Make the Web come to you: Simple tools and techniques to keep you in the loop.

[Session Notes]

I ran a new session on Wednesday about using web feeds to keep track of online information. This has made a big difference to the number of topics I can keep track of, and so I'm keen to share about them more widely in the institution.

A section was added about online social networking sites such as Twitter, as some people find that they replace the need for feed readers in their own lives.

I thought I'd share a link to the session notes which contain a link to a screencast version of the session, and some extra resources to expand what we talked about. There's no real replacement for getting a group of people together to talk about experiences and help each other learn, but these resources might be of some use to you.

[image by gdesigneralex]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License.

Open Courses and Web 2.0

Over the last few years there has been a massive amount of research and discussion about how new social web tools, sometimes referred to as Web 2.0, can be used in education.

Often though we get focussed on the tools and can miss some important reasons why these tools are so powerful, an example being the fact that they tend to grow in value as more people use them.

One online course that opened it's doors to allow people who weren't registered students to participate was Stephen Downes and George Siemens' Connectivism course which we've mentioned before. The recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education talks about their experiences in more detail as does this research paper from 7th International Conference on Networked Learning 2010.

This course is interesting as we see some of the effects of running their course this way, with issues arising such as privacy, behaviour (one person joined to criticise the course) and inflexible licences for platforms like Blackboard (a problem we've struggled with in the past).

So clearly, seeking to using social web tools to their full potential is not without potential problems, but reading the research paper we can see courses and modules delivered this way can offer a different learning experience which might be beneficial. As George Siemens himself said "The question for me is ... ‘what are the implications of people being connected in a certain way?'". The Web gives us different ways of connecting as well as new tools, and it is worth thinking about situations where these new ways of connecting could enhance learning.

[image by umkcofficial]


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Research into Virtual Worlds in Higher Education: The Cloudscape

Cloudworks is a kind of social network for educators, which enables people to create 'cloudscapes' - that is collections of links to resources (clouds) about particular topics. Clouds can be added to cloudscapes by anyone with an account and an included discussion tool encourages conversation around the resources.

I've been collating research on using 3D Virtual Worlds in Higher Education, and used Cloudworks to both make the list available and enable others to add to it. If you are interested in using Virtual Worlds like Second Life for learning and teaching, this list might be useful to you or you might like to develop the resource further.

If you're not sure what we mean by 3D Virtual Worlds, have a look at the session notes for 'The World of Virtual Worlds' beginners guide session. This goes through definitions, examples, uses and contains lots and lots of links to resources.

What is Google Wave Good For?

There's been a lot a talk about Wave, even though it isn't properly released yet. But is the hype justified? What is it best used for? Does it replace any other tools that we use?

Well, as noted in the video below, Wave was designed to help people move from using email on occasions where there is perhaps a group having a long scale conversation.

Many people have given their views on what Wave is, or isn't, good for. For example:

• Tony Hirst sees Wave as basically a set of Wikis organised in an inbox. That seems like it could be a good way of starting looking at it and categorising it.

• Scoble argues that the live aspects of chatting in Wave lead to unproductivity, and excess 'noise'. He thinks that things like real Wikis would be better used by projects which Wave is aiming at.

• Stephen Downes points out that email is 'trapped' in your email client, and Wave could change this for the better.

• Finally, and best of all there are a good few ideas from people about how they might use Wave on Lifehacker. One of these is a student wanting to use it for collaborative lecture notes... which sounds interesting.

However, it is difficult to know how valid these opinions are until you use it yourself. I got my invite to Wave on Wednesday and have had chance to set up a 'Wave', that is, a conversation containing synchronous and asynchronous text conversation, maps, images, etc. On the face of it I like the way it pulls together a lot of the media that might be involved in a conversation, making all of the 'artefacts' from a conversation accessible to a large number of people.

My Wave was public, and a few other interested people got involved. One interesting thing in Wave is seeing people type in real time. This means you can see people type spelling mistakes, and change their minds about things, which might sound annoying but I much preferred synchronous chat working like this. András Beck, who was involved in the Wave put it well, saying that "its more close to real life conversations than usual chat programs. I mean... if a friend talks to u, u usually know what he wants to say after 50-60% of the sentence [and so] you can start to put ur thoughts together while they type. Usual chat means u type, and wait, then type, and wait...".

