A thoughtful article on why the shoehorning approach that the LMS will encourage in an educational setting is a bad thing. I couldn’t agree more and have written the odd article and given the odd talk on the subject myself. The LMS is a dangerous and addictive narcotic. Let’s call it Crackboard.
Created:Sun, 16 Dec 2007 02:51:51 GMT

Original: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5258&resid=1348
Posted: December 15, 2007, 7:51 pm

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/19416.html

It seems that the race for presidential nomination in the US depends on more than the common sense and opinions of voters according to Brian Knight and Nathan Schiff at Brown University. Getting in there early makes a big difference. In fact, voters in early primary states such as Iowa and New Hampshire have up to 20 times the influence of voters in later states in determining whether candidates are selected. This is startling. It is also interesting that it offers a refinement of the simple Matthew Principle (the rich gets rich while the poor gets poorer). People are more influenced by those that came first than by those who have most recently posted results. It appears that priority is more important than novelty, at least in presidential primaries. The reasons for this are not entirely clear: it may be that the fact that the information is available for longer gives it more time to seep in, or that there is a simple cascade (but it is hard to see how this explains the relative unimportance of recently voting states) or that the media makes more of the first ones so it sticks more easily. It is probably a combination of all three.
The implications for those of us trying to use the wisdom of the crowd in e-learning are profound. I have been exploring the importance of delay in harnessing crowd wisdom and it would seem that this offers proof that it is needed. If people didn't know the early results then they wouldn't be influenced (as much) and could make more independent decisions. However, the problem in an educational setting is the cold start – if we don't feed back contributions to the system right away, then contributors and latent contributors will be less inclined to contribute. We seem caught between a rock and a hard place. If we want wise crowds, we need delay, but if we want crowds in the first place, we need immediacy.  Let's imagine an educational social recommender system (say, http://ltsn.CoFIND.net) which tries to provide the appropriate resources for learners as and when they need them, using mainly a combination of list priority and font size to recommend particular resources. The resources themselves are added and rated by learners. This is a clear case where priority could offer great advantages. The first resource will, a priori, be at the top of the list to begin with (and the bottom, as it happens). It will thus attract more attention than those that come later, whether or not it is better. It is thus more likely to stay at the top. A number of potential solutions present themselves:

