Stephen Downes
Knowledge, Learning, CommunityUnedited Audio Transcript
Okay. Hi everyone. I'm Stephen Downes. I work with the national research. Council of Canada and my presentation for you. All today is open learning in the meta verse, and as I was commenting with the moderator beforehand, this is not one of the top 50 presentations at the conference, it's one of the bottom.
I don't know. 100 I should have used fevers maybe that would have made all the difference or multiverse whatever. I'm just kidding I got a lot of stuff to talk about today. There will be room for questions moderator will be monitoring the chats so if you have any urgent questions she will jump in otherwise we'll be holding them to the end and I do intend to leave time for questions at the end.
Although I say that a lot and deliver a lot less frequently. So, but let's keep let's get going. So I here's the contacts. We've got a whole pile of new digital technologies, new terms, new concepts, the metaverse fediverse blockchain, web three activity pub and more. Yeah, that's the new world that we're in.
What I want to do in this talk is show you the relation between them all. Now, I don't expect, you know, if I just give a presentation, which is a talk like this, I don't expect you to go away knowing all of these things, but these slides will be available.
The link is or will be posted in the chat. They're on my website. Now, they'll be in my newsletter later and so you can refer back to them. There's a few main points to keep in mind. I'll flag those as we go along. But what I'm really trying to do is to of you, the core pattern to look at to recognize what people are talking about when they're talking about these new technologies.
That's it. This is a non-pret technical presentation. I'll be talking about tech, but, you know, I'm not going to start getting into the details of the tech because this isn't the conference for that. I understand, most people here are educators and even more importantly, few people want the deep text stuff, Although I do like to talk about the deep text stuff, but not today.
So I'm going to consider these teller all of these technologies not just from what they are. But also thinking about the risks, the impacts, the, the ethical considerations to some degree. And again, my thinking here is I want you to be as I'm going through again. Don't try to remember, try to think of ideas, try, try to think of, you know, how does this relate to what I know about open education?
That's how to do it. Now, I fell as in a different way of doing these things. I'd have another screen just as big. You could jot down your, your thoughts as I went along, but most of us don't have two screens and extra places where we can type stuff.
So, the technology is not quite ready for that sort of interaction yet. So, let's begin. I'm going to look at first of all, the two major concepts in the title, this presentation. First of all, what is open learning obviously? This is a conference about the subject. I assume most of, you know, what it is or has what what area is it covers, but it's based on principles of learner centeredness lifelong learning removal of barriers to access learning recognition, perhaps of credit for prior learning experience, open, pedagogies and learning support etc.
This is just one way of characterizing open learning. There are a variety of ways. They all kind of revolve around these things. Open learning has different areas. You know, I remember back in the early to mid 2000s, we were thinking of welding, you know, open curricula open content, open assessment.
Well, here's a presentation. That looks at 10 different, dimensions content, pedagogy accessory, pedagogy access, research, etc. And, again, everybody has their own list and that's fine. I don't have a problem with that. There is no one received official list of what constitutes open learning. In my mind, the other side of the presentation is what is the feathers?
That's a tougher one. It's tough. I know to wrap your mind around the concept, this is an introductory picture only. It looks a bit messy, but if I had this summarized, what the feathers is in a phrase, I would say, it's in network of networks. And you might have heard people say, well, that's what the internet is.
And yes, that is what the internet is. The internet is a featherverse, in many, important respects and you should see that pattern throughout email is a fediverse and many report, many important respects. So although the fediverse is a new thing, it's also a very old thing. Now how does this come into contact with open learning or open education?
Well with respect to what's called the really decentralization of the web open, learning advocates and February fediverse, advocates have a lot in common and I'll actually read this out from the read decentralized website. We've had enough digital monopolies and surveillance capitalism. We want to world that works for everyone.
Just like the original intention of the web and net. We seek a world of open platforms and protocols with real choices of applications and services for people. We care about privacy, transparency. And autonomy, our organizations and tools should be fun. Should fundamentally be should be fundamentally? That's probably a better way of saying it.
