Studying the Open Education MOOC from OU UK

As an avid supporter of MOOCs will form the future of all open education I have enrolled as a student in the Open Education MOOC offered by the Open University UK. The distinguished education technology guru +Martin Weller is the lead instructor. I hope to learn about the pedagogy behind MOOCs for my own talk to my local higher ed institution where I hold the honorary position of Adjunct Prof.

To regular readers of this blog please note that all posts tagged with the #h817open label are work items submitted to this MOOC. Such posts may not be directly relevant to cloud matters per se but will be of interest to cloud education at least.

Netbooks live on in Chromebooks

I loved netbooks and actually still use my Samsung N210 occasionally. Over a period of 4 years I owned 3 models of Eee PCs, an HP (free at a Microsoft conference) and the trusty Samsung. Yes they were slow and all but the Samsung keyboards dodgy, but they were small, light and rugged (great for conferences/meetings). You could also buy 3 or 4 netbooks for one laptop. Being a cloud fanatic my latter netbooks interacted with my documents and data online, the browser being my most used locally installed app.

As I suggested almost 2 years ago we now have Chromebooks with the same form factor (although as a consumer I can’t buy an Australian version yet). They are much, much more responsive, more secure and allow you (force you) to live in the cloud.

A significant number of manufacturers are jumping on the Chromebook bandwagon. With the announcement of the HP Pavilion Chromebook we see the screen size grow to a weighty 14 inches. Such developments are starting to scare the tablet- and smartphone-toting users, see Jared Newman’s Time article entitled ‘Please, Chromebooks, Don’t Turn into PCs‘. He gives a good summary of Chromebooks available in the US when talking about the HP Chromebook:

The device is available now for $330. That’s pricier than some other Chromebooks like Samsung’s Series 3 ($250) and Acer’s C7 ($200), but cheaper than the Samsung Series 5 550 ($450), which is far and away the best of the bunch. Lenovo makes a rugged $429 Chromebook, but it’s for schools only.

It is definitely time for the Chromebook naysayers to wake up. I can’t wait to order one of the above.

ICE appears - the integrated cloud environment

I have long been a proponent of integrated development environments like Cloud9 which allow cloud app development via the browser. Now out of private beta we have Icenium from the well-respected Telerik stable.

Icenium Mist allows development of cross-platform iOS and Android apps using only HTML5, CSS and JavaScript and your Github repos. Development and testing can be done from any Internet-connected machine running modern browsers. Also available is the Icenium Graphite Windows desktop development environment working to the same cloud backend.

The ice on the cake comes in the invention of a new term for this type of development - ICE, the integrated cloud environment. Long overdue.

Famous Last Words on MOOCs Perhaps

Time Magazine has given MOOCs credence today in a lengthy, provocatively named article entitled ‘College Is Dead. Long Live College!’ by Amanda Ripley. On the fourth web page we find a quote from the University of Phoenix but one that is typical of many senior managers in higher education today:

Still, it will be a long time before companies besides high-tech start-ups trust anything other than a traditional degree. That’s why hundreds of thousands of people a year enroll in the University of Phoenix, which most students attend online. Says University of Phoenix spokesman Ryan Rauzon: “They need a degree, and that isn’t going to change anytime soon.”

I wonder whether these are yet another example of famous last words.

Chrome Social Media Hub–Android v iOS

I am on my 3rd iPad model but acquired a Google Nexus 7 a couple of months ago or so on its release in Australia. In that relatively short time I now use the Nexus three times as much as the iPad on a daily basis. There are obvious differences but today I just comment on the use of Google Chrome on the two platforms as a social media hub. This use occurs when I browse a web page and need to disseminate the link and a comment across my social media assets that primarily include Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+ and now App.net. Add to that list the asset repositories Diigo and Instapaper.

On iOS Chrome when you want to share the page link the menu is shown on the right. It is basic but useful, especially the Google+ link which for me is important as I am tending to use Google+ rather than Facebook as my first choice. Of course most of my social media channels feed into Facebook by choice so I rarely need to go to Facebook directly.

