The Ed Techie

MixedInk - affordances for collaboration?

From the always useful Jane's elearning picks I came across MixedInk. It's a tool to promote collaboration to produce joint documents. Before you raise eyebrows and say 'not another one,' bear with me. It has some neat features - you are working towards a definite goal document, it has time limits to focus effort, but most intriguingly it positively wants you to take and adapt the text of other writers. As you type it finds similar phrases from other contributers, and you can add these in. Each submission can be voted on, so you can see which are the most popular/useful. And then when the document is finalised it shows which writers contributed each element.

This has collaborative assessment written all over it. You can easily imagine setting a group assignment and using MixedInk to produce it. Students can jointly create the document, and the role of each contributer is clearly visible. This is beginning to get at creating real affordances for collaboration, which are often lacking in the standard wiki. By suggesting other bits of text the tool is encouraging plagiarism, but in a good way. Using tools like this will be the way we can make assessment relevant to learners who work collaboratively in every other sphere of their lives.

I am about to try and kick of an experiment in crowdsourcing, mass contribution around understanding learning in a 2.0/participatory/digital/social world, so I've set up a quick trial with MixedInk to try and determine what the key questions are - I'll blog more about this later, but if you fancy having a play with MixedInk, here is my big education questions doc.

And here is the company's video explaining the technology:

MixedInk Demo from MixedInk on Vimeo.

Shiny show 2

Following on from the hugely irrelevant Shiny Show 1, I bring the next instalment, where I look at any new technologies that have crossed my path and evaluate them from an educational perspective. The usual proviso that some of these may not be that new, it's just when I get to them.

Odadeo - a social network site for dads. It is built around the concept of 'pledges', eg 'I pledge to be more patient', or 'I pledge to take my daughter to see High School bloody Musical 3'. You can then 'pip' your pledges when you do something towards them. You can share pledges and there is a 'Dadsdaq' which shows your progress. I like the way it gets you to define yourself according to various labels (you can invent your own tags), and then find others in those groupings. My concern was that it would be populated by either a) angry Fathers for Justice types or b) American dads who kept crying every ten minutes and hugging each other. But it's not, and is quite a fun place. If you're a dad, check it out.
What's more interesting for me though is if you replaced pledge with 'learning pledge' you've suddenly got the makings of a good learning social network site.
Shiny score - 4/5 Educational score - 2/5

PostRank - I covered this in detail in my previous post, but want to include it for a shiny award too. They get a shiny for their widget alone, see the left hand column on my blog. I think this way of measuring engagement with content is something we need to explore as educators (to help students) and under the digital scholarship banner, as a means of demonstrating the type of response and value there is to your online output.
Shiny score - 3/5 Educational score - 4/5

Shelfari - a social network for book readers. It takes the bookshelf idea from Facebook a little further, so you add books from an extensive database to your 'bookshelf' (I've added a couple to mine as illustration). This can be shared with others, and you can join groups, meet authors, etc. It's well done, and books are a subject people are passionate enough about to make a network viable. Books are sufficiently rich social objects to foster community.
From an educational perspective, like with Odadeo, you could see this being adapted to work around subject areas, or rather the user's bookshelf being imported into a learning environment so that they can join groups around other text books. Because you can tag books, it also adds to resource discovery for learners.
Shiny score - 4/5 Educational score - 4/5

Debategraph - takes the concept mapping idea and wikifies it. It looks nice, and being able to share maps and argument structures clearly has educational potential, but I found it difficult to use. Like a lot of concept mapping tools, it has a range of terminology (for example all the different nodes and types of links), that produce a high threshold to entry. They need to simplify I think, at least on the first play, so you can quickly bash together a mind map, without needing to take a course in mind map theory first. This is in competition rather with the Open University's own Cohere. There is definitely something in this shared maps for education, you can imagine them being legitimate forms of output, or group process, but the software isn't quite there yet.
Shiny score - 3/5 Educational score - 4/5

That's it for now folks, and remember - keep it shiny.

PostRank as course content filter

I've been playing with PostRank. They use an algorithm to analyse which posts have got the most 'engagement' from a particular RSS source. The good thing about this is that it gets over some of my reservations in previous posts about the use of metrics to measure your blog value. These are often relative to everyone else, so as with Technorati, you'll get lumped in with professional blogs. PostRank tells you about the engagement relative to your own posts. This is potentially useful, as it tells you, and more importantly, the reader which posts have generated feedback. They measure engagement not just by back links, as Technorati does, but by a range of interactions eg. by delicious links, comments and Twitter links. This gives you a much better idea of the type of interaction posts are generating. My top posts are shown in the widget over on the left.

