Today I consider to have been my first day as a proper MSc student although technically the semester starts tomorrow. Having received and read through the various course handbooks and started going through the readings I have today started downloading and registering for the various systems that, unlike Facebook and Second Life, I have not already tried in the past. 

In particular I downloaded, installed and registered with Skype. Although I have colleagues and friends who have been using Skype for years I had never gotten around to registering as I do not at present have the facilities for voice chatting on my PC although I am familiar with the technology as EDINA, where I work, has almost entirely Voice Over IP telephones (including my own line). I found Skype exceptionally easy to download and install although having looked for several friends I was suprised to find that unlike in a social networking community many had not registered with their full/real names. I was however able to instantly test the text chatting with a friend in Japan. It seems to run in much the same way as similar chat systems I'm more used to (GoogleTalk, AIM, Jabber) although I am interested to see if the hogging of bandwidth which colleagues have warned me about prooves to be an issue. As I like to do several things at once I will need to take time in the next few weeks to make my computer a little more efficient given the amount of time and resource hungry resources I will be using contiguously. 

I am already very interested to see how WebCT looks and runs. A few years ago I attended a talk on WebCT in the Edinburgh University Library staff training sessions and later took up the opportunity to try building a test WebCT course but because of my job at the time this was more a matter of exploring for it's own sake rather than a proper attempt to use the system. A major barrier to knowing how to set a course up was never having seen one before so it is fascinating to see how the system looks and feels at first hand as a student ahead of the weeks where we will be looking and playing with the technology from the other side of the fence. It is particularly interesting at this stage to dip into different areas of the course online. Being able to see material for the whole module is also very liberating having found the drip feeding of information in my undergraduate degree (which predated the university's widespread use of WebCT to support learning) rather frustrating. 

Having been on Facebook for a while now. I had already joined the MSc's Holyrood group and have a rather overactive profile (indeed I shall be attempting some weeding of Facebook Applications that I haven't reexamined since joining the side). I have however now joined the appropriatte IDEL Facebook Group and have added Brian Martin, my MSc DoS as a friend on Facebook along with another student whose post I had read in the Week 1 discussion area. I will be very keen to see how Facebook works as a space for learning and collaborative working as I have both read and had many conversations of the relative merits of Facebook lately and am currently trying to build a Facebook Application for SUNCAT, the project I work on, as something of a pilot to see if there is any value for my organisation in creating content for this "walled" community. I am hopeful that Facebook will join OpenSocial
as, in theory at least, the ability to port social information and applications across networks would make a big difference to the viability of creating applications, profiles etc.

In reading through the various e-learning related feeds I noticed a few which I receive and think would be of interest and I will therefore be posting links to these in my next post where I will also be specifically hoping to reflect on my hopes and expectations for this course and the way in which it will gel with both my specific project and workplace. 

I found that starting my first blog posting yesterday was very inspiring. Although I have blogged before on my personal website I haven't really used blogging to discuss and explore one focused set of issues in detail over a long period and I am really excited about this. Indeed this freedom to explore is part of the key reasons I decided that I should apply for this course in the first place.

I have, for as long as I can remember, been interested in technology for it's own sake. Although I am not always the person bustling in the queues for the newest gadget I am the person registering for any exciting looking web service and just playing around trying things out. I was let loose on the internet in my late teens and found it the gateway to a wider world full of possibilities and pitfalls. My interest was cultivated further by my first proper job on a Year in Industry where I was hired to assist the Millennium Bug team at a BP Chemical plant. Although some of my job was relavent to the engineering degree that would follow, most of the work involved my scouting out the latest news and updates on what was happening and what the latest thinking on this rather strange computing issue was. From then onwards I have been both captivated by the possibilities afforded by computing and online content delivery and also hampered by my intuitive comfort with technology. I am happy to test, play and work intuitively feeling reasonably happy that nothing will break in any serious way. Whilst that works for me most of the time it is a serious limiting factor in my ability to communicate my enthusiasm and ideas to other people who may not be "digital natives" or interested in computing, the internet or indeed anythin technical other than as a means to an end.

