http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/50976.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1403

“…these huge changes will also seriously threaten the ability of universities to provide all the things beyond teaching on which society depends: science, culture, the transmission of our civilization from one generation to the next.”

Many interesting things about this development and others like it. On the one hand it is wonderful that the approach puts learners in control, provides materials and community, all for a single low fixed monthly price that lifts barriers to education for many that would otherwise be excluded. The model makes perfect economic sense as long as there are not too many students like the one described in this article, who worked 18 hours a day to get her qualifications. On the other hand it is another step towards the commoditisation of the creation of knowledge, a market-driven approach in which only the strong will survive.

I’m currently reading Howard Bloom’s magnificent ‘Global Brain’ which makes a forcible point for the need for diversity generators: non-conformist approaches that send out feelers into the evolutionary landscape and explore possible futures and different ways of being. Market-driven colleges of the type described in this article are what Bloom calls conformity enforcers: despite catering for individuals so well they must necessarily avoid the unprofitable avenues and, in so doing, reinforce the status quo even more than our traditional institutions (magnified still further by their use of bought-in commercial educational course offerings).

For all their many many faults, our traditional universities are pretty good diversity generators: the ivory tower is not all bad inasmuch as it affords scope and freedom to explore beyond the boundaries of practical and economically viable concerns. Most of the time this leads nowhere but, just occasionally, it enables breakthroughs that simply wouldn’t happen in a more pragmatic world. More importantly than the exploration of ideas new to the world, perhaps, is that it also offers that space for anyone who is able to join in – a space for young people in particular to grow and explore their boundaries and, sometimes, to leap over them. Our universities and colleges are in desperate need of reform but, in the process, as a society we must keep their valuable functions.

I hope we in the institutional sector of higher education find another battle ground to fight on than in the increasingly crowded space of cheap and flexible courses. Apart from anything else, we will certainly lose that battle.

Universities still have a dominant role in the creation of at least some kinds of new knowledge so it would make sense to take advantage of that. When universities first formed it was because they made it easier for people to come and hang out with great scholars and become part of a rich scholarly learning community. I reckon we should return to our roots here. What universities (at least currently) can offer that education-as-a-commodity brokers cannot yet aspire to is the opportunity to not only read the books but to hang out with the people who write them.

However, this might change.

An interesting and growing trend is that many of the great and the good in the guru category are reaching out beyond the walled garden into networked communities, notably in blogs and social networks that have little or nothing to do with the institutions in which they work. Most institutions short-sightedly offer very little support for that kind of outreach (I am very lucky to work for two that do). What they *can* (and sometimes do) offer is the opportunity to be part of gurus’ small groups, rather than just their broader networks. If I were running StraighterLine then I’d probably want to start to poach that territory too. Once that starts to happen then the old gang needs a pretty good strategy to deal with it.
Created:Sat, 05 Sep 2009 22:04:35 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/50878.html

I've just spent three rewarding and exhausting days at the IEEE Social Computing Conference in Vancouver.

It was an odd experience for me as by far the majority of papers and presentations seemed to have a lot to do with computing (most predominantly various forms of network analysis and visualisation, plus a fair bit on technologies of privacy and security) and very little to do with 'social'. One of the more spectacularly glaring omissions was any notable use of social technologies before, during or after the conference, apart from a few bottom-up initiatives. In fact, given that this was a computing conference, use of computers was altogether pretty dire, with the most appallingly designed registration process I have ever encountered, that suggest its designers had never considered users let alone followed anything like a user-centred design process. The conference website is something out of the 1990s. At least the network was fine, but that was provided by the hotel.

A few speakers asked people in the audience about their use of various social systems and it was more than slightly bizarre to be among the minority of delegates using big players like Facebook, Digg, Flickr and Twitter, let alone less popular social apps. I find it almost incomprehensible that some social software programmers can be so utterly divorced from the use of the things that they are studying and developing. Except that, as a breed, computer scientists are not known to be the most sociable of people.

Despite this gaping hole, there were some great people and there was some good stuff to be found there including fine sessions from Ben Shneiderman, Bebo White, Barry Smyth, a big contingent of creative folk from MIT MediaLab, and many more. There was some fascinating research relating to the use of sensors and wearable devices and even the mainstream of network analysis and visualisation papers, as well as those considering privacy, security and access control, held some great potential insights and discoveries. Again, however, it was depressing to see how few had performed any follow-ups or studies with real people to find out what social factors might be lurking behind the effects they were seeing in the abstracted data or how their designs might be used by real people. A panel hosted by Jenny Preece followed up Ben Schneiderman's talk in considering the big ethical and related issues that social software engenders, which was refreshing and a necessary counterpoint to all this abstraction of humans into nodes and edges, but it stood out from the mainstream themes as a distinct oddity.

The conference certainly helped to inspire me with some ideas, refinements of ideas and issues I'd not thought about well enough before, so it was well worthwhile, but if that was 'social computing' I hate to imagine what it might be like without the 'social'!

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/50755.html

Terry Anderson and I are leading a small project at Athabasca University in Alberta, Canada taking a design-based research approach to exploring ways of using social software for learning.

We need someone with a computing degree or equivalent experience to extend and improve aspects of Elgg, as well as to integrate and mash it up with other systems (specifically Moodle and the Project Wonderland immersive environment). PHP and/or Java programming experience would be useful. The post holder will also research and evaluate the effectiveness of interventions using the software so will need to be a great communicator, ideally with experience of participative approaches to design and/or qualitative and quantitative research methods.