1. we introduce delay and control the learning process that surrounds it. In formal education this is not too difficult: we just tell students that they must post (ideas,resources, ratings, whatever) and that feedback will be delayed. This, incidentally, fits neatly with several principles in my book, notably emphasising the importance of context and the significance of scale (the larger scale institutional environment influencing the smaller scale more than vice versa). However, this is less effective in a less formal setting as it requires significant buy-in from the learners and assumes a cohort working in sync.
2. we layer learning experiences, providing fast feedback at first but delaying it more and more as the content grows, as well as building a natural decay into resources so that they lose weight relative to the new ones. I like this approach and have tried it in CoFIND, but it is incredibly hard to tune it right so that everyone gets the learning experience they want or need. Early on you get mob stupidity (so discouraging people from using the system) and later some people, especially the early starters, get discouraging levels of delay and the system moves slowly. Plus it is really easy for good things to get lost if the rate of decay is too fast. This would work better if we could discover whether the right resources are getting through and then adapt the results. However, it is not clear how we would perform this adaptation. We could of course reintroduce design (e.g. a bit of adaptive testing) but this goes against the grain. My natural inclination is to use random mutation, but when evolutionary systems compete with designed systems they are almost certainly (at first) going to do worse. People will leave, and use the less-than-optimal-but-at-least-working designed systems instead.
3.  a variation on 2) – we introduce a random element, artificially boosting some things for no particularly good reason (or, as in my systems, you give a boost for novelty). Again, through evolutionary mechanisms, this will head towards a great optimum, but in the short term will give poor results. And it is the short term that matters – if learners can learn better elsewhere then that's where they will go, even though we might promise that it will be better in the long run if they persist.
4. a variation on 1) – we automate some of the process, perhaps by mining things like Google PageRank or maybe using a bit of content-based matching, or extracting links from Wikipedia, or using the conventional collaborative filtering approach to find similar users, or… the list is endless. This is pragmatic and, in any sensible system with the purpose of helping people to learn, this is the kind of thing that I would do (and, with variations on the theme that tend to involve WordNet and ontologies) many people have done this kind of thing. But I am after something more than just a sensible system. If we really want to harness crowd wisdom, we need to find ways to make it work for us, not to cheat by reintroducing the individual designer. Making use of PageRank or Wikipedia is getting there – instead of using a single approach to crowd wisdom, we can take coarse systems that use big crowds (albeit ones that have seriously large problems with the Matthew Principle) and refine them, with inherent delay. This certainly helps to reduce the cold start problem and works nicely at a range of scales. However, while it might help with finding some of the right resources straight away, it does not begin to cope with issues at a smaller, more private scale (e.g. sorting out the useful parts of a discussion forum) and the immediate benefits are no greater than googling the results in the first place, so it might be hard to get buy-in.
5. we lie. We establish a community using a different pretext and slowly encourage them to contribute to and build a more complex system. I feel mildly amused by this idea. If we can build, say, a community with shared learning interests that uses a discussion system of some sort, then if they incrementally build a list of resources, that they then make available for ranking (but not showing results), then parcellate the resources and again use blind/delayed ranking, we might have  a gentle way of avoiding the designer too much. Early on it would work like a traditional learning community, but could evolve new features as a result of crowd behaviour. To make this work effectively using crowd processes, we would have to encourage this dynamic to flow naturally within the system, rather than imposing it according to our own rules. We should provide ways for the crowd to decide that it is time to evolve, plus many different affordances according to the needs of the community, different tools, different parameters (which should be crowd-driven). Of course, we would need to use crowd processes to kill off the mutations that failed. This is beginning to sound a bit like a job for the wonderful Ning, especially now that it is using OpenSocial. We could build a Ning application that modifies itself according to the wishes of the crowd. Crowdware indeed.

I'm just rambling out loud. Must get back to some real work.

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/19415.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1347

Unype is a great idea, albeit one that needs a little work before it is really useful. It attempts to be a kind of Second Life that runs in Google Earth (yes, you can meet people anywhere in the world) and allows access via your social networks (several supported, including the obvious ones, more to come as it supports OpenSocial). Apparently you can create objects as well – could get a bit crowded if this catches on though! There is also a standalone (Windows-only) client. It aggregates interestingly with Skype, so you can chat and talk too.

Rather fun – I like the idea of meeting people in ‘real’ spaces. It would be nice to hook this in with mobile technologies, so you could meet with people, some in the actual place, others visiting virtually.
Created:Sun, 09 Dec 2007 08:58:25 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/19395.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1346

Jimmy Wales says “You can ban kids from listening to rock ‘n’ roll music, but they’re going to anyway,” he added. “It’s the same with information, and it’s a bad educator that bans their students from reading Wikipedia”

He is absolutely right. Wikipedia is one of the best ways to learn something new. On the other hand he also mentioned that it still lacks the authority to be used as a citeable source for college-aged and university students. Again, he is right. I would not condone citing Encyclopaedia Britannica for that matter. It’s an encyclopaedia! But Wikipedia is a darn good one, and it can lead to some great resources to find out more. As an educator, I strongly encourage my students to use Wikipedia, but not to cite it. The idea that some fools think that we should ban it appalls me.

But the idea that we should rely on it scares me more.
Created:Sat, 08 Dec 2007 08:53:16 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/19384.html

http://amps-tools.mit.edu/tomprofblog/archives/2007/11/834_death_

As is often the case, Tomorrow's Professor (in this case Mano Singham) provides some excellent food for thought. Singham's argument is that we should reconsider the syllabus and the message that it sends. Syllabi are often a model of the worst in formal education – above all controlling and disrespectful of students, but also dull, restrictive, anti-learning devices. Singham even uses the word 'punitive' about the typical syllabus, observing that 'its tone is more akin to something that might be handed to a prisoner on the first day of incarceration'. I totally agree. If you have to have one, a syllabus should be an inspiring document, with flexibility and imagination built in from the start. But the average syllabus reflects a different purpose. As Singham puts it:

'The implicit message of the modern course syllabus is that the student will not do anything unless bribed by grades or forced by threats.'