At the moment I am very lucky to work in EDINA which is generally a forward thinking organisation which supports and encourages interests in new and emerging ideas and technologies. There are still however generational, cultural, political and funding issues which mean it is neither practical nor desirable to try lots of different approaches and technologies. Whilst I have lots of ideas to contribute I do not have any formal teaching experience (aside from running occasional in-house workshops when I worked in the Edinburgh University Library on, for instance, how to use Outlook) and lack the skills to structure and roll out my ideas in practical ways sympathetic to the varying needs and experience levels of others.

I am therefore hopeful that this course will help me develop a more formal structured approach to delivering e-learning and/or rich electronic content and in particular to help me tailor my thinking to better suit a wider range of users so that I can communicate the simplicity and usefulness of a given idea in a practical way rather than being too focused on the cleverness and possibilities of the technology. I think tailoring my existing skills in this way whilst developing and enhancing others will allow me to make the best of my ideas and the opportunities I may have to progress in my career.

At present I work on the conversion of library data for the SUNCAT project. The project team have been very receptive to my ideas and have already allowed me to move most of our day to day documentation onto an externally hosted wiki so that it is easy to search, edit and navigate (previously we had been working within locally hosted and very hierarachical Windows folders of documents). My work have also recently approved the development of a Facebook Application and a Blog for the project and I will be working on these (in work time) as I progress through this course reporting on their development and sucess as a case study for EDINA's other projects and services to be able to reference. I feel this has been a personal achievement but I need to be able to contruct a formal and strategic arguement and practical plan to be able to persuade other teams who I do not work with that such advances are worth the considerable investment of time. I feel that this course may enable me to develop a much better understanding of the wider digital landscape and the issues and barriers inherant in actually making practical day to day use of technologies which, to date, I tend to have only used in personal or erratic contexts.

I have also had some negative experiences, which I have not coped with well, of dealing with differing user expectations. When I launched some of the features and the content management system for the British Federation of Film Societies Scotland website I have encountered negative and/or bewildered comments from some members whilst others have been engaged and interested. I have particularly had trouble dealing with spam and inappropriatte postings which have on occasion become very noticable. I was aware and dealing with the situation but was unaware of the negative impact this was happening on users of the site who did not, like me, assume that a certain level of spam was to be expected in any online context - these incidents were particularly in my mind today after reading a piece on the Scourge of Blog Comment Spam by Scott Karp on Publishing 2.0. This incident also raised issues of trust and security from users that I had not expected to be concerns in the context of this website but have proved to be very important to many of my site visitors. As indicated in that Publishing 2.0 article there has also been a long term effect on the indexing of the website which has regretably linked the very respectable content on the site to websites which much of the intended viewership would not feel appropriatte. Related to this issue I have noticed a sea change in recent years, partly due to the widening access to the internet in the UK and the blurring between personal and professional virtual worlds, regarding the assessment of what is and is not appropriatte for a given audience. 5 years ago I blogged very personally about myself but as my personal information becomes tied to my online identities and colleagues and family are all now connected I do not blog as freely as I once did and I am interested by how such connections are changing the nature of web publishing.

The spam was a problem but the bigger shortcoming was in my own skills to communicate and train my users in an intuitive and intelligent way that did not insult those with good IT knowledge and internet experience but did not exclude those who had only recently started using the internet (many of the site's users fall into this group as far as we can tell). Although I plan to stand down from this voluntary post in the next few weeks I still think that working for such a demanding and diversely skilled audience has been a huge and useful challenge for my skills which has provided me with an opportunity to take stock of what it will mean to work for true end users - something I would like to do in a more training, e-learning or communications led post - rather than being skilled only to communicate with the already tech-savvy. I think these personal goals fit with EDINA's current development into e-Learning and continuing projects which require high quality interfaces, training materials and interactive content. I have already made contact with the User Support team in the organisation and they are also supporting me in my studies and have indicated their enthusiasm to embrace practical projects that may emerge from this or any of the other modules in the MSc.

Ultimately I see myself, in whatever paid of unpaid role I may be in, as being something of a technology evangelist. My hope is that this course will help me to become more practical about how I work with and convince others of the value in investing and developing digital resources by developing my understanding of the possible structuring of e-content, helping me to develop a more realistic and practical view of user expectations and the day to day digital lives of others and developing my communication skills so that I can concisely and intelligently argue my case in order to secure funding, time or simply moral support from those I hope to work with and for in a professional context in the future.