Accountable that resilience but you know you think about the other sessions in this conference all of that should kind of ring true, right? But now again hard to get your head around. So let's do a thought experiment, think of Twitter. Now, if I was in a room, I'd say how many if you know about Twitter or how many of you use Twitter and everybody would race their hands, right?
And that would be you know, establishing something in common now, Twitter is a single website. So silo. All right, all the messages, all the users, everything that there is to Twitter, all goes to that single site, same with Facebook, saying with Instagram, same with LinkedIn. That's that that corporate siloising surveillance capitalist kind of approach.
Now Twitter like these other sites contains a social network It looks a bit like this only multiply it by 500 million and Facebook looks like this only multiply it by a billion, right? It's got what we call a graph in it. There are users represented by the orange dot, and they follow, or they communicate with other users represented by the gray lines.
So that's inside Twitter. The problem with Twitter one of the problems with Twitter is that it can't connect with other social networks. So if you don't like what Twitter is doing or maybe if you don't like who owns Twitter or who will own Twitter, if you jump to Facebook and now you're blocked from all your Twitter friends.
If like me you hated Facebook and years ago to start it, I don't want anything to do with this, You jumped from Facebook. Well, now you lose touch with all your Facebook friends and in fact, I did Super annoying. So the problem is that have no common language of protocol, they have no way to speak to each other.
So they're actually isn't a way in Twitter for me to follow someone on Facebook and vice versa. So, imagine a new protocol that could allow them to connect. That's not so hard to imagine. Right? If I was in Twitter, I could just follow somebody's Facebook feed. If I was in Facebook, I could just follow someone's Twitter feed, just like I follow other people inside Facebook or insights Twitter.
Now they could do this, if they wanted, but they won't, it works against their business model, their business model. You know, is basically what content goes to die? They draw you in. They don't want you to leave. So instead, imagine an open source social network kind of like Twitter that does connect with other services.
That's what we have here. So here we have one social network, we have another social network and we have a way to connect between them. The example I'm using here is a software called mass student. This is the feathers, you know, the first picture of the feathers in the feathers individual social networks are called instances.
So we have in our little, tiny fed of ours here, two instances, and then whatever, connects them is called a protocol. Now, I'm being untactical and using the terms a little bit loosely, forgive me, if you're a technician, forgive me. But that basically is what the fedder verse is.
So, why the feathers? Well, one of the major reasons is my site. My rules, if you look at the feathers, here's a another picture of the fediverse on the side. We got individual mastered on instances individual word press instances and instances of other stuff. I don't know what they are.
Each one of them is owned by a different person or group of people. Each one of them operates by its own rules which means that you don't need to convince Elon Musk that and no naturally rule should apply in your network. You just say no Nazis in my network and you don't have to deal with different perspectives on what should be allowed or not allowed.
And we see that in actual practice in the mastered on fediverse here, this we've coded Christina Hendricks here, but also a lot of people belong to an instance, called scholar social, which is pretty pretty restrictive in terms of content. Other people belong to say, truth dot social, which has its own content limitations, and it's own things that it allows everybody has their own individual roles.
Now, you notice they're all connected together here, but it's the fediverse, which means if you don't want to follow someone, or if you don't want to follow another instance or link to another instance, you don't have to mine network that I'm on mastered on. Social does not connect to truth or social, which already makes it way better than Twitter for me.
So there are different ways of using this kind of system and one of the best ways of in my experience is experiencing the small and more intimate groups that you get in a federated social network as compared to a mass social network, like Twitter because you are not sharing with the entire world, every time you share and so we can explore, you know, we can explore narratives, we can explore how we form communities.
Alternate possibilities, we can accept the communities come and go and there's a flow and all of that is and more is documented in the paper called pedagogy of small and I've put a link to it there or a link to a link to it there. Also, there's just as an aside, if you get these slides for every slide, there's a notes page on every notes page, there's a ton of links supporting what's on the slide.