It is a vicious circle, a negative feedback loop that perpetuates itself and, eventually, even comes to be seen by students as a good thing – they want to know what to do, when to do it. Formal learning junkies, they have developed a dependency that is hard to kick, and we don't help them in any way by reinforcing this mindset. And so we carry on, making ever more 'managed' experiences which are essentially to do with controlling students and keeping bureaucrats happy. And, in the process, the joy of learning is lost.

Whilst we're on the subject, another stupid idea from the folks that brought you formal education is the standardised course – the idea that every subject is learnt in multiples of 100 hours (or whatever your preference may be) is beyond mad. It is positively pernicious. It is an arbitrary limitation that seldom fits the needs of teachers, let alone students. Typically, we either try to squeeze too much in (at least for some students) or pad it out so that (at least some) students are bored, and maybe so are the teachers. Everyone suffers. This is topsy-turvy reasoning. The arguments in favour are all to do with external constraint: simplified admin, convenient  for holidays, makes it simpler to compare instutions and so on. But it has nothing to do with whether it makes sense to learn that way. It doesn't have to be like that. In the online world we are not so constrained. For instance, online scheduling tools are quite effective nowadays and allow groups to organise themselves quite effectively: we don't have to limit ourselves to top-down insitutional timetables. And the classroom is as big as it needs to be.

People naturally learn different subjects in different ways in different contexts and over different time periods.  Therefore, we should build learning designs that are appropriate for the different needs of individuals, the resource constraints and the different needs of the subject matter. They should be no bigger nor smaller than they need to be for the person, the subject and the pedagogy. Sometimes a simple learning object will suffice that might take the learner an hour or a week (whatever) to finish. Sometimes a discussion will need to occur, sometimes even a lecture. Sometimes a laboratory session will be needed. Sometimes it will take years of sporadic reflection, discourse and practice. Again, it should take as long as it takes, in whatever form makes sense, not what a timetable cut into arbitrary chunks dictates. It is silly enough in a conventional paced course, but in the context of unpaced open courses it is ridiculous!

The world has changed. Maybe there was a time when the industrial model was necessary as a means of providing education for all. We needed mass-production models to cope with the numbers. But, at least in many contexts, this is different now. We don't need to do this any more: it is one of the ways that moving online can free us from constraints. When the most efficient means of teaching was to get as big a group of people together as possible to make the best use of limited guru-time, and libraries were places you had to visit in person, and administration was done by hand, and schedules had to fit around classroom availability and teacher presence, and courses could not easily be mashed up and remixed except by their authors, there was a logic to it. Now it is time to shake off those shackles and rethink what we really want. The technology is there, the standards are there, and it would be dead easy to create exciting, learner-driven learning experiences that actually fit the needs and interests of the learners and the subject matter being explored. All we need now is to slightly rethink what we mean by the university.

Mastery doesn't come in neat chunks of 10-15 weeks, or whatever your particular chunk looks like. If we need to summatively assess (it is an important role) then the form and content of that should be negotiated with the learner. We can decide the number or credits to give at that point or, ideally, later.

And of course, we should make the assessment relevant. Sometimes the formal part might not be attached to a particular learning transaction: integrating, aggregating and connecting different subjects, ideas, topics and so on is far more important and revealing of knowledge than assessing small, isolated learning objectives. Of course, we should continue to provide formative feedback whenever it makes sense to do so. Or we could drop the whole notion of summative assessment altogether until it really matters. Once a student has aggregated enough (informal) credits then they can submit a portfolio and/or some performance-related tasks, depending on the subject, and be judged by a panel of what, by then, will be their peers, much as we do in a PhD thesis or research paper review.

This is not radical. This is not new. This is not uneconomic. It is just common sense. And yes, sometimes we will settle on our old ways because they are the best ones for a given context. But we should never take that for granted.

