Interesting resonances with our workshop series

I chanced upon Online Course Design from a Communities-of-Practice Perspective (John Smith and Beverley Trayner) in eLearn Magazine. (The title is a slight misnomer, in the authors’ practice, there are also face-to-face meetings.) As I was reading the article I found myself picking up on various points that the authors make and on the phases of community development that they describe. To me, these points and phases resonated with what we experienced, both as individuals and as a group, and how we informally evolved our learning practice.

In the article, the authors provide several ‘heuristics’ which characterise different phases of community engagement, from inception to conclusion. They choose the word ‘heuristics’ carefully, to characterise events and to indicate “the ongoing tension and contradiction” between their interpretations and that that is interpreted.

Bullet renditions of the phases, which may be repeated, are:

• Getting into the online space
• Finding your way: asynchronous discussions
• Experiencing a new kind of community
• Engaging in a larger social space
• Anticipating face-to-face engagement
• Meeting individuals face-to-face
• Participating in groups face-to-face
• Framing one’s experience in a new context provided by the group
• Diaspora: Moving back to the online space
• Online closing or transition

The authors also provide some conclusions for education and development of (largely) online Communities of Practice, the headings to their recommendations are:

• Design for learning using CPD model is productive.
• Spending time on social processes.
• Using different media to negotiate language as part of a larger process.
• Creating new possibilities: subgroups and outside experts as resources.
• Demonstration of leadership roles in different media.
• Provoking shifts in “comfort zones.”

Some of these titles are a little less explanatory than those in the first list. I won’t describe further, but instead recommend that you read the original.

Personal Learning Environments at Fortnightly Mailing

I wrote a short piece on PLEs that was inspired by the CETIS Personal Learning Environments Meeting held in Manchester this week.

Both Phillip and I attended. And guess what? We could actually sit outside without getting wet.

The piece appears in Seb Schmoller's Fortnightly Mailing, which is a great resource for anyone interested in e-learning and related topics.

In the mean time I've been building up a collection of PLE-related resources over on the wiki.

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).

The world’s first integrated brower and server-based PLE?

In our first workshop meeting I wondered if we might build a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) for ourselves using only web-based components, i.e servers out there. I spent a bit of time yesterday and today doing just that, and provided an integration mechanism to act across different sites by hacking up a tool to harvest and reuse tags. This may be the world's first integrated PLE that is based on a browser and diverse web severs.

The idea of a PLE built using a browser and web servers is not new: There are plenty of posts out there in the Blogosphere about this. Here is one:

"Why do we need a PLE when we already have the Internet? The Internet is my PLE, ePortfolio, VLE what ever. Thanks to blogger, bloglines, flickr, delicious, wikispaces, ourmedia, creative commons, and what ever comes next in this new Internet age, I have a strong online ID and very extensive and personalised learning environment."

Leigh Blackall here

I'll start building up further information on this idea here.

Our focus on tagging started me thinking about how tags might glue together the diverse services and create a browser based PLE that utilises diverse we sites out there on the web. My own experiences with tags had already led me to the wish for some kind of tag server which served up my favorite and possibly 'somewhat standardised' tags. 'Somewhat standardised' means, as you can guess, my own personal collection of tags I would like to use. A way of harvesting tags off web sites would also be useful, so as to build up my collection of tags I like.

We might also call this the half-hour PLE, because it could be implemented in just a half hour. In truth I had to be a bit round about and do a few techie things which made the task a bit longer — add two hours to load up easyPHP and learn enough PHP (a web programming language) and mySQL (a database system) to implement my glue, the web site which appears in sidebar.
All of this is hung together using the FireFox Browser, which had a handy tool bar for favorite links. I started by getting rid of most of my collection of toolbar links; many of them had just gathered there for historical reasons and were largely unused — how often do I go to the ordinance survey site to find a free topographic map segment?

