Project patterns

Thinking of various non-profit social projects that are more about a real world component then virtual one brings to idea of using 'project patterns'. What is it?

We've got a project that is done in particular place and particular conditions - so there are some scenarios, tracks and few roles are defined, some documents ( e.g. e-mails and formal papers) are written. So this knowledge and produced materials can be used to make similar project e.g. in different place, times, circumstances and what is most important by other team.

This idea looks a little bit similar with franchise when business that buys a contract get not only a brand, support and supply chains but set of documents, approaches, know-how, etc. Since for non-commercial area brands and active support usually don't have sense as a remainder we've got a project pattern.

Conclusion: due to its openness AHE can produce (or at least provide ground for extraction of) project patterns.

Connexions

A wonderful (and live) educational project: Connexions

Here is quatation from the web site

Connexions is an environment for collaboratively developing, freely sharing, and rapidly publishing scholarly content on the Web. It contains educational materials for everyone — from children to college students to professionals — organized in small modules that are easily connected into larger courses. All content is free to use and reuse under the Creative Commons "attribution" license .

And here is another resource:
http://www.euro-cscl.org/#about

This web site serves as a community site and resource of information for practitioners (teachers), researchers and school administrators in Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) field. Here you can find news and best practices from CSCL community, links to CSCL research, information about CSCL software tools and have discussions with other members of the community.

AtLeap and Ad-hoc

К определенному отрезку времени у относительно разных людей из относительно разных мест появляются весьма схожие идеи.

Андрей Гребнев эффективно совмещая Java программирование с научной деятельностью (что уже было отмечено Intel и Sun) разрабатывает Blandware AtLeap (

предназначен для создания как контентно-базированных сайтов, так и
интернет-приложений со сложной бизнес- логикой

), выступающий в качестве строительного элемента для

КНОС (коммуникационная
научно-образовательная среда) – это распределенный набор взаимодействующих
независимых типовых программно-информационныхкомплексов. В своей основе, каждый,
из которых представляет собой, с точки зрения хранения – архив документов, с
точки зрения систематизации – коллекцию документов, с точки зрения использования
– портал. Однако наиболее общим определением будет электронная библиотека. Итак,
КНОС – это подкласс электронной библиотеки, это распределенная система с
открытым доступом, объединяющая коллекции, сервисы и людей для поддержки полного
жизненного цикла создания, распространения, использования и сохранения
полнотекстовых научных публикаций, представленных в слабоструктурированной
гетерогенной форме.Распределенность и взаимодействие отдельных
программно-информационных комплексов поддерживается на принципах Инициативы
Открытые Архивы (Open Archives Initiative). Которая, по сути, является
протоколом сбора метаданных. Когда протокол используется в качестве поисковой
машины, то информация из отдельных архивов обрабатывается так, как будто бы она
взята из одного архива. К настоящему моменту данный протокол используют уже
более 70 архивов мира. В их число входит и один из наиболее крупных бесплатных
архивов arXiv.org содержащий более 200 тыс. документов по физике, математике и
компьютерным наукам.

The Initiative D21 of Germany

Thanks to Dr. Frank Stefan Becker for guiding me to The Initiative D21. As the site of this initiative says it is the Germany's largest public private partnership. More than 400 representatives of enterprises, associations, parties, political institutions and other organizations are currently involved, including board members from companies such as Alcatel, AOL, Cisco Systems, debitel, IBM, Microsoft, Siemens and TNS Emnid. Full list see here.

The shared goal of all those involved is to improve the general conditions necessary to move successfully into the information and knowledge society and to make Germany more internationally competitive and ready for the future.

The Initiative D21 is organized into four subject areas ("steering groups"):

• Education, Qualification and Equality of Opportunity
• eGovernment/ Security and Trust in the Internet
• Information and Communications Technologies in Healthcare
• Growth and Competitiveness, with the focal issues of broadband and the mobile society

Launched in 1999, the Initiative D21 is a registered non-profit association with no commercial interests. It is funded from membership fees and donations and has its head office in Berlin. Its Managing Board consists of 25 members and is chaired by Thomas Ganswindt, a member of Siemens AG's Corporate Executive Committee.

