http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/39192.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1387

A great study by James Fowler (the same James Fowler who discovered that obesity is infectious through social networks) and Nicholas Christakis. It seems that happiness ripples through a population. Thankfully, it ripples slightly more effectively than sadness.

Their conclusion:

“People’s happiness depends on the happiness of others with whom they are connected. This provides further justification for seeing happiness, like health, as a collective phenomenon.”

The research is an offshoot of the remarkable Framingham Heart Study, instigated in 1948 and carried on through generations of volunteers. The experimental methods seem to have effectively dismissed the possibility that the effects are a result of random clustering, homophily or confounding factors like joint experience of an economic downturn or neighbourhood upheaval.

The results are fascinating. We are 15% more likely to be happy if someone with whom we have a close connection is happy. The effect is greater than the unhappiness caused by unhappy close people. As a result, the better connected our friends and family are, the more likely it is that we will be happy:

“Happy people tend to be located in the centre of their local social networks and in large clusters of other happy people. The happiness of an individual is associated with the happiness of people up to three degrees removed in the social network.”

Becoming happy is a good thing for all concerned – an unhappy close friend becoming happy increases the chance that we will become happy by 25%. If the friendship is reciprocal, it increases the effect by 63%. Interestingly, friends and next-door neighbours have more effect than spouses, which may partly be explained by the fact that happiness spreads faster through same-sex relationships (they don’t discuss gay relationships though!).

Physical proximity is very important – the effect decays noticeably, even between next door neighbours and those a few doors away. As the study looks at data from 1971-2003 it is hard to draw any conclusions about the effects of computer-mediated relationships and the authors are careful to point out that they can only speculate on the mechanisms for transmission. It could be anything from the effects of happiness on behaviour (generosity, helpfulness etc) to the direct effects of smiling, to the influence of pheromones.

The authors observe that educated people are generally happier than those who are not (and, incidentally, that women are generally sadder than men, but that’s another issue). I’ve wondered in the past about how we could adopt an infection model of education. This gives another driver that could make it work. Happy people are generally better educated and happy people get better connected. So education can have a disproportionate effect on happiness that goes beyond the benefits to the educated. This is good news all round and further proof (if it were needed) that the absurd notion of treating students as customers should be relegated to history. The customer of education, it bears repeating, is society, not the student.

Created:Wed, 31 Dec 2008 13:58:00 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/39189.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1386

Great study by Duncan Watts (of Six Degrees fame) that shows we are at least as influenced by what we perceive that other people think of a song as we are by the quality of that song.

It is all down to cumulative advantage – the early bird catches the work then the rich get richer while the poor get poorer. Quite aside from what this tells us about democracy and many other processes, this is at the heart of a fundamental problem that we need to overcome when designing social software, be it Google or Facebook or anything down below. Tricks such as parcellation, delay, limited sampling and so on can help, but as long as we have the channels to reinforce poor choices (be they Justin Timberlake, George W. Bush or Blackboard) then the problem will persist.
Created:Tue, 30 Dec 2008 18:01:12 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/39183.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1385

Wordle is a great little application that can create a tag cloud out of pretty much any text or website. It’s a neat way of summarising large texts, kick-starting a tagging system, getting the weltanschauung of a community and much much more. Maybe as importantly, it is good fun!
Created:Mon, 29 Dec 2008 11:39:05 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/39184.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1384

I’ve extolled the virtues of Slashdot before, but it bears repeating. I am still amazed by things like this – a question that interests many web developers and web masters is answered by many individuals in many different ways, then Slashdot uses the crowd to take care of the rest, quite literally evolving (in a strongly Darwinian sense) a dynamic and adaptive learning resource of extraordinarily high quality. Better still, if you don’t like the shape of that resource, you can tune it more precisely to your needs, altering thresholds, adjusting weightings according to your belief in the person posting, using value tags in the moderation drop-down box and so on, which in turn contributes to the overall shape and value of the resource to others. This goes notably beyond scrutable user models. And of course, to top it off, you can contribute yourself and/or ask questions of the crowd-teacher which, if they are half-way sensible, are likely to be answered promptly and helpfully. This is social constructivism at its best.

