The solution to this miasma of browser quirks and hacking? Some people call them “RIAs”, or rich internet applications. You can do things in them that you can do in normal applications such as Word or on your desktop. Drag things around. Click on windows. Play videos. Record your voice. Show presentations. That sort of stuff. They run on remote servers, and you access them via your browser.

The whole notion of web-based apps really took off when people started taking a combination of html, the document object model, css, javascript and XMLHttpRequest, to create things such as Gmail and flickr. Of course, people had been doing this stuff since Microsoft originally put the XMLHttp activeX object into IE 5, and even before that using iFrames and other hacks, but circumstances contrived to make Gmail and other apps like it a minor buzz point; and so Tim O’Reilly coined the phrase “web 2.0″, a load of colourful logos were created, another coined the phrase ajax (“Asynchronous JavaScript + XML”, a word which is also the name of a household cleanser) and, with a general increase in jargon, controversy arose about the possibility of a new internet bubble.

But as more students, customers, colleagues, etc, have faster and faster internet connections web applications start to make more and more sense. Particularly when people want to collaborate over the ‘net. Indeed, some of the most useful applications simply wouldn’t make sense as anything else except server-based web apps: search engines, online collaboration software of most kinds, ecommerce sites, and so on. Indeed, the discussion is over bar the protestations of a few. Web apps are the future. No-one wants to support multiple code bases for Macs, Windows, Linux and so on (they’d rather support multiple browsers ). No-one wants to deal with boxes of software anymore. Punters don’t want to worry about upgrades, software installs and all that. And, for e-Learning, the punters are used to learning things from the internet and socialising using everything from mobile phones to internet forums. For web-based e-Learning, indeed for most applications, the web application is a given.

But programming web applications still makes grown men weep. Really great projects such as the dojo toolkit and prototype help a lot, but they are still in a nascent form. Dojo, for example, is really wonderful, with some AOP and some handy use of the functional programming possibilities of javascript and all sorts of other cool stuff – but it is still only approaching version 0.4. Google, of course, is in on the act with GWT, which actually tries the abstract the whole “ajax” hack behind a java library. Microsoft has it’s own thing: Atlas, all built around it’s ASP.NET platform. The problem is, no matter how good they are, they can’t expand the web application much beyond the limitations of the browser and the hackology inherent in it.

There is, of course Java web start as an alternative to all this javascript hackology. But that requires a large plugin to work and it just doesn’t work a lot of the time. How many people have had bad experiences trying to get applets to run? Quite a few. Although there is talk of making it smaller. And Adobe’s Flex, and the Apollo project, which makes use of the cross-browser Flash plugin, which I’ve written about before. And possibly something by Microsoft called XAML. And so the list goes on. In other words, there are a lot of buzzwords …

… and with buzzwords comes the traditional sound of buzzing, which addles the brain and makes programmers wish they were born in Age of Reason were Everything Just Worked. But … it doesn’t.

What does this mean for the typical e-Learning site? Major redevelopment. Why bother? Because as I’ve posted about before, as multimedia becomes more common on web sites we’ll need more sophisticated applications to make the most of it. Plus, a better UI is a better user experience, and by extension a better educational experience.

I remember seeing my first fast modem later in that period. It was a Netcomm Trailblazer. I stood in an office marvelling at how quickly the text appeared on the screen. It was a joy to behold. There were jealous oohs and aahs, but no thoughts of watching videos, listening to music or doing anything like that. It was only 14400 bps from memory. It was s.l.o.w. Almost one quarter the speed of, say, the average 56k modem that comes with a squealing aeroplane-fanned doorstop PC from KMart.

It really only started to be interesting to most when the world wide web appeared. And things started to feature pictures and text (courtesy of NCSA Mosaic amongst other things). Sure, email and other cool things might have had something to do with it too, but they’d been around sometime previously (email had existed since 1972). No, pictures and the www did a lot popularise the internet; in 1996, 56k modems started to make things look good by making pictures download slightly faster than watching a hard drive defragment itself beside a wall of drying paint. Most people didn’t want to ring up BBSs and type messages to other people who also rang up BBSs to talk about … ringing up BBSs, the computer subculture and miscellaneous topics on Usenet about odd things. They wanted to read news stories with pictures. Read about celebs. With pictures. And there was something else that involved pictures that we won’t go into. And they wanted to see lots of content from all over the place. So old fashioned BBSs all but died, and people began ringing ISPs to get on to the internet.

Next came the next smallest media type – music. And that only became viable when it was compressed into, amongst other things, the famous mp3 format. Small enough to download. And then there was the Napster phenomenon and all that legal malarkey as an entire industry realised it could be being visited by the grim reaper in the form of a cheeky, pimply teen in a Metallica t-shirt.

And then … moving pictures, in really small boxes that you squint at and then go for a coffee or herb tea or massage while you wait for the “buffering …” or “loading …” message to disappear. But even video of this kind has turned into something of a phenomenon. Youtube, the biggest of the video sites may not make much money, but it could be on to a good thing, or it may not.