I've browsed the English presentation (PDF 425 KB), unfortunately the main content of the site is German. The initiative looks similar in some aspects to AHE idea. And their experience seems to be very useful, especially from organizational point of view.

Free SW in Higher Education

28-29 января 2006 прошла конференция «Свободное программное обеспечение в высшей школе».

Много чего интересного. Например доклад Кирилла Маслинского (СПбГУ, ALTLinux) "Профессональные потребности филолога и свободное программное обеспечение". Это к той проблеме, что нужны открытые междисциплинарные проекты.

Open Learning Support

Thanks to Computerra, a weekly periodical that is published in Russia (outstanding reading!) I've found (the mentioned article "Education of the future: waiting for the evolution") one another implemented educational concept: Open Learning Support that is running in integration with eduCommons . OSL allows to find people who are can be contacted on issues of materials studied. So the idea is to forge communities of interest in particular areas (subjects, etc).

In the article there is a lot of very useful links e.g. Will Richardson's blog www.weblogg-ed.com on stuff related to innovation in education (using blogs, wikis and podcasting in education, "read/write web" idea, etc.)

Education of the future

До важных материалов в «Компьютерре» я как всегда добираюсь с большой задержкой. На сей раз это статья Ильи Щурова «Образование будущего: в ожидании революции», №43 от 24 ноября 2005 года. Замечательный обзор существующих инициатив и тенденций в области « Школы 2.0» (видимо, термин введен автором). Цитировать ничего не буду (по крайней мере, в этом посте) – статью лучше целиком читать.

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Another Missed aspect

В результате общения с Иваном Михайловичем Григорьевым (зам. декана физического факультета СПб ГУ, председатель …) всплыл еще один очень важный и упущенный момент (как в концепции, так и в статье), на который в свое время указывал Сергей Науменко:

«Можно попытаться наладить массовую связь с преподавателями, например, чтобы они проводили учебные задания как курсовые, лабораторные и дипломные работы…)» внутри (в контексте) АНЕ.

ФизФак может себе позволить работать со студентами на индивидуальном уровне, да и по-другому с их спецификой хорошего результата не получить. А вот в обычных вузах, на обычных факультетах (думаю, я имею в виду в основном технические) нет такой возможности (да, особенно, индивидуальный подход и не предполагается). В таких случаях курсовые обычно выглядят как одинаковое для всех задание с различными вариантами и различными численными исходными данными. Что при нынешней ситуации часто приводит к тому, что можно скачать с сайта какой-нибудь группы уже готовый doc файл с отчетом, а свои численные данные подставить в уже готовый файл математического пакета (MathCad,
например), или даже в excel-файл. В ближайшее время всем станет очевидно, что такая методика оборачивается полной профанацией процесса обучения и нужно менять устоявшуюся практику (хотя значительный контингент, как студентов, так и преподавателей такая практика очень даже устраивает). АНЕ может помочь в поиске и организации более новых (и вполне конкретных) альтернатив.

В моем собственном (и моих знакомых) студенческом опыте поминаемые шаблонные (и, как правило, устаревшие) курсовики не раз удавалось заменять на альтернативные, интересные для обеих сторон задачи. Можно предположить, что со временем ведение (написание) дипломных работ, и возможно даже диссертаций (как, впрочем, и продвинутых
курсовых) в режиме open project (open work…, ну как-нибудь вот так) станет хорошим тоном и популярным способом показать, что производимая деятельность, самим автором воспринимается не только как работа во имя получения зачета, той или иной бумажки или звания.

Среди таких проектов проведение конкурсов становится более простым, очевидным и благодарным (экономически-целесообразным) делом.

What is it in fact?

There are people with particular problems and ideas.

There are people who know what to do to solve particular problems and to make ideas reality.

There are people who know how to do to solve particular problems and to make ideas reality.

There are people who will do things to solve particular problems and to make ideas reality, according to knowledge the two groups above.

Ad-hoc Education can be the place where all these people work together.