Slashdot is one of the most elegant, highly evolved learning environments on the Web and it works without a teacher in charge and without the explicit top-down enforcement of styles and standards of Wikipedia. Remarkable.
Created:Mon, 29 Dec 2008 10:34:59 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/34433.html

I was listening to the wonderful Lucifer Chu talking at the E-Learn 08 conference the other day when something he said struck a big chord. He was talking about edutainment and open content but it suddenly occurred to me that we (mostly) don't have a formal means of incorporating learners in our development processes for online learning. This is silly, especially where courses are, like most online courses, developed in advance of delivery. So here's the idea…

Alpha courses – 0.1 releases

Alpha courses are not those belonging to a curious christian sect, but those that are released for free to a select group of learners who can help us evaluate what we have produced. When we provide alpha courses we give students accreditation for free, but ask them to help identify in great detail what is good and bad, what we do well and what we do badly. We would have to assume that the content would have been produced using more traditional processes so there would be few concerns about factual content – the biggest problems would likely be pedagogic at this stage. This is not the end of the world as these weaknesses in the course would notably be outweighed by the metacognitive reflection that such a process would engender. Given such potential weaknesses, these courses would be most suitable for mature, reflective learners and, although the feedback would be very valuable, we would have to be wary that such learners are atypical.

Beta courses – 0.9 releases

The beta course would be a more general release intended to iron out the wrinkles and tie up the loose ends.   These would be offered at a considerable discount and, again, accredited. As the course would probably be close to its final version, we would expect to get a much broader range of learners on board and could evaluate it in a more authentic context than the alpha version.With luck we would get a lot of feedback both by analysing usage and seeking commentaries from learners.

1.0 releases

Once we have incorporated feedback from these learners, we would release the final course at the usual paid-for rates and it would go through the usual revision processes.

Why bother?

Most e-learning development methodologies (e.g. ADDIE, PADDE etc) incorporate an evaluation phase, but this is fiendishly difficult to manage in an authentic context and is usually either quite expensive or quite skimpy. In real life, we tend to release courses that are as good as we can make them but, given that they are almost always untested (at least in higher education), are inevitably imperfect. In fact, pretty much like beta software. Using alpha and beta releases of courses would provide feedback from real learners with real needs, as well as enabling learners who are excluded for reasons of cost from participating in traditional courses. There is undoubtedly a cost involved but the benefits, in terms of quality control and consequently improved reputation and retention, would probably far outweigh the costs, especially if we could work out how to limit participation in the early stages. Our courses would be notably better tailored to the needs of our learners. Better still, it would enable us to use a lighter weight development process, perhaps based on RAD processes and maybe even something akin to XP, to let us produce courses more quickly and efficiently than older methods. Better still, such a process would lend itself more naturally to flexible and social courses, where learner engagement in a community is a prerequisite for success and very hard to gauge in advance. And just to round it off we would get a lot of useful information on the demand for a course before committing big resources to the project. There might even be some good research spin-offs.

It is a modest proposal but I think, if implemented with care and rigour, it could make all the difference to the courses we create. The process might be useful in traditional face to face courses, but the big value would come from those that are online where there tends to be more up-front development, feedback is less rich and immediate and (in many cases) it tends to be harder to adapt as we go.

I haven't tried to search very carefully for instances of this being done already. Perhaps it is an old idea (apart from anything else we all iterate development of courses and the idea is implicit in the development of open educational resources) but I haven't yet come across reports any attempts to formalise this process. Whether novel or not, I like it.