So, here's a, you know, and so this came about as a result of a couple of hash tags on mastodon. One of them is small poems, which which I quite like. Another one is small stories. And again, these small ephemeral groups that form and disappear OE. Are you open education?
All resource university has created its own instance of mastodons so it's joined the feathers. Connecting people with hashtags. Here they're using a scavenger hunt hashtag to have a worldwide. Scavenger hunt, federated commenting. People have blog posts or they might have static content on a website using another face. Like this, one described here allows for people to use their mastered on account or their fitters account to comment on static content.
This is still in trial, still being tested but again it's a learning application, just is in the side. I probably should have mentioned this earlier. I did quite a bit of background reading for this and I'll actually link to some of it. I'll show you some of it later on.
I found very little in the way of resources on open education or opening the feathers. And and so you know, a lot of these things, a lot of these areas there won't be a lot of resources. So like Federated commenting, there isn't a whole lot of stuff that actually works yet so for those of you who are still looking for research projects, there's tons of different research projects and things that you can try and evaluate I'm doing the broad scope.
Here's here's what the lay of the land is but for our, you know, the empirical projects in the pilot programs, that's still like a blue ocean. As they say, it is almost nothing in the literature covering this. Oh my headline format is run. So now Twitter is micro content and by microcontinents, you know, I mean, tap posts of 256 characters or whatever mastered on same sort of thing, but the feathers because linking is so free and easy within limitations, there can be multiple kinds of content and therefore, multiple kinds of instances.
And so here's a few and this slide for things like microblogging or personal networking, or plemora or friendica. If you're interested in link aggregating, sharing links, there's lemi for video hosting and sharing in a federated social network, as an alternative say to YouTube. There's peer tube similarly, as an alternative to Instagram am or to flicker.
There's pixel fed and similarly, as an alternative to. I don't know what these days because it seems like Spotify owns everything. There's a federated pub cast podcasting platform. And what's needed, is these because these are all part of the fediverse, they all connect together. So if you're on master done, you can follow at least in theory and account on pixel fed or you cannot follow somebody's video feed on peer tube etc.
Again. There's, you know I was doing some testing for this and with the the idea of maybe oh I'll show you some of the stuff. But first of all, the problem isn't time but secondly I found it's not always working. Remember this, a lot of this is still leading edge technology and and has it been widely made solid yet although it gets better and better by the month.
So some of the things you can do, here's an article from mass through Turner back. You turner on teaching and learning with friendika, friendika is another platform. Another place where you can create an instance. So and that way it's very similar to mastodon and he writes, you can have absolute control over your data.
You do whatever you want it to lead it forever. So that's one benefit another benefit. It's not subject to surveillance and data mining profiling. You can control who accesses your social network and that's a really important thing. If you wanted, you can set up a social network and not linked to any of the other instances in the federal version or maybe just one or two, you know?
So you can sort of create your own private subnet, a subfediverse knit, whatever. I don't know if there's a name for it which isn't connected to the rest of it. You know, and this creates a safe space for people to try out social networking with out ruining their job prospects 20 years from now.
I think that has to be a good thing. Here's another application learning application. Right now. If we want to do live content streaming, we typically turn to something like YouTube or Twitch, which is what I do. I do quite a bit of streaming on YouTube, but there is an alternative something I still need to learn to play with and that's streaming GTA through life.
So Jitsi is a conferencing program, it's a lot like zoom. It's very similar to zinc and we could have conference in Jitsi and using the Fediverse stream it through peer tube. So people could watch the content stream just the way they could watch a consent content stream on YouTube.
If they wanted are another one, which maybe is a bit of a controversial one. But I want to mention mention it here because it's important is the original conception of Moodle net. Now this was created by Doug Belshaw and others originally. Eventually Moodle decided they didn't want to do it this way and so they terminated that projecting dead noodle net.