Contrast this with the equivalent menu on Android Chrome. The vastly different extensive list of sharing locations is not built in to Chrome per se. Rather a mechanism is provided to allow any app installed on Android to register itself to be a source of sharing. This can be a little overdone of course as you see some unlikely sharing locations that I will never use. like Godaddy mail.

Note that the Power Note app saves the link to Diigo. Hooha is the portal to App.net. For those unaware the Remember the Milk app is a great Aussie task manager.

The ability to save to the cloud storage systems such as Drive, Dropbox and SkyDrive is also a huge bonus.

Evernote has become my lifeline with data accessible on every portable device I carry so its inclusion is a lifesaver at times.

Flipboard and Skype are added bonuses which I am yet to explore.

Which platform would you choose for your social media hub? Android has become my first choice.

Potential giant leap forward for secure cloud storage

Storing your documents and data in the cloud has several significant benefits:

• access and manage documents via a wide range of modern browsers
• most cloud providers offers shared access, shared editing and version control as well
• download and upload from any Internet-connected machine or device:
• new devices have immediate access
• old devices can be discarded safely
• backup automatically managed by cloud provider

Set against these major features are the need for a constant Internet connection and bandwidth requirements which may be high if there is a high rate of document upload/download. These concerns are lessening over time and will be unlikely stumbling blocks for cloud storage adoption.

The one remaining concern is document security. While document transport can be secured it remains a trust relationship with the cloud storage provider that they will not read document contents, even when encrypted, and not disclose the document to authorities possibly sited overseas.

Fortunately a solution to secure cloud storage is in sight by way of federated cloud document architectures. Soon to launch in public beta in a few days comes LifeStuff offering "totally unlimited, totally secure and totally free cloud storage". When the LifeStuff software is installed on your device your documents are divided into segments, encrypted, and different segments stored in different parts of the cloud a multiple number of times to allow for failures. No one cloud site stores the complete document.

Whole documents are reconstituted from different cloud stores when needed. The cloud stores are free and unlimited because they exist on the local storage on other users' devices. Thus if you want 50 GB of cloud storage you must agree to store 50 GB of other users' document fragments on your device, and be connected to the Internet for access. Note the storage is 'free' but the bandwidth charges are not. Nevertheless the encrypted, federated nature of the cloud storage offers high security.

As outlined in a cloud breakthrough article Australia's own CSIRO ICT Centre has "developed a secure cloud system that breaks up files into segments, encrypts them and sends each segment to a different cloud provider. Using special software the user would still see and manipulate their files as a single entity, however, each provider received only part of the file in an unreadable, encrypted form".

So this solution uses existing cloud storage providers for the actual document storage. Most cloud providers allow a free service for up to about 25 GB storage. This federated solution thus maximises the use of free storage in the cloud. Users would sensibly pay for larger capacities and support from the providers.

Both the LifeStuff and CSIRO solutions offer the real potential of secure cloud storage at last and should speed its adoption.

MOOCs stir a VC to reflect

I am very pleased to see that slumbering giant Australian Higher Education react against the MOOC tidal wave. In a reflective post entitled 'MOOCs : neither a death of a university nor a panacea for learning' Jane Den Hollander the VC of Deakin University gives a balanced view of the disruptive effects MOOCs will inevitably bring.

Here the recognition of the threat:

Those in higher education would be foolish to ignore it [MOOCs] even though outcomes are not clear and many uncertainties exist.

Here the recognition of the opportunity:

MOOCs, and all their iterations, are an opportunity to re-imagine how we can deliver excellent learning outcomes in new, more accessible and engaging ways, fit for 21st century learners and graduates.

But where is the hint of an immediate action plan? Surely a MOOC Disruption Committee should be formed and start meeting within the month, Otherwise the MOOC tidal wave will sweep in and likely decimate the institution.