Bazaar seminar: Hey Dude, Where’s My Data?

With Web 2.0, more and more people have their documents, products, personal details and photos stashed all over the internet – what issues does this raise for education?

- and, it’s in lovely Barcelona! (25 October, 2006)

Mark is also blogging elsewhere

Inevitably I have gone off and started blogging elsewhere.

Aside: For such is the transformative power of LKL SoSo; bow down and be humbled in the presence of transformative group process… (whoops, I don’t know how that slipped in )

One blog is explicitly for interacting with a new community I have caught up with, the Connected learning Community (see Frapper map here). That blog is markz space, and it is explicitly an experiment in transforming a blog into as much of a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) as the blog can become. I’m not entirely sure of future success, at least in blog-only form, but it will be interesting to see where it gets to. Some transformations are on hold for now while Blogger completes an important upgrade cycle.

My other blog is purely elearning related and a little scant at the moment, but has entries on the Wikipedia History of PLEs page, in response to Blackboard and its recent mis-founded patent of the VLE. See also the Wikipedia History of VLEs page.

Honey, where did you put the cat’s RSS?

Web-too-oh: Wondermark sums it up.

read more | digg story

Social Software Technology Comparison Table (from Tim)

Hi all,

at the last session, I promised to post a blog entry with something related to
the Comparison Table in the wiki. Well, I prefer email at the moment (can't
sort out my WordPress account):

In our comparison table, the technologies are all listed under the umbrella
term "social software". I am having my difficulties with that term – its definition
is quite muddy, probably because it's currently very fashionable and "sexy".
However, I am not even sure what is actually so "social" about some of the
technologies in our list, for example RSS feeds. Are "sharing" and "linking"
sufficient qualifiers for "social"? That would be a bit shallow.

There has been an attempt at categorising "Technologies of Cooperation", and
here, social software is just one of eight categories – interestingly, Wikis,
RSS and Social Bookmarking are NOT in the social software category! If you
have time, have a look at the following map, which goes far beyond our table,
but provides lots of fantastic food for thought, highlighting some issues from
interesting angles (more technology- rather than sociology-oriented) and
helping a great deal with definitions of terms. It's here:

Technologies of Cooperation Map:
http://www.rheingold.com/cooperation/Tech_of_cooperation_map.jpg
Technologies of Cooperation Report:
http://www.rheingold.com/cooperation/Technology_of_cooperation.pdf
Info about Cooperation Commons:
http://www.cooperationcommons.com/

Have a good 4th session!
Tim

P.S.: I actually forgot where I had stored these links – and found them through
Google in my own Learning Technologies Unit blog…duh!

and a practical note

Wired's webmonkey tells us how to make the best of wordpress.

The Economist says…

The Economist recently ran a survey on emerging media. Among other things, claiming that blogs and wikis are changing journalism from a sermon to a discussion.

A recent article on China and the Internet (subscribers only) claims that the government, with its 30,000 power internet police, can't keep up with blogger's challenges. 

notes from session 3

Our discussion of paper on friendster

This discussion focused on a range of points, including:
the relationship between research and personal experience
design and the 're-design' of systems through their usage
the way in which idealised sociological views (in this case of how relationships might happen) get materially embedded in the design of applications
how the use of this application reveals the complexity of identity
ideas of the public and private and how these get taken up and understood differently by people
the need to reflect on our own processes and experiences when researching software – including what motivates us
the ways in which system are not designed to reflect reality
the question of whether or not systems such as this offer new ways of performing identities
the pleasures of fraudalent identities
the remaking of authority and power relations – a sense that everyone is equal but that they are not – the ever present power relations of off-line realities
motivations and negotiations of identity – different levels of negotiation
the nature and character of friendship on and off line

Our use of supporting technologies in the group to date

Carey gave her 'reflection' on the groups use of the wiki, blog, mailing list etc. Her main points were:

There are some differences in many of the posts that go on wiki and blog – as outlined in the table on our wiki – such as length, personal vs public, etc.

However the distinction in our use of these resources is not as clear as the table we built up may suggest.

There were many posts that went across the blog and wiki, these seemed to have a particular characteristic which was the interconnectedness of 'content/info' and 'narrative/personnel account' almost as if the impossibility – or difficulty of separating out the the knowledge/info and the personal experience it was embedded in meant that it could not be clear where to put the post. Is this perhaps something to do with the personalisation of knowledge and the shifting boundaries between knowledge, information and personal experience?