As I've looked at at a very ordinary within a single LMS constant content, sharing sort of thing wasn't open at all. That's open a little bit, but nothing like the feathers. But the original version of Moodle. Net envisioned federated content, sharing, you know, images, open, educational, resources, whatever. Within a learning management system I have no idea what the Moodle politics were behind that and I don't even want to know honestly but I always thought the idea of having a federated open educational resource content sharing service attached to and usable by learning management systems and not just one brands like Moodle but all brands so that people can share no matter what LMS they're using.
I always thought that was a good idea. And as Doug Belshaw wrote in one of his posts, this would encourage participation efficiency and privacy all told together in this resource, sharing a network. There's also a next generation digital learning ecosystem. Now, you're I know, you're probably thinking edgy cause when I come up with a mouthful like that, but this is what was created for OERU by Dave Lane and Claire good.
Another colleagues, it's a federated infrastructure with different kinds of open linked technologies being able to communicate with each other. If you ever get a chance to have Dave Lane give a talk and explain what he's done. Jump at the chats of the work is really good. The stuff behind you, the tech stuff behind the scenes is a bit daunting.
But once you have it and you can have it on your own server or on a cloud installation, then the actual using of these kinds of systems is pretty easy. It's no more complicated than using Twitter or using a blogging software etc. Now again you a bunch of examples, I've given you some educational applications.
The important part is now and these are the elements of a featherverse or federated software that they're having common. Sorry about the mangled grammar there. So I'm just going to take you all step by step through this. So first of all, we begin with instances and instance sometimes called a hub sometimes called a server, sometimes called a pod if you're timber nicely.
These are web servers that sit somewhere maybe in the institutional infrastructure, maybe in the cloud somewhere that are accessible by the internet. And there are different types of instances. As I've already mentioned mastered on friendika etc, I can see here, I could do an entire talk just on the different instances that neither other many, many different kinds of innocences mostly all.
We'll focus on a few specific types of instance. Now connecting these instances are what we will loosely call protocols a protocol. We can think of it is just a language that these different instances use to talk to each other. Now we the users of these instances. Don't need to worry about the protocols at all or hardly at all.
We certainly don't know how to need to know how to speak. That language, The whole point of the federal verses is the software notes, how to speak that language. So there are different protocols, One of them is called activity pub. I've already mentioned that that's used to connect to instances Some others are diaspora, which is very old.
Now, very often years zot, which I know almost nothing about Adam, which is very old. And I just threw in SMTP, which stands for simple male transport protocol. That's the protocol used to send email from one email server to another email server, You know the new web is just like the old web.
Right? It's the weird centralized sites, like Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn that are the aberrations. It's important to remember that. So, also, all of these federated social network systems will have users, have some sort. Sometimes they're called subscribers, sometimes they're called numbers, sometimes they're called accounts in grasshopper, my own software.
I call them persons with seems niceer. So, and what happens is each user subscribes to an individual instance. So a person can subscribe to masterton. A person can subscribe to peer tube etc, and that's how you set up your individual network. So this is how one network, and this is another network, and then they're connected through our protocol users have their own addresses.
That's how we identify individual users. So typically what we do is we combine the name of the user with the name or the address of the instance, to form our username. So the name of the user, the name of the instance, put them together and that's the full username.
So we have, for example, you one, which is user one. Oops, it shouldn't have done that. There we go. You won at instance two. So that's this user. You won at instance two, you two, add instance one. So there's YouTube and instance, one etc. You may be asking I certainly would ask nobody could stop me.
Really? Can you have accounts on multiple instance? And the answer is, yes, I have downs at mastermind, social downs at peer tube.org downs at pixelfed.org etc, so okay. Yeah, you can't. How do you know you won? On one instance is the same as you won. On another instance or downs at.
This is the same as downs at that. You don't, that's one of the conundrums facing the fediverse. So you won at instance, one could be one person here in Canada. You won, at instance, two, could be a complete, a different person, maybe in Germany. So, that's an important thing to keep in mind.
Another question people might have is suppose I'm you one at instance. Let's say instance one. Oh, how terrible you wanted instance, one? Could I just move my account to instance, two? Yes, you can. That's one of the great advantages of the feathers, you can move your entire account, including your content, and all of your followers, all the people you're following from one instance, over to another.
