Publishing in the Cloud

In October 2013 I created a short MOOC called The Cloud and You on Udemy.com. I scripted the dozen or so 3-4 minute video lectures and there are a couple of Cloud workshops in downloadable text documents. It seemed a good idea to turn these texts into my first venture into a Kindle book - another Cloud-based format. This finally came to fruition a week ago.

Those who have self-published on Amazon will know they recommend you create the text in Word and save in filtered HTML format before uploading to Amazon. Sadly initial experiments showed the filtering still left huge quantities of extraneous Word HTML and lists and images weren't treated well. I soon turned to editing in pure HTML to achieve a clean layout on Kindle.

When I therefore needed an HTML editor at this point my thoughts naturally turned to a Cloud-based text solution. The editor obviously needed to be aware of HTML and CSS syntax highlighted sensibly and provide some auto-completion to avoid mismatched tags. An HTML pretty printer would also be useful.

Having some small experience with the Cloud9 IDE I turned to it, and since it supports Github repositories this again was a natural choice. And so it was these two free Cloud services allowed me to create my first Kindle book. The HTML pretty print feature of Cloud9, triggered with a single key combination, was particularly useful in spotting tag start/end errors and keeping the whole text easy to manage as shown to the right where the generated overall structure is shown rather than the detail of the text itself.

There was a lot of fiddly but simple copy and pasting of the script text out of PowerPoint presentations into the book text then adding some HTML tags. Little of the text changed as I adopted the more casual style of the online course lecture scripts for the book itself. The versioning of every text file on Cloud9 came into its own when I suddenly noticed half the text was missing due to an Internet connection interruption. Reverting to a version of a few minutes before was very easy. However it forced me to increase the frequency of Git syncs to my Github repo which of course acts as the backup.

Even the final proof reading and the actual layout of the book the Kindle can be done from the Kindle Direct Publishing web site via a Kindle emulator running in a browser window.

It was my hope that I could actually create and publish my ebook just using my Chromebook, ie completely within a browser. As it turned out I did cheat in this regard doing most of the authoring in Cloud9 using Chrome on a Windows 8 machine to exploit the excellent text expansion capabilities of the much praised AutoHotKey app - it's so much easier to type cay[ instead of The Cloud and You! I wish we had an workable equivalent of AutoHotKey on Chrome OS. As well there is a much more comprehensive Kindle converter and emulator on Windows which allows you to see how the book will look on a wide range of Kindle devices and apps.

One downside of editing your Kindle book text directly in HTML is you miss out on the automated Table of Contents (TOC) features of Word. You need to insert <a name="..."> tags on the headings and build the TOC entries with <a href="..."> tags. In my short how-to book of only about 70 pages and a couple of dozen TOC entries the extra work is small. However in a longer volume that also requires an index this would soon become tedious.

I enjoyed putting together my first simple Kindle book and found the self-publishing learning curve relatively short and painless. Being able to do it with Cloud apps was even more satisfying.

Bond uses my Cloud and You MOOC again

For the second semester running business students at Bond taking the Information Systems in Business subject INFT11-120 have been given free access to my Cloud and You MOOC offered on the Udemy platform.

This MOOC is available to all at:
  https://www.udemy.com/the-cloud-and-you/

50 years on my Computer Science School voted #1

Great to see my alma mater University of Birmingham School of Computer Science and  IT coming #1 in the Guardian University Guide 2014.

Reading for an applied maths degree I took the first ever FORTRAN course offered in September 1963 exactly 50 years ago. Overnight this single course changed my career and I have been studying, teaching and researching computer science every since.

My GrannyBook Raspberry Pi Emerges

At the first MakerCamp on the Gold Coast we were asked to suggest a project we were working on. I suggested I would like to make a GrannyBook based on the Raspberry Pi, the $35 computer I estimated would do the job. Loosely defined, my idea is for a very cheap device, under $100, that would allow your granny to turn her old Windows XP box into something akin to a Chromebook. In other words any person with an obsolete PC that still works could throw out their old processor box and replace it with a small device that would boot straight to a browser within which all normal use of a computer could be conducted - a very cheap and easy cloud computer.

