Fortnightly Mailing

Solution Watch - reviews of Web 2.0 tools for education

Solution Watch:

"surveys the new generation of the web, reviewing and providing in-depth walkthroughs of today's best products and services. Owned and maintained by 19 year old Brian Benzinger, Solution Watch aims for writing quality reviews of products and services that are of benefit to its users."

Today Solution Watch published the 3rd and final in a series called "Back to school with the class of Web 2.0". The series contains numerous short reviews of mainly free web-based tools for teaching and learning. Part 1 - 29/9/2006. Part 2 - 6/10/2006.

Songbird - a promising looking Open Source media player

 

Songbird is a desktop Web player and digital jukebox, built from Mozilla (on which the Open Source browser Firefox and mail-client Thunderbird are also based). Developed to run on Windows, Linux, and Mac operating systems, it is available now as a "version 0.2" developer preview. So it is too early to use for people like me. But worth keeping an eye on. (Thanks to Dick Moore for pointing this out.)

CAMEL - collaborative approaches to the management of e-learning

Sorghum crop recently grazed by cattle, Paysandu, Uruguay

'Meetings were 'calzon quitao' – 'with underpants removed'. Sometimes there emerged some truths or criticisms which were very painful, and this is what I think helped many to come to terms with reality.'
Nicholas Kent

In 1985 I visited my uncle Kent in Mercedes, Uruguay. He showed me the "log book" from what was, in effect, a "community of practice" that he and a group of 7 other local small farmers had established. The basic approach was that participants paid each other facilitated exchange visits at which they reviewed and critiqued each other's farming practices. For some reason, what he showed me stuck in my mind.

Nearly 20 years later this simple model was built into a small scale project (with a focus on e-learning rather than agriculture) involving 2 English Universities (Greenwich and Staffordshire) and 2 English Further Education Colleges (Loughborough and Leeds College of Technology). The project, called CAMEL, was funded by the HEFCE Leadership, Governance and Management programme, and jointly run by ALT (for which I work half time as Executive Secretary) and JISCinfonet (a JISC service), with the support of JISC and the Higher Education Academy. A  30 page  project report is now available. This tries and largely succeeds in getting to the heart of how to establish and sustain an inter-institutional collaboration, whether or not that collaboration is about e-learning. You can download it as a 1MB 32 page PDF. There's also this presentation about the project, from 2008.

Eye tracking: "climbing inside your users' heads and seeing your web site through their eyes"

For the first time for ages I clicked on a Google advertisement. The "climb inside your users' heads" is what did it. Though I'd have preferred it if I could have chosen to switch the sound on, rather than have it jump out at me as soon as I opened the page, this 2 minute video clip, and informative sound track  - from the British company etre - shows clearly what eye-tracking studies can reveal about how users take in (or not) the contents of a web page.  (It would certainly be interesting to see what eye tracking studies show about how users look at web-based learning materials.)

Christian Dalsgaard: social software - e-learning beyond learning management systems

Thoughtful article by Christian Dalsgaard of the Institute of Information and Media Studies at the University of Aarhus in Denmark in the Europen Journal of Open, Distance, and E-learning. Abstract:

"The article argues that it is necessary to move e-learning beyond learning management systems and engage students in an active use of the web as a resource for their self-governed, problem-based and collaborative activities. The purpose of the article is to discuss the potential of social software to move e-learning beyond learning management systems. An approach to use of social software in support of a social constructivist approach to e-learning is presented, and it is argued that learning management systems do not support a social constructivist approach which emphasizes self-governed learning activities of students. The article suggests a limitation of the use of learning management systems to cover only administrative issues. Further, it is argued that students' self-governed learning processes are supported by providing students with personal tools and engaging them in different kinds of social networks."

The Web is not just a better printing press. Nature's Timo Hannay on what the Web means for science.

Timo Hannay leads Nature Magazine's extensive, and for an established scientific journal, very unusual, web-publishing activities. He gave a lunchtime presentation on 17/10/2006 to a small group of mainly youngish researchers at Harvard's Berkman Centre. Without question Hannay "knows what he is talking about".   So if you are interested in publishing, Open Access, e-research, how research is done (not just scientific research), blogging, the future of the Internet, Second Life (where Nature has an island, and is trialling integration between Second Life and external research databases) etc., you should spend an hour or so on one or more of the following three "views" of Hannay's presentation, and the questions that followed it:

• PowerPoint slides - [24 MB ppt];
• video transcript - [200 MB mp4] - best viewed with the slides open in another browser window, as they are not distinct in the video;
• contemporaneous notes by David Weinberger, who chaired the session.

There is no shelf. There is no file system.