You can then filter the results by a key word, eg Twitter will show you my posts relating to a certain micro-blogging tool, ranked through PostRank. This double layer of filtering (term plus engagement ranking), has some potential to act as course content I feel.

Let's take an example: You create an aggregated feed of many RSS sources, eg using RSSmixer I created this one of UK edubloggers. You could then get PostRank to analyse this (although there seems to be a problem with doing this at the moment, the PostRank team are looking into it). Or, you use PostRank and in Feed Details you add in each source. You then need to add a tag eg edublog and click Create New. This adds it into your Channels in PostRank. As you add each feed in, you can set it to analyse 'Great', 'Good', 'Best' or 'All'. You can then export this as an OPML file to display. Here are the 'Best' posts from some UK edublogs in Grazr:

This is all a bit fiddly though. What I want to be able to do is for me (as educator) to set up a range of channels for a course (eg UK edubloggers, global edubloggers, media blogs, library feeds, etc). The student can then use these as the basis for their course content. For example, say I ask them to discuss the Research Assessment Exercise they can filter by RAE in the UK blogs.

The point of this, over just using Google say, is that allows educators to have some input by selecting the best RSS resources, and these are then filtered. A course then becomes a sequence of activities that relies on these sources, but does not need to generate the content itself. So, any chance PostRank team that we can do this?

Digital literacies

I was asked to provide some thoughts on digital literacies for the Vice Chancellor, but rather than just do a dead email, in keeping with the spirit of the topic, I thought I'd put them in a blog post.

This isn't the research related view, but rather a personal perspective. Here are what I think are interesting about what we might term new digital literacies:

• Different voices - think of the bloggers you read the most. It might be people like Stephen Downes, David Warlick, Will Richardson, D'Arcy Norman, Alan Levine, Scott Leslie, Tony Hirst, etc. Now consider the top-cited researchers in educational technology journals. I'm not sure who they are, but my guess is it probably won't bear much resemblance to your top blog list. There are a few exceptions (Grainne Conole, Terry Anderson come to mind), but generally I think blogs have allowed people to find a different voice, and that has allowed very good writers who perhaps didn't find the academic journal an appropriate publishing outlet to have a voice.
• Reuse as an artform - Steve Jobs is fond of quoting Picasso's "Good artists borrow, great artists steal". The same might be said for new digital literacies "good educators borrow, great educators mashup". Taking existing material be it content, data, tools, and remixing it isn't just a shortcut or convenience, it is an independent skill of its own.
• Becoming a broadcaster - educators need to re-envisage themselves as broad-(or narrow)-casters. A lecture is a form of broadcast. You now just have many alternatives. Creating videos on your PC is, if not simple, at least achievable. Creating podcasts is a doddle. You can blog, slidecast, webcast, or hold forth in SecondLife. These are considerable skills to acquire, see for example the videos of Michael Wesch for how good they can be. Also, if you have the time watch all of Wesch's hour long lecture on a portal to media literacy to appreciate how the new digital literacies are not just nice add-ons but essential if we are to get students to participate in education.
• Multiple outlets - an additional point to the above, you now have many different possible outlets for your material, and often for the same material. A paper may appear in the conference proceedings, on your blog,on slideshare, scribd, etc. There are multiple ways of finding an audience.
• Social motivation - why do all this? Partly it's for the creative itch, we like to express ourselves, but more prominent in the digital literacies is the social motivation. If you post something you may get comments back, which may start a dialogue, which may lead to the expansion of your network.
• New metrics - I have talked a lot about this in the past, and I still don't know what the answer is. As I've often said, I don't want technorati to replace my RAE rating because it would end up influencing behaviour. But I do know that many of the traditional metrics we apply in higher education (e.g. publishing in 'quality journals' whatever they are), are simply irrelevant to understanding digital literacies.
• Openness as a starting point - following up from my previous post, part of acquiring digital literacies is about a mindset also. One of the cornerstones of this is that you start out with openness as a default - it may not always be appropriate, but it's where you start from. That way reuse, conversation and your own literacy develop.

The eduWomble manifesto

For those who have difficulties with the connotations of edupunk, straight of Wales we bring you - eduWomble! One of my twitter friends Griffithss4 tweeted yesterday that regarding their learning environment

"Current approach can be summarised (and will be referred to) as the #'Womble Strategy"

For those outside the UK, the Wombles was a children's television programme set on Wimbledon Common about creatures who lived underground and made their homes and stuff by recycling the rubbish humans left around. The green message was very ahead of its time, but it's the theme tune that offers itself up to us educational technologists as metaphor.