I duly purchased a $60 the Raspberry Pi kit from Steve at Gold Coast Techspace which included the Raspberry Pi board, an SD card completely configured with the OS and an HDMI cable. On eBay Australia I bought a clear acrylic case for less than $10. To use my existing monitor I had to add a $5 HDMI to DVI adapter. Finally with another eBay purchase from the shop that supplied the case I added a $10 Comfast Wi-Fi adapter rather than use the built-in Ethernet port. In total this amounted to a $85 investment.

After plugging in a USB keyboard I added a standard non-powered USB adapter to take a USB mouse and the Comfast Wi-Fi adapter. Then came the big moment of the first boot and true to form the RPi within about 15 seconds opened in the desktop having determined the monitor resolution perfectly. To my surprise and delight there were drivers present for the Comfast Wi-Fi adapter and I simply had to login to my home Wi-Fi network.

The on-board Midori browser fired up perfectly and I logged in to my Google account. Thereafter I was in the usual Google wonderland with access to email, calendar, sites, blog, and all the other goodies - in other words a good approximation to a Chromebook.

The inevitable downsides are present:

• the less than lightning speed of the boot sequence compared to a real Chromebook
• the pauses as web pages are loaded in the browser although performance overall is very adequate
• the lack of Google Chrome and associated plugins, but further investigation might solve this

Nevertheless for a very small investment and an hour of my time I am well on the way to a viable GrannyBook. More anon.

Activity 24 Considering open learner literacies #h817open

The list of literacies provided by Jenkins et al in their occasional paper on digital media and learning is duplicated here. I have marked in bold those literacies I feel are particularly appropriate to open online learning, although it seems obvious all literacies in the list are beneficial at one level or another.

1. Play – the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem solving
2. Performance – the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery
3. Simulation – the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes
4. Appropriation – the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content
5. Multitasking – the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details
6. Distributed cognition – the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities
7. Collective intelligence – the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal
8. Judgement – the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources
9. Transmedia navigation – the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities
10. Networking – the ability to search for, synthesise and disseminate information
11. Negotiation – the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.

I note that in previous posts in this series I have referred to Judgement as significance and Collective Intelligence as curation, but the intent of my terms exactly aligns with Jenkins et al. In my post for activity 22 I addressed at length the need for PINC tools and literacy to support collective intelligence. Judgement is much more difficult and complex. Advanced search skills allow sophisticated discovery of resources, but determining reliability and credibility is highly specific to the unit of study being undertaken. Obviously the skill and experience of instructors plays a major role but they must be able to codify these measures that I collectively call significance. A set of rules and guidelines must be produced that students can follow to produce consistently a degree of judgement to be relied upon.

Appropriation has a degree of overlap with transmedia navigation in my view as following story flow gives the necessary context to the media content being appropriated. Significant media literacies are needed to take an assumed finished product, itself the result of potentially many hours of production, and make meaningful changes so as to reuse the product in a new context. Skills might include rewriting, diagramming and charting, image manipulation and animation, and audio and video editing. It is no wonder that media courses for these skills are in high demand. It is also not strange that a typical university teacher lacks this valuable combination of skills.

Distributed cognition requires the use of outliners, mind maps and other topic association tools. Even if the tools are well designed and straightforward to use a significant trail of experience is needed to extract benefit from these tools. If lecture notes and academic journal papers are any indication then much more experience is needed.

I would think that networking skills are best acquired by judicious use of a variety of social networks used with a degree of focus. Careful selection of 'friends' depending on your perceived quality of their information flow must be acquired over time. This same strategy can be employed on the ubiquitous forums that are usually present for all MOOCs.

Negotiation defined here as the ability to cross disciplines and appreciate different perspectives is a necessary and underrated literacy. Little attempt at teaching this in the walled gardens of university disciplines means there is a definite niche for open education to fill.