Missed issues

Важные моменты, которые, я упустил как в концепции, так и в статье.

Аспект 1

В своем комментарии к одной из первых версий концепции Сергей Подузов, автор системы www.neurosyst.com отметил, что кроме очевидной нехваткиИТ-кадров, так же имеет место проблема отсутствия специалистовмеж-дисциплинароного уровня:

At the same time the labor market has lack of qualified professionalsnot only in the field of IT but also in other interdisciplinary areas.For example specialists having skills in modern approaches to analysisof financial markets, risk management, management of complex systemsand organizations, etc.

По моему мнению, среда Ad-hoc Education, во многом благодаряпроектно-ориентированному подходу способна восполнять такиемеж-дисциплинароные пробелы.

Аспект 2

От Олега Простопопова (oleg dot prostopopov at gmail.com):

Группа А, теоретико-информирующая
Я бы добавил информацию такого рода: ссылки на предметы базовогообразовательного курса и указать на возможности применения этих знанийв тех или иных областях. Так как любое дополнительное образование будет более эффективно, есливберет в себя наработки базового. Они смогут друг друга обогащать. Как мотивирующий фактор – повысить показатели в базовых предметах. Также может дать толчок к самостоятельной работе в области образования инаписанию методической литературы для следующих учащихся. (Любой полезный опыт должен аккумулироваться и повторно использоваться)

Пример: мат. анализ - выход на формирование фракталов, расчет3-мерных изображений, … другие современные задачи, основывающиеся набазовом теоретическом курсе.

Группа B, практико-мотивирующая

3.Подчеркнул бы возможность создать подсистему, помогающую людям изразных вузов найти друг друга по интересам и работать вместе накаком-то проекте. Например, рядовой студент выбирает из списка темы,интересные ему, и в результате получает рассылку новых проектов,семинаров и т.д., которые релевантны выбранной им тематике.

Co-operative learning

I’ve been delighted to see the exact wording of my suggestions that were in a base of ad-hoc education idea by notable education innovator as Dr. Karl Winklmann of College of Engineering and Applied Science University of Colorado at Boulder.

Quotation from University of Colorado site:

"Co-operative learning," as described and advocated by Karl Smith and others. (See Johnson, Johnson, and Smith, Active Learning: Cooperation in the Classroom, Interaction Book Company, ISBN 0-939603-14-4.)
Learning by doing, by carrying out projects.
Students learn by teaching, and they can be the best teachers.
Related to the preceding points: "just-in-time" learning, or "learning on demand."
A common thread in all of the above ideas seems to be the notion that learning is knowledge construction, not knowledge absorption.


Other stuff is placed http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~karl/education_committee/inventory_college.html. The notable thing is that these notes are dated 1995.

Will Universities become extinct?

In the presentation for 21st ICDE World Conference by Terry Hilsberg named “Will Universities become extinct in the Networked World?” among other themes the low end disruption by internet upon higher education industry is discussed. One of the most interesting conclusions (at least to me because of having the same thoughts before) is:
“Value will be moved to assessment and support from content. Pay for examinations and academic support not content”.

Ad-hoc Education in PC Week/RE

PCWeek/RE опубликовал статью про Ad-hoc Education. Огромное спасибо всем, кто соучавствовал на всех предыдущих этапах перед этой публикацией.

Global University System

Thanks to Roman Schastlivtsev I searched for any similar ideas to ad-hoc education in scientific domain. I mean I looked through scientific publications. The stuff that I've found on the surface: Global University System.

From one of the available abstracts on this system:

The Global University System (GUS) is a worldwide initiative to create telecommunications infrastructure for access to educational resources across national and cultural boundaries for global peace. GUS aims to create a worldwide consortium of universities to provide the underdeveloped world with access to 21st Century education via Internet technologies.

The GUS works in the major regions of the globe with partnerships of higher education and healthcare institutions. Learners in these regions will be able to take their courses from member institutions around the world to receive a GUS degree. These learners and their professors from partner institutions will also form a global forum for exchange of ideas and information and for conducting collaborative research and development with emerging global GRID computer network technology. The aim is to achieve "education and healthcare for all," anywhere, anytime and at any pace.