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/34432.html

I got back from the best E-Learn in many years last night. Partly it was the great selection of keynotes, partly the fact there were hardly any no-shows (at least in my experience), partly the great people who were there, partly the quality of the papers. A notable improvement in a conference that had been slipping slowly downhill for a long time. I suspect more than a bit of the kudos goes to the conference program chairs Curt Bonk, Tom Reynolds and Mimi Miyoung Lee. There was a freshness and vibrancy to the event that was a pleasure to be a part of.

My highlights

The keynotes and invited speakers were all good, but some were outstanding…

Erik Duval and Wayne Hodgins

These guys are brilliant. A highly innovative presentation including Wayne via Skype from his yacht somewhere at sea, talking about mass personalisation – what they call the 'snowflake effect'. I have to have a certain sympathy for this one as it is what I have been working on for more than 10 years. It is nice to hear that it is now the mainstream. When I and others were applying automated collaborative filters and other social filtering systems to education 10 years ago and more it was very cutting edge stuff. I guess the thing that surprises me is that it has taken so long to reach prominence. Erik and Wayne gave a tour-de-force performance that reached into all sorts of nooks and crannies of the issues  personalisation raises and the technologies that we might use. I have seldom seen such a slick yet creative presentation as this one – a kind of planned chaos that seamlessly integrated the audience but packed in some really important ideas. Erik's great graphics-intensive beautifully designed presentation was delightfully offset by Wayne's helter-skelter Pecha Kucha presentation – 20 seconds a slide, 20 slides, six minutes and 40 seconds, giving plenty of time for a highly interactive and stimulating conversation.

George Siemens

George is always wonderful. We have been working in parallel for many years, but George is so much better at expressing things about how learning happens in networks, collectives, as well as the benefits and effects of emergence and so on than I will ever manage. An inspiring speaker. His talk was wide-ranging, including stuff on amplified change, storing our knowledge in our friends, why we name dogs but don't name cattle, and some good thoughts on the differences between the old and the new: formal vs informal, epistemology vs ontology, structural vs exploratory, open vs closed, pace vs depth and accreditation vs reputation. It was great to talk with George and Erik at a party after their presentations. They are as smart and funny in real life as they are on the presentation podium.

Lucifer Chu

Lucifer is stunning. A man who made millions (in some currency at least 🙂 through translating Lord of the Rings into Chinese and who has ploughed much of it back into improving learning for all, especially in the area of open educational resources. He has such phenomenal energy, enthusiasm and absolute clarity of vision it is hard not to be inspired by him. In fact, I will be posting a blog entry on my particular inspiration that I got from him soon (hint: we should build courses the same way we build open source software).

David Wiley

What is not to love about David Wiley? Here he was talking about the disaggregation of education and, by extension, the end of the traditional institution as we know it. Inspiring. He is another person who coins beautiful phrases to capture what we do. I love the analogies of water polo as swimming on horseback and celebrating the mass in latin to describe how we are transferring old and inappropriate models to a new environment. David Wiley is one of the great innovators in this area. Excellent stuff.

Mark David Milliron

A good solid and entertaining keynote on the generation gaps in online learning and some sensible thoughts on how to fill them. Packed with useful statistics, anecdotes and ideas and some lovely memes. I particularly enjoyed his characterisation of the 'techno cro-magnon' mantra :"technology go-oo-ood".

Richard Baraniuk

A very cool speaker, mainly discussion Connexions and others of its ilk. A call to arms for those (like me) who believe in openness and sharing. Creating, ripping, mixing and burning were the keywords for this one. It was good to see that some really significant things are now being done through Connexions and those like it, with a mature and sophisticated business model.The notion of lenses was particularly powerful – a means of filtering content through more or less trustworthy lenses that reinvents peer review and offers a revenue stream without diminishing the power and strengths of open educational resources.