We then looked at these in terms of how they configure the semiotic resources of time, pace and rhythm, spatial design, public private differently.

At the next meeting we will attempt to think what the effective use of these semiotic resources might be like for learning.

Collective Intelligence: some theories

This week I will present a brief overview of Pierre Levy's theories on collective intelligence.

One of the most influential theorists of Cyberculture, Pierre Lévy offers a metaphorical conceptualization and posthumanistist theorizing of cyberspace to argue for a new relationship between technology and knowledge. His view on collective intelligence allows the cultivation of a mutually developed and enhanced knowledge space through social interaction and associatiative cognitive exchanges. Lévy’s ‘information utopia’ can be nspiring for grasping the cultural ethic of open source movements and social software we have been discussing in the seminars. But as much as such approaches enlighten some elements of the cultural interfaces of the Web, they also obscure, I would like to argue, the clear relationship between the Web, digital knowledge forms and the rest of the industrial society. I will try to combine some of our reflections on the definition and classification of social software with some of my research findings from online encyclopaedias (including wikipedia).

Wiki Building

I just built my first Wiki by myself… feels good. It was a good exercise to do as it has really helped me to better understand the purpose of a Wiki as a site for knowledge collaboration. It wasn’t until I had to grasp the overall structure of the site, and to design instructions for others on how to use it that I really began to understand how the Wiki works. I’m still working on it and still learning, but getting there.

I’m feeling more confident about Wiki use and about the potential use I could make of it in a school setting (Lyndsay’s case study on wiki use in schools helped a lot there – thanks Lyndsay).

I also like the shape the LKL Wiki is taking on… I think we’re making good progress. It’s good to see that most of us have now contributed something, and said a little about ourselves and our interests in the project and the HowTo and WhatIs pages are giving it more of a ‘knowledge-building’ feel, I think.

When I began building the PBWiki for Mirandanet, I was struck by some questions that came to me as I began to generate a skeleton structure:

What does the Wiki need to do?

Who is the Wiki for?

What kind of knowledge will they have?

How will they use it?

Why will they use it?

What kind of structure is required?

What is the best/easiest/most aesthetic design?

Public of private?

Free or Pay

Content – what’s relevant and how to show it

Examples – how to show what users need to know

Getting users on board – how to share

Keeping progress safe – backup facilities

Linking – rss feeds, hyperlinks, search facilities

Tracking – tagging, keywords, recent changes, history

As I built the Wiki and wrestled with these ideas, and thought about the purpose of the Wiki and who would use it and what they would want to get from it – it finally dawned on me what the Wiki is and why it is different, more structured, than (say) something like this blog or a web page… it’s the collaborative nature of the thing… the whole point of the Wiki is that it’s not just shared (like a blog) – it’s (as Lyndsay suggested somewhere, I think)… a quasi-independent entity… it’s a thing-in-itself with a reason for being… it’s purpose of knowledge building… generates a space that is neither individual, nor collective but an amalgam of both… and separated from both… it becomes like a ‘cultural’ collective space, if you like… still fuzzy, that notion, but I’ll keep on thinking.

It’s like (for me) the blog is a discussion space, a meeting place… where we all keep our individual identities (and separated -as opposed to separate because in a way they interlink, through comments and temporal hierarchical positioning – narratives) whereas the Wiki is, not so much a ‘thinking’ space as a place of ‘established’ narratives – of community generated concepts (as in Mika’s piece). There’s a collaborative ‘will’ in the construction of knowledge in that space… towards a shared goal – the codification of an evolving structure into an emergent set of communal values (or ontology). Hmm, interesting, I seem to have come full circle tonight.

Bibsonomy

I’ve just popped over to post a few references on Bibsonomy and, actually, I really like it. It’s easy to use, fast and presents your links really clearly. I also like the tagging and the option to have a taglist or a tagcloud. Here’s a link to my bibsonomy page:

http://www.bibsonomy.org/user/bakuvia

Incidentally, there is a similar bookmarking tool at Reader2 which provides a visual structure for sharing books, with ratings, reviews and tagging.

I just received the book “Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms” in the post… it’s small, and quite interesting, and practical, with good ideas for using these social software tools in the classroom.

A more immediate and cheaper (yes, free) alternative is the “Coming of Age” booklet, a UK book produced by collaborating writers via the ICT in Education website. Contributors are also hoping to keep the book updated online and have been using Superglu for this. It has some interesting thoughts and ideas on the use of wikis in education. I also liked the chapter on video blogging.