http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/21155.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1356

Some sensible thoughts on building social sites that work, some of which mirror my own.In brief, Dion summarises these as…

* Ease of Use is the most important feature of any Web site, Web application, or program.

* Open up your data as much possible. There is no future in hoarding data, only controlling it.

* Aggressively add feedback loops to everything. Pull out the loops that don’t seem to matter and emphasize the ones that give results.

* Continuous release cycles. The bigger the release, the more unwieldy it becomes (more dependencies, more planning, more disruption.) Organic growth is the most powerful, adaptive, and resilient.

* Make your users part of your software. They are your most valuable source of content, feedback, and passion. Start understanding social architecture. Give up non-essential control. Or your users will likely go elsewhere.

* Turn your applications into platforms. An application usually has a single predetermined use while a platform is designed to be the foundation of something much bigger. Instead of getting a single type of use from your software and data, you might get hundreds or even thousands of additional uses.

* Don’t create social communities just to have them. They aren’t a checklist item. But do empower inspired users to create them.

Created:Sat, 02 Feb 2008 12:49:13 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/19715.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1354

An excellent little report on member overlap between social networking sites. As you might guess, it is huge: 64% of those on Facebook are also in MySpace, for instance (only 20% vice versa, but MySpace is still much bigger). Unless we start finding more ways to aggregate these networks, it is likely that many will die as it is simply too hard to maintain that many profiles and logins for most people. It looks very much as though it will be a stand-off between Facebook and MySpace, but I think that there is still a place for niches, as long as we can mash them up intelligently and the big bad networks don’t fight too hard for proprietary lock-in.
Created:Wed, 02 Jan 2008 18:57:17 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/19668.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1353

Jaron Lanier in typically excellent form, continuing the theme started in his fine article for edge.org. I think that he repeats his earlier mistake of considering many different forms of collective behaviour to be the same (Wikipedia’s dynamics are not remotely similar to stock market-like systems), but his central point is good: we urgently need to understand how crowds can be wise, and what makes them stupid.

Lanier’s warning of the danger that information technology can lock in cultural or behavioural patterns is dead right and unsurprising. In any system, choices we make earlier will constrain the choices we can make later. However, the nature of the computer as not only a tool but also the medium and the environment on which the tool works leads to an almost paradoxical problem that is seldom encountered in other systems. Not only may we get tied into formats, paradigms and habits created by the software, but the software becomes our virtual landscape, the context in which other behaviours occur, and thus its influence is pervasive and huge.
Created:Mon, 31 Dec 2007 14:49:09 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/19637.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1351

Help with designing an office of a very particular kind.

There’s nothing particularly unusual about this post or the responses on Slashdot apart from the fact that, rather than offering the more typical popular Slashdot post that gives information or an opinion, someone with a learning need posted a simple question to the network yesterday and (to date) has received over 250 replies. Many are facetious and silly but the multidimensional scoring system works as an effective filter to help those with specific needs (those seeking answers that are funny, informative, interesting, insightful etc), and there is a wealth of useful information here, offered in many forms from stories to design specs to anecdotes to discussion. There is a kind of collective/network consensus forming, along with arguments that will help the person with the original problem to make a reasoned and well-informed decision.

The fact that this has risen to the top few posts of Slashdot implies that not only do many people have an interest in solving the poster’s problem, but that there are plenty of others who have similar problems and interests – me, for one. Who needs specific courses when the network is so good at making decisions?

This is a great example of crowd learning.

The quality, specificity, depth and range of responses goes far beyond anything that might have been achieved through asking a single expert, or reading books, or following an online course, or even getting one-to-one tuition. There is such a diversity of learning needs catered for here that it is hard to imagine any learner being left behind.

Of course, so much depends upon the kind of question and kind of network involved. Slashdot is news for nerds, and this is a subject that is of interest to many nerds, and in an area that is comfortably within the zone of proximal development of much of the readership. It is very task-focussed and highly contextualised. But this is exactly the kind of learning that we generally need. Brilliant stuff.
Created:Thu, 27 Dec 2007 11:04:26 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/19542.html

I have been thinking some more about the issue raised in my previous post about the importance of being first in a social system where people influence each other's behaviour. On reflection, this helps to make sense of my thoughts (and those of others) on structure influencing behaviour. In many ways, this is just a symptom of a more fundamental dynamic. It has been noted more than once that the large and slow tend to have a disproportionately large influence over the small and fast in a system of otherwise independent agents, although this is a slight oversimplification. It seems to me that this might be more properly framed as a question of context. Where other issues of scale are equal, those that come first change the context for those that come later. Similarly, the large and slow moving provide a context for the small and fast, whether as defining features of the landscape to which the small and fast adapt, or as constraints on their activities. Big events such as forest fires can change the context rapidly, as can large-scale aggregations of small-scale behaviours, such as locust plagues or riots.  And, of course, intentional human intervention can make a big difference, allowing us to sometimes overcome the large and slow and to change the context by ourselves.

Relating this to one of my favourite topics, why learning management systems are pernicious, it is easy to see how several features of context come into play. In the first place, the LMS was developed within a context. Most arose from large and slow-moving institutional environments which, for reasons that have as much to do with history as with intentional design, have a particular shape and form. They have courses, classes, lectures, lecturers and a host of other structural features that influenced the developers of such systems. Had it been otherwise, they would not have been such a good fit with institutions and would not have been taken up as enthusiastically. Once they become an institutional feature, the power of priority takes hold. When an institution has wholeheartedly embraced a given system it is incredibly hard to get out of it – the effort of transferring and rewriting alone is bad enough, but the changes in culture, ethos, not to mention the training and  marketing needed make institutional LMSs almost unassailable except through the equivalent of a forest fire, changes in the intentional policies of the large and slow moving, or massive small-scale rejection. Small scale perturbations cannot shake them. And so, with their emphasis on the traditional values and structures that first shaped them, they actually enhance and strengthen the status quo. This is depressing to those of us who once saw them as an agent for change and liberation in learning and teaching methods.

