Category Archives: Web 2.0

Future imperfect

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Following the third Pew Future of the Internet survey and the most recent Horizon report, I came across this Map of Future Forces Affecting Education recently and keep finding myself drawn back to it despite myself.  Though the interactive map itself looks smart, it’s a bit clumsy and impractical to use (somehow I wasn’t surprised that their ‘how to use this map’ video was made on a Mac ;-) ), but there’s a nice pdf version (requires registration) also available for the more Web 1.0 amongst us.

It’s intentionally US-centric, but many of the trends, dilemmas and topic hotspots will be very familiar to educators elsewhere, such as participatory pedagogy, cheap mobile devices, serious games, open content, transformed learning environments and alternative financial models.  The map offers an opportunity to look at these in a wider context of change and under influence from other, competing or complementary, factors.

So why does it make me feel so uncomfortable?  There’s a heavy emphasis on personsonalisation and diversity, yet at the same time there’s a strong underlying perception of ‘Generation Y‘ as a homogenous group, all of whom are highly adaptable (or fickle), socially-orientated, technologically adept and heavily into group activities, and a distinct sense that all the innovations proposed serve a single, extroverted learning style.  There’s the inevitable reference to ‘integrating digital natives and digital immigrants’, yet voluntary and involuntary digital exiles are disregarded, and there’s an apocalyptic, been-watching-too-much-Mad Max feel to some of the predictions which undermines its intention to ‘provide a common framework to explore innovations, new solutions and experiments’.  To be fair, it doesn’t intend to propose a single potential future but rather to act as a ‘conversation catalyst’ based on the assumption that ‘a trend is a reasonable possibility’, and it largely achieves that with only the odd wtf moment. 

Unraveling social networking

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Another week, another survey, this time a snapshot of the top ten web applications as voted by around 3,000 participants from around the world.  Most of the entries are little surprise, with the likes of Gmail, Flicker, Twitter and Facebook all appearing as expected, but sitting at number five is an unexpected entry: Ravelry, ‘a knit and crochet community’ that offers a rather impressive user experience underpinned by ‘the usual search and Google map thingies‘, online shopping, project books, displays of finished work, pattern sharing, personal messaging and discussion boards.  Their own stats from Google analytics are supported by those from Alexa showing a rapidly growing user base, with up to a thousand users invited every day and a waiting list of over seven thousand.  Perhaps it’s time to reconsider that Wikipedia: speedy delete decision…. 

What makes this site so interesting, of course, is the thoroughly non-techie nature of its subject matter and the naturalness of computer use implied amongst its user base.  The way in which well designed sites such as this can draw together users from around the world and support their communities should have some very valuable lessons for learning communities.

Birds of a feather

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A recent graphic from Le Monde illustrates the geographic variation in popularity of different social networking services across the world.  The graphic, based on data from August 2007, shows that while MySpace and Facebook have an unsurprising stranglehold on the North American market, things are very different in the rest of the world. 

Bebo leads the market in Europe, with the US’s big two being split by French equivalent Skyblog, an enterprise whose growth has been attracting comment for some time and whose parent site, Skyrock, is currently ranked seventeenth in the world by Alexa.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, Skyblog also has a relatively strong presence in parts of Africa, although Facebook is the clear leader there.

Friendster may be the wallflower at the west’s web party, but it’s a strong favourite in Asia, while Google baby Orkut dominates South America due largely to its phenomenal popularity in Brazil.  Although a large number of LiveJournal‘s users are American, its position as the social networking site of choice in Russia is evident.

Social networking sites are clearly a large part of many people’s lives, whether they are used to keep in touch with friends, make interminable lists of favourite films/smells/lists or to spoil Christmas.  The playfulness of early Friendster fakesters has given way to misguided attempts at humour and spite, but sites can also be used to raise awareness about more serious issues.  Are such sites just a fad?  Only time, and demographics, will tell.

The Horizon Report 2008

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The 2008 Horizon Report, fifth in the annual series, is now available online.  A collaboration between the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, the report examines six emerging technologies that the authors predict ‘will likely enter mainstream use in learning-focused organizations … over the next one to five years’.

The report focuses on six technologies or practices in particular: grassroots video and collaboration webs, predicted to enter the mainstream over the next year; mobile broadband and data mashups (two to three years); and collective intelligence and social operating systems (four to five years).  The emphasis is on educational applications of these technologies, with a range of example projects and products illustrating them in action.

Earlier Horizon reports and other publications can also be freely downloaded from the NMC site.

Joint CETIS Assessment and Educational Content SIGs meeting announced

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Registrations are now open for our next Assessment SIG meeting, and you’re warmly invited to book your place for this event hosted by the University of Cambridge.  It’s a joint meeting with the CETIS Educational Content SIG, something we’ve been planning to do for some time, looking in particular at two standards of interest to assessment: IMS Common Cartridge and IMS Tools Interoperability.

