A presentation made to the EEE project in Valladolid, 14th November 2011, talking about ways of thinking about widget services, and describing work carried out in the iTEC and Omelette projects

1. The whys and wherefores of Wookie widgets
EEE, Valladolid November 14th 2011
Professor David (Dai) Griffiths
The Institute for Educational Cybernetics
The University of Bolton
D.E.Griffiths@bolton.ac.uk

2. What is Wookie, and why am I
talking about it?
● At IEC we have developed a technical infrastructure for the delivery of
services and resources using Widgets
● It is now in the Apache incubator, & has created a lot of interest in TEL and
in mobile telephony.
● It is a potential enabling technology for the orchestration for EEE
● I will not go into technical detail, which is available through Apache. I will
discuss four ways that I think about the usefulness of the infrastructure
● I hope that over the three days we can talk about
● If and how the technology I have described is relevant to EEE
● The research questions which are raised by the perspectives I offer

3. Four perspectives on Wookie
(& widget based services in general)
●
Non-exclusive perspectives which we can use to
understand why this generic infrastructure has
resonated, and what importance it may have as
– a learning design intervention
– an interoperability tool
– a support for teacher's orchestration of the classroom
– an articulation of institutional / personal technology
●
No implied hierarchy in the list

4. a) A learning design intervention
●
Common sense tells us...
●
some learning activities are better than others
●
we find ourselves enthused or bored
●
we achieve our objectives or we fail to make progress
●
This suggests we should we be able to...
●
identify activities which are effective
●
describe them
●
provide guidance instructional designers which will enable
them to create optimal courses
● Cognitivism, and constructivism are both problematic for
this approach

5. Koper defined the underlying
approach (building on Reigeluth)
“...learning design knowldedge consists of a set of prescriptive rules
with the following basic structure: if learning situation S, then use
learning method M, with probability P.”
● Situational, so distance learning is easier
● A good rule improves the probability of desired outcomes in a situation
● Probability is inexact, because it is situation dependent.
● Rules are not value free. People prefer certain learning outcomes and
methods above others.
● When alternative methods can be used, the learning designer has to
evaluate the various methods available and choose between them.

6. Orchestration of learning activities
●
Take the idea of learning rules
●
Formalise them (lots of issues here!)
●
Instantiate them in computer systems so that
they could orchestrate activities
●
IMS LD was intended to do this
●
It was the starting point for much of the work I
have been involved with over the past ten years

7. The technological problem...
An implemented rule has to be both
●
context free (abstracted, so it can be run
repeatedly)
and
●
context specific (so that it can make use of the
services which are available to each individual user)
●
How can this be achieved?
●
A number of groups worked on this in different ways,
but our solution was Wookie

8.  Wookie is a widget server for W3C widgets (reference
implementation), and largely compatible with Open Social
 Built by IEC by my colleagues: Scott Wilson, Paul Sharples
and Kris Popat
 Now in the Apache incubator, and building a wider
developer community
 http://incubator.apache.org/wookie/
 Developed for IMS LD, but the problem of generalisable /
localisable services had very wide application

10. How Wookie balances the general
and the specific
● Like any trade-off, the Wookie resolution to the problem
has costs and benefits
● A single server providing multiple services
● One integration for many services
● You choose your Wookie server, which has default
services on it
● Could be at the level of a University, a school authority, a
country, the world...
● Specify the server when you set up the course
● No guarantee you will find what you need, but set up of
Wookie and its services is simple
● A disk image available if you want to try it out. Contact me

11. b) Interoperability enables Wookie
to provide LD services
● Widgets are simple: HTML and Javascript, so they will run
in any browser. So does an LD player.
● Much widget content is delivered across the network, so
they provide a tunnel between environments which can be
used to provide services from a single source to multiple
consumers
● We added multi-user capabilities, roles and server side
data storage to enable more sophisticated functionality
● Delegated authentication to the container

12. Interoperability generates
applications for Wookie
●
As a matter of policy and convenience we used
interoperability specifications: W3C widgets
●
We ensured that our extensions of the specification
were aligned with the W3C
●
We positioned Wookie as an open source reference
implementation for W3C widgets, and successfully
applied for admission to the Apache Incubator
●
As a result Wookie could be used in many environments
and platforms, for many purposes
●
The system we developed for IMS LD is now a focus of
quite different research and development activities