This activity has caused me to think and reflect as much as any previous activity in this course. My thanks go the instructor for setting this task.

Jenkins, H., Clinton, K., Purushotma, R., Robison, A. and Weigel, M. (2009) Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, Chicago, IL, The MacArthur Foundation. Also available online at http://digitallearning.macfound.org/ atf/cf/ %7B7E45C7E0-A3E0-4B89-AC9C-E807E1B0AE4E%7D/JENKINS_WHITE_PAPER.PDF  (accessed 15 November 2012).

Activity 22 An open education technology #h817open

I have mentioned before in this series (activity 19)  the need for students to be able to collect together links to the resources given to them on a course merged with those resources discovered by themselves. Let's refer to this tool category as PINC (PLN Information Node Curation). A PINC tool, most usefully a cloud app, will have these features:

1. a central repository of information nodes (links and documents) culled over a lifetime of learning; by definition this should be capable of:
• information node insertion/edit/deletion
• convenient searching
• export in convenient formats
2. a personal tagging/labeling system to structure what is likely to be a very large collection
3. the ability to share any or all information nodes (make public and maybe more targeted sharing)
4. quickly accessible over the Internet from a wide variety of devices to include smartphones, tablets, laptops, even wearable devices; some devices will allow local storage for off-net access
5. automatic backup and ability to download all information for archiving purposes

In my experience some existing apps come close to these PINC requirements although none meets them completely:

• Evernote: a widely used app/service that can store a very large range of information types and now has easy sharing
• Diigo: primarily a link repository that took over and expanded upon the early now reincarnated Delicious service; this repository is only useful if all information nodes are resource links
• Mendeley: primarily a citation repository which is widely used to share academic references as well as links; PDF and data files are also handled well; the recent takeover by Elsevier casts doubt on its long term survival

All the suggested PINC apps come with free versions although the paid service offers not only more features but also promises more longevity, a major requirement for a service that will be needed over many years.

It was pleasing to see the early creation of a shared Diigo list of references for this Open Education MOOC but it appears not to have survived week 1. The excellent list of references provided for us on #h817open are currently scattered over several OpenLearn pages. It would be more useful if all references were gathered together in a public repository of some sort that will survive the end of the Open Education MOOC.

I would be very happy to hear of alternative PINC tools that other people are using. Please comment below.

Activity 21 How technology and pedagogy inter-relate #h817open

My own experience is coloured by my 40 years of teaching computer science and always seeking to employ the latest computer and networking technology to improve my teaching. I spent over half of this time in my last institution and notched up a number of firsts that include:

• first online test (Macintosh 1991)
• first web site (1995)
• first web forum (1996)
• first 'LMS' (SharePoint, 2000)
• first student assessed blogs (2005)
• first pilot with BlackBoard (2006)
• first virtual teaching laboratory (VITTL, 2008)
• first lecture screencasts (2009)

Throughout this process I faced uphill battles to co-opt my colleagues and have ploughed a reasonably lonely but exhilarating furrow. Nevertheless I venture to suggest all these technological advances are now recognised as bringing significant improvements to the teaching process. At the same time it is realised all bring concomitant changes, sometimes very substantial, to teaching preparation and presentation.

Looking back over the years I estimate I spent between 15% and 20% of my time keeping abreast of advances in technology. A small proportion of the outcomes of this effort found its way into the curriculum of  the subjects I taught. The larger proportion of the technological changes affected society as a whole, and, of course, the students coming on campus. Thus the major pressure comes from changes in the way society communicates and that inevitably cause a change to education itself. I firmly believe that all activate educators must spend of the order of 10% to 15% of their own time keeping abreast of technological advances if they are to remain effective educators, not to mention staying in step with the society in which they live.

A couple of years ago just before retirement I was pleased to find the smartphone and tablet revolution was being recognised by a much larger group of colleagues including myself. In my last year of full-time work I did not feel alone in the pursuit of applying new technology to better higher education.