A lot of ideas there seems to be great. But unfortuntely I have not found any progress on this activities (maybe I tryed in too glance way).

South Africa Example

In the interview with Taddy Blecher by Peter Day on BBC World Service I've heard about a very radical and simple idea (and the implementation) of a University that runs on no money.
A news article - "University for South Africa's poor" on this topic is here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4092130.stm

The article begins as follows:

Five years ago, from his office in Johannesburg in South Africa, without any university buildings, courses or staff, he began faxing out a letter of invitation to 350 schools.

He asked the brightest and poorest students to apply for a new university - and promised them the "best business education in Africa".

This was going to be South Africa's first free university, created to serve talented youngsters from the poor black communities who could never afford to send their children to the established universities.

The letter struck a chord - and because the only address on the letter was the place where Dr Blecher was working - would-be students began gathering outside the plush consultancy offices.

Draft Concept: English Edition V2.5

Self-organizing Education Environment (Active Ad-hoc Education)

Motivation

CIS (former Soviet Union) Region
The speed of changes in IT & telecoms makes it very difficult to define education standards and programs in non-fundamental disciplines. The State (especially in countries like Russia) has no ability to set directions in this area. Meanwhile the industry shows strong growth every year. Accordingly the need of qualified employees grows too. The current situation is that the number of advanced students (who do not rely on the University program and practice self-education) cannot satisfy companies’ needs anymore. What’s more, there is no culture among students to investigate what knowledge and skills will be expected (e.g. by reading job postings). Moreover, demographic issues are going to start affecting the labor market in the nearest years. So to allow further development and save (secure) competitiveness of the region (cost of workforce and high professional level) the business should play an appreciable role in educational process, which could be done in some aspects without spending many resources on it (that is now possible as a result of new technologies).

Worldwide
It seems that the lack of IT professionals will remain for years in all parts of the world (including EU and USA). At least if we do approximation basing on the previous times. There are also countries where the situation is similar to Russia.

System concept
An online environment can be established which will allow to create and boost positive processes. Business publishes what knowledge and experience it expects from graduates (in the near perspective of 1-3 years and middle-term of 4-6 years). Sometimes it is not so easy even for the technology leading companies to precisely predict areas that will emerge, but they've got strategy planning teams and there are market research agencies. They can put their vision. It could be more valuable for students when not the government institutes, but the top companies and the brightest local ones say what to learn and what to do. Because companies give jobs and they (at least in theory) know what they need. Usually companies (but not government) are considered as employers.

The environment should contain:

1. Scope of areas to learn with appropriate resources to study (recommended books and online materials – only links, not content)
2. Common actual tasks (Linux installation, apache configuration, punching UTP cable, make a floor plan in AutoCAD…). Such a list could help with orientation – which areas are interesting to dig out and which are not. Practice is very essential. It is boring to study without playing with real things.
3. Open, non-critical for the current business tasks which companies post on the system (e.g. small tools development, beta-testing, process optimization, playing with frontier technologies, light research, market research even in non-tech areas). It is all interesting to play in a sandbox but it cannot always drive mad with enthusiasm. Contact with the real world is important. Curiosity should be maintained by real world tasks
4. Enthusiasts search for enthusiasts. Posts of ideas to implement. (E.g. a professor searches for student(s) to implement his/her idea e.g. a test model creation or developing some software). This feature could attract people who have the same needs and interests and some free time and experience.
5. Enthusiasts search for a serious task. A team with relatively comprehensive skills (4-5 year at the University) looks for an interesting project (idea) to implement within area they already got some experience.
6. Some business incubator function (seeding startups). Projects started in the environment could evolve into new original businesses.
7. For relatively complicated tasks the system’s engine should support some project management functionality (that supports online collaboration, project tracking, documents management; allows integration (at least links) with other new systems like sourceforge.org, blogs, wikis etc). It is important that the environment should establish proper project management culture.
8. Rating system - E-Bay alike (task openers and task doers rank each other). Companies with good history will attract more attention, as well as a student with few successfully done projects will be the top candidate for many employers. Ratings of areas of knowledge, skills and standard tasks also could be started.