Something you simply cannot do with Twitter. You simply cannot do with Facebook, even Google+ made it to do. You would have to use the Google+ takeout application? Which is anyone who's used it notes, that that's a nightmare. This is much easier. So there's some fluidity and some mobility here but there are still some questions lingering in our mind, right?
Another common element that fed. Averse software has is what will call clients a client stands in between you and the instance? So think of it, you might recall the client tweet deck for Twitter. There was once a time when tweet deck wasn't owned by Twitter, it was a separate standalone company and you'd use tweet deck in order to access your Twitter account.
Now of course, Twitter owns everything because that's what they do here, we have clients that do the same sort of thing, and it allows me to access the network from different devices. So for example, I access the master done my master on account on my phone, using something called tusky to access it on the web while I could use an application, but I just use the plain old default website because I have no imagination at all.
If I got an iPhone, not that I would ever get an iPhone, but if I got an iPhone, I could use a different application to connect to Macedon on the iPhone. I can even have a standalone desktop client, that is not a web browser that I can use to access my mastered on account.
Another way of accessing your federverse account is through plugins. A plugin is an extension to some other software that allows you to connect with the fediverse. Usually for publishing, but not exclusively for publishing. So some more well-known plugins exist for WordPress or Drupal. But as time goes by, I can imagine fetaverse plugins beginning to be developed, for even things, like, Microsoft Word, or Excel, or PowerPoint, or whatever, or Google talk, okay?
Google would never let you do that, would they? I don't know about microsoft. So, and basically, so like the word press plugin. For example, I have a word, press account called left-ish dot media, and I write posts on that and I've set it up, so that if I write a post on left ish, it automatically sends the post to my masterton account.
I could aim theory also set it up so that if somebody on masked it on come entered on my post and I wouldn't matter that they could be on my instance or some other instance or they could be using. I don't know appear tape to make a video comment I suppose that could show up on my original WordPress post.
Now, again, you're asking doesn't that create the whole possibility of spam? Yeah, but less. So then the traditional web because again we have the federation, which intermediates for us. So somebody on truth, social, who comments on my post, I'm never going to see it. And thank goodness because I don't want to see it.
Now, there are different types of protocols so there's not just activity pub. There's a range of different protocols and give me a sense, you know, the webs full of protocols, but to give you a sense for, for that, I think of some of the other protocols that, you know, like the content protocols, the ways, we organize content HTML, which is how we make web pages are XML, or PDF, or Dock, X or whatever.
There are very data, protocols, I could have put SQL in there, JSON, etc. There are linking protocols. The HRF is how we link on the web. That is how we link in another system. I'll talk about later transit or transport protocols HTTP, which is how we transmit data on the worldwide web activity pub.
Which I've talked about is how we transmit data on the, in the fediverse even syndication protocols which are ways of providing information about how you can follow a person, how you can follow content etc. So again, protocols, it's an alphabet soup, but the weight main way to think about it is different languages for different purposes.
Now, I didn't make this slide here, but I thought about it and because I thought about it, I share it would be a fun exercise to have students create their own protocol back in the early days of the web. Somebody once created PTP the pigeon transport protocol, It was the protocol for sending messages using carrier pigeons, Can you imagine the sorts of protocols that people would come up with, you know, just as an exercise, maybe a collaboration exercise or team exercise, just as a way of getting them thinking about, you know, what the mechanics are, what the issues are in.
The whole realm of sharing content, Anybody can create a protocol. That's one of the beautiful things about it. And because mastodon and other feathers applications are open source. You could actually create a protocol from scratch and edit mastodon, so that it supports that protocol. Now, you need some good programming chops to do that, but you can imagine doing it another way of I'm not another set another, how do I want to put this?
Another version of the FedEx is what's called the indie web. Oh, I talked about using master done to publish your in your WordPress post, right? So you write a post on a wordpress and you publish it on Mastodon and comments can show right up on WordPress. What if we change the couple things?