Sadly I can't yet embed the Wave in this blog yet, but it will be a possibility in the future. This would make it easier to make conversations public.

In conclusion, Wave is a complicated tool, and like any tool it is for certain purposes and not everything. Regarding my question about if and how it should be used, it looks like an improvement on email message boards from some perspectives, and I'd like to use it with a group as a place to store thoughts and conversations about a project instead of using a blog, or a group of students to use it to explore a topic together.

As for my experiences, I had an enjoyable conversation (about Wave itself), with people who were interested in the topic. Perhaps if the tools you use allow your students to connect with a range of people like this, precisely which tool you use matters less.

Finally, here are two views on whether Wave will actually take off: Ryan Carson says yes it will, Anil Dash says it won't.

Using Delicious for Managing Your Bookmarks

Back in the olden days everyone stored bookmarks in their web browser. In Internet Explorer you'd click on Favourites or in Firefox you'd select Bookmarks.

Many people are now using Social Bookmarking tools to store bookmarks. I use Delicious.com as this allows me to:

• Search through everyone's bookmarks on a certain topic, to see what other useful sites and articles are out there.
  
• Access your bookmarks from anywhere, home or work.
• Annotate your bookmarks to remind yourself why you saved them.
• Subscribe to a feed of another person's bookmarks, if you find that you have similar interests.

To get started with Delicious

• Watch this video that explains the benefits.
• Create an account at http://delicious.com/
• Find a plug in for your web browser. This makes adding bookmarks easier. There are ones available for Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Google Chrome.

There are certain things to think about when you are using social bookmarking.

• Your online identity - Are you sharing your page/feed with other people - perhaps students? I use my delicious account for both work related and personal bookmarks with out worrying who can see what. However if privacy is more important to you, you might just want to mark all your personal bookmarks as Private.
• Backing up - When you collect useful personal data in any service you want to know that you can back it up. Delicious isn't likely to loose your data, but you never know. You can backup your bookmarks by choosing Settings > Export / Backup Bookmarks.

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danah boyd: Some Thoughts on Technophilia

danah boyd has written a very accessible piece for the New Media Consortium's Symposium for the Future entitled 'Some Thoughts on Technophilia'. It aims to 'provoke conversation in preparation for the event', and I think it does a great job of simplifying some important issues that educators using new technologies need to consider.

I think we all know that "Dumping laptops into a classroom does no good if a teacher doesn't know how to leverage the technology for educational purposes...", and so on, but I think that it is also clear that it's tough for teachers to know how to use a specific technology in teaching and learning, let alone a wide variety of technologies. Learning 'deeply' how to use the technologies requires using them in different aspects of your life, thus it requires you changing the way you do things, and this is time consuming and disruptive. It doesn't fit neatly into managed staff development sessions.

I think educators should be encouraged by danah's statement that "Also there are no such things as 'Digital Natives' ... Most of you have a better sense of how to get information out of Google than the average youth." People of different generations, and perhaps even of different year groups, may have different online habits and subtly different online etiquette, but there's no need for educators to be intimidated by perceptions of young students' competence. You have a lot to teach them about information literacy for example.

The second to last paragraph challenges us to be careful with the online spaces that we choose to use in education. The argument here is not refering to the affordances of the technologies themselves, but instead demands some awareness of how students' various online identities are constructed and how their complex social world works online. This might mean not using Facebook and tools that students may already use in a different contexts for socialising.

By the way, danah boyd has studied extensively how American teenagers use the web socially, and some of her insights are relevant to anyone wanting to explore social aspects of learning and teaching online. The video of her interview with Discover magazine is a good overview, and then have a look at her published work.

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Managing Your Online Identity

There's an interesting conversation starting on the The Identity Studies Blog about blogging, asking the question "How compatible are the identities of blogger and published academic?".

In LTD we had conversations around slightly different, though related issues to do with general online identity. I suppose our questions would be "Do you try to keep your personal and professional online identities separate? Do you try to keep them controlled?"

I've created a simple diagram to help me think about the information available about myself, and it is interesting to see how personal and professional overlap. It is also perhaps a little alarming that there is so much information out there that is publically available.

