SocialLearn

Workshop for OU Students, Associate Lecturers and Alumni interested in Web 2.0

As part of the OU’s SocialLearn project, you are invited to attend a workshop to contribute your views on what the OU could/should look and feel like in a Web 2.0 world.

We are bringing together web-savvy OU Students, Alumni and Associate Lecturers to discuss the potential and the pitfalls of learning, mentoring, and doing business on the Open, Social, Free and For-Fee Web.

• What are the characteristics of web-native learners, and what tools do they want/need?
• What new learning/business opportunities – and risks – are opened up by social networking and media sharing tools?
• What do you think of the prototype tools that we will preview?
• Do we need to reframe our ideas of learning?
• What is the OU, once many of its current services are disaggregated to specialist providers on the Web?

If interested, please email SociaLearn with a brief statement of your background, and what you would hope to add to these discussions.

On confirmation of your place, you will receive a briefing pack and travel directions. All accommodation, food and reasonable travel costs are covered. The day will run from noon on 18 June – noon 19 June in or near Milton Keynes.

You are very welcome to contact the workshop coordinator if you have any enquiries:
Simon Buckingham Shum

Just got back from the annual 2500-strong CHI 2008 conference in Florence last week. A great piece of work presented by the IBM Collaborative User Experience (CUE) Research group reporting on the use of their Beehive social networking system (their intranet equivalent to Facebook). They thought they’d try to move from purely social media sharing a la Flickr, to promote more “knowledge sharing” by introducing a new widget called the “hive5″:

Users can create top-five lists, called “hive fives,” to share their thoughts on any topic they are passionate about. For example, they can add a “hive five” list that outlines their ideas about their project, and then invite their team members to “reuse” the list and voice their opinions. Hive fives cover a lot of territory, from clearly work-related subjects to the kinds of personal exchanges that might only happen among collocated team members at the water cooler. Hive fives are a light-weight way to share ideas and a great way to keep in touch with remote team members.

Werner Geyer, Casey Dugan, Joan DiMicco, David R. Millen, Beth Brownholtz, Michael Muller. (2008) Use and Reuse of Shared Lists as a Social Content Type. SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in computing system. Florence, Italy, April 5-10.

It turned out in fact that initially the hive5’s were used by people to… tell others more about themselves socially! But the more ’serious’ kinds of lists also emerged. Beehive tracks and displays who has reused a list, providing a way to make a social connection through paying tribute to the originator of the idea, thus providing a measure of social reputation as well. A nice piece of research, and many other interesting papers by this group.

Food for thought as we develop our tools for managing and sharing personal “To Learn” lists…

David Wiley is part of a startup called FlatWorld Knowledge. Their aim is to publish textbooks free of charge online, with users paying for the printed version if they want it. But it goes beyond this and really gets at the role of the textbook in education. For a start the educator can edit the text book, so their students get the version relevant to their course. And then there are tools for working with other students around the text. People can sell content (and services I guess) also in a marketplace.

There could be some good synergy with the social, multiple tools approach of socialearn here.

Character: Ellen is a professional vet, living in Wales. She is married, with a four year old son, and is a fan of 60s sci-fi movies and is a keen skier.

Scenario: Ellen is called out to look at a sick Pot Bellied Pig. She is unsure of the symptoms, but thinks she has a diagnosis. She uses her mobile device to put out a call for help on her learner network. This is built on top of Twitter and allows her to filter tweets to groups, e.g. ‘vets’, ‘parents’, ‘friends’, etc. Dan, from Sussex is an expert in Pot Bellied pigs and confirms her diagnosis, sending her a link to a resource. She saves this to her study list in her learner profile, with the tags ‘vet’, ‘pigs’, and studying it is automatically added to her To Do list in Remember the Milk, so she will study it later.

Back home she gets a prompt to watch a programme on skiing on BBC 4, which is generated by an automatic tweetscan and schedule scan she has set up with filters. She won’t watch it live, but a link to the replay in iPlayer is automatically added to her To Study list, with the tag ski.

This is part of a content aggregator that finds content related to the learning goals Ellen has set up. Her current goals/interests are “To learn snowboarding”, “60s Sci-Fi movies”, “Blue Tongue virus”, “Teaching children French” and “Harry Potter novels”. Content related to each of these is found using data-mining, and social recommendations, building on 43Things. Recommended resources are then attached to each goal, with a score, and a category, e.g. ‘video’, ‘book’, ‘person’, ‘course’, etc. Ellen sees that there is a weekend snowboarding course running at the dome in Milton Keynes. She sees that one of her skiing contacts has taken the course and sends her a message asking about it.

She is doing an ‘informal course’ on 50s/60s Sci-Fi movies, created by an enthusiast in Oregon. The course is delivered through his blog, and is free to study. Today, having watched ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’ yesterday, she reads the blog entry on it. She sees that John from Queensland is online at the same time, and they use Gabbly to chat around the topic, which is embedded in the blog. This is the last entry in this course, so she decides to have a go at the end of course quiz, which is delivered via a free MCQ engine. The score is automatically passed back to her profile, as authentication is handled in both by openID.

A suggested task for the course is to create a mash-up, which she has been working on. She has taken clips from Invasion of the BodySnatchers, Them! and The Blob all of which show women screaming, helplessly, and mixed this with a 1950s magazine article about how women should be protected from rock music. This is overdubbed with a PJ Harvey track, which she hopes makes the ironic point clear. She posts this on her blog, with the tag ‘DonsSciFi’, which means it will be pulled in to the resource pool for the course for future students. This also pulls it into her profile as one of her public outputs, and this action notifies her sci-fi friends via a tweet.

Purpose: I wanted to take some existing tools, and some imagined ones, and show how these could be easily combined for a learner. I also wanted to combine formal and informal learning, professional and private life.

Next: I’m going to try this as a mini-meme. Not because I want to be annoying, but because I think this is a genuine way of building up a set of scenarios that might inform what we want to do. I am keen to explore this open, distributed model of collaboration. So, if you want to be involved, simply write a scenario and link here (I’ll do a wiki later). The ‘rules’ are:

1. It can be about teaching or learning (or both)
2. It can be as long or short as you like
3. Try and link to existing technologies
4. It’s purpose is to show how loosely linked applications could make learning/teaching easy, pedagogically sound and fun.

SocialLearn is a vehicle for the UK Open University and its partners to rapidly prototype new ways to foster high quality learning in the open, participatory landscape unfolding on the Web.

We’re exploring wide-ranging scenarios and questions, such as:

• How can the production of open source educational resources be sustained on a long term basis?
• What principles underpin Web 2.0 learning ecologies?
• How can different tools be pulled together to work coherently for learners?
• How can the power of social networks, web 2.0 approaches and new technologies be used to benefit learners?
• What organisational and technical infrastructure will facilitate the kind of social, creative commons-based economics that are revolutionising sectors across society?
• What does an e-university look like in the new landscape of disaggregated learning service providers?

Track our progress as we develop our ideas, and consider partnering if you think you have a piece in the puzzle.