I thought I would start posting my thoughts on some of the pre-course and blog background readings both to record my thoughts and in readiness for responding and recording readings in future weeks. I will keep the format of one reading per post for now as this allows me to look back over previous thoughts and reference readings more easily.  

This first reading was one of those recommended in the preliminary MSc paperwork - full reference is shown at the bottom of this post.

Hamilton and Feenberg discuss the conception of e-learning by comparing and contrasting two early Learning Management Systems, the first being CAI (Computer Aided Instruction) which the authors see as exhibiting negative symptoms of the commodification of education, the second (referenced here on as WBSI) being a conferencing system which formed the first organised online education system and was part of the teaching of the School of Management and Strategic Studies (SMSS) at the Western Behavioural Sciences Institute (WBSI) in La Jolla, California. This latter system followed a more sociable and interactive model and it is the possibilities for this type of e-specific adaptation of traditional pedagogical teaching that the authors wish to highlight against the more cyinical and (it is argued) less effective approach of CAI.

This was a very interesting paper for taking a broad view of e-learning and it's origins. As I work for a University it is easy to see parallels in early adopters enthusiasm for cheaper automated teaching systems in an environment of tight budgets and high expectations. There is a pervasive attitude (not only in education) that online manifestation of real life services are, by their nature, cheaper to provide as a much smaller real world footprint is required. However many of the costs of providing material in an online context come not from capital costs (buildings, heat, light) but from the variable and sometimes obscured costs of originating and adapting intellectual content, providing personalised feedback and support and the implicit time costs of academic or support staff acquiring and maintaining technical skills.

The authors discussion of the attitude to e-learning as an efficient way to reduce costs has parallels in the early days of automation in the manufacturing industry. Just as some University Administrators see e-learning as a way of commodifying courses so that they may be replicated and rolled out automatically, so the Ford Motor Company introduced production lines thinking them the most efficient method of production but little thinking about the human element of those involved at every stage. Human nature cannot, no matter the advances in technology, be overlooked in any successful system. Just as Ford found staff could not perform as his mechanical system required, becoming bored, unhappy and less efficient in repetitive perscriptive roles, so those observing CAI found lower than expected levels of response and participation exhibited in the strict confines of the automated learning system.

Hamilton and Feenberg see WBSI as an alternative approach which factors human behaviour into the equation. WBSI's e-learning approach with interactive dicussion boards at it's heart can be seen as a success story. It is interesting however to note that unmoderated discussions proved too intimidating or unfocused to work. It was only in the digesting and understanding of feedback from students that WBSI introduced a focused moderated system which provided sufficient openness to encourage enthusiastic and interactive participation whilst retaining sufficient stucture to keep contributions relavent, progressive and to drive momentum. This seems to reflect ideas already at play in physical teaching environments. For instance no-one would expect a group of students from the same course to automatically find any academic benefit in randomly chatting with each other whereas it is reasonable to assume there will be a useful exchange of ideas in a slightly formalised and focused discussion area such as open but structured tutorial.

The authors ask several "critical questions" but the one which struck me was the consideration required in designing online learning materials to give pause to thinking:  

"what does the technology stand in for in the educational process"

It seems that those planning the WBSI courses recognised that technology was standing in for geographic distance and basic tangible resources. The CAI designers seem to have seen the technology as replacing the academic and interpersonal elements of courses. Whilst there are genuinely different audiences and requirements of real world versus online education and training there is no difference in the participants basic human nature so it seems obvious that some of the same expectations and requirements for personalised feedback and guidance will be required in any learning environment.

This paper predates the widespread uptake of social networking websites and it would perhaps be interesting to speculate on the level of prompting and structure required to help students meet each other and become accustomed to the technical barriers to online learning (something that, as the authors indicate, it is becoming easier and easier to overcome as interfaces improve). However it is clear that structure and guidance clearly remain important no matter how psychologically or technically prepared students may be for interacting and participating online.