I've just collected my information together on MyBlogLog while I'm thinking about managing online identity, and I'm setting up a page on ClaimID. Does a central place like this enable you to manage your identity and reputation properly? Does it enable anyone to find so much about you that there are dangers involved?

Why is this relevant to Edge Hill University? We are asking questions at the moment about what our role is in educating our students generally about new literacies and skills required in the emerging digital world. As we make decisions about encouraging students to use various open online services as part of their courses, do we want to advise students as best we can as to how they can be safe and in control of their reputation and identity? Perhaps even how they can use the resources created and stored in these services as an ePortfolio.

Two very interesting articles on this subject are The Shifted Librarian's Who is Managing Your Online Identity and the article from New York magazine that it links to.


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Backing-up Your Personal Learning Environment

With the news that the social bookmarking site Ma.gnolia might have gone down for good, it's a good time to consider exactly how we can ensure we don't lose all the data that we collect in various online services.

Feed Readers make it easy to do this. I can download an OPML file from Bloglines, either to backup the list of feeds that I subscribe to, or to read them in another service like Google Reader. OPML is used as standard, in feed readers and podcast aggregators.

The same is possible with some social bookmarking sites, but there doesn't seem to be a standard way of migrating bookmarks similar to OPML. I use Delicious, and this allows me to download a list of my bookmarks, along with data like my tags. However to import them in to Google Bookmarks I'd need to run them through a third-party program rather than an official Import Bookmarks function.

At the far end of the scale are virtual worlds. There are moves towards your avatar being able to move between worlds, but this is in a very early stage. The fact that Google closed Lively while educators were using it, shows that it is important to be able to move your avatars and creations, in some form, to another environment.


Anyway, the point of this post is really to emphasise the importance of backing up your data. If you've found some web services that you are settled with, and that you are collecting large amounts of valuable data in, the experience of Ma.gnolia shows us that it's not as safe as it sometimes feels.

'Connectivism and Connective Knowledge' Open Online Course

The new Connectivism and Connective Knowledge Open Online course run by George Siemens and Stephen Downes started yesterday at the Univeristy of Manitoba. It is a 12-week course that "will explore the concepts of connectivism and connective knowledge and explore their application as a framework for theories of teaching and learning."

It is particularly interesting because it is an open course that anyone can take part in. Only those who are wanting credit need to pay fees. It also uses a wide variety of online services to enable communication. Matthias Melcher has created a diagram to try and show how some of the tools and services link together and the course Pageflakes page brings together all the RSS feeds related to the course. The university's Wiki is probably the best place to get an overview.

It'll be interesting to see what happens, but at the moment I think open courses like this can bring benefits to the paying students as well as those who just take part. There are lots of readings and learning materials, but there is also real value is in the conversations surrounding them. An increase in the number of people in the debate can, in my experience, help undertanding by making more connections between ideas and bringing diverse ways of looking at things. For an example of the numbers that are at least thinking about getting involved, there are currently about 250 people in the course Facebook group.

Social Networking Debate: Does it bring positive change to education?

The Economist is running an Oxford-style debate on the use of social networking in education entitled "Social Networking: does it bring positive change to education?". It is happening between 15th January and 28th January 2008.

This has encourages at lot of interesting views to be expressed around the topic. While much as focussed on pre-Higher Education students, there is also plenty that affects us. If you're interested start by reading:

-The Moderator Robert Cottrell's Opening Statement

-Ewan McIntosh's opening statement for the proposition that "This house believes that social networking technologies will bring large positive changes to educational methods, in and out of the classroom." He talks about the way that the technologies in question can be used to remove the restrictions of the classroom and to aid connections with the world outside.

-Michael Bugeja's opening statement for the opposition. He is concerned that technology is changing pedagogy and methods of teaching, rather than pedagogy defining the technology, as well as the resources required to implement these.

-Then move on to the comments and responses posted on blogs. Some of the responses talk about how the vaguely terms are being defined, and it does seem like the opening statements are referring in a very general way to web-based technologies in general and not addressing specific issues around social networking and networking sites.

A blog post well worth reading is Vicki Davis' It's about Educational Networking not Social Networking which is a really good overview of the debate and contains practical advice if you are interested in using the technologies.