According to The Age newspaper, quoting from an Accenture report:

Accenture said that, although predominantly younger consumers were driving changes in consumer behaviour, the trend could not be written off as a temporary fad.

“Change will only accelerate over the next 10 years as today’s youth gain purchasing power,” it said.

To address the trend, media companies would have to consider overhauling existing business models to offer more flexible ways of accessing content, Accenture warned.

“They must experiment with new channels of content distribution and new business models. In addition, they must provide the consumer with more of an editorial role in selecting, modifying and sharing the content.”

Of course, this is all predicated on people having fast enough connections to do all this. Once it’s cheap enough for the average punter to download and upload a given type of media easily, you see riots and ructions. Text and pictures changed the newspaper industry, the classifieds industry, and changed the culture of journalism, amongst other things. Mp3s changed the way music was promulgated, it changed the music industry forever. Video is in the process of changing the nature of TV, movie distribution and so on. Education will be shaken up by this sort of change, too; it is, in some respects, just a purveyor of various types of media too; classes can be delivered via video, scholarly articles can be distributed via services such as JSTOR, academics can write blogs, lectures can be recorded on video and streamed online, tutorials and classes can be conducted by video conference, and so on.

As E-learning develops, and as internet capacity increases, online education stops being just about fairly boring static content; it starts replacing some tutorial rooms and class rooms for some courses. The young people, who comprise a great many students, will be used to the new technology and happy to use it. The interesting question is: how long before this happens on a wide enough scale to start changing education a lot? And how long before it is much more fun and informative than going to, say, a stuffy old lecture or another boring tutorial? Or boring old high school? Or an an uninspiring tech college’s theory classes?

How long before the local University is also competing for students with the greatest and best from all over the world? Why attend a lecture about a topic by some lesser academic when you could watch the lady who wrote the book, so to speak, over the internet? And perhaps, attend, a video conference tutorial with her as a tutor with other students from all over the world? What if you could put together a load of different subjects and classes from different Universities to create courses? What if teachers start going freelance and offering their own courses from their own web sites?

It depends on the ubiquity of fast internet connections amongst students. It took from 1962, when the first widely available 300 baud Bell 103 was made by AT&T, to 1996 when the 56k modem was released, to go from 300 bits per second to 56,000. Now over 2 million people in Australia usually get between 256k and 1.5 mps using what is optimistically referred to as “broadband”, mostly using DSL. It is still relatively expensive, and most punters are limited by the amount of data they can download, but it’s getting cheaper.

So it seems likely bandwidth will increase over the next 5-10 years. ADSL2+ being the next big change-over. It gives much increased speeds: early adopters are seeing speeds of up to 24 Megabits per second. Good quality live e-Learning, voice over IP telephony, video on demand, and all sorts other multimedia will be possible at that sort of speed. But it’s some way off as a commonly used technology; in Australia it depends in many hard-to-assess factors, not least of which is the current debacle of Telstra. Just keep an eye on those “average punter” broadband uptake stats and the costs of serving content; the changes in education will follow.

But there is something else to consider, too. With all this bandwidth being downloaded in the future, someone has to serve it. It is a massive leap from providing some static files, some course notes, some pictures, some pdfs and the occasional mpeg to providing video conferencing, video on demand, and other services to students. The costs of bandwidth increase considerably. A University may have to serve, say, 8, or 20, or 100 feeds for a class. And receive a feed from each of those students too. Things can get out of hand quickly! It is as if you stopped driving around a scooter and suddenly started paying to fill a v8’s tank. So bandwidth costs for educational institutions will have to come a down a bit, too, before the new technology starts to be commonly used.

And as an aside, those who are the best (and cheapest) providers of the type of IT infrastructure required to cater for these students with broadband are not educational institutions. They’re people such as Amazon with its S3 service and its eccentricly named Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (or EC2), or possibly Google or other data centre specialists. As an aside, Google already have some great lectures online. People such as Amazon and Google can scale effectively to meet demand, Google can implement clever programming such as MapReduce. Organisations of their ilk can do things a typical educational institution’s IT department can’t.

Indeed, a great deal of educational institution IT infrastructure is unwieldly. It can’t just be moved to new systems such as EC2 easily to reduce costs. It has horrors such as Peoplesoft installations that eat small children instead. But as I wrote in another post, the same technical and social changes that are making e-Learning more important are also providing alternative ways of garnering qualifications. Those alternative ways of garnering qualifications will make the most of cheap IT infrastructure such as Amazon’s EC2. Traditional educational institutions will have to do the same, otherwise they will (technically) be less useful to students, and (price-wise) be relatively expensive.

In economic terms, educational institutions filter people with skills and limit the supply of those they qualify, thus maintaining the scarcity of qualified personnel. Thereby putting a market value on the qualifications – beyond what might apply because of a limited supply of talented people.

