they think it needs
to be changed. And
then the Cambridge and Oxford authors would both be
co-authors but the Cambridge author would be notified of this and could have their name taken off
automatically if they
so wished. All right? Does that kind of make sense? So the idea is try to create within
the software sort
of a schemes to allow, enable more dialog over the material. [Question] Absolutely, absolutely
so this
is, and
it's a very interesting question and
it's very, well some
of this we'll take offline after the talk.
But you bring up a lot of really good points because, well
I'll just
say, the last thing I can say is that all Connexions can legally do is
take down illegal content. The minute
that Connexions starts becoming a lens for the entire, a gate keeper
for the comments, there's two problems. One is it's total not scalable,
right?
Because we're not like Wikipedia
in that sense.
And
second, it basically changes us from
the safe harbor provisions, right? As an Internet service provider, it makes us liable for the content. So there's
some very interest tricky issues
around that.
Okay, so let
me just end by saying the kind of things that we have going on right now and then invite more questions. So we're
developing a lot more tools. I mentioned already the XML editor. We're
also, there are people out there using our, the
software that drives Connexions, these customizations of Ploan. We
call that Raptos and
you can go to raptos.org. That means 'to weave' in ancient Greek.
And there are a number of people in organizations that are running our software
just as a content management system.
We're also developing tools for translation. I don't mean automatic translation, but to enable easier, -- easier finding materials in different languages and enabling people to translate materials really, really easily. And keep content up to
date once it's been translated. So, if the English version is updated, how does the
Hungarian translator know to go update their material? I
also already mentioned about peer review. We're building work flows for that so
that organizations can
basically be building their own peer review processes within Connexions.
We're also developing a distributed infrastructure, so that there's not just a
server farm at currently in Huston at Rice University. But
we actually
distribute this repository around the world.
We envision in the next
year probably putting up a server in
Germany and another one in Asia and then basically building things from there. So there are some very interesting issues around
distributing a content management server. Lots
of work going on in semantic stuff around XML; around semantic search. We're
going to have with, already
in Alpha, one of our collaborators
in IUB in Braimen has
a math ML search engine. So you'll actually able to type in if
you're looking for a certain type of equation and you're
going to be able to bring that up.
That's very exciting. I
already mentioned
a bunch of content projects.
The most exciting content projects right now are in dynamic content. The
idea, that since Connexions is a living repository, we're
interested in content where people are actually updating it on the minute. For example, imagine an atmospheric science textbook where
all the tables, right,
with temperatures and wind flow patterns are up
to
the minute, right,
accurate, right, as of the minute that you generate the paper,
the paper textbook for print, okay? And there's a number of
organizations that are interested in getting involved in that. So
I think I will end there and then ask if there's
any last questions and
then sort of, if
people want to take things offline yes, sir.
[Question] Okay, so that's a great
question. To answer the first part.
Your question was do you see -- What's going to happen to all these editors? What's
going to happen to the educational industry and publishing industry? And
the broader question is, is there
going to be money involved in there somewhere, are there going to be companies? And I think that we really just have to look over to the open source world and
see that around the Linux operating system
there's been an entire industry
developed, right? For example, Red
Hat, right, is a company that's in the business of selling services
around this
free open source software, okay?
For example a lot of institutions
and people don't, when they put Linux on their workstation, they
actually pay 99 bucks to Red Hat to put Linux. Why do they do that?
Quality control, a 1-800 number when
things break,
right? Et cetera, right? It's all on one CD ROM and
things like that. So
we hypothesized, right, when we started Connexions six and a half years ago that
if there content comments was really viable there
would be companies sprouting up around the outside of it. And in
fact, there already are, okay? One of them is
this tremendous resurgence or growth in publish-on-demand
companies like Coup,
like Lulu press, which incidentally was started by Bob Young, okay,
of Red Hat, okay?
To be a Red Hat for the open content world. And
I see
that these editors don't necessarily have to be put out of business because I think there's going to be a very vibrant industry growing up around this
open
content, okay?
So does
that answer the point? There are
even fore-profit lenses out there. Check
out Facultyofathousand.com. People pay
29$ a month to have a lens on
the internet to find the
best, most up to date coolest stuff in the bio and
medical sciences. Other
question, yeah. Do you get musicians and authors
of say fiction uploading? Okay, interesting,
do we have musicians and authors of fiction uploading content? We do not. I don't think currently we have any fiction, but
that's absolutely
possible. We've had numerous requests to people to start projects in like
receipts, right,
gardening
-- things that would be outside of traditional sort of textbook world. As
for as music, we have a number of musicians contributing, however,
it tends to be more on the music theory or musicology side
rather than using Connexions to post their music. Right?
I don't think that this
is the -- This is not iTunes, right? There are better places I think to post and organize sort of,
just pure musical content. That
being said, anything that you can do on the web you can post in Connexions, simulations, music videos, --
all things
like that.
Yeah.
[Question] Yeah,
okay, so
I lied. In fact there are already people going to things like project Gutenburg and other projects, uploading Shakespeare for example.
A rather large proportion of the
textbooks that K through 12 institutions buy are actually in the public domain.
So,
yeah, so do Shakespeare in
our search bar you'll actually find there's already some Shakespeare, yeah.
Other questions?
Okay, so I'd like to thank everybody and we'll be
hanging around after, so if you have any questions for Joey or for me, just
feel free to
come bug us. And
if you have any ideas
on better ways we can harness all
the powers behind Google that would be superb as well, thanks a lot. [Applause]