I liked his distinction between repositories (such as Connexions) and referatories (such as Merlot). I am not totally convinced that the centralised model of repositories is the way to go – I like distributed solutions despite issues of consistency and reliability that still have to be solved. Apart from anything else, the single point of failure of repositories remains a deeply troubling issue if we want to use them for a long time. In such a time of flux as this, no single organisation (even Google perhaps, and certainly not Facebook or any smaller educational site) is trustworthy. I have been burnt too often when relying on external sites to accept that centralisation is the answer. Remember the furore when EduSpaces was nearly lost? Education may be a big market, but individual sites are relatively small and fragile.

Summary

I guess the thing that most impressed me about the conference this year was that the ideas I and many others have been playing with for many years have gone through the innovation barrier and we are beginning to see great richness and complexity in real-world applications. We are moving on from 'hey, blogs are cool, look what I've done' or 'wouldn't it be nice if we could pull things together from different places' or 'what can we do to cater for the digital generation'  to a more critical phase of examining how the world is actually changing as a result.  There was a lot of talk of trust, reliability, reputation, security and stability, a lot of discussion about the clash between the old educational cultures and the new open world, the need for remixing and repurposing,  and that old chestnut of top-down vs bottom-up. These remain big issues that have yet to be solved properly but I think we are starting to address them and entering a period of refinement rather than massive innovation.

I think that we are now on the verge of moving into a new phase that hardly anyone is talking about yet: how do we eliminate the tyranny of the system designer? Cursory surface thinkers like Andrew Keen and slightly more credible but technologically blinkered academics like Tara Brabazon look at our new media and despair. They are right to be concerned (even if they really don't get the fact that we are moving into a richer age that outstrips the old in many more ways than it falls behind) but misunderstand the cause. This is a hard one, especially in networks and even more so in collectives. In natural systems, the rules for evolution themselves evolve, but in designed systems the creator of algorithms and interactions usually plays a fixed and determining role, even more than the architect of a physical space. The big and emerging issue for me is therefore how we can prevent, reduce or circumvent programmer/designer control. I have commented before on Wikipedia's problems, but our other main source of instant knowledge, Google, is perhaps even more pervasively and insidiously shaping our behaviour with its family of algorithms that surround the central PageRank. The crowd is only as wise as the means through which it expresses itself and there is still far too much simplistic ranking and deliberate shaping going on. It will all end in tears. We will get stupid mobs if we carry on this way, which is a pity, because the real stupidity is with the system designers, not the people who drive such systems. I have begun to scratch the surface of this problem in my book, but we have a long way to go on this.

I suppose that it is worth mentioning that there are still quite a few people doing the same old dull things with learning management systems and tired old methodologies, but even their sedimentary work is being washed away and eroded by a strong trend towards learner control and a richer view of the world where the teacher is a fellow traveller, not a guide nor (heaven forfend) a sage. I know that we are in the rarified space of stuff that is worth reporting at a research conference and that most of the world is still lost in control-space, but even at the weaker end of this conference the trend is kicking in hard. Ellen Wagner, a very sound thinker, had some good things to say on where we are in the innovation cycle and the tensions between innovation and implementation,research and practice, academic and corporate, product and solution, and traditional and emerging forms. There is still work to be done at the trailing edge and I got some useful confirmations of what I already know at even the most mainstream of presentations.

And of course it was wonderful to catch up with friends and colleagues from all over the place. Sadly not much of a showing from the University of Brighton this year: well, actually, only me and Diana Andone, but at least we got an outstanding paper award. It is sad to think that Brighton was once a significant research leader in e-learning. Hopefully it will be again. On the bright side my main employer, Athabasca University, was a major contributor to the conference, with at least 10 of us presenting, possibly more – I was still running into colleagues I'd not come across before even on the last day. 

Overall, a fine conference.

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/31954.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1382

A woman who changed her status to ‘single’ days after her husband moved out was stabbed to death as a result.

I am intrigued about how our public (or semi-public) faces are becoming increasingly significant and meaningful in social software environments. Would the husband have reacted the same if she had removed her wedding ring? Would he even have known? And would we shout the things we shout in our profiles and mood messages if we were in a room with the same group of people as those who read them?

