Many thanks for the perspective Yves, Youve given me a Eureka moment when you said Indexing has to be made with a very different view.
So far as the convergence of mindsets between NREN (apps) managers and (content) curators - this is it (towards the end of this mail). Ive ccd the DCC community. Ive replied in line, in length (sorry, but Im still trying to understand what the question about global dial plan/scheme (GDS) means, so I can explain it to curators in a video. So, lots of words which have to be condensed into < 5mins) From: Yves Epelboin [mailto:yves.epelb...@cpm.upmc.fr] Sent: Thursday, 11 August 2011 2:44 PM To: Simon Fenton-Jones Cc: tf-me...@terena.org Subject: Re: [tf-media] Is there a way to build dial plan to accommodate all, but still Hi all, I will give my position as IT director from one of the most important universities in France, first in international ranking (for what it means). NREN are thinking about global services, in the cloud, of two kinds. A first category which I will call neutral, such as e-mail systems. A second category offer, such as video, learning platforms,... is much less attractive for institutions for reasons that I will explain. Simon is mentioning two categories of actors: NREN and librarians. An important one is missing: professors and academic and I will explain why. > Youre absolutely right. They ARE the producers. I also havent mentioned the most important group students. They are, after all is said, the primary customers. Its their expectations, and those of potential students/researchers who cannot afford an (old world) education, which are driving this change in media production and distribution; Open being its driving principle. >My primary aim here, as the tf-media community is concerned with satisfying the front end of these expectations the capture and aggregation of media in all formats is to make clear that after they have done half the job, there is another half to do. Both halves are now being asked to take a global perspective on a world saturated with poorly produced and badly distributed media (I overstate). The customers live on a Web which is worldwide so we have to aggregate that way. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------- 1 - Global services Neutral services may be already served by different actors, in the cloud, Microsoft, Amazon, Goofle, tomention some of them. What retains me from transferring such services to them is the danger to become dependent of these private actors (continuity of services in the future, trust...) and I really will change my mind when GCN and NREN will offer these services. In my mind neutral services are all services accessible to a variety of interfaces which gives to the user the freedom of choice of his/her system and interface. e-mail is the best example. >Yes this IS one danger. The first thing i do, in an attempt to monitor each NRENs response to this question = whether they should outsource their commodity services (to use the language of tf-msp and others) = is check out their Federated services list. I see FederationRENATERs and others have Library services up front. i.e. They start at the back end. https://refeds.terena.org/index.php/FederationRENATER. >Surfnets page says The driving services for the federation are publishers and other (local=national) inter institutional services. I think we can this agree is a THE common perspective. As you say, its a matter of each institution & NREN, individually, offering their users a freedom of choice. Individually they do, which is why they are reeds in the wind blown by global commodity service providers and global publishers. NRENs dont appreciate the strength of a combined (marketing) position. The talk in tf-msp about Can an NREN aggregator help manage cloud providers? is more about inter-Federations sharing/aggregating services between NREN. But as youve said about indexing, it needs a different perspective; i.e. CCIRNs. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------- Learning platforms will not be handle by NREN in a near future because there is a variety of solutions, a need for support and education linked to the solution. It has to remain local (although servers can be managed in the cloud). > Im not so sure. Ive spent 12 years watching teachers/researchers, separately & in different countries, compile massive lists of teaching solutions/learning platforms. Thats pretty normal when a new technology, like the web in this case, is introduced. Ever done a study on car production early on? Now we have Ford/Apple/Google offering any colour as long as its black, and a bunch of (National) General Motors (REN) searching for ways to satisfy the common requirements of global groups, each of whom have cobbled together an Edsel. When institutions/NRENs change the way they aggregate, the economics change, big time. The NRENs might not handle learning platforms. But they have a role in determining which ones are the best of (interoperable) breed, which in turn, makes them marketers of the ones selected. >Reading your next para - solutions depend on the local strategy. I guess youre saying its up to the local institutions teachers. Absolutely, although with clouds, were now in consolidation phase. Many teachers within local institutions have reached out, had a global play with tools like Moodle, ustream, etc, and firmed up on a lot of components of a solution. Its a bit like it was in Chicago as the back-yard, hand-built, carriage and engine builders consolidated into mass manufacturers. Now, institutional service specs are becoming more common. Many teachers/researchers are driving an ad hoc combination of an Eluminate, wiki, Google group, etc, and run a messy library. The more practical ones drive an Apple or Google model-T. (N.B. Surfnet seems to be the only NREN which has federated Google apps. I wonder why.) > Its telling that only Internet2 puts Community building in their list of prominent federated services. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------- The same applies for video because solutions depend on the local strategy. Video is not only capture and distribution. It is much more: room features with digital board or not, automatic cameras, variety of solutions adapted to different uses (Powerpoint, screen capture...), variety of distribution (immediate, with editing or not...). It starts with room reservation, automatic capture or not and, although I can find some bricks in what has been mentioned in this group, a good part of the full process has never been mentioned because it is depending on the local institution, how it is organized, the willingness of users and many other factors, all local. >True. But Economics drives most edu institutions these days. Theyre just learning the lessons learnt over the last 15 years in the world of real/commercial media. Edu (and other public) institutions often get bogged down in technophobic expectations like automatic cameras and mics. The choice of tools is a teachers/producers job. They certainly have to be cheap and easy to use. If a teacher/student/researcher producer cant use them at work AND home, then forget it. E.g. It always amazes me why, in education, anyone would want to record a lecturers talking head, while never having enough cameras/mics for a workshop. Andys intuition about Camtasia and Ingrids implementation of its Relay, show the attitude is changing at the NREN level. E.g. After all the capturing is done, institutions still end up with the same indexing problem as they have with their open journals. Their perspective is still about classifying objects. >Every wondered why feedback to a lecture at an (inter-institutional) conference is not considered important enough to capture, in the context of groups that rove between them, while lectures recordings within the institution MUST be buried within a learning platform so feedback can be aggregated. Theres a good reason the word institutionalized always leads to discussions about who are the inmates and who are the wardersJ >Edu institutions rarely have media producers who, with an inter-networking knowledge, look at the end-to-end of the media lifecycle in a Webbed world. The willingness you mention wont happen until teachers can provide a students expectations (I. e. Give me a recording of a lecture because i cant make it), while being offered additional recognition by their peers for a job well done, individually or in a group. The way teachers, and researchers, are rewarded is changing. Individually, institutional management says save a buck, get citations. But their institutions librarians still pay a motsa to edu publishers, like Elsevier, for aggregating the peer reviewed outputs of their researchers. >Institutions dont look at how to aggregate the captured recordings from various institutions, so teachers/researchers/students can peer review (and auto-translate) them and get the best to the top. Its happening at youtube, so a few professors like Mike Wesch are becoming global stars. http://www.youtube.com/user/mwesch And we all know about TED. Its a funny habit that people who think they are delivering an education want to ignore this kind of popularism. But its just another aspect of the open journal movement. >I cant say anything about your local politics. Sounds like youve got some wars to fight. But its always easier to say, to those who have never owned a business, this saves bucks. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------- 2 - Learning resources and academic people For once, it seems that we are in advance in France! A number of universities are establishing local databases of learning resources which are automatically harvested by national servers, "the universités numériques thématiques (UNT)" (Thematic digital universities) so that users, both students and academic, can find references and access open resources locally available in the different universities through one national database. The most advanced example is medicine, http://www.umvf.org/. >Thank you so much for this one. Its just so important for people involved in the front end to see whats happening at the back end (and vice versa). I remember when you mentioned UNT last year. I went searching for it in these rankings. http://repositories.webometrics.info/top100_continent.asp?cont=europe >I had a good look at umvf this time; wondering why it doesnt appear on this Open Access webometric radar. Answer; one cant auto-translate a page of it. Regardless, these Open Access Journal/ Open Education Resources/Open Courseware - type initiatives all suffer from the same problem. They dont join the front end to their back end. So while the front end is furiously capturing stuff -some good, some bad - the back end is furiously trying to figure out how to classify all of it so that it can be useful to global teachers/learners/researchers. One of my favourite US Library writers calls it hampster wheeling. http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/002179.html Id add, in parallel. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------- The question remains to know who does the indexing work: librarians and/or teachers. My politics, in my university, is that this work is mainly the responsibility of the teachers, for two reasons: a/ It would be necessary to monopolize between 5 and 10 librarians, full time, to do the job in a university like mine b/indexing learning resources is a different job than indexing scientific resources. I know that because I have started the job, in 2003, with librarians and it did not work. Indexing has to be made with a very different view. We do not have the human resources to devote the necessary staff. Moreover, when you ask the teachers, they are not interested, for teaching (and it is the same for the students) in the "deep indexing" needed in Research. The bad part is that it is very difficult to convince teachers to do the job and a good part of my resouces is not available in our database (http://savoirenligne.upmc.fr). have no real solution to convince them today. > Eureka! Thanks for this. (lunch is on me) Indexing has to be made with a very different view. You know that librarians and teachers/researchers have been playing this ping pong game for over a decade now. We also have a separation between teaching resources and (can we call them?) research resources. Meanwhile, the archives of communications (E.g. http://www.terena.org/mail-archives/tf-media/) which logically goes with this information/resource is never considered in the same breath. As for archiving real time communications, like streams of a video/event conference, forget it. They either sit on a tool-centric site like Global Plaza or are buried on some event organizers site under conferences. >As they were saying in Galileos time, when mad epicycles couldnt be used to describe the facts = that the sun and planets revolved around the earth; Tis all in pieces. We want, so much, to believe that our world of media revolves around our old associations & institutions. Trouble is, as social networks help global users to gravitate towards their professional suns, WE CAN SEE that they dont. E.g. members of Internet2, terena, clara, apan, etc are obvious associates (once one knows the regional associations). But youll never see their associations taskforces/working groups sharing a Global mail list/LinkedIn group. >The problem, for both production and curation providers of media services, in whatever format, comes down to figuring out who the Global customers/users are and helping them get together in a fixed shared space/url/archive. If we can agree that users, like this little media group, are just people who are trying to share knowledge with their professional peers (and unprofessional ones like me), we might be able to take a very different view/perspective to how we go about capturing and disseminating their/our media. >A Global solution is not so much a matter of indexing information. Thats the back-end-of media-production perspective. Progress is a matter of associating/conflating your (& your curating peers) excellent knowledge about classifying information with this threads original question about a Global Dial Scheme for communications. New paradigms only tend to be recognized when you conflate world views. E.g. Hypertext (information) and IP transmission methods (communications) in the case of the web. >This paradigm shift is not so much different. If an old (national, circuit switched) GDS for communications cant be transplanted on a new (global, packet switched) one, then you have to say, forget it. But if an old, well accepted bibliographic classification scheme can be adapted to attempt the same thing, well.......... its worth a go, no? ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------- So teachers are needed for any national or international project in this field. And it will be difficult to activate them. >Amen to that. Like everyone, its hard to activate any person when one doesnt present a clear view of what they call progress. Activity for its own sake is childs play, which is no bad thing. So if someone could explain what the original question on this thread means, i might be able to be clearer about my perspective of progress. Thanks again so much, simon Sorry for being long. Regards Le 11/08/11 02:31, Simon Fenton-Jones a écrit : Guys, I need some advice Ive just been revising the conversations which have gone on around 3 task forces/working groups in various global spots for the past few years. In terena-speak the main ones are cpr, media & msp. Others include refed and storage. The primary theme to all of them, for me, is what youd call a Global Campus Network (GCN). This GCN discussion is starting to get serious now as the CCIRN ( Committee for International Research Networks) members are going to have their first pow wow shortly and Peter is attending. Even the Canadians are talking about GCN. http://digitalinnovators.wordpress.com/2011/02/09/ryerson-university-leads-d evelopment-of-global-campus-hd-ip-broadcast-network/ Inside an NREN, a GCN looks like Ingrids http://www.ecampus.no/english-ecampus-2/ just bigger. Norges 3rd aim = making it easy to access digital learning resources nationally = isnt something which a tf-media type person will concern themselves with. Librarians/curators normally have to do that. We also dont think about problems like translations, which are necessary for a global audience. So we know that two professions network (app) managers and curators - have a common need; to access (and use) learning resources (globally), and so do other users. But we have the problem that each looks at the problem from their own perspective app managers from the front, curators from the back (of the content production lifecycle). We also know that each profession works hard to serve their institutions. Even if, as Ingrids report says (about ad hoc collaborations) This form of web meetings is in its infancy, and we expect a sharp uptake with exponential growth. The ad hoc collaboration differs from the meetings and lectures in that the area is not necessarily closely connected with the institution. https://ow.feide.no/_media/ecampusnorge:ecampus-webconferencing-memo-09.pdf There are only 1m./week joining Google + at the moment. But it should pick up over the next few months. Im bringing this up because the place where the two professions ideas hit the common tarmac, in the tf-media perspective, is around a question asked at this ces events session. http://www.ces.net/events/2010/ipt-workshop/p/szegedi-ipt-terena.pdf (slide 9) Is there a way to build dial plan to accommodate all, but still remain transparent? The idea of adapting an old National and Institutional-centric GDS numbering plan from a circuit switched network to an-all IP network hasnt worked. Surprise, surprise! So could we look at the Global adhoc collaborating groups as customers rather than National institutions. I need to explain (in a video) what this question might mean to a bunch of curators who have to assemble and curate the ad hoc results of a local/regional/global groups collaboration. I wont ask you to actually talk to a librarian so you both understand one another. Just a brief explanation of what you think they might understand by the question would be fine at this point. Kap krun krup, simon -- Prof. Yves Epelboin,Université P.M. Curie, Directeur du Service Général des TICE, Centre de Production Multimédia, Atrium, case 1205, 4 place Jussieu, 75252 Paris Cedex 05, France Phone: +33 (0)1 4427 6568/6567 Fax: +33 (0)1 4427 6544 http://www.cpm.upmc.fr