I set up the toolbar to look like this (click on the image to see it larger)

In the lower toolbar, there are a bunch of vertical bars which respectively group together different resources on the web, from left to right:

• My own resources for email, blogging, using elgg, my own wiki (which runs on my laptop and is only for my own use), and my own entries in bibsonomy
• Resources for one of my spheres of interest, the LKL Knowledge and Social Software workshop series
• Resources for another sphere of interest, the VLE I use when I teach a course on Interactive System Design Methods.
• Resources that are useful to me. The RSS folder provides a drop down menu of RSS feeds I find useful, in this first version the feeds are for the LKL KSS blog, wiki and bibsonomy. This feature is useful, I can easily check, in one place, what recent changes have happened on sites that I find interesting. The second folder drops down bookmarks which are not central to my PLE, but are somewhat useful to me, so for example I parked the Ordinance Survey bookmark here.
• Finally there is a bookmark entitled tags; clicking on this enables me to generate the left hand sidebar you can see in the Firefox window.

Gluing the constituent sites together

The only reason why I call this an integrated system for dealing with diverse learning related sites is that I provide myself with a mechanism for easy collection and (re-)use of tags. Because of the centrality of tags in the kinds of sites I want to use in my PLE, I want a quick and easy way of dealing with them. All I have here is a little website (for now hosted on the laptop running my browser), where I can enter a tag in the text input field, hit submit, and have that tab stored in a database. Typically, I won't even bother to type in a tag, rather just copy it off an existing page using cut and paste. (In fact, in the screen grab, I had just 'harvested' the tags folksonomy, learning, lkl-kss, PLE from the main lkl-kss BibSonomy page.) Then in tagging something new, if tags are entered via text, I can just copy and paste tags from my 'tagster' sidebar to the requisite tag text field on the page that I am using for tagging.

Tagster sidebar variants are possible, one could have a multiple users system that includes groups, each user and group having their own favoured tag sets. One could then display in the sidebar, for example, one's own favoured tag-set, augmented/merged with a tag-set for another user or group when dealing with things of interest beyond ones normal spheres of interest.

Analysis

This configuration has only been together for a few hours, so its clearly experimental. Already I find myself using the toolbar bookmarks quite heavily, together with multiple tabs in Firefox's page display area.

The tagster sidebar seems as though it will have applications when adding new entries elsewhere, I'll leave a comment as to how I am getting on with it.

Simple though the ideas may be, I feel as though this is an integrated environment.

• Resources which are important to me are grouped together (which is also important) in the toolbar, and I can reach them easily. My middle mouse button opens them in new tabs in the browser so that I can easily juxtapose and switch between information in different tags.
• I can have different spheres of interest represented in the toolbar and reach them. One concern is that my toolbar may overflow with spheres of interest, and this might have to be dealt with by providing FireFox with a special toolbar that switches context between different spheres of interest.
• Having RSS feeds in one place seems more convenient that the mechanism we were using of showing them in the wiki.
• There is a place to hang other resources, under resources in the toolbar.
• The tagster sidebar gets over many of my 'oh what did I start calling this' problem with tagging. I think that this facility will grow over time: I like the idea of having my own tags augmented by others' tags, including those of special interest groups like ourselves. I could imagine a tagster tool being able to interrogate sites like bibsonomy and delicious as to potential tags, filtering them, and so on…
• Much of this is a testament toFirefox's flexibility. particularly, I make the tagster sidebar appear from clicking on the toolbar icon by pre-configuring the bookmark via its properties to display in the sidebar, creating that sidebar if it is not already there. The action is easily reversible, I can close the sidebar at will.

It's surprisingly easy to build a PLE like this. In comparison, I was part of a team which spent about two person years doing complex and intricate hacking in order to part-implement a PLE (I wasn't doing the intricate hacking though, just keeping the project working). CETIS are involved, again with a lot of hacking, in implementing a PLE, called PLEX, on top of the Eclipse framework. Both projects have their merits, I particularly like PLEX's ideas for handling friends-of-friends and activities.

But somehow I feel that I am spot-on in constructing this assemblage of sites with its tagster glue mechanism, the system is very much under my own control, and it is highly personal, adapted to my needs. Both of these, I feel are essential attributes of PLEs. Time will tell how good this system is, but certainly the basis (bar a public tagster) is out there for anyone wanting a quick customised PLE.