The thing that bugs me about most current social sites is that I am the same thing to all people. In real life, I show different faces in different contexts with different people. In social space, I am just one thing (or at least no more than two or three). We need much finer grained control over what we reveal, to whom, when and in what circumstances. Elgg (http://elgg.org) is heading in the right direction but it is still very coarse grained and insensitive to context.

Would more variegated and richer permissions on her profile have saved the life of the woman in this case? Perhaps not: It is highly possible that she was deliberately sending a signal to her husband, and (perhaps) deliberately telling all their friends at the same time. But maybe she did not think of it as direct communication at all. Maybe she was just saying something about herself with no particular thought of an audience, maybe just asserting her new-found freedom. Perhaps if FaceBook had given her more shades of grey to play with she might still be alive. OK, maybe that’s stretching it a bit. But, if we are to really use these things effectively in education, we must get these issues sorted out.
Created:Fri, 17 Oct 2008 20:37:13 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/31870.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1380

Via Stephen Downes, an interesting posting from Ruth Reynard in Campus Technology. The article explores potential abuses of blogs in education. It is very notable that the education referred to lies very firmly within the traditional institutional context. Most of her recommendations relate to fitting blogs with traditional institutional values and norms, including issues such as learning objectives, assessment and structured use of the environment.

Although blogs can be useful in such a setting, it seems to me that she has rather missed the point.

The remarkable value of blogs comes not from their support for annotated postings, but from their connections with each other. The blog is a fundamentally network-based environment that achieves meaning through being part of its piece of the blogosphere ecology. If we choose to constrain this then we are missing out on a wealth of connections, serendipitous encounters and new opportunities for learning that were simply not an option before this kind of technology came about.
Created:Tue, 14 Oct 2008 12:51:57 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/28585.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1379

Mind-blowing talk by Sugata Mitra on how kids aged 6-13 can and do teach themselves and, most importantly, each other. All that is needed is access to a connected computer, which Mitra’s team provided across India through public holes in the wall.

There were no teachers or formal curricula of any kind. Not even a start page, just a search engine. The kids are able to teach themselves without anyone telling them to do so, without any teachers save the other children (often with younger ones teaching older ones) and of course the creators of content on the Web.

A central observation is that the kids learn as much by watching and talking about it as by doing – typically in groups of about 4. It makes no difference whether they are controlling the computer or not, they all learn as much. Results in tests were closely comparable to those achieved in schools and incredibly cost-efficient. The educational effect has no correlation with any other factor that they could measure apart from access to a computer in a group.

A nice example, the first thing non-English speaking kids did after figuring out the computer interface (which took very little time) was to find out about and learn the English alphabet.

Mitra concludes with four important points, each of which is elegantly proven in the video:

– remoteness affects the quality of eduction (largely because of poor teaching by teachers who do not want to be there – there was very little correlation with any other factor).

– educational technology should therefore be introduced into remote areas first – many of the studies that have been performed are in places where education is already pretty good, so the gains are modest. Where teaching is bad, educational technology has a more important place. He uses a lovely quote from Arthur C. Clarke – "Teachers who can be replaced by a machine should be"

– values are acquired, doctrine and dogma are imposed (some delightful evidence of this, using a bottom-up process for identifying value statements)

– learning is a self-organising system

This is a stunning piece of work. Anyone connected with education should see this.

Mitra sums up that education and pedagogy should be digital, automatic, fault-tolerant, minimally invasive, connected and self-organising. Brilliant.

Created:Mon, 15 Sep 2008 01:20:16 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/28561.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1378

Excellent NY Times article exploring the big issues in social networking. Great stuff on ambient awareness, microblogging and issues of trust and privacy. A must-read for social software newbies.
Created:Thu, 11 Sep 2008 18:38:54 GMT