13. Thanks to Chuck Severence

15. c) Support for teacher's
orchestration of the classroom
●
Learning design hoped to help the teacher by
off-loading the responsibility for orchestration
onto the computer
●
An alternative approach is to provide systems
which amplify the teachers ability to orchestrate
the classroom
●
A different balance between planning and
response to evolving situations

16. The educational environment is
highly standardised...

We have a standard curriculum

We have professionally produced learning
materials

We have pedagogic guidance and inspection

And with IMS LD we have a standard way of
analyzing and specifying activities

17. … but we still have “great teachers”
and “bad teachers”

We give them awards, and we fire them

We ascribe the difference to “inspiration”,
“personality”, “experience”. But it often seems to
be some kind of magic teacher dust

This may (or may not) be
OK for traditional
classroom teaching

But when we design
computer systems we
have to be very explicit
http://www.anthonyshome.com/images/Monica%20&%20Karla%27s%20Party/Karla%20Gets%20The%20Magic%20Dust.JPG

18. A working hypothesis: teaching as
modulation of activity and discourse
 The “magic dust” is composed of coordination and micro-coordination
of activity and discourse
 It is too detailed to show up on IMS Learning Design and similar
activity designs
 It is not well understood, even by teachers...
 ...but good teachers have a good rhetoric applied at this level and
deployed on-the-fly
 If so, how can we
– describe it?
– identify it?
– analyze it?
– support it with computer systems?
 Wookie provides a means of exploring these questions

19. iTEC
●
iTEC: large scale pilots to promote innovative
use of IT in the school classroom
●
Wookie delivers services across platforms
●
Scenario is a Learning Story, supported by a
Learning Activity Resource Guide
●
Like an LD environment & activity instruction
●
Leaving the teacher to carry out the
coordination

20. Moodle example
● ITEC target enviroments include LRN, Liferay, Moodle
● The VLE is a means of controlling access to a set of services
● Resolves problems of legality and complexity for teachers adapting Web
services in the classroom.
● The same widget, the same instantiation, can exist in multiple locations and
platforms (whiteboard, phone, PC, tablet...)
● The widget can be controlled by the teacher who can 'position' learners (in
Harré's sense) with tools which are 'to hand'
● Change state learner's device or access to resources (e.g. widget simulation)
● Provide learners with opportunities for collaboration (forum, shared text...)
● Enable learners to provide input (e.g. a clicker, vote...)
● Enable learners to control devices (embedded widgets? remote control?, RFID /
near field...?)
http://itec-moodle.eun.org/course/view.php?id=9

21. http://zope.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott/blogview?entry=20090612190435

23. ITEC App Store
● The iTEC services and resources need to be
● Stored somewhere
● Described
● Curated
● Made available
● The iTEC App Store does this
● Major effort, in collaboration with ROLE and OU UK
● removing widget management from Wookie
● revising the APIs
● developing the new App store server
● Working prototype, full release summer 2012

30. d) Articulation of the institutional /
personal
● The idea of a Personal Learning Environment originated with
Oleg Liber and his collaborators in IEC Bolton
● Technology is increasingly in the hands of the learner, not
just the institution
● The institution provides services which can be consumed
and amalgamated by the learner at their choice of
● time
● place
● Platform
● But we didn't want to build one

31. Omelette
● Uses Wookie, but not in eLearning: mobile mash-ups combining web
and telecoms
● Provides functionality which move us towards “PLE” style services
which are situated in the users own environment
 Wookie can provide the same instance to a number of different
platforms. The same chat with the same participants can be in your
blog on Moodle and on your phone
● IEC is working on
● Wookie
● Mash up definition software
● Specification for collections of widgets and their display
● Apache Rave, a lightweight container for widgets

32. Rave

33. Some Omelette widgets
Some widgets from Scott Wilson
● International Campus Education - Students Map
● Video (back to coordination)
● Monstermath
● Widgets working with the phone
● Phone poll
http://demo.ict-omelette.eu/wookie/
http://labs.cetis.ac.uk/

34. Some final comments
● Widgets are just one strand in a number of interwoven
technological developments, including
● HTML 5
● Websockets
● NodeJS
● I have related the technology to education, but educational
certainties are also being challenged
● In IEC we move in an ongoing dialogue between these two areas
● How we model the causal efficacy of our interventions and their
different aspects is a major challenge
● Not a proposed 'truth about widgets' but a suggestion for
approaching a discussion of the technology

35. Gracias por su atención
D.E.Griffiths@bolton.ac.uk