Common Cartridge hasn’t even been released yet, but has already generated significant interest amongst content vendors and publishers and has been heavily promoted by IMS.  It combines profiles of a number of different standards, including IMS Content Packaging v1.1.4, IMS Question and Test Interoperability v1.2.1, IMS Tools Interoperability Guidelines v1.0, IEEE LOM v1.0 and SCORM v1.2 and 2004.  The resultant learning object package or ‘cartridge’ is intended to be fully interoperable across any compliant system allowing content to be delivered to any authorised individual.

The appeal of Common Cartridge coupled with authentication and digital rights management systems to content publishers is clear, and the specification is particularly suited to the American educational system where there is a closer relationship between content vendor and courses than in UK Higher Education; in the UK, its primary impact may be in the schools and Further Education sectors where there is more of a history of buying content from publishers than HE.  The inclination of many UK HE lecturers to produce their own content and the bespoke nature of many higher level courses are issues we’ve already encountered when looking at topics such as open content and item banking, but there is some interest within UK education, in particular from the Open University.  As a major content producer whose resources are used far beyond their own courses, Common Cartridge has clear potential, and Ross McKenzie and Sarah Wood of OU OpenLearn will offer an insight into their experiences of implementing the specification and developing cartridges.  There has been very little work to date on the delivery of assessment material through Common Cartridge, a topic which will be addressed by Niall Barr of NB Software.  Our own Wilbert Kraan and Adam Cooper will update delegates on the current position of Common Cartridge.

IMS Tools Interoperability has received rather less fanfare, but is a valuable specification which takes a web services approach to seamlessly integrating different tools.  It allows specialist tools to be ‘plugged in’ to a learning management system, such as integrating a sophisticated assessment management system with a VLE which only provides limited native support for assessment, or discipline-specific tools such as simulators.  It also supports accessibility requirements through the (optional) incorporation of the user’s IMS Accessibility Learner Information Package profile to allow silent interface configuration.  Warwick Bailey of Icodeon will be discussing his experiences with the specification.

In the morning, Steve Lay of CARET, University of Cambridge, will be providing an update on the current state of IMS QTI v2.1.  Steve is co-chair of the IMS QTI working group (with Pierre Gorissen of SURF and Fontys University).

The afternoon will feature a presentation by Linn van der Zanden of the Scottish Qualifications Authority on the use of wikis and blogs in education and assessment, picking up on an increasing interest in the use and potential of Web 2.0 technologies in this domain.

The meeting is colocated with a workshop by the three JISC Capital Programme projects focusing on assessment to which you are also invited…

Massively Multi Learner

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The HEA Information and Computer Science subject centre recently ran a workshop, ‘Massively Multi Learner’, on learning in multi user virtual environments which I was fortunate enough to be able to attend.

Perhaps inevitably, the presentations on the day were heavily skewed towards Second Life, a fact that I was glad to see the organisers themselves acknowledged as not necessarily ideal.  Unfortunately, Carl Potts, who had been scheduled to speak on learning within guilds in World of Warcraft, was unable to attend, but Laz Allen of TPLD (standing in for Helen Routledge) provided a non-SL and more game-orientated perspective on emerging technologies.  Of particular interest was the emphasis in this presentation on the assessment of game-based learning and of gaming activities, through reflection and debriefing, and through the logging and interpretation of ingame activities with reference to an identified set of skills.  Unlike commercial off-the-shelf games (COTS) and other resources such as SL, games specifically designed for learning can offer a more effective balance of learning objectives, subject matter content and gameplay, with assessment – often itself highly innovative – integrated from the outset.

The rest of the presentations all referenced SL to a greater or lesser extent.  I hugely enjoyed Aleks Krotoski‘s work on social networking in virtual worlds, in particular her identification of 75 avatars (“they know who they are”) who form “the feted [fetid?] inner core of Second Life”.  Unlike either single-player or MMO games, MUVEs such as SL are inherently socially orientated rather than goal-orientated; ‘success’ doesn’t come necessarily from accumulation of in-game objects or from PvP or PvE pwnage but from occupying key, extremely powerful positions within social networks.  As an infrequent and rather ‘resistive’ SLer, I feel strongly that the lack of scaffolding within SL, in contrast to the carefully balanced quest structure in games such as WoW which directs players through the game world and encourages casual grouping, makes social relationships within SL disproportionately important.

Other presentations explored some of the many purposes to which SL is being put.  Dave Taylor of the National Physical Laboratory discussed some very exciting international collaboration which has been taking place in the Space Island cluster, while Peter Twining demonstrated the Schome island pilot on the teen grid which is trialing SL as a learning space for a group of ‘gifted and talented’ learners.  Jeremy Kemp discussed Sloodle, an integration of SL and Moodle which uses mashups to connect the two systems.  The integration of SL and Moodle also offers the potential for resolving accessibility issues around SL by offering meaningful real time alternatives to inworld communications.

The final three speakers had all integrated SL closely into their teaching practice.  Mike Hobbs of Anglia Rushkin University described scripting tasks undertaken by second year Computing Science students to create learning resources used to explain computing concepts to first year students, while Annabeth Robinson (well known in SL as AngryBeth for her creative and practical objects) described the options her Design for Digital Media students had for woriking in SL and particularly for using it as a tool for machinima.  Mike Reddy provided an entertaining end to the day, looking at various ways in which Second Life can be integrated into a range of courses.