The things we are trying to do will hopefully be of benefit to anyone in education who wants to use Elgg as their social software. We hope this will be ground-breaking work that will lead to publications etc, so it would be good for someone wanting to break into learning technologies research.

This post can be remotely located, but occasional visits to Edmonton, Alberta would be required, and Canadian residents and citizens will be considered before anyone else.

Full details are available at https://athabascau.hua.hrsmart.com/ats/js_job_details.php?reqid=469

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/50936.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1402

Some great ‘hey wow!’ statistics and facts about social media use of the sort one tends to see a lot in keynotes. Not all of the facts are reliable or significant but there’s a very good list of sources to verify their plausibility and, while we might quibble with the odd detail here and there, the overall message is clear: this stuff is *big*.
Created:Fri, 21 Aug 2009 23:26:00 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/50555.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1401

It looks like the 3D Web is nearing reality. The current generation of general-purpose immersive spaces (e.g. Second Life, There, Wonderland, OpenSim etc) are clunky, poorly-interoperable, resource-hungry monoliths that help to show the potential but are really not ready for mass adoption. These two initiatives (WebGL and O3D) should be exactly what is needed to build a truly standards-compliant and open immersive web. I recall similar arguments in the early to mid nineties about VRML and later X3D but maybe this is the bit of the puzzle that means we get the real thing at last!
Created:Fri, 07 Aug 2009 20:47:00 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/50297.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1400

A good list of the current main players in mobile social networking, with some intelligent commentary on functionality, affordances, weaknesses, prognosis for the future etc.
Created:Thu, 30 Jul 2009 01:33:01 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/50298.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1399

A collective approach to social networking. Instead of explicit friending, the system finds people like you and clusters those into your network.

I guess the big issue is the control that the creators exert in the choice of aspects that are considered in establishing similarity. You can select styles which establish the context that is of interest to you at a given time, each of which uses a set of explicit questions to find out about you (valuable info!). I suspect it could have some potentially interesting applications in education, especially on the informal and lifelong learning front, if it were to be open-sourced. Not so useful as a closed service like this.
Created:Wed, 29 Jul 2009 22:29:33 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/45582.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1398

Is it possible that anyone is surprised by the news that 10% of Twitter users are responsible for 90% of the tweets? Or that over half Tweet less than once every 74 days? I suppose it is interesting when compared with the social network norm (10% produce 30% of the content) but it is certainly not newsworthy nor does it show anything unexpected about Twitter. There was no hype bubble to burst.

The study’s authors suggest that this makes it a one-to-many publishing service as though that is a bad thing. Of course, it *would* be a bad thing if there were any limits on who could publish, but there are not (well, censorship issues to one side for a moment).

It is much more interesting that, in the space of year, it grew by 1382%. That’s a big number – even Facebook only grew 228% in the same period. I’d be inclined to put that down to a few factors apart from the usual variants on Metcalfe’s law:

1) it’s very fast, very simple, very easy to get going – there is little investment needed in time, attention, computer power, etc

2) It exploits multiple technologies and their associated networks – not just computers but cellphones – and it fits neatly in everything from a widget to a web page.

3) unlike phone, email or SMS, it’s a push technology that doesn’t usually intrude too much or demand a response – even if it distracts, for most of us the 140 character limit keeps the distraction small, even less than RSS feeds.

4) Media hype and prominent celeb twitterers – there’s something very intimate and immediate about tweets that makes the view into someone’s personal life compulsive reading with very little effort.This certainly gave a boost.

5) Perhaps most importantly, it can ride on the back of other social networks. Despite their best belated efforts to compete, Twitter started by competing with no one and so was able to take full advantage of people exchanging info about their Twitter profiles on many social networks like Facebook, email, MySpace, etc. Throw in a dead simple API that makes it easy to integrate with other sites, so there is very little reinvestment in building a new social network needed, and it is almost surprising that it did not grow any faster. It is a compelling symbiotic (or maybe a bit parasitic) organism that thrives on other networks as well as building its own.

I find it interesting not so much for what it is but as an example of the way we must go forwards – to build small, open, agile, flexible, integratable services that enable a federation of networks and functionalities, building on what is already there and evolving fast. It is more than likely that Twitter will some day crash and burn or, more probably, get sucked into the genetic material of something else, but that is the nature of evolution and nothing to cry about.

Created:Fri, 12 Jun 2009 03:21:48 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/42189.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1397

Clay Shirky on typically brilliant form, here talking about cognitive surplus and what we do with it.

I love his rough calculation that the whole of Wikipedia, in all its language variants and including discussions, edits, lines of code and so on, amounts to around 100 million hours of thought. Coincidentally, that is the amount of time US viewers spend watching adverts on TV every weekend. That’s a lot of cognitive surplus just ripe for engaging in participative activities. He observes that the Internet-connected world spends around a trillion hours watching TV each year. If just one percent of that time shifted towards producing and sharing on the Internet, it would be equivalent to 100 Wikipedia-sized projects per year. And, of course, that is exactly what is happening, probably at a higher rate than that.

Let’s now imagine that one percent of that one percent could be turned to replacing our current processes of higher education. That’s one Wikipedia a year. Meanwhile the Internet continues to grow at a phenomenal rate, but still slightly less than a quarter of the world’s population have access to it. That’s a lot of growth potential – even a quarter of one percent would be a whole lot of brain power. We are just at the start of this revolution and have barely scratched the surface in terms of searching, filtering, connecting, aggregating and interacting with all of that content and all of those people. Assuming other things remain fairly equal and we don’t all vaporise or vanish down a hole of recession, it is hard to see how this cannot completely change higher education as we now know it.
Created:Mon, 23 Mar 2009 11:17:04 GMT