I just had a meeting with Tom Smith of Other Media has been working with Ultralab to facilitate online collaboration between folks in NZ and in the UK using blogs.
Other Media are website builders who get involved in a variety of projects such as Hyper Island School of New Media Design in Sweden.
Tom has worked on think.com and spinalot and an online living newspaper project.
Sakai is an Open Source Course Management System that has the potential to unseat Blackboard and WebCT from major Tertiaries. It has US$6.8M funding and follows open standards and a “community source” model for “the purposeful coordinating of work in a community”.
Sakai is a collaboration between the University of Michigan, Indiana University, MIT, Stanford, the uPortal Consortium, and the Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
It is integrating four existing existing projects to produce a set of interoperable modules.
Open Source eLearning Content Management System Moodle is gaining a strong user base in NZ. It has its own hosting and consulting company moodle.co.nz and is the focus of the Moodle Moot conference.
Yesterday I attended a presentation at CORE of the Review of the recently completed T4T4T project. This was a research-oriented pilot of online community of practice for teaching staff at the four major tertiary institutions in Canterbury.
It is encouraging to see the extent to which online collaboration is being embraced in this sector and the richness of the learning gained through this pilot. I recommend reading the review when it is released.
Some questions emerge for me.
While T4T4T clearly shows that it is possible to increase the opportunity for participation among tertiary teaching staff, it seems that the motivation to do so remains at best variable. The increasing incentives for the NZ tertiary sector to focus on research does little to encourage it. What can be done to develop a culture of development in teaching and learning in this area? One idea raised at yesterday’s meeting is encourage research into subject-specific teaching.
The pilot also shows that there is some interest in teaching and learning among tertiary staff. I would be interested to hear of any research as to what these folks are doing already to act on that interest. If we are to invest in encouraging this, would we be better to create new communities or to encourage and teach people to join ones that are already there - or simply to start their own?
Elgg is an open source “learning landscape plaftform. It supports a social constructionist approach to eportfolios where learners link their ideas and interests with others’ as they evolve.
You can tag your interests and it shows you who else has the same interests. You can create individual and group blogs. Everything is linked by tags. Everything speaks RSS.
Strangely, there is no link to “home”, even on the logo at the top left.
[Added:] Is “eLearning” software becoming generic social software? This makes sense to me because we’ve built GroupServer to be a generic collaboration server. Even thought the original client for it is an eLearning provider, it has met their needs from the start.
Content is content, conversations are conversations. Groups and people are what they are.
In a meeting of eLearning specialists the other day, I rashly declared that the most powerful eLearning technology useed by my 12 year old daughter is texting (SMS) on her cellphone.
I said it in an attempt to provoke some controversy but to my suprise, people nodded their agreement. As I reflected on it, I realised that it is true. Despite the terrible interface, Elsie sends over 500 text messages per month and, presumably receives just as many. It’s all socialising with her friends but isn’t that one of the most important things for her to be learning to do? And, given that access to and literacy with this technology is increasingly ubiquitous, why shouldn’t it be used for other learning areas?
My son Ed has recently acquired an iRiver. For now he’s using its 5 gigs for expanding his musical awareness but he could easily carry his homework around on it.
Now, a report prepared by education.au for the ACT Department of Education and Training suggests that cell phones and iPods will soon be core accessories for learners. It’s called Emerging Technologies: A framework for thinking (900kb PDF).
Yahoo! Answers allows participants to ask and answer questions and to rate the answers, contributing to the reputation of the answerers.
It has categories but why not tags?
Would this work inside an organisation? Will it work here?
A lot of the questions look more like discussion-starters than Q&A candidates, to me. How does this do more than a good conversation medium with rich metadata?
Should I be asking these questions at Yahoo! Answers?
Last weekend, I was privileged to participate in a weekend Symposium in Waiheke. It was convened by Lisa Galarneau and John Eyles of the EON Foundation to further the Neosophy notion that they have been exploring. It was a delightful and stimulating experience. The venue, setting and food were wonderful and the participants were diverse, stimulating and lively.
The question that we explored was the relevance of the digital age to the five competencies that have been cooked up by the OECD and are being adopted into the NZ curriculum.
Here are some things that I learned on this weekend…
Not everyone is as optimistic about the online world as I am. To some people, the idea of deep human contact occurring online just doesn’t make sense. To them, the idea of people substituting online relationships for physical ones is appalling. Collaboration in MMORPGs seems like people “ganging up and killing things”.