What could change this depressing pattern?

• top-down policies, outlawing (say) courses (OK, maybe asking too much too early) or at least courses that follow the same patterns as other courses
• top-down policies mandating flexible, mashable, agile computer systems that would allow the locusts to swarm and take over
• a fire – perhaps started by something like the sites that offer hired tutors on demand, or the many sites that offer assignment writing, or even the widespread avoidance of institutional learning through use of Wikipedia, Google Search, social networking sites and so on.
• large-scale disillusionment – this has both a good and a bad side. The good side is that people may recognise that the problems come from trying to replicate a system that only ever worked because of all the informal and tacit elements that come with it: things like the motivational benefits of a timetable and the presence of others (consider the benefits of watching a movie with others), the ability to talk with fellow students in corridors and coffee shops, the largely hidden conversational aspects of lectures that cause changes in presentation and content according to the needs of the audience, the simple physical existence of an educational institution and much more. The bad side might be that people become disillusioned with technology per se, rather than recognising the flaws in its design. I fear that the vicious circle that starts with students liking these systems because they let them do the institutional dance better, thus reinforcing beliefs in their value when the problem is the institutional dance in the first place, may not help this process.

Now that I teach at Athabasca University I am becoming aware of another related issue with the LMS. When it was formed in the 1970s, AU modelled itself to a large extent on the UK Open University and developed a style of teaching that was aimed at enabling independent study, very largely through correspondance. Unlike the UK OU, AU's teaching was almost entirely at a distance and it developed a model of course design and support that worked well, albeit one that only suited a relatively small group of fairly self-directed learners. This was nonetheless good, because those learners would not have been able to complete a traditional university course, so access to education was increased. Now that courses are becoming increasingly online, AU has turned to a somewhat customised version of Moodle for its learning environment. This is bad in two ways.

1. Moodle, as implemented at AU, encourages forms of interaction through discussion forums (it also has wikis, blogs and so on, but these are not yet institutionally supported to any great extent). This does not fit with the context of the correspondence model, either pedagogically or practically. It means more work for the tutors that engage (who are already quite heavily weighed down with things such as the large marking burden that the correspondence model entails) and, especially where tutors are less active, disillusionment for many students who discover that what should be a wonderful learning resource is actually often quite restricted and unengaging as, no matter how active the tutor, students enrol throughout the year and thus do not form a meaningful cohort. What is incredible is that, sometimes and not often for long, active communities do emerge.
2. Despite providing a small range of templates relating to different learning designs, Moodle is still a product of the same mentality that led to WebCT. It is suited to a different context of teaching than that practiced at AU (at least in most undergraduate courses).  

AU teaching teams are faced with two choices:

1. bow to the Moodle model and redesign courses to match its implied pedagogies. I think this would be silly as AU is free to cast aside much of the frippery of conventional university approaches to teaching and this would just bring the institution in line with others, who would therefore be competing head-on with it in the online space. AU's mission is to open education to all, not to compete for students with other universities and colleges.
2. take the perpendicular path. Build on its strengths in allowing open, unpaced courses, but surround that with a social infrastructure that fits the overall ecosystem better. This is a bit scarier, but seems the only logical path to take. It is scary because it means rethinking the whole process of course design and delivery, not replicating structures that made sense in the days when courses went out through little more than post, phone and TV. We do at least have an institutionally supported instance of Elgg, which is a step in the right direction albeit still lacking some important features (notably in terms of the ability to  mash it up through more than RSS and its rather flat and undifferentiated model of communities)

I am very privileged to be a part of two institutions, both great in their own right, but both with related problems. One of the joys of working at the University of Brighton is that it provides a context for the individual tutor to adapt at a very small-scale level, changing the delivery of a course in real time, as well as enabling experimentation and adaptation throughout. However, the constraints set in at a higher level and the institution as a whole, whatever its good intentions, is hard to steer in an agile fashion, moving like a mega-tanker in a small strait. Innovations spread slowly, despite good communication, because the overall structure is deeply embedded in a physical and temporal context. Athabasca University has some of those constaints, but is inherently more agile at an institutional level. Its campus is primarily virtual and thus malleable. Its mission requires it to seek those who would otherwise be denied an education, so it is not constrained by the struggle to compete for school leavers. However, the context created by its history remains a powerful barrier, and the pedagogical approach that its history entails reduces the flexibility of teachers at the smaller scale, at least in undergraduate teaching. What is needed, and what would benefit both insitutions, is the best of both worlds. Flexibility at the top and at the bottom. I think that there are ways to achieve this – my book represents an attempt to address the problem at the level of the learner, but there is a need for a similar set of principles that would enable the valorisation of diversity at the level of the institution. Technology can support this or prevent it. The kinds of things that would give support would be the provision of small, reliable, interoperable, aggregable components, and diverse templates to help people to use them effectively. The kinds of things that would prevent it are…well…the monoliths. The big, engineered hunks of code that embody cultures and patterns that, whether in keeping with or opposed to the institutional ethos, are dangerous and evil. I am encouraged by moves in industry into social spaces such as Facebook, with their increasing diversity of available applications and their agility and scalability, although I am still wary of putting eggs in a single basket, no matter how big the basket – until Facebook becomes really open (and this may happen) OpenSocial is a far better option.

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.