However, there are some limitations. For example, if I want to use a wiki provide a lengthy book review of a book whose reference I make available in bibsonomy, then I would have to manually embed a URL to the review in the descriptive text that accompanies the bibsonomy reference. At the moment I have no idea of how limiting this is in general; if I was a student using this PLE I would have to know a bit about what I could do with URLs — how to copy the URL for the review page, the fact that I could insert it in text elswhree, and that I or someone else might have to copy and paste that URL into the URL field for a browser in order to find the review from the bibsonomy entry.

LKL-KSS

If there is interest, I may implement a tagster for us all on a publicly available server. Certainly, if you use some less customisable browser, I can get you started with setting up your FireFox toolbar bookmarks.

Mika’s Ontologies

I finally managed to grab some time to read Mika’s article and found it very interesting – not in a mathematical sense, but maybe in more of a ’social science’ sense.

I liked the notion of a tripartite model of actors-concepts-instances. This move from the bipartite model (concept-social) to include the ternary element of ‘actor’ or ‘agency’ is interesting. It kind of mirrors something I’ve come across in my own research into cultural semiotics where, in moving from notions of binary opposition in meaning generation, the idea of a ternary system is introduced, the third element being the process of interaction… whether social or otherwise. It seems to me that in a triangulation of elements, a certain notion of balance emerges – perhaps that’s because the ‘thirdspace’ situates or anchors the propositional knowledge? So, in this way… the introduction of the ‘actor’ by Mika lends itself to his later elaboration of ’semantic identity’ being something that emerges from a community network or collaborative group, for example in the production of ‘tags’.

The functionality of a ‘group’, as it were, automatically ‘frames’ their thinking (tagging) and collective memory (Mika’s ‘agreed upon terms’) and this, of itself, helps to categorise the apparently ‘loosely’ defined tags generated by the members of the community. So that, if you like, even though each individual makes an individual choice as to which tags to use, the tags are used within a ‘visualised set’ belonging to the group (Mika’s ‘concensus’), which makes them less problematical as identifiers because the element of randomness is thus lessened.

I was intrigued by Mika’s raising of temporality as a problem in concept definition… (his ‘ontology drift’) but, for myself, saw this as a natural part of the evolving semantic map and not as problematic as he suggests as, surely, there are causal links which tie new concepts back to old ones, even as communities change and evolve? Knowledge may be ‘codified’ as Mika suggests, but must codification always signify something which is fixed?

I liked Mika’s vision of a dynamic ontology as a ‘community of self-organising, autonomous, networked and localized agents… establishing connections and negotiating meaning only when it becomes necessary for co-operation’. He suggests that there is a lack of an abstract model for such a system but, actually, it seems to me that this ties into Yuri Lotman’s concept of semiosphere (forgive me for plugging my own research interests here). That said, Lotman’s semiosphere is demarcated as an abstract model for meaning making/meaning generation, whereas Mika’s interests seem to lie in connectivity of concepts for meaning making. Both, however, envisage meaning made on multiple levels and as multilayered.

Mika points out the lack of ‘one-to-one correspondence’ in keywords generated by individuals when tagging… however, although not explicitly stated… the notion of ‘many-to-many correspondence’ seems somehow appealing in the context of tagging and folksonomies.

I really liked his explanation of the relationship between user, object and concept and the notion of ternary associations. Forgetting the maths and the fancy language – lovely word ‘hypergraph’ but don’t they block the way sometimes? and just fixing on the concepts, I liked the idea that the combination of these three produces a ‘higher level’ concept that is accessible in different ways, so that, even where tags are non-identical, some overlap in conceptual framing at this ‘higher level’ may bring them together into one category – so, where two might not meet, three have the potential to do so… (thanks for the nice graphs, Yish). I did chuckle a little at the understatement:

Tripartite graphs and hyperedges are rather cumbersome to understand and work with. (Uhuh!)

How I summarised the rest… take two people who share an object, expressing its value with different tags… the object’s defining potential is multiplied by two… and so on. For me, I ignored the hyperedges and affiliations and instead pictured an ever-growing spirograph, growing rapidly more dense at different nodes around a central point (actor or object) – equivalent to the weighting/filtering properties of the ‘affiliation network’ – well, it kind of works for me and makes for interesting reflection. The idea of ‘overlap’ in conceptual framing generating an emerging semantic network seems eminently feasilbe (and somehow sensible) to me.

