The Wales-Wide Web

I am increasingly interested in how we can use social bookmarks or tagging as a form of developing social networks based on content. We all know that social networking is a powerful tool for informal learning. But the friend of a friend type approach assumes a commonality of interest which does not always exist!

Tagging has the potential to generate similar social networks - based not on just friendship - however many steps renewed - but based on commonality of interest.

There are two contexts in which I am looking at tagging and at using delicio.us. The first is for research students. A friend of mine is researching sustatinable production. She is spending a considerable time undertaking a literature search, mainly through the internet and bookmarking sites on her computer. If she was to use delicio.us tags, not only would she develop a useful shared resource for all of us, but through following people who had used the sme tags, would speed up her work by finding what other work they had been following.

My second interest is as part of the background research for the MOSEP project. MOSEP is a European funded project researching and piloting e-Portfolios for vocational school students. For this project I have devised an initial list of tags which (I have suggested the seven or so partners in the project all use in their literature reviews and research activities. Hopefully, this will allow us to share our work in a distributed network. I will report back on how this goes.

My friend Mike Malloch has developed a very considerable resource of tags. He uses an interesting link blog to display this tags. he also has been working on developing different tools for displaying tags, including tag clouds and a tag viewer.

for another example of a useful tag collection, Colin Milligan from Cetis has assembled a collection of links to resources around Personal Learning Environments.

Technorati Tags: Peronal Learning Environments, tagging

Back from the the ALT-C conference in Edinburgh. I always go to these events convinced I am going to blog through the confernce and never do. In reality I suspect that post-confernce reflection may be of more value than 'news coverage' as it happens. Lets face it - academic confernces have little that requires up to the munute reporting.

I have come away with about ten headings for future posts - so I must have learnt something. HopEfully these will roll out over the next couple of weeks.

My overall impressions? Well thIs was the year of social software. Presentations about blogging in education were the topic of the conference. Wikis were also popular though less so. Interestingly there was little or no reference to tagging (might that be next years trend?).

About the blogging - as far as I can see there were two main issues. First was whether blogs should form a structured part of the curriculum or be an additional - add-on - space for students - or both. The second issue was whether blogs should be open to the whole world or be used in a closed system - and who should decide?

There was little talk about VLEs - apart from the by now customary slagging off of Blackboard. Indeed there was even public doubting of the future need for VLEs in a services led world. there was plenty of angst about the future role teaching and of institutions. And plenty of what seemed largely ungrounded discussions about the 'net generation'. More research and less talk would seem to be useful.

I organised a symposium (which we turned into a workshop) on Personal Learning Environments. I enjoyed it greatly and the audience seemed to too. I will post a video of my contribution on this blog tomorrow. And the ever gorgeous Joise Fraser is working on a Flicker stream of the results of the workshop.

It is good to see (at last) the take up of social software. I just worry a little that this is this years fad - and as it proofs hard to get students involved and develop appropriate pedagogy people will move on to the next technology - video?

had a great time night out drinking with the ELGG boy band (photo pending). And met many old and new friends. Thanks to all of you who told me you read the blog regularly - I never new so many people cared. And thanks to all who helped with the workshop especially Ray, Terry, Josie and Lawrie,

Technorati Tags: Alt-C2006, social software

As promised here is the newly formed ELGG boyband - featuring, left to right, nurdy ELGG, scruffy ELGG and smarty ELGG.

Photo: Josie Fraser.

Sleeve Notes

The first of the autumn podacasts from Sounds of the Bazaar. From now on these will be published fortnightly (at least I will try).

In this edition:

Blackboard - what are the deeper issues behind Blackboards patent on VLEs - Graham Attwell's regular rant. Graham Attwell sees the Balckboard patent as an inevitable result of the provatesation of learning infrastructures and the commodificationof learning. He goes on to call for more support for Open Source developers.

John Steinbeck on patents - in East of Eden, published in 1952, Steinbeck about the "very bad patent habit, a disease many men suffer from".

What is the Bazaar project all about - an interview with Raymond Elferink

Blog of the week - Mike Malloch's use of social bookmarking tools. Mike Malloch publishes a regualr bog, e-learning2.0. He also publishes a 'link blog', providing a dynamically updated listing of his delicio.us tags. And, along with his Knownet colleague, Steve Tuffail, he has developed a number of different for viewing tags.

Listen to the whole programme

The Blackboard patent - the inevitable result of privatisation

John Steinbeck on patents

About the Bazaar project - an interview with ray Elferink

Blogspot - tools for viewing Delicio.us tags

Endspot - Graham Attwell's wrap-up to this edition

Technorati Tags: blackboard patent, Peronal Learning Environments, tags

Tonia emails: "Hi Graham

That John Steinbeck that you read on your podcast, Brilliant. Do you have the text for that in a digital form?"

Here you go, Tonia. Its on pages 52-53 of the Penguin edition of East of Eden.