Just links, with no filesystem

Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags, from which the diagram above is taken, is a long piece by Clay Shirky, via David Weinberger, about approaches to classification and how "classical categoristion" is not appropriate for the web, if it ever was. Here is the introduction, and if you read the essay, take note of how the Dewey Decimal System categorises religions of the world, and the Library of Congress System handles history.

"Today I want to talk about categorization, and I want to convince you that a lot of what we think we know about categorization is wrong. In particular, I want to convince you that many of the ways we're attempting to apply categorization to the electronic world are actually a bad fit, because we've adopted habits of mind that are left over from earlier strategies.

I also want to convince you that what we're seeing when we see the Web is actually a radical break with previous categorization strategies, rather than an extension of them. The second part of the talk is more speculative, because it is often the case that old systems get broken before people know what's going to take their place. (Anyone watching the music industry can see this at work today.) That's what I think is happening with categorization.

What I think is coming instead are much more organic ways of organizing information than our current categorization schemes allow, based on two units - the link, which can point to anything, and the tag, which is a way of attaching labels to links. The strategy of tagging - free-form labeling, without regard to categorical constraints - seems like a recipe for disaster, but as the Web has shown us, you can extract a surprising amount of value from big messy data sets."

Blackboard patent. John Mayer interviews various lawyers with patent knowhow.

John Mayer, who is Executive Director of the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction, is building up a set of interviews with lawyers who know about patent law.

The first is with Professor Mary LaFrance who teaches patent law at the Boyd School of Law, part of the University of Nevada-Las Vegas.

The second, which is a long and intensly relevant to key issues in the Blackboard infringement case against Desire2Learn, is with Professor Vince Chiapetta who teaches at Willamette University College of Law.

This post was revised, and republished to include a link to Vince Chiapetta's interview on 16/10/2006.

Note. Other posts about the Blackboard patent:

• 25 January 2007 - United States Patent & Trademark Office orders re-examination of Blackboard Patent;
• 9 December 2006 - Two contrasting views about software patents. A debate between Eben Moglen and Blackboard's Matt Small;
• 2 December 2006 - Blackboard: two separate re-examination requests to the US Patent and Trade Mark Office; and an application to the Court from Desire2Learn for a stay in proceedings;
• 27 October 2006 - EDUCAUSE on Blackboard: "patenting a community creation is anathema to our culture";
• 16 October 2006 -  John Mayer interviews various lawyers with patent knowhow;
• 10 September 2006 - The new "post-patent" environment for e-learning: a perspective. Guest contribution by Jim Farmer;
• 9 September 2006 - Blackboard's work for IMS;
• 8 August 2006 - Did the US Department of Justice know about the patent when it cleared Blackboard's acquisition of Web CT?;
• 26 July 2006 - Blackboard's US Patent 6988138.

Google For Educators. Destabilising or constructive? Or both?

"Today, teachers like you are using technology in innovative ways to help students build knowledge. You play a critical role in breaking down the barriers between people and information, and we support your efforts to empower your students. We're reaching out to you as a way to bolster that support and explore how we can work together."

Google is turning its attention to the use of its services by teachers, and has launched Google For Educators, a Google Teacher Newsletter (from which the above extract is taken, and to which several thousand people had signed up within hours of its launch), and a pilot Google Teacher Academy, through which a group of 50 (North California only) teachers can become "Google Certified". 

Google for Educators provides links to brief, somewhat school-focused, overviews of 12 Google products, which between them provide a pretty comprehensive (mainly) web based learning environment. (Google Earth and SketchUp require the download and installation of quite heavyweight applications.) Each product page calls for users to submit examples of successful "lessons" developed using the product in question, and in some cases the product page contains such examples, and other support resources.   Products to pay particular attention to include:

Privacy, trust, disclosure and the Internet

"In this paper we present results of a study which provides a detailed examination of the interaction between people's willingness to disclose personal information online and their privacy concerns and behaviours (and any moderating factors such as trust and perceived privacy)."

I'm trying to discover if there is anUnfortunately there is no audio or video file of the presentation that went with this paper [abstract only] by Carina Paine, Adam Joinson, Tom Buchanan and Ulf-Dietrich Reips, from which the above excerpt is taken. Meanwhile you can review the slides from the presentation [1.3 MB ppt]. But two full papers by Pain, Joinson, Buchanan and Reipson site cover the same broad ground:

• Privacy and self-disclosure online [272 kB PDF];
  Privacy and trust: the role of situational and dispositional variables in online disclosure [132 kB PDF].

Other related posts of potential interest:

• Why youth heart MySpace - identity production in a networked culture.
• When did you last see your data, and who do you trust to keep it safe?
• Anonymity online as the default.
• Are anti-plagiarism systems ethical?
• Privacy and self-disclosure on-line.