Skipping along, some other things I picked up on and which interested me:

- the notion of observing tagging behaviour to determine the kinds of meanings they generate – whether collectively or individually
- reflecting on the idea of a ‘collective mind set’
- the ‘well-known law of community formation’

I really like this: “interaction creates similarity, while similarity creates interaction” – I think it’s a nice phrase to link to the whole idea of social networking, although I’m curious as to the scope of the notion of ’similarity’ and what this might engender in terms of collaborative or communal interactions. It also kind of brings up the question of ‘the chicken or the egg’ and which comes first. Something worth thinking on, just the same.

Some quick notes without too much reflection (from later sections):

social bookmarking: link, describe, tag (keyword) and share

bookmarks: searchable, affiliated, associated, temporally situated

issues: synonyms, ambiguity, generalisation

community: core interests, clustering, evolving, correlations

folksonomy: tagging, keyword associations, community ontologies

Finally, the comparison of ‘object’ (say, search engine) and ‘actor’ in terms of effectiveness as meaning negotiators had me thinking (and I’m still thinking)… when I read this:

Overlapping communities turn out to be a stronger link than overlapping sets of web pages. A possible explanation is that even after including the disambiguating term in the query, the search engine still suffers from knowing too much, blurring away community-specific interpretation.

The idea of a search engine ‘knowing too much’ made me smile… sure had that ‘glut’ problem myself. Quite apart from the fact that a community has more consciousness (by virtue of its members) – the idea of the ‘overlap’ between communities generation meaning in and of itself is an interesting one. I’m wondering about the point of intersection and the ‘zone’ where meaning is made in such a case… which kind of ties in with Lotman’s notion of ‘explosion’ and the idea that where two apparently correlating actors and concepts interact… meaning is self-generating at some level but not necessarily immediately perceived… I’m wondering whether Mika’s interpretation of the interpretative impact of overlapping communities is similar to Lotman.

Learning communities?

It seems that we hear a lot of talk about learning communities, especially in relation to social software.

But what does it really mean? Critical mass, as discussed in last week's paper, is necessary in order for many social softwares to be useful and successful. But as the user base becomes wider and more diverse, can it still operate as a learning community? For example, as del.icio.us grew, early users became disengaged as their previously cohesive community diversified and they could not always guarantee to find the latest niche programming information on the front page. There seems to be a tension between similarity and diversity. A group who are too similar may not bring anything new, whereas a group who are too diverse may not have enough common ground to be able to share. I'm thinking particularly of social bookmarking and social networking here, although a case could also be made for blogs and high participation wikis. As user bases grow, become more mainstream and diverse, it seems likely that sub-communities will form within them (for example at a large scale the launch of MySpace UK catering to the different usage patterns in this country). Some of the hype around social democracy emerging from use of social software perhaps arises from the idea that we'll be communicating with diverse groups of people from outside of our immediate social communities – but how far is this likely to be true, or how far do people actually seek out communities that will validate our already held beliefs and positions? How, then do people find, enter and participate in learning communities in social software? 

In this area, I found danah boyd's talk at e-tech on the collision of global and local cultures really interesting. It can be found here. (I'm not yet sure how to use Bibsonomy, so will try to add it up there after the session tomorrow.)

Case study using wikis in schools

At the end of last year I carried out a case study using wikis with Year 9 students in school. While it was small scale and short term, it did raise some interesting issues around using social software in schools. I'll very briefly present some of the ideas emerging from this study at our second session. I'd be interested in any comments or questions either in the session or through this blog. The full report can be accessed here.

Categories are ‘tags’

Thanks for that, Yish, I’ve been wondering how to add ‘tags’ to my own blog for ages. I’ve been using a wordpress blog for about a year and I never really understood what the categories were for. It’s good that the workshop series really is a place to learn as well as to think.

If you want to know more, there’s an interesting commentary on tags and tagging at Wired.

Thinking on Carey’s latest email and ideas about memory – I don’t know why – but somehow, whenever I get to thinking about tagging, I also start to think about memory and the idea of ‘traces’ (of knowledge, information, etc.).