The main theme is represented in the lyrics by "Making good use of the things that we find/Things that the everyday folks leave behind." For the modern educational technologist this means using non-educational applications in educational settings. It also applies to content - as I argued in the YouTube annotations post, what commentary allows you to do is to take any resource and make it an educational one, and what digital content allows you to do is find and locate any resource. So an average photo becomes part of a digital storytelling class, a clip from a 50s TV series part of a commentary on changing architectural styles, a Sex Pistols track a theme tune for RSS, and so on. We're making good use of the things people leave behind.

A second theme is that of the loosely coupled nature of the educational technologist. Obviously this applies to our use of applications, but also our network. We all belong to different types of network (e.g. I sort of belong to networks such as 'The OU', 'The OU plus associated people', 'UK edubloggers', 'The Canadian/US eduglu affiliation', etc). These are bottom up, but still highly effective networks. Here the lyrics do the Clay Shirky by stating " Wombles are organized, work as a team."

Another theme is that of change management by stealth. Here the lyrics remind us that " People don't notice us, they never see/Under their noses a Womble may be." And furthermore that " We're so incredibly, utterly devious/Making the most of everything". This sounds like Injenuity in Viral Professional Development mode.

And just to reiterate the reuse, mashup agenda the lyrics end with " Pick up the pieces and make them into something new/Is what we do!". Surely written with Tony in mind?

Recently David Wiley asked if we should have something akin to a carbon footprint for education, which calculated how much you reused material. The status one should aspire to is eduWomble.

Here are the lyrics in full:

Underground, Overground, Wombling Free,
The Wombles of Wimbledon Common are we.
Making good use of the things that we find,
Things that the everyday folks leave behind.

Uncle Bulgaria,
He can remember the days when he wasn't behind The Times,
With his map of the World.
Pick up the papers and take them to Tobermory!

Wombles are organized, work as a team.
Wombles are tidy and Wombles are clean.
Underground, Overground, wombling free,
The Wombles of Wimbledon Common are we!

People don't notice us, they never see,
Under their noses a Womble may be.
We womble by night and we womble by day,
Looking for litter to trundle away.

We're so incredibly, utterly devious
Making the most of everything.
Even bottles and tins.
Pick up the pieces and make them into something new,
Is what we do!

Ads won't fund learning (as we know it)

http://flickr.com/photos/labanex/1572962316/

Following on from our business models discussion, Tony has a really interesting post on some back of a beermat calculations on what you would need to generate from ads to match current revenue for courses. It assumes there is no other income, ie students don't pay fees, no Government subsidy, no additional services, etc. It's a bit hard to follow, so here are a few headlines.

• Current course revenue: 800,000 GBP
• Each 'page' needs to generate 4 GBP
• To make the money back on click through advertising each course page would need 1million impressions per year.
• For an affiliate model we would need every student to click through once on every page over all presentations of the course.

Now, of course, there are loads of assumptions and simplifications in Tony's model, check his original post to see these. But what it does show is that current revenue streams would not really be sustainable on a pure advertising basis, at least as we do it currently.

Now I don't think we ever thought they would be, but it's good to get some figures against it. So, let's pretend Governments stopped funding Higher Education tomorrow, how would we fund it?

Here's some thoughts:

• It would be a hybrid model
• There would be 'education classic' - ie you get the same as you do now but parents/employers pay for all of it
• There would be disaggregation of the services - you pay for some content, so
  It would likely feature some selling of additional services (assessment, support, etc)
• Ironically it might make the need for free content stronger - because you need to assemble courses quickly

But most of all it would mean we don't do education like we do now. This is the big (and necessary for his purposes) assumption in Tony's post - that new forms of return need to equal current ones. If Government funding disappeared then so would many academic jobs and functions. Education would become much leaner, so who knows, maybe the ad model could fund this new stripped back model. The question then would be who would want to work in such a system?

I have visions of an 'academic call centre' with bearded profs answering phones to queries on Heisenberg while an aggressive 18 year old manager prowls the floor, barking out admonishments:

"Russell, stop smoking that pipe!"
"Dawkins, you've been on that call for two minutes, if they haven't got evolution by now, hang up."
"Everybody - three minute journal break, then back at your desks."

If we didn't know it already, Tony's post highlights that education doesn't come cheap, particularly the sort of education system educators would want to work in.

YouTube annotations (on edupunk video)

YouTube now allows you to add annotations to your uploaded videos. It's very easy to do (to go back to my previous post, another example of lowering the 'cost' to the user). So, I took my edupunk video, and added some annotations, see below.