What if we removed the middleman, which is mastered on and just had our blogs communicate directly with each other. Now my blog because an instance in a fediverse and your blog becomes an instant in your fetus in your feathers now, they're not really not where it's not really a network of networks anymore or it is, but each network only has one person in it and that's what characterizes the indie web.
And also we're a related to initiative from Jim called domain of one zone where instead of having a bunch of people joined together to create an instance, you create an instance all by yourself. Now, you could do that with master done and that would probably be what I would do.
If I created a mastered on instance, it would be just for me because if I opened it up, I'd have about three people join and what's the point of that? Right? So you could do is master known as well. And but most people do it with their blog. But if you use a protocol called web mention and a syndication protocol called H card, then you can create a federated social network with your blogs.
Now, this is detailed and technical and it's not ready for prime time yet, but we can certainly imagine, which is the state where we're at right now and imagine that anytime you created a blog, you could connect with a network of other blogs. So, yet you could have a set of class blogs all interacting together etc.
And so, you get all the benefits of blogging, but without many of the problems of blogging and probably the big problem of blogging. I think for especially for newer bloggers as you write a blog post, nobody reads it Who nobody likes that and this is being trialed in various places.
And here's an article from Missoula where they're using the indie web as I've just described to help students and educators create open educational resources. So the way they do that is they create or provide free websites to the students and the educators then and and then the use these websites probably wordpress of all.
Honestly I didn't check and indie web protocols to create this network. And you know, now you have people creating learning resources learning with learning resources and of course, interacting with each other, to my mind, a very empowering experience. Now One of the questions that comes up and this is an important question is going to change.
Not just the federal verse but a lot of what we do generally aim, the world of open education, is the question of persistence. And the question of persistence is essentially, how do you know? One thing is the same is another thing or over time. How do you know one thing now is the same as that thing later or if you're searching for a resource.
How do you know the resource that you're getting is the resource that you ask for now? This, this is on one hand, a technical problem. And on the other hand, the social problem and there have been all kinds of ways of trying to solve this and you're probably familiar with digital object identifier or the hand of protocol or pearl or the URN, which is the actual way that we use to address resources on the worldwide web.
What they all have in common is they don't work. Apply sort of work, the web sort of works DOI, sort of works, but I can't tell you how many times I've clicked on a deal, why, or I handle and gotten something like this. Resource is no longer available and and I'm sure other people have had that experience too and persistence becomes even more of a problem.
Once we get into a distributed or decentralized network on Twitter, it's at downs because of the little blue Twitter thing, right? And so yeah, okay, Twitter verifies my identity but on a distributed network, it's hard to do. So what's happening in education? You've probably all seen this to some degree or another is and identity federation, which is another kind of fediverse.
It's set up the same way, it has instances and protocols, and all the rest that I just described was, it's used for identity in common, for example, which many of you would use at your own university, it's mostly in the US is is used to log in using your university account.
It uses an identity federation system called shibilist which is the mastered on a federated identity and ship a list uses something called security assertion markup language or similar, which is the activity pub of distributed identity. Seems it's all the same, right? And so we can have a single sign on kind of system.
But there's to my mind a big huge problem with that. And that is, what if you don't go to university, you don't work for university. I'm not, I had I experienced that with edgy role. I might like experience that with all of these federated assistants because I work for the federal government and I don't belong to any of them.
And similarly people outside the federal government can't connect or sign into our systems either. It's it's a big mess. So that's where federation sits with respect to identity. Right now, coming down the pipe is decentralized identity. Sometimes also called self-sovering identity which is really a bad name for it.
This is a worldwide web. Consortium a protocol. A basically there's a scheme, a method. And then the actual identifier, now there can be all kinds of different methods and all kinds of different identifiers, but this basically is the name of the protocol that you're using. This basically is your username in that protocol.