I got to thinking about the notion of positive feedback received from a computer (say in a single player game) being somehow as nourishing as that received from people. It seems slightly shocking, even to me. What about the self-esteem building that can occur shooting baskets in the yard or hitting a fence-post with a stone? Of course, the inanimate objects are simply mediating social phenomena. Stone-throwing was once (and in many places still is) a highly valued survival skill. Shooting baskets can provide entry to the good team which then gangs up to try to beat the others.
Have you ever noticed how cut-throat sport is? Sure there’s collaboration within each team but there is no second prize at the end of the game. It often horrifies me how even kids’ teams will keep racking up goals when they are obviously mismatched with their opponents. And it horrifies me, the callousness with which players sacrifice pawns and even bishops in the abstraction of war on the chessboard.
To me, the gore of killing monsters in a computer game is actually less shocking than some of those things.
I am not an unqualified optimist, however. I know that psyberspace is a boundaryless and uncertain place. I know that inhumanity can occur here as much as humanity can. One area that particularly concerns me is the shortage of public space on the Web. OK, I can blog here and you can come and go. This is pretty close to public. My photos, however are on flickr and I don’t know that I could get them out. OK, I’ve got copies but not of my tags. My daughter spends lost of time on MSN where she has photos, blog posts and message archives (though I don’t think she can access those). To her it’s all free and just works. What is the price that she pays?
I want to use our software to build public spaces, a commons on the Web. I want it to be as easy to take your content out as it is to put it in. I want people to stay because they want to and not because they are locked in.
OK, there are ideas for some other posts here but this is what I have returned from the Symposium thinking.
This morning I attended a CORE session presented by Gina Revill of Ultraversity. Ultraversity provides what they think is the world’s only degree course that is 100% online and 100% research-based. It is a BA (hons) in Learning, Technology and Research targeted towards people who would otherwise not typically participate in tertiary education.
The course has literally zero content and zero face to face. The first cohort are completing their final requirements at present. Amazingly, only 40% of enrollees dropped out, the staff have not burned out, and Ultraversity hasn’t run out of money.
The “researchers” (students), typically mid-career in jobs like Teaching Assistant, participate in communities of practice along with “learning facilitators” and guest subject matter experts. Their “action inquiry” and “critical reflection” processes typically involve activities relating to their work contexts, and peer review in small groups.
It’s pretty cool that this kind of thing is succeeding. While I am excited about enquiry learning, and how similar it is to the learning taking place in organisations, the questions that jumped out for me were about online participation in general.
Firstly, this course has genuinely created engaging social contexts with no face to face. Of course it doesn’t work for all but those who stayed seem to have had a rich experience. The 100% online approach does not seem to have been an impediment to this. In fact, Gina actually suggested that, in some ways, the online environment creates a more intense social experience than face to face. Everything you “say” is recorded, including if you do not respond. You may have more time to respond but the readers have all the time in the world to evaluate your reply.
Secondly, Gina suggests from her experience that the key to successful online participation is facilitation. Now, I know the value of facilitation. We try to make sure that each online group has a Participation Coach and that that person is trained and supported. We also provide an eCampus where 700 post-graduate learners collaborate actively online with no facilitation whatsoever. And I know that, with all the facilitation in the world, an online group with a bad design will not succeed. Where I wonder are the research and conversations about the relative impact of design and facilitation on the participation that takes place? And, under what conditions is it possible to do without (expensive and difficult-to-scale) facilitation? Is it possible, in fact to embed the social principles that underpin facilitation and design in the very software?
After nearly four years developing the underlying open source technology GroupServer, we decided that it’s too good to keep it to ourselves. Sure, there are variouls successful GroupServer sites but we figure that lots of people don’t want a whole installation, they just want some groups or a site. So we decided to build a site where they can have that. After many months of polishing the interface and building the ’shop’, OnlineGroups.Net is open for business.
OnlineGroups.Net allows you to create your own site and then add online groups. Sites and trial groups are free. Our online groups work equally via email and the web. There are other tools that provide this but we believe that OnlineGroups.Net has the most usable interface. What other tools don’t do is allow you to have your online groups on your own site. With a little help from us, OnlineGroups.Net sites can be completely customised.
We want to have tens of thousands of sites running on this service so that we can make GroupServer better faster, and build our specialised services business. So please, start a site and try out our online groups, tell us what you think of them and, if you like them, spread the good word (web feed).