What adding comments does is potentially transform any video into an educational one. Much of teaching can be seen as providing commentary, analysis and interpretation on the world. YouTube annotation allows this second order decoding. If you combine that with the discussion permitted by comments and you've suddenly got a pretty compelling learning application. At the moment (I don't know if there are plans to change this), you can only add annotations to your own, uploaded videos. It would be much more powerful for educators if you could add annotations to other videos.

So here is my edupunk video with annotations. By adding these comments it changes from being a jokey nod to some of the people involved and edges closer to being an edupunk 101, ie you could use it to introduce the concept to novices now, in a way you probably couldn't with the original. You have a comparison now, the original unannotated version on Blip.tv and the annotated version on YouTube. I prefer it without comments, since any humour that may have been present in the original is destroyed by explanation. But the latter is a better teaching device.

[I've just tested this and despite what YouTube says, the embedded version seems to lose the annotation - click on the vid to go to YouTube where the annotations do work]

When is a creepy treehouse a community of practice?

Chris Lott coined the term 'creepy treehouse', and John Krutsch defines it as "a place online that adults built with the intention of luring kids in." Jared Stein has an excellent post on defining a creepy treehouse further:

n. Any institutionally-created, operated, or controlled environment in which participants are lured in either by mimicking pre-existing open or naturally formed environments, or by force, through a system of punishments or rewards.

n. Any system or environment that repulses a target user due to it’s closeness to or representation of an oppressive or overbearing institution.

n. A situation in which an authority figure or an institutional power forces those below him/her into social or quasi-social situations.

None of these commentators is suggesting that we shouldn't exploit new technologies for learning, but rather warning of the way in which you do it, to avoid Creepy Treehouse Syndrome.

I think it's an excellent term, but I have a couple of reservations about it. Firstly, it could be used as a justification for not engaging with any social networking tools in education. You can imagine someone saying 'I've heard students think you're building some kind of creepy treehouse if you go near that stuff. What they want from us is distance, authority and lectures.'

Secondly, it suggests that all learners are young (I know that is explicit in the definition  of luring kids in, but it could be extended to all uses of social networking in education). In the States and many other countries the number of higher education students older than the traditional 18-22 year old range now exceeds those in that range. There may well be different needs and different uses of technology for the adult learner. They don't see it as a creepy treehouse, or even a happy playground, because those are not meaningful metaphors. These are people more concerned with a peer or a professional network.

For instance, I asked all my post-grad students to sign up for Twitter. Some have stuck with it, some haven't, but for me it has changed the dynamics of that educator/student relationship and made it more peer like. I was pleased to see that one of my students, Manish, is now doing the same with his students. I don't see anything creepy about this (of course, the students may disagree!), because of the different nature of learners involved.

Is ed tech an obsolete term?

Old School Bus by Kahunapulej http://flickr.com/photos/kahunapulej/324000439/

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the Institute of Educational Technology where I work has recently been reviewed. I'm reasonably phlegmatic about the review, but one sentence in the review document rather raised my shackles, and it was:

"educational technology is now an almost obsolete term"

I didn't know where the authors had got this view from. Admittedly, being a Professor of Educational Technology, and having a blog called The Ed Techie, I am not unbiased in this, and the thought of being 'Professor of Obsolete Stuff' was rather unsettling. My view was the  opposite, rather that it was a term that had gained more currency recently as an umbrella term to describe the general interest in taking web/internet technologies and applying them to education. I know ed tech is more than this, but if I meet someone who says they are into educational technology nowadays, I don't usually think they mean print. John Naughton tells the joke the joke that the only piece of educational technology known to work for sure is the school bus.

I digress, my view was that if it's good enough for Scott Leslie, D'Arcy Norman and Jennifer Jones to use it to describe themselves, then it's current enough for me. But I thought I'd check I wasn't totally off-beam so I set up a Twitter poll, using PollDaddy, with the question 'Is educational technology an obsolete term?'. I'm glad to say that at the last viewing, the Nos have it.

An eduglu learning scenario

I was part of an ad hoc Flashmeeting recently with David Wiley's team, plus some of the edugluers (Jim, Brian, D'Arcy and Scott), along with the OU social:learners (Tony, Simon, Patrick and Stuart). We batted some ideas around about the idea of eduglu, loosely coupled apps, open courses, etc. There was lots of common ground, but we don't want to tie it up in consortium or anything - so we're going to work in the open, in a loosely coupled manner. And of course, anyone else is free to join.

We agreed to come up with some stories, or scenarios, as to what it might be like for a learner in eduglu land. This is my attempt at doing one:

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.

I'm going to tag Scott next, as I think he has some ideas from the teaching angle. Take it away Scott.