So, that's one way around this, and that way everybody would get their own unique identifier. Now, there's questions of privacy with this and there's questions of, you know who controls it? A big part of decentralized identity is that is should be standalone such that nobody controls it. There are people trying to move distributed identity into the featherverse so that you remember, I asked you, how do I know that downs at scholar?
Social is the same person as downs at based on social right now, you don't, but if I could connect both of those to a distributed identity, then I you could know that it's one in the same person or more of the point. I as that person could prove it, other people might not know necessarily, and again it's one of these ethical questions.
We asked, right? What's the right answer? Here, the point of this is to enable following. So I encourage you to look at this is Clint. Lalon's link here. Open, educators on Macedon. It's a whole list of open educators on Macedon. There's a site out there called trunk, which does the same sort of thing, but would different communities, and of users.
And this is one of the future learning applications, right? You can get collections of people, different interest groups, different lists of people, similar to Twitter lists, but people who are in many different feathers instances. So they may be in pixelfed, hubzilla diaspora or whatever they can all be on the list and you can subscribe to or follow them all and trunk actually kind of almost allows a mass following so that you're not constantly entering every single name into a form.
There are many other types of decentralization and I knew I had a time. I wouldn't have a whole lot of time to talk about them but I want to tweak them in your mind so you realize, oh yeah, same thing. Different place. So you have HTML pages software repository is messaging content and data ledgers and finance and virtual world briefly, decentralized, content, and data.
There's a federated system called interplanetary file system and there's also the data protocol for decentralized content. So the whole mechanism here for decentralized content, I've written about it and tested it to create something I called content, addressable resources for education. So in this case, instead of creating an identifier for a person, I created an identifier for each individual piece of content and then I link those identifiers together.
And the trick here is to create a unique identifier for each piece of content based on the content of that content. There's also distributed ledgers. You've heard of them is blockchain bitcoin ethereum and all the rest. Again, it's just a federation. Each person in the federation tastes care of recording financial transactions, a digital coin, like bitcoin is a protocol for how you record that these transactions and how you come to agreement on?
What transactions has happened? It's all. It is all the rest of it is fluff. Decentralized credentials. Can use something like a blockchain network in order to ensure that this credential actually does below to this person and was guaranteed by that institution because you have identifiers for all three of them.
And that way you can have a distributed network of credentials, tons of open learning applications here. Some of them are already talked about under the heading of badges and even some talk about using blockchain for credentials at this conference and other conferences. But the question for educators is what happens when anybody can produce a credential.
That's what this allows that is open education, though. Isn't it? Where is it? Decentralized worlds? You know, right now you think of virtual reality, you think of you go to one environment and virtual reality, this kind of like, you know, a virtual reality silo. I play no man's sky, which is almost like a VR game and you know, I can't go from no man's sky to Minecraft but imagine I could all of these questions about persistence come up again like for example suppose I have a sword, a no man's sky.
I don't I have a I have a phase or multi-tool. So I have a multi-tool in no man's sky. I go to Minecraft. Do I still have my multi-tool suppose? I had money units in no man's sky. I go to Minecraft. Do I still have money? Am I the same person a no man's sky or Minecraft?
Is the person who's hosting it. The same person, etc. All these questions. Come up. These are all addressed under the heading of persistence now.
Yeah, I'm not. I I've got one minute left. Okay. And then there will be time for questions so and two things I want to say first web three. You've heard it. You didn't know what it was. Now, you know what it is, web three is everything. I've talked to them so far up to and including persistence up to and including blockchain and distributed identity and all of the rest.
All of that together is web three different people will emphasize different aspects of it. Like, for example, here in digitally, they talk about based on proof cryptographic proof of who you are, you're distributed identity, but doesn't matter. All of it is web three, and the metaverse, you've heard a lot about the meta verse.
Well, that's our decentralized virtual worlds. Either virtual reality, augmented reality or mixed reality combined with persistence. So that may mean digital currencies that mean digital identities or that may mean digital objects such as non-fungeable tokens and all that means when I talk about persistent digital objects is, the each have a unique and verifiable digital ID.