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/19139.html

http://www.google.com/gmm/index.html

It's hard not to be bowled over by Google on an increasingly regular basis. Some people call them the new Microsoft, but they do something that Microsoft have never been very good at – they innovate. They reinvent. They do what the rest of us would like to do.

There is nothing spectacularly original in this new offering, but that doesn't mean that it is not innovative: GPS-less location finding on a wide assortment of mobile devices, integrated with local search, satellite imagery and (for a few US locations) real-time traffic info. This was one of the (many unfulfilled) promises of the semantic web. Of course, if you have GPS then it works fine with that too but, if you don't, Google lets you know where you are through triangulation of mobile towers, without telling anyone else (even Google) about it. The technologies are simple and have been widely used for years, but the organisational genius to make it happen and the mashability of Google technologies makes this a deeply exciting reality.

Combine this with OpenSocial and Google Gadget technology and suddenly a whole world of applications that benefit from knowing where you are become possible. I dislike the term 'Web 2.0' because it tends to be taken to mean a particular set of technologies, most of which have been around since the last decade. What it actually does do is to describe a trend, a pattern that reaches a new pinnacle of perfection in this new technology. Sun used to make a big thing out of the network being the computer, but they were only thinking of a network of computers. Now, the network is computers, other people, and the physical environment. This is a brave new world and we are privileged to see its beginnings. Suddenly it is easy to create applications that know who you are, where you are, who you know and where they are. In fact, we can even find people we don't know but should. Wow. And if we don't use it to rethink what we mean by educational institutions and learning communities, then we will be left in the dust by those who do.

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/19009.html

An interesting discussion has been developing around notions of groups, communities, aggregates, crews, teams, collectives, etc etc. Terry Anderson responded to Dave Snowden's post on aggregative and emergent identity to which Dave has given a very full reply. I guess it's my turn now, as Dave mentioned me a few times!

First, my take on Dave's original post:

I like the notion of the crew. I think it is a helpful metaphor. There are, of course, many other kinds of 'crew' – many project teams are brought together to perform research, development and so on in a very similar way, for instance, as do some medical teams, programme boards, councils and clubs. I think it is a useful to distinguish formal, relatively transient groups of specialists as a particular type of group. I'm not sure that I would want to call all such groups 'crews' (I agree with Christian Hauck's comment on the post there) but I see the point and I can see how it helps to talk about one of the ways we classify groups and to help differentiate some sorts of groups from others.

I totally agree with Dave that we should get away from talking about communities and networks as though they were just one kind of thing and even more with the absurd notion that people are one of a small range of kinds of thing. This sort of thinking about people is one step removed (maybe not even one step) from racism, sexism and other forms of unhelpful and counter-productive prejudice. Most of it (including the 'evil' Myers-Briggs but equally Belbin) is unscientific nonsense on a par with astrology. Yes, it can be useful when designing things to be aware that there are different ways of being, and it can be helpful to have a coherent and all-encompassing framework to help reflect on your actions and behaviour (even astrology has a role) and the results of using such ideas can be provably beneficial. But, big BUT, as soon as we start believing in the truth of this hogwash then we are on a slippery slope to unwarranted and potentially harmful conclusions.

I like Dave's systemic approach and understanding of the abilities of teams (or crews) to adapt. I don't think I would call it emergent – there is nothing going on here that is different from the sum of its parts. It is more about good management practice and group dynamics. It is not an aggregate identity – it is just that the group is a recognisable entity with a focus on achieving particular tasks and patterns of activity. This is interesting and important, but not emergent.

Now, to answer some of Dave's objections to Terry's post: 

Dave is a little inconsistent – he doesn't believe that you can' classify groups/community or whatever' – er…crews? Of course you can, and he does! Terry and I do not believe that we are talking about mutually exclusive categorisations. Quite the opposite. There are fuzzy borders between them (e.g. wikis could easily be seen as fitting with all three at once, depending on context and perspective). They are more like a palette of primary colours that can and should be mixed. An individual's perception may make the results appear different from one point of view to another, and a particular computer system to support one or more aspect may shift between them or be used differently in different contexts. So, 'what's the point?' I hear you wondering! The point is that we can make mistakes if we try to apply approaches and methods to education (maybe to business?) that work in one mode to a system that is operating in another. In much of the educational literature on social software people have attempted to apply the principles that relate to what we call groups to systems that are much more network or collective in nature. It is no surprise that this leads to incongrous and sometimes negative results. You can't take the ideas that worked in a closed discussion forum and transfer them to Facebook. So we need a richer vocabulary and a different set of ways of dealing with these emerging forms.

