A nice article at The Register relating the complexity in building mashups that is sometimes forgotten.
Mosaic
We have recently heard that we have got funding for the Mosaic project which aims “to develop an online course, ‘An introduction to the earliest English literature’, and a standard induction unit to introduce students to learning online, from pre-existing content external to the University. The project will also develop guidelines and case studies, as appropriate, to disseminate the lessons learned both within the University and to the wider HE community.”
This is going to be a really exciting and challenging project for us – taking something we already do well, developing short courses in English literature but doing it using at least 50% content external to Oxford.
Anyone who has studied one of our online courses will know we already have a policy of using the best content on the web to support the learning process, so that will be nothing new, it is the extent to which we are going to try and do this, that will prove the real challenge. In our favour we are working with one of our most experienced academics ,Sandie Byrne, who has already written Critical Reading: an introduction to literary studies, Jane Austen, and many other excellent courses for us.
As well as producing a course which maintains the high standard of online learning we already have across all our offerings, we are also looking to explore the issues to be found around developing courses with reuse of content and to develop new approaches and best practice for ourselves and others in the University. At the moment I think key issues are going to be identification of content, the line between learning content and learning design and the ever present copyright and IPR. I am sure it will all become clear over the next few months and we will endeavor to keep you informed on what we learn.
Google ♥’s the social semantic web
The semantic web is making steady progress in the social networking sphere via microformats like XFN and FOAF, which provide standard ways to describe me, friend, and other relationships between websites – and by proxy, their owners.
Lots of websites and tools already support these (e.g. WordPress, ClaimId, last.fm), but there’s a lot of duplication of effort required from users with, for example, having to find and add your friends in multiple social sites – adding the same relationships multiple times.
Google’s Social Graph API looks set to help solve to this by providing an easy way to identify the relationships found in their index of webpages. Social sites can ask about any URLs a user gives (e.g. their blog), and the API it will tell them about any other URLs that relate to it via the microformats, and use those to link up all the user’s me pages, and set match up other users on the site who are identified as friends elsewhere.
This API, along with other efforts such as OpenSocial, really help the web’s network effect, and make it a lot more interesting and useful.
I don’t think we have any projects in TALL that will use these tools yet, so I think some of my next tasks for my band’s website with be to see if I can automatically a) set up some relationships, and b) push out gig listings from our database into social sites like MySpace…
Following Online Society Across Time and Tech
Below is a pitch for a research project that doesn’t exist yet because I can’t describe it properly. The ‘Open Social’ concept and Social Graph API seem to be a tech kind of response to the phenomenon I am attempting to outline. I can’t seem to find an academic tool/framework to help me though…
——————————-
The web continues to expand and diversify its capacity to support communication and collaboration. This is evident in the expansion and popularity of social networking sites such as FaceBook and communication tools such as Skype. The increase in groups that now straddle the real and the virtual is now having significant cultural impact. Individuals are increasingly part of a network of friends, acquaintances and colleagues that is distributed across multiple locations on and off-line.
These groups of distributed individuals are relatively new in form and are constantly changing in character as advances in online technologies provide new affordances which interplay with individuals aspirations to extend/refine their group and collaborate in novel and useful ways. Despite this being in a constant state of flux it is highly likely that individuals in the first world will be part of a distributed group for the majority of their lives. A 28 year-old in 2008 may have been part of an online group for over 10 years, a group that has morphed as that individual moved through a number of different life stages. The group is likely to have moved across a number of online technologies or environments and may exist across multiple environments at any one time.
Collaborative groups have been characterised in many ways, for example, Affinity Groups (Gee), Communities of Practice (Wenger) and Knotworks (Englestrom). Each theory describes different motivations, goals and structures of groups of people attempting to work together with some sense of shared participation. In each instance the theory in question is based on a particular area or type of collaboration or interaction for example fandom or institutional work. This is not to say that these theories are not applicable in a wider sense rather that their underpinning rational has a specific types or styles of groups. A similar bounding can often be seen in research undertaken in this area which is often focused on activities that take place within a particular tool or environment for example, Second Life, FaceBook or World of Warcraft.
It is increasingly important that we gain a better understanding of the phenomenon of the persistent distributed group, one which is not too closely tied to a particular style of interaction or type of technology. We are at a point in time where it is possible to trace the history of an individuals relationship with these groups, following that individuals changing relationship with other members of the groups they are part of and the technology involved. This would require investigating individuals motivations for being members of a group, their reasons for types and levels of participation and their changing perception of what constitutes the ‘real’ or what Castronova calls the ‘Semi-Permeable Membrane’ between online and offline worlds. The aim being to discover and map the underlying principles that are forming as online technologies facilitate the changing makeup of societies, becoming paradoxically more distributed and fractured while at the same time affording greater flexibility for communication and collaboration. In thinking about this it is important not to bounded by a single technology but to accept that many groups transcend specific technological advances or shifts and morph across the changing online environment. In this way a clearer perspective will be gained and a better understanding of the longer term implications and opportunities for society will be understood.