"Meanwhile Samuel got no richer. He developed a very bad patent habit, a disease many men suffer from. He invented a part of a threshing machine, better, cheaper, and more efficient than any in existence. The patent attorney ate up his little profit for the year. Samuel sent his models to a manufacturer, who promptly rejected the pans and used the method. The next few years were kept lean by the suing, and the drain stopped only when he lost the suit. It was his first sharp experience with the rule that without money you cannot fight money. But he had caught the patent fever, and year after year the money made by threshing and by smithing was drained off in patents. The Hamilton children went barefoot, and their overalls were patched and food was sometimes scarce, to pay for the crisp blueprints with cogs and planes and elevations."

Tonia also points me to the brilliant Cast on - podcast for knitters site. Its very cool - check it out.

Technorati Tags: blackboard patent, patents

Time to eat some humble pie (for non native English speaker see Wikipedia entry).

In a post on Friday I doubted the value of live conference blogging. Rod replied on the Bazaar site: "Nice to meet you at ALT-C & I look forward to your reflections - as we discussed at the conference our quick & dirty posts (see Informaticopia on http://www.rodspace.co.uk/blog/blogger.html and HI-Blogs http://www.hi-blogs.info/ may not provide depth of reflection but we (& quite a few users) do feel they have value."

And of course he is right. The posts on Alt-C are of much use - I was quickly following up his links and downloading worksheets to use next week.

I think the truth is that I am no good at live conference blogging. For one thing my typing is just too poor. Fort a second I loose track. And it just doesn't suit the way I write. So it's horses for courses. Thanks Rod. Keep up the great service.

Technorati Tags: Alt-C2006

Regular readers will know I have been messing with different video formats for the last three or so months. Thsi  is  the first video presentation I am really pleased with. I think the live recording is much better than trying to reproduce within a studio the adrenelin of speaking live.

We are working on a wiki to give access to the full outcomes of the workshop.

I am increasingly concerned at the new moral outrage over plagiarism.

On September 12, the Observer said: "One of Britain's newest universities has found more than 200 students guilty of cheating after it launched a crackdown on what university officials admit is one of the biggest problems they face.

Using a computer program to catch students trying to pass off others' work as their own - often simply 'cut-and-pasted' from the internet - Coventry University discovered that 237 students had broken the rules. As a result, seven were expelled from the university, while another 12 cases are pending."

Are all these people really cheating.

On 12 September the Guardian reported: "The National Union of Students (NUS), vice-president, Wes Streeting, is becoming familiar with the problem. "We are coming across an increasing number of cases where students have been accused of plagiarism when it's not obvious that the accusation is justified," he says.

"A big problem is that students are not being told what plagiarism is, or how to avoid it. Students may be referencing an author in the bibliography, but not in footnotes. We are also being told of huge differences in the way that departments within the same university are dealing with the issue."

Ian Beak (not his real name) has just graduated from Birmingham University. He was accused of plagiarism in his second year. Two diagrams in an essay had not been footnoted in the text.

"They were referenced in the bibliography, but not on the page. I was accused of plagiarism, which I wasn't very happy about. I wasn't given the opportunity to discuss it; the accusation was made and I had marks deducted, which caused me to fail the module," explains Beak."

Many years ago when I was at university we did not have computers. Library searches were done through card index systems (although the new technical wonder of microfiches was just being introduced. If we had an essay to do, we were given a booklist by the lecturer. This nearly always included the lecturers own writings on the subject. We read or skim read the books - or those of us saving time to spend on other things (drinking, politics) read the introduction and conclusion. And then we paraphrased the contents to linked them together in our essays. This was not only tolerated but was the expected way for us to learn.

We did not reference our essays - rather we put a reading list at the end - and if you were clever you made it impressive whether or not you had read the books (which half the time ere unobtainable anyway because the library did not have enough copies.

Today the standard is much higher. My daughter - who is doing an undergraduate course in history in Aberystwyth University college is expected to fully reference her texts. It seems to me the standard of research for undergraduate essays is much higher (and she is doing history - the same subject I studied at university. students are using the internet in just the same way we paraphrased books. Yet the moral panic has taken over yet again - and it just isn't needed.

Yes - there is a problem with sites writing essays on demand for poor little rich kids whop do not want to learn. This comes from yet another Guardian article on August 1: "Calls from teachers and lecturers for a plethora of internet sites to be investigated have been rejected by the government's exam watchdog, although officials are said to be concerned. More than 15,000 students are estimated to have signed up to one website alone, which charges £9.99 for access to tens of thousands of assignments.

Another, Academic Answers Ltd, based in Nottingham, runs five websites and receives 800 requests a week for tailor-made essays. Barclay Littlewood, director of AAL, said that demand was so great that his firm could only meet around half of these orders. The newly formed company made £400,000 in its first year's trading, with Littlewood expecting this to double by next year. 'We're expecting 50 per cent of last year's customer to return, on top of new ones,' he said.