In the software industry, the same thinking applies. You can artificially create scarcity by controlling access to and so limiting the supply of software. This maintains profitability, just like limiting the number of people with qualifications maintains the value of your qualifications by limiting the supply of qualified folks on the jobs market.

Open source software development is based around a different approach. The notion is that anyone can read the source code of the software and, if they participate in the project enough, actually modify that code. In some ways, open source is an economic innovation – people work on it, but have no interest in maintaining scarcity. Value comes from increasing usage and participation, not limiting it. The more people make suggestions, the more people use the code, the better it becomes, the wider the pool of talent that is available to the project.

Sometimes projects stall or fail. Some succeed brilliantly. Sometimes egos clash, sometimes there can be political in-fighting, there are often technical disagreements, but, on the whole, open source works. The proof is in the software that has been written – millions and millions of lines of useful code that runs everything from operating systems based around Linux, complex web servers to word processors to Internet browsers such as Firefox, to languages such as Python or Ruby. The ‘net has allowed people to communicate easily, and the open source mode of public peer-review via the ‘net is now a rigorous, efficient and innovative model for software development. Everyone from IBM to Google participate. Not necessaruly for altruistic reasons, but for some good business reasons. Some more recent innovations such as Koders and Krugle, even aggregate this code into searchable databases.

From an educational point of view, the open source model is not just for writing software, but also for learning about how software is written. It gives people new to programming a way to see what the old pros do, to read the work of others and then contribute their own once it has reached a certain level of competency. A stint on an open source project is like an apprenticeship. Open source generates a lot of research, a lot of “how to” guides, a lot of discussion — in short, a lot of knowledge, as a result. By going through the apprenticeship you are “qualified”. The proof is in your publicly accessible work in, say, Krugle or in source code on SourceForge, and in the mailing lists archives at, say, Gmane.

By doing what they do online, in a peer-reviewed way, and contributing to functioning systems, open source programmers become “qualified”. Their quality as programmers is established by their online body of work. The results of their work is there for everyone to see. It is a fairly transparent and accountable process. The same could apply in other areas – web sites establish a reputation for quality, for example, as reviewed by other web sites. Writers the same thing. Services such as Technorati are examples of that process.

This somewhat anarchic new world isn’t perfect, of course, as many have pointed out. It is by no means a replacement for the pure, classical form of educational institution where eccentrics wander about in gowns and talk about topics only they know anything about. But in terms of more staid work qualifications, it is working. People from the open source world are being employed based on their work in open source software: often to carry on working in the same area. Google have done it, so have Microsoft, Redhat, Apple, and all sorts of other less well known companies. What does this mean? It means open source participation can get you a job. If it can get you a job by doing open source work, it is a qualification. After all, that’s the main point of the qualification, apart from adding letters to your name or making you sound important; to demonstrate that you know what you’re doing to an employer. But it’s a qualification that doesn’t come from an educational institution. To some extent, the existing system of academic qualifications has been bypassed.

The same approach could apply to other forms of education. Outside programming circles, the ‘net is also gradually turning into more than just a source of information, it’s turning into a social system, and, gradually, it is making a great deal of knowledge and networks of peer acceptance and review freely available to many more people. Flawed, but progressing. Web logs and other forms of peer-reviewed writing are examples. A great deal of that interaction can occur online – increasingly so with video conferencing, shared web sessions, and so on. For educational institutions, this means education – and the ways of garnering qualifications – are gradually turning open source too.

How so? Why couldn’t a journalist or an engineer do the same thing as an open source programmer – participate online, garner peer respect, do an apprenticeship and get “qualified”? Of course, scientists need to do experiments in labs, philosophers need time sitting around in Parisian cafes, amongst other things, engineers need to make sure their bridges stay up, but there’s no reason a great many of the functions of educational institutions won’t be gradually be rendered less important by online communities and new eLearning technology. Then, the economic innovation strikes – many more people with talent can garner qualifications in say, journalism, history, programming, science and parlay that into paid work via services similar to, say, rentacoder.com.

Then what happens to educational institutions? Some stay useful as filtering and research organisations, such as Oxford or MIT, but many less prestigious Universities start to see the value of their qualifications erode because there are more and more people getting jobs without them, having proven their stuff to the satisfaction of employers in the open source way. As more people with the talent and inclination enter the jobs market the supply of people with proven skills increases relative to the demand, the value of those skills – and related qualifications – goes down. Alfred Marshall would have recognised it and plotted it on a graph. Cournot may well have got there first.

Maybe existing educational institutions will start to suffer from “incumbent paralysis“. They will be unable to give up some existing income from the model of rationing qualifications so that they can create new business models around new technology; and absorb the new open source model of learning. But someone will. And the vital aspect of all this is how quickly eLearning starts to integrate traditional models of face-to-face education. And that has a lot to do with broadband uptake. But that’s for another day. I’ve probably already bored you enough already!