Content of features #1 and #2 is a consolidated result of many participants. From the other hand could be useful an ability for a particular team in a particular department of a particular company to post its own list of desirable knowledge and skills that are required. Such customized lists can be interesting for the students who target particular companies and particular areas.

The main goal of the environment is to promote this active ad-hoc approach to education and to form the environment that boosts use of it. The environment should attract and involve people by showing interesting examples.

The proposed system possesses a property of self-organization, the system that inherently has an ability to catch new directions and trends. It does not matter what the area it is: IT, power generation or economics. The more new knowledge and experience emerge, the more projects that required them are posted on the system and more buzz for these areas appear. As a result, more people will face emerging areas. And this is what we need in fact. There is no task to swap existing institutes (the Universities, high schools etc.). The system concept is an attempt to catalyze a parallel and independent process, the process that could in time adapt to any changes that appear at high speed. Futurists predict that 25% of the jobs available by the year 2025 will be in positions unknown today.

The environment of that kind has more chances than ever before since the very special knowledge, devices and software look as features of the past century and technologies which are common and posses open nature here come to stay. More and more study materials, documentation and SW are available for free via Internet and the only hardware needed in the most cases is a PC (better 2 or 3 networked) and its standard off-the-shelf periphery. The second reason is that the Internet (forums, wikies, blogs) allows acting in ‘one to many’ mode. There is no need to waste time explaining a task for each who is interested. An explanation that is done once is in use for everyone. And of course online collaboration will play a great role.

An important thing is openness. In this context - anyhow the way the process goes it should be visible – intermediate results and current project state must be reflected (presented) in the system. At least the minimum that must be shown are a task definition - 'request for result' and results - what was done, how it was. The best case is when all interim, support and final documents, negotiations, time tables etc (i.e. the whole history of a project - are available for public access (directly on server or links to external places). Possible gradations of openness: totally open, …, closed research (only area of task and opinions on results).

Involved parties

• Companies (employers)
• Students (employees), enthusiasts
• Recruitment companies (they get a resource to trace bright candidates on early stages, meanwhile such companies could coordinate activities within some components of the system)
• Publishing houses (just to sell more books and periodicals, from their part some information support could come)
• Market research agencies, consulting companies (can play roles of mediators and coordinators)
• Venture funds

Benefits for employers

• Recruited people already shaped (at least they’ve got an idea) to current activities at company
• Gain overall students’ competence level
• Tasks which were done successfully
• Reaching talent people from regions
• Company’s promotion (making positive image)

Benefits for students

• Gain motivation and get broader view in current technologies and labor market requirements
• Opportunity to understand what is interesting to work with and what is not in fact before any full-time contracts (before going into industry)
• Actual knowledge and experience
• Opportunity to get grants, part-time contracts via the system
• Opportunity to get over geografical borders in some cases

Implementation
Web-based platform, maybe with offline clients. Not to create implementations of existing tech engines, to integrate them or just use in the current context (maybe use external blogs, wikies, CVS (sourceforge.org), instant messaging systems etc.). Cashing information from external resources is possible. Among the known existing open (GPL) engines NetProjectJournal looks the most suitable (see here: http://www.npj.ru/node/english_description). Unfortunately, it’s still under development although it’s already usable. The other strategy is to adopt loosely coupled architecture using free services provided by other systems.

The whole engine of the system should allow activities related not only to technical stuff but maybe economical, social, culture, art. The environment should be allowed by its born to evolve into something like a project fabric (forum, market, mall…).

Inspirations
Open source (www.sourceforge.org , www.osdl.org, code.google.com/summerofcode.htm ),

Open hardware (www.opencores.org, www.openhardware.ru, www.openhardware.de, http://opencollector.org/Whyfree/),

shared R&D idea (an article in Financial Times http://www.rand.org/commentary/082504FT.html ),
www.wikipedia.org, www.wikibooks.org, www.iec.org, http://creativecommons.org/education/,
www.intuit.ru, www.e-graduate.ru, www.respublikaidei.ru, www.e-generator.ru, www.firststeps.ru.