We can talk about the issues in the questions. That's the presentation. Oh, accidentally hit on the link instead of changing the page. Sorry about that. I'm Stephen Downs. Www.ca comments questions. I'd certainly. Welcome them.
So repositories would definitely be a part of it. I think now, of course, you can build a standalone silo repository using D space or whatever. But you know, that's part of what Moodle net, the original version. Not the current version was intended to be was an OER repository using activity pub, which made it part of the feathers so definitely, and if you think about it, you know, you could have persistent identifiers and you can have persistent identity for that for the authors, persistent identifiers for the objects, and that makes it much more flexible and much easier to share content than what we currently do.
You know, and especially to ensure that the content you've shared is the content that was originally requested.
More.
So I'm looking at them. Our words comments. So enjoying this tremendous. We thank you, Emma. This is a completely new concept. Yeah, I know that and that's why I thought it was important to do this presentation at this conference. Open education in open, educational, resources, are in some important ways.
Still in the world of the late 1990s and early 2000s and oh wears come out of the concept called learning objects. And you know, these these were the fathers, there's a lot that could be said about learning objects but this idea of being able to create and share and rebuild and reuse digital contents and the rest of the world moved on.
First of all, it moved into silos. And so, you know, we got real usability problems with shared digital objects and now it's moving away from the silos and it's, you know, the way we move away from the silos create new kinds of openness for us, you know, I mean, sometimes I I post this as a challenge, but I also post this as an opportunity, you know, how can we be open in different ways?
Like I mentioned the identity federation, the in common that is used by say edgy cause and other organizations is it part of open education to have identity federations that support, not just people who've paid tuition and can access the university, but the general public has a whole, it seems to me that it is.
I mentioned earlier, the, the idea of not simply the idea of open credentials people have talked about that before, but if you mix open credentials into something like a feta verse kind of environment, then anyone can create credentials, I could I have created, you know, I have created my own badges, I'm awarded badges for participation in a mook and these can be shared in the feathers as part of your personal portfolio or whatever.
So, how do we talk about? Good badges versus bad badges is the capacity to create and earn badges part of open education or not. These are important questions to my mind, but they're also opportunities.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, they they will coexist frankly but but you know there's they will certainly impact each other when. And if you loan musk by Twitter, a lot of people will leave Twitter, some of them will go to Mastodon. Others will go to, I don't know where but there will probably be you know, son of Twitter that grows up somewhere and the reason why is the hosted and that works are easier.
You don't have to keep track of hosts. You don't have to keep track of different kinds of contents, but I think over time, we'll have more and more feta versus types social networks. Yeah. They the other thing is historically, it's always been hard to have your own web presence.
You know, that's what was hard about. Blogging that blogger fixed? That was hard. That's what was hard about messaging that Twitter and Facebook fixed wing and I'd say wait it becomes easy to have your own web presence, you're the domain of one's own. The gym room says, then people will tend to prefer federated, so from that works rather than having the entire world accessing their own, their own website, their own social network.
I think when it's an open quest, right? Which is all kinds of things that can happen between now. And then the other thing too, is the silo type in this silo type that people are not talking about are the the small private social networks SPSN there. I've just coined in acronym for USPS, it's sort of like small, private online course, except for social networks.
So SPSN, you know, for your class or maybe a two or three classes that you don't want to advertise to the entire world, you don't want to share with the entire world. You just want this, small little social network for yourself, that'll be really common. I can imagine having one for my family, I can imagine having one for, you know, a hockey team, you know, or whatever.
As these things, get easier to establish, we'll see more and more individual small group kinds of things like that. Okay, so me shows made me host. So I came in the session when I'd like, I'm not seeing any more questions and of course there's other conference that I'm sure you all want to go to.
So I'm going to end it here. Thank you very much for coming by really appreciate you taking the time to listen. And now I'm just going to try to figure out how to end it. Oh, I just click and all right. Thanks everyone. Bye.
Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca
Last Updated: Apr 23, 2024 12:28 p.m.
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