Also Danah Boyd probably knows as much about on-line social networking as anyone and she has written a response which talks about pedagogical issues.

Using a Social Network instead of a VLE: Getting Started

We've set up a Social Network on the Ning.com site for one of our modules, to help the students share their work with each other and keep in touch during the module and the module placement.

We have an area for them on the institution's VLE, but Social Network sites work differently meaning that in some situations they are a better option for a class.



Social Network or VLE?

Our first decision was whether to focus the students on using the VLE or a Social Network area. The main differences are:

1. In our VLE (WebCT/Blackboard CE) there are limited options for students to add content easily. Many Social Network Services make simple, and empower the students to share, create and communicate more.

2. Students have to be invited to the area, and then set up their own accounts. This is an added level of complexity for them over having an institutional account to log into everything, but none of the students who started using the area today had a problem and it only took them half a minute.

3. You can subscribe to RSS feeds detailing activity on the site. Although not everyone uses feeds, if you follow a lot of sites there's no good reason not to! If the VLE that we use had RSS feeds of updates, it would make it much easier to follow what is going on in each area.

Why use Ning?

There are many different social networking sites, and they are all different. This means the interaction of people in each of them is different. We’ve chosen the Ning social networking site to test at Edge Hill because:

1. We wanted people to be able to join the private group without accepting the module leader as a friend. This seemed to be the case with Facebook (let us know if there are any settings to change this). We thought that students might not want to accept their tutors as a Facebook Friend as this gives them access to your updates about what you are doing and photos. Using Ning feels a lot less intrusive into students private lives.

2. The groups can be set so that the module leader (or whoever set the group up) accepts requests for membership of the group. This means that they can keep control of access, but students can still take the responsibility to join themselves.

3. Once students are members they can use the Video tool to share videos, the Music tool to share audio, the Photos tool to share images, the Forum to share ideas and attach documents. The module leader can send out notices via the Blog tool. This covers everything that they might want to share.

I'll try and write an update on how this Social Network was used, to see if there is anything that we can learn from it for the future. I think that using Ning is much more likely to encourage informal learning networks and connections that would benefit learning.

I've just watched Sugata Mitra's talk at the Lift conference about his work with kids in remote areas of India. Basically PCs were installed in a wall in a village and the kids who'd never seen a computer before, all helped each other learn to surf the web (including learning English). It's well worth watching as it goes to show the power of informal learning networks when people have something (like the internet) that empowers them, and they connect together to help each other learn.

Social Networking Sites in Education

I'd say using Social Networking Sites in education is the big topic of the day in Learning Technology. I'm in the process of setting up an area on Ning for a group of students on placement to use right now.

Dana Boyd is one of the leaders in the academic study of Social Networks and if you're interested in joining the debate about how they could/should/shouldn't be used it's worth having a look at Dana's blog (see the best of page if you're short of time).

If you're interested in current research have a look at the most recent issue of the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication. This journal presents a lot of research relevant to those using communication technologies in education, and this issue covers research on Social Networking Sites in detail.

It's worth subscribing to the Journal's feed if you have a feed reader - and if you've not sort yourself out a Bloglines account or use Feedblitz to get email updates. Just go to the bottom of the Feedblitz homepage and add http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/loi/jcmc as the website address.

Social Bookmarking in Plain English

The Common Craft Show have released another video in their Technologies in Plain English series, this time highlighting the power of Social Bookmarking.

Click To Play

The short video, (3.25 min) focuses on Del.icio.us, and simply illustrates how to get started and why you should want to. Another really great video - which is definitely worth watching.

ccLearn: Creative Commons' Open Education Resources Project

Creative Commons is an organisation founded in 2001 with the aim of creating copyright licences that you can use to make it easy for others to share and build on your work. Some videos explaining it are available.

For example, if I has written some music that I wanted people to feel free to listen to and use in their own work (e.g. in videos) I could apply a Creative Commons licence to it. I could then make it available on a site with other music that has been given a similar licence. Examples of Creative Commons music sites are Jamendo and Magnatune.

Recently an educational division - ccLearn - has been started with the same sort of focus. It's mission is "minimize barriers to sharing and reuse of educational materials — legal barriers, technical barriers, and social barriers."