Examples of tasks to post

• Write a tool to analyze (compare etc) logs
• Deploy Jabber infrastructure (for 50 workplaces)
• Develop a small DB
• Build cluster on old computers
• Deploy an open source ERP (in University)
• Make IT audit - define scope of work. Team that successfully finished a project can define scope of work for another project.
• More broad initiative: digital home open architecture (protocols, components, SW & HW implementation, accent on standard components, old HW reuse)

Other issues (additional comments)
Companies with well established processes could be more interested in the first two components of the environment, while for chaotic and stingy companies the main interest could be in the remaining parts.

To establish and maintain the core system functionality a forum (consortium) of international and local companies could be formed. It is especially important for local companies to gain average level of graduates, since global players have more abilities to attract the most interesting people.

The very important thing is strong and aptly targeted marketing of the environment.

The system should not be considered as a profitable business, it is rather a strategic social/technological project to develop the ground for further ICT industry growth. Nevertheless if the system works well, points of profit could appear.

The system must not be targeted only at high-school and university students. It could also be a resource for retraining.

Companies make students and techies competitions. All that is known after a competition is often only names of winners. Conditions, results and maybe some intermediate stuff could be placed at the server. In this case distributed teams can be involved.

I classify students into 3 groups (it’s a very rough and subjective division based situation in Russia). The question is how it correlates with the reality.

1. those who are interested in nothing (regarding to education)
2. those, who are interested. And they discover and dig out and study by themselves (in borders of standard educational programs and often far beyond the borders – in emerging areas). They not just attend lections and practice, they do a lot more.
3. Others (about 30% - 60%) could potentially be interested. But it’s hard to begin because it is not, of course, a trivial challenge (and there is no motivation often) – to take control on the education process.

And the idea is to help group #2 - give them a more focused roadmap and a playground for their activity. And to stimulate an incentive for group #3 - to show them that they could do things like those who are in the second group.

The second biggest problem for Russian

CNews сообщает:

Ассоциация "Руссофт" провела исследование "Рейтинг мер государственной поддержки экспорта продуктов и услуг в сфере ИТ". Данные о том, какая господдержка наиболее востребована отраслью разработки и экспорта ПО, были получены в результате опроса руководителей 33-х российских компаний-экспортеров. При этом меры господдержки были проранжированы в порядке значимости, а также была оценена целесообразность их применения.
...
Второе место [после снижения налогов] рейтинге значимости заняла поддержка подготовки кадров. Отсутствие партнерства между ИТ-бизнесом и системой образования не позволяет системе высшего образования воспроизводить недостающий ресурс. Кроме того, у ИТ-компаний существует нехватка и в профессиональном менеджменте. Недостаточная подготовка в области иностранных языков является еще одним барьером на пути развития экспорта индустрии.

Loosely coupled engine

As an option (I mean one of the possible implementation scenario) the Ad-hoc Education Environment engine may be just a pool (or a network, if you wish) of loosely coupled free services provided by other systems.
Is there a need for the own service that tights all other together or it's already non-mandatory?

As an example sketch (this post itself could be posted on npj.ru, somefreeWiki or rumored Google Base)
project: graphics for the Ad-hoc Education Environment

what is requested: any pictures that can help with promoting ahe and its visual design (logo, posters, banners, and even design concept and color schemes, pictures for navigation buttons etc.)

how to contribute: put your jpeg files to e.g. flickr as following user …

comments by reviewers could be posted at blog ahegraph.someblogsystem.com at this blog will also appear final results (what was selected for use)

to participate please register (if not registered yet) at someregister.com or otherregister.com

Wikiversity and wikicities.com

There are ideas that spur in the same time in different places. The concept I’ve named Ad-hoc education has some similar core ideas with the concept of Wikiversity. The brief info is presented at Wikipedia. At this time there is a temporary site where Wikiversity is placed.

Thanks to Danila Medvedev and consequently http://www.wikicities.com/ (especially to MetaCollab project by Mark Elliott) for guiding me to this project.