Of the company's websites, ukessays.com is the biggest, receiving 240,000 hits a year. The company charges £50 for a pre-written essay, and anywhere between £200 and £5,000 for an original piece. "

Even this is not new. We often shared essays to help each other out. And you could always commission an essay off another student. But the answer to this seems easy. Don't chase the students - just ban the sites - or make the 'service' they offer illegal. These people are parasites.

Then lets end the moral panic

Technorati Tags: plagiarism

Storytelling - KM toolkit: inventory of tools and techniques - Knowledge Management - NeLH Specialist Library:

I.m writing a paper with Ray Elferink on an 'Architecture of Participation' for the Blogtalk conference in Vienna.

Part of the paper is trying to explain our ideas about how to use Web 2.0 tools and social software to support knowledge development but at the same time trying to show the background research which our work is resting on. This includes Activity Theory, research into Communities of Practice and Storytelling.

Searching the net for resources on storytelling ( which are remarkably sparse) I came on this great web page published on the UK national Health System's Knowledge management Library:

• Stories communicate ideas holistically, conveying a rich yet clear message, and so they are an excellent way of communicating complicated ideas and concepts in an easy-to-understand form.Stories therefore allow people to convey tacit knowledge that might otherwise be difficult to articulate; in addition, because stories are told with feeling, they can allow people to communicate more than they realise they know.
• Storytelling provides the context in which knowledge arises as well as the knowledge itself, and hence can increase the likelihood of accurate and meaningful knowledge transfer.

• Stories are an excellent vehicle for learning, as true learning requires interest, which abstract principles and impersonal procedures rarely provide.
• Stories are memorable - their messages tend to ‘stick’ and they get passed on.

• Stories can provide a ‘living, breathing’ example of how to do something and why it works rather than telling people what to do, hence people are more open to their lessons.
• Stories therefore often lead to direct action - they can help to close the ‘knowing-doing gap’ (the difference between knowing how to do something and actually doing it).
• Storytelling can help to make organisational communication more ‘human’ – not only do they use natural day-to-day language, but they also elicit an emotional response as well as thoughts and actions.
• Stories can nurture a sense of community and help to build relationships.
• People enjoy sharing stories – stories enliven and entertain."

Technorati Tags: e-portfolios, eportfolio, Personal_Learning_Environments, PLEs, storytelling

Guardian Unlimited Technology | Technology | Home videos, beauty contests and party stunts: the future of mobiles:

I don't know whether to be sad or sorry. Having spent the last two years talking about user generated content, the big technology providers have themselves suddenly got it:

From the Guardian on-line:

"Mobile companies have been watching the rapid growth of networking and video-sharing websites such as MySpace and YouTube. They have realised that content created by users themselves might be just what they need to persuade their customers to do more with their phones than make calls and send text messages.

The mobile industry has spent billions of pounds on licences to run new services over 3G networks, and reassured nervous investors that the future of mobiles in markets where everyone already has a phone is based on customers downloading videos and accessing the internet. But the take-up of such products has been slack."

"Having invested in high-speed networks, user-generated content is an obvious next step, whether they do it themselves or work with existing online brands," says Frédéric Huet, managing director of industry specialist Greenwich Consulting UK. "It's very cheap to set up and it very quickly gets high usage.""

As the idea of user generated content mainstreams, the issue for education is how we use such content, store and share content and how we 'judge' the quality of content. This has quite profound implications, given that the traditional model was to trust in academic qualifications and names, to provide approved lists of materials or to trust in publishers kitemarks.

Technorati Tags: Open content, social software

A new feature on this blog - a series on aircraft food. Please feel free to send photos of your experiences.

Jen Hughes kicks off with an email"

"Stop press news .... KLM have got new sandwiches which are about 3 times more inedible than the old ones. After triangles in plastic came oblongs in bloated wax paper bags and now we are moving into a new paradigm of round ones in boxes. The new ones are circular sweet brioche things with salty cheese in them, melted in the microwave and then allowed to go cold. And along with the toothpick, coffee stirrer, napkin and plastic cutlery you also get a small wooden pencil. Uh?

One of the big issues in e-Portfolio development is how to foster reflection. Everyone talks about it - but there are few examples of how to do it. I think story telling - or the use of narrative - lays at the heart of the issue - these definitions of reflection are a useful starting point for considering how we can incorporate story-telling as a strategy for reflection.

Reflection is the "heart and soul" of a portfolio. Digital storytelling is a highly motivating strategy that can make reflection concrete and visible. Some definitions of reflection:

• Careful thought, especially the process of reconsidering previous actions, events, or decisions; an idea or thought, especially one produced by careful consideration of something. (Encarta)
• One of the defining characteristics of surface learning is that it does not involve reflection. (Moon).
• Reflection is an active process of witnessing one’s own experience in order to take a closer look at it, sometimes to direct attention to it briefly, but often to explore it in greater depth.(MIT)
• Reflection is what allows us to learn from our experiences: it is an assessment of where we have been and where we want to go next. (Wolf)

Digital Stories in ePortfolios

Technorati Tags: eportfolio, storytelling, e-portfolios