My hope is that this and similar projects that we could get involved with, will help us to use and develop resources that would otherwise be too difficult and time consuming to develop, by building on others work. For example the educational potential of games is very interesting (see James Paul Gee's book as a good introduction), but at Edge Hill we cannot really find the time to develop them by ourselves.

For more links and resources about open education resources, have a look at the Wikipedia OER page.

Web2.0 Explained

The Machine is Us/ing Us

This is a great video created by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University.

The video introduces the Web 2.0 concept,("..the so-called second wave of Web-based services that enables people to network and aggregate information online"*), and highlights the impact it is having in less than 5 minutes.





*A Lesson in Viral Video, an article written by Elia Powers back in Febuary for Inside Higher Ed, gives some background to Wesch's video.

Wikis: The Development of a Wikipedia Page

I've heard people criticise Wikipedia a lot, mainly in academic circles because staff don't like the fact Wikipedia pages get referenced by students in essays.

That's fair enough, but I find it incredibly useful as a starting point for looking into topics. Yet I've heard people sitting near me in academic conferences, go into quiet rants when it's been mentioned at the front.

John Udell has created a very interesting screencast about the development of a particular Wikipedia page. I love the way that showing the development of the page puts it in context, and I think that it would help anyone appreciate better how Wikipedia and wikis in general work and should be used.

Before you watch the screencast be aware that 'naughty words' appear on the page from time-to-time :) Wikipedia Screencast (Via: Weblogged)

Wikis in Plain English: The Common Craft Show

The Common Craft Show have released another video in their technologies in plain english series. This time they cover Wikis in their inimitable low-tech style, but you might also want to see their 'RSS in Plain English' video.

This demonstrates a visual engaging way of explaining why people might want to use different technologies. I think that if I was explaining to academic staff how these technologies work and might help their teaching and learning, these videos would be a good place to start.

Scribd: YouTube for Documents

Mark pointed me in the direction of Scribd today. Scribd describes itself as a "free online library where anyone can upload.".

Mark described it as YouTube for documents. I think YouTube succeeded because it removed the need for people to worry about what format video was in - different file types could be uploaded, and they were all just coverted to Flash which nearly everyone has the plugin for.

Scribd in a similar way lets you upload multiple file types, and you can access the documents as Flash paper, but also as PDF, Microsoft Word, or MP3 files as you require.

I've uploaded our WebCT guides to it, which can be accessed at my page, or individually like the uploading a file to WebCT document.

Not sure if there are many situations where we could use this for students - perhaps if lots were having trouble accessing some files we could upload them to here and create links to them from WebCT?

Lawrie Phipps' Presentation on Emerging Technologies

Last month (25.01.07) Lawrie Phipps from the JISC Users and Innovation Programme came to the SOLSTICE Centre at Edge Hill University to talk about Emerging Web Technologies.

The session was videoed and edited into the 11 sections below. They are currently available as streamed Windows Media (.wmv) files.

01. Introduction - (2:55)
Links:
O'Reilly: What is Web 2.0

02. The Web as a Platform - (2:16)
Links:
Google Docs

03. Participation - (3:25)
Links:
Wikipedia: Edge Hill University
Wikipedia: University of Plymouth

04. Social Networking - (5:38)
Links:
SurfBird.com
ELLG Spaces

05. Data Consumption - (3:23)
Links:
Skibonk.com
also see: Googlemapsmania blog

06. Are These Useful? - (3:28)

07. Real Students and Their Digital Experiences - (8:34)
Links:
Instant Messenger
YouTube
MySpace
Google Mail
Blogger
Skype
Zoomr
del.icio.us
Writeboard
Nuvvo

08. Encouraging the Use of Technologies - (1:59)

09. What Next? A Look at Second Life - (4:08)
Links:
Second Life
What is an Avatar?
Education space in Second Life

10. Assessing Risk - [2:23]
Links:
Yahoo Mail
Flickr

11. Google Homepages - [7:36]
Links:
Google Homepages


In the future I intend to write some posts expanding on some of these topics from our perspective.

Finally, this nicely crafted video from Kansas State University seems to have been linked to by everyone, and it gives an overview of what we have been looking at here, and how the Web is evolving.

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