—————————
So there it is. I’m assuming that if you made it this far you are intrigued by the idea. Let me know what you think.
Blogging Phoebe
Interesting blog post from Ian Harford who was at our evaluation on the 14th. Titled “Learning Networks, Learning Design and Phoebe” it looks at Phoebe from the perspective of ACL and mentions some thoughts about future directions for Phoebe especially around the community aspects.
Evaluating Phoebe
Well after months of development and lots of talking to people in the design for learning community we finally started the process of evaluating the Phoebe pedagogic planner with practitioners, and at a first pass, gratifyingly seem to have created a tool that people want to use. Not that there weren’t lots of suggestions about how to make it better…..
As well as all the specific technical issues, a clear theme was the importance of the user community and how to support them. We had already given this some thought (and it is not as if there are not enough models out there to consider) but it is clear if Phoebe moves forward this is going to be one of the factors that most impacts on making Phoebe a tool that people want to use.
We are still in the early stages of our evaluation process at the moment, the session on Monday was mostly with practitioners from FE and ACL. We will be doing another two workshops in the next few weeks, the first with HE lecturers in Brighton and the second with student teachers in Swansea. We are also going to do a remote evaluation, so if you would be interested in taking part, letting us know what you think and shaping how we take the project forward, keep an eye on this blog for more information, or let me know by emailing me at marion.manton@conted.ox.ac.uk.
The Importance of the Cheesy Disco?
I have just returned from the Online Educa conference at which I was part of a symposium panel discussing Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVES). The session was entitled ‘No Life in Second Life’ and was a look at some of the current practices and issues around teaching in MUVEs. My 10 minutes was on the range of environments in Second Life from amphitheatres to ‘cheesy discos’. Each brings with it a set of cultural expectations and modes of use.
After the session the point was raised that the term ‘cheesy’ may not be universally understood by an international audience. What struck me about this discussion was not its content but the environment it was taking place in. We were attending the conference dinner and ‘entertainment’. The venue for this entertainment was an oversized, modernist hall on the ground floor of the hotel with floor to ceiling glass and orange up lighters. The view out of the 12 foot windows was of a stark courtyard containing a number of neat, isomorphic trees and plants. Inside, small groups of smartly dressed individuals stood round in clusters and made small talk while an untidy mass of energetic attendees executed a range of jerky dance moves with no overall style or pattern. The music was slick and very definitely middle of the road.
In short we were in a cheesy disco which appeared to have been designed as a re-enactment of many scenes in Second Life, certainly in architectural terms but also socially. Love them of hate them it struck me that this real life cheesy disco was an accepted part of the conference system and designed to help people to talk and network. For undergraduates the nightclub or union bar is an integral part university life. For online distance students there is no clear equivalent. As we experiment with MUVEs for teaching and learning will the cheesy disco in prove to be as important as the amphitheatre?
Reaching into the Web
As part of our JISC funded ‘Isthmus’ project we have launched a pilot Facebook group for students on our short online courses. The overall concept is to encourage a ‘community’ of students that exists beyond the run of any single course. It’s been running for 6 days now and so far we have 45 members (about 10% of this term’s students) and around 20 posts.
Keeping students on course
Although I am very closely involved in the development of all our courses, we have so many now that I can no longer follow them as closely as I used to when they finally go live. The course stops being the thing that the author, project manager, web developers, and I (as learning technologist) have laboured over and becomes something that is owned by the tutor (often, but not always, the author) and the students.
As an external observer you can dip in and get a sense of how things are progressing but it is not the same as visiting a course every day, getting to know everyone, and really being part of the course experience.
Unsurprisingly it sometimes feels odd guiding people in creating effective online learning when my “hands on” involvement is so much less than it has been in the past, so I am reduced to getting my affirmation that we are on the right track in other ways. Evaluation forms are always interesting reading (and we do monitor these very closely) but recently we got some very gratifying hard statistics that I had not personally seen before.
In continuing education funding is often predicated on the mysterious completion rates – i.e. it is not just the students who start your course but those who finish who are important to HEFCE….especially hard for us in our fully online courses (an area where completion rates can be VERY low) .
So to the meat – we got the latest stats and we are averaging a 91% completion rate, even more amazing is that this is higher than the face to face rate of about 85%.
Designing courses to encourage completion is something we have given a lot of thought to over the years and we have devoted a lot of our learning design energy in creating learning and assessment in such a way to keep students on-board and motivated. It seems that in 91% of cases it is paying off….
Have you thought about your thoracic cavity today?
UC Berkely is releasing videos of course lectures on YouTube (including Integrative Biology 131 – Lecture 05: Skeletal System) .
I don’t think there is anything particularly amazing about this from a pedagogical point of view, as it is just standing in front of a big room with chalk and talk – you could probably get the same facts from a text book. It’s reasonable to expect that lecturers can be more engaging and give more insight than studying a text book alone – but not necessarily true.
The most value here is in widening participation – these lectures could reach a lot of people. Combined with other online resources like Wikipedia, they can be used for learning with far less commitment (e.g. in time and money) than enrolling on an actual course.
Spread the knowledge 🙂