Dave thinks that we are simply distinguishing between formal and informal groups. Not so. That distinction is useful, but it is a different kettle of fish altogether. Again, he is a bit inconsistent. In fact, we agree entirely with Dave's point: "In saying that I am pointing to the obvious fact that to exist as a community some form of network has to be in place, but that a commercial network or other transaction network, does not have to be a community." Precisely so. They are different.

Neither Terry nor I would want to suggest that further subdivisions of our three primary divisions of the Many should be discouraged. Precisely the opposite in fact. This is an area that interests me greatly as there are many different kinds of network, group and collective and they are far from equally useful in an educational context – which is where we are coming from, of course. In fact, I think that some varieties of each form are positively pernicious, and all work very differently in different contexts. 

Finally, some clarification: Dave is dismissive of the term collective and I fully understand this as we had a lot of discussion about the use of the term ourselves in which Terry raised exactly the same objection. Dave associates collectives with cooperatives and the like, whereas we have a very different meaning in mind: it's perhaps a little whimsical and non-academic, but our collective is more of a cybernetically-enhanced super-entity inspired by Star Trek's Borg. Collectives are connected to each other because their behaviours are aggregated algorithmically. A collective shows its face in the tag cloud, or the suggestions of a recommender system, or the ordering of search results in a search engine, or the visualisations of networks that show us clusters we never saw before, or even (less purely and more controversially) the growth of a large-scale wiki. The computer system makes use of the behaviours of the many, applies an algorithm and presents the results back to help guide us. In itself aggregating behaviour is quite interesting but it gets really interesting when we consider the systemic effects caused by this feedback. For instance, at least part of what keeps sites near the top of Google's search results is the fact that they are at the top of Google's results. I think that there are several ways of subdividing the classification further in useful ways, not just by technology but most interestingly in the delay between information gathering and system feedback. I would hate to think that this was the ultimate classification (no such thing), but it is a useful way of looking at one of the main ways that social computer systems operate.

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/18743.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1343

Very interesting mis of automated and social tools for recommending music. The pattern matching stuff is quite cool, but I particularly like the social tagging which mines the Web for a multi-dimensional tag list (reminds me a bit of PHOAKS in this), rather than relying on potentially biased or misleading personal tags. They are also doing some interesting work on visualisation of the results. And it is open source. All in all, looks like a system that marries a great selection of technologies and research-informed ideas to produce something that might be really useful.
Created:Thu, 15 Nov 2007 16:49:51 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/17763.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1342

This is probably the biggest thing ever to happen in the world of social software.

Wow.

MySpace, Bebo and SixApart are in on the deal that already includes Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle (yes, Oracle). As the article says, checkmate for Facebook, but it can’t be long before they join in.

I can hardly wait to start playing.

The range of possible educational uses is staggeringly large. Maybe not as big as the invention of the Web itself, but potentially as transforming. I think that we have just seen the start of a new era.
Created:Fri, 02 Nov 2007 05:40:06 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/17559.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1340

Yet again showing why it is a good idea to hire intelligent people, Google have launched three open and easy-to-use APIs for profile info, friends info (the social graph) and activities (news feed type stuff). We’ve needed this for a long time. What makes this doubly cool is that Google is not trying to compete head-on with Facebook and its proprietary brethren. Far from it. Instead, they have gathered together the likes of Orkut, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Friendster and Ning to implement the standards.Wow. This may turn out to be an incredibly big step forward on the road to the mashed up universe and applications that move into another realm of usefulness and adaptability. Web 3.0? No. But I think this might be the point that Web 2.0 comes of age.
Created:Wed, 31 Oct 2007 03:42:49 GMT