The BBC has reported on the University proctors using Facebook to track down students involved in “unruly post-exam pranks” as TALL is actually located in one of the Universities two main exam buildings we have more experience than most in what these involve….However for isthmus I think it is a telling example of why students may not want their online social spaces used for learning.
Category Archives: Projects
Scott Wilson: Using student-owned technologies in educational ict
Here’s an interesting article on PLEs from Scott Wilson. As you would expect from someone who was a core member of the CETIS team that looked into PLEs for JISC, and the person who originated the ubiquitous future VLE, it contains a lot of the ideas that have informed our thinking on Isthmus. However the comment that intrigued me, which I have not seen so explicitly elsewhere was
“On a more basic level, the use of commercial third-party services has risks, such as a change in charging, or even services disappearing completely, and so there could be a role for universities in offering a free secure archiving service to that students would never lose access to things they have published. It is also increasingly on the agenda of universities to make access to basic administrative processes and information available through multiple channels and devices, such as using mobile phones, iPod, and RSS feeds.”
These are all things we are looking into for Isthmus – we’re drafting the survey at the moment so it will be interesting to see what our (admittedly non-standard) students make of these sorts of ideas.
PLE Classification and Market Segmentation
Another post that touches on the ways we classify PLEs. Once the research we are doing into isthmus comes in I think it will be worth revisiting these and deciding whether the solution we decide to implement makes sense by these metrics.
The dangers of popularity in online communities
An interesting article about MySpace spam on The Register.
“In the beginning, MySpace was a place to meet new friends and get to know old ones even better by browsing their journals, photos and network of chums.
But soon, Viagra marketers, pedophiles and hackers latched onto MySpace and rendered it as ineffective as most other net-based public forums.”
Some MySpace groups have practically been killed off by spammers – and as we increasingly use websites and third-party web services in education, we have to consider how vulnerable online websites and communities can be.
In mitigation of the danger, MySpace is a big target, and I’m sure that it could do a lot more to improve the situation*, so it’s not the end of the online learning world – but do we need contingency plans to cope with one’s VLE being attacked? Do you have them already?
* MySpace rant unrelated to the security issues in the article: I really hate MySpace – the navigation makes no sense; I’ve told it I don’t want music to play automatically, yet it still does; you get the idea. As I’ve said elsewhere, the only good thing about it is that lots of people know about it, so it can serve as a crude search tool.
How do you personalise?
I have just read a very interesting post by Josie Fraser (always a good read) who has a great diagram which points up some of the implicit assumptions people make about PLEs without realising they are talking about completely different things. I think we need to clarify where Isthmus fits in this grid …as we may find some of our assumptions are not the same.
Of course not that Isthmus is necessarily trying to build a PLE…
Phoebe at CAL ’07
Liz Masterman is presenting Phoebe at CAL 07 – ‘Development, Disruption and Debate’ today, as part of a symposium, on Designing for Learning – revolution or evolution. Our paper is “Disrupt or co-opt? The role of a pedagogic planning tool in promoting effective design for learning.”
Some real data on Web 2.0 use
As part of the JISC funded ‘SPIRE’ project we ran a survey to try to discover which online services people were using and in what manner. We were interested to find out which services were popular and if they were being used for work, for study or socially / for fun. The SPIRE project was originally looking into the possibility of using peer-to-peer technologies in UK HE and FE for informal sharing but switched to a more Web 2.0 focus as it became clear that these types of services were already having an impact on the tertiary education sector. They also appear to be where most of the informal sharing and collaboration is currently taking place online.
The survey was advertised to the Department for Continuing Education’s online students and on the online courses marketing pages. We received circa 1400 responses which left us with a lot of data to analyse. I have processed this data in to a number of colorful charts which are in the PDF below.
I have already drawn a number of conclusions from these charts but have not included these thoughts in the PDF as I would be interested to know what others think the data might mean.
Results of the survey undertaken by the JISC funded SPIRE project (PDF)
For the full analysis of this data please download the final report here:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/digitalrepositories/spiresurvey.pdf
So many services, so little time…
At TALL we’re particularly interested in how the many forms of online collaboration might be used in education and educational institutions such as our own, and currently have a couple of projects touching the subject: SPIRE and Isthmus.
There has been something of an explosion of these services over the last few years, producing photo hosting, calendaring, bookmarking, mapping, and blogging sites just for starters. With so many of these various services to consider, we need a list of what they all are, and how they compare, complement, and compete with each other… and which ones should I use!?
Here are a couple of sites listing these services:
- http://www.allthingsweb2.com/
- http://www.econsultant.com/web2/ (less comprehensive, but easier to read)
Here’s a quick selection of those that easily come to mind…
Identity/authentication/login
- OpenID
- LID
- Yadis
Reputation/profile
- ClaimID
- Mugshot
- Last.fm
- jyte
- myspace
- http://twitter.com/
Photo hosting
- Flickr
- Zoomr
Blogging/journals
- Blogger
- WordPress
- LiveJournal
News/aggregation
- Digg
- Bloglines
- Google feeds
Bookmarking
- del.icio.us
- Ma.gnolia
- Stumbleupon
Meeting/calendaring
- iCal
- Renkoo
- planyp.us
Some provide multiple services, e.g. many profile services such as myspace provide some form of journal facility.
Phoebe – Phase 2
We have just heard from JISC that we definitely have funding for Phase 2 of the Phoebe pedagogic planner project which will involve a lot more evaluation of what we have done up to now and development of additional functionality. There will also be a big evaluation of new developments in the autumn so if you are interested in taking part, do get in touch with the team now, through the project wiki.
Isthmus: Linking the personal and institutional in learning technologies
TALL have been awarded funding by JISC for the two year Isthmus project looking at integrating user owned technologies with formal learning environments.
This is something we are all very excited about as it will give us a chance to implement some of the things we have been talking about in TALL, especially giving students an online presence between and beyond courses, with the time to make sure we do what really works for our students.