Something implicitly raised by the paper, and it's later discussions of statements prepared by the academic community in response to the ongoing changes to education and development of distance and e-learning provision, is the interaction of the real and virtual worlds. Although there are physical only and e-only courses it is increasingly the case that real and virtual worlds converge. It seems likely that this will continue to happen with increased rapidity as "Digital Natives" begin academic courses with an understanding that materials are created by computer and should therefore be sharable as files/online presentations etc. as well as in traditional delivery method. However online delivery may vary from department to department and even course to course, something that seems unlikely to be sustainable as students feel incresingly empowered (not least by the cost of attendance) and connected enough to share experience.

Hamilton and Feenberg give their last thoughts to the possibilities of open source initiatives highlighting TextWeaver(Feenberg, also a founder of WBSI, is also the developer of this project), an open source discussion forum project which, from the looks of it's website is now somewhat dormant, and SAKAI, an ambitious attempt to build a full open source e-learning suite to rival LMS such as blackboard. Both projects hint at the issue of entry cost to e-learning provision. Whilst the approach to e-learning may be dictacted by pedagogical methods, the commodofying of successful extant courses, personal or institutional politics, or any number of ideological factors it may simply come down to cost. A larger institution may take it's pick of software solutions including the possibility of building or customising complex e-learning systems. A smaller or less well funded institution may be limited by the expertise of staff, the cost of LMS or of products required to support learning delivered by that LMS, or the systems capabilities of that institution. This is, in essence, the same issue that I encounter in my own work on the SUNCAT project in which it is impossible to overlook the differences between the type of systems people are able to afford and run. SAKAI and other open source projects seem to provide an answer to those institutions which are time rich but case poor. However there is a high level of technical expertise required to get the best out of open source software which may come with little or no support and may need substantial customising for each institution. Do you select a pricy solution where all the backstage work is done for you or do you choose the cheap/free solution which will require you to have (and retain) local expertise and contribute substantial time and effort to activate? It is a dilemma that I believe is at the core of current debate in the academic world about the best way to harness modern technologies and expectations of the speed of development and integration of web services.

Not only are e-learning strategies and approaches under scrutiny but also, in a context of changing expectations and possibilities, providers of traditionally taught courses are also inevitably required to reflect on their own approach and online elements. This is amplified by the fact that most recognised academic institutions do not exist solely in the electronic or physical world but instead straddle both. Ongoing comparison of these converging worlds raise difficult questions regarding the nature and professional standing of those involved in providing education at all levels. Future thinking about e-learning and it's fit with existing teaching also raises the thorny issue of ongoing budgetory and political pressures which may not always gel with some of traditionally accepted goals of education in society. Hence the authors conclusion on the future of e-learning inevitably draws on it's origins as an offshoot of traditional academic institutions:

"What it will become will be determined ultimately by the politics of the very institution it promised to replace only a few years ago."

Full Reference For This Reading:

Hamilton, E. and Feenberg, A. (2005) The technical codes of online education. Techne: research in philosophy and technology. Online at: http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/SPT/v9n1/hamilton.html [Date of access: 10 January 2008]

The e-Learning Professionals and Practitioners group is an internal University of Edinburgh group for sharing ideas on e-Learning practice and development. I attended this event in December in part in readiness for the MSc in e-Learning and partly to report back to my work any relavent items of interest.

Although the group is internal most of their resources and information is available publically on the web and I therefore do not think there is any issue in posting my report of the day here. I think it raises some interesting ideas and I was particularly interested in the stark division of teaching into online and real worlds in this project.

Tuesday 11th December 2007 - eScript: the growth of a successful online learning environment

Events and news on the E-Learning Professionals and Practitioners Group, for those interested, can be found here: http://elearningforum.ed.ac.uk

This week it has taken me quite a while to work out when and what I should be blogging about. Not because there weren't lots of things being raised by the tasks which I was eager to engage with but because I was already engaging through the discussion boards. There are however some thoughts that have come up as the week closes (which I'll be reflecting on here) as well as some topics which have come up in unrelated work context (which will be in a/several separate blog entries).

I found this week's exercise fascinating as much for the tangental discussions that were sparked as for the initial problem situations raised.

Initially reading over the six case studies I was interested to see the areas of overlap and differening levels of seriousness:

The Black Hole was a situation I am all too familiar with albeit from an asministrator rather than a participant perspective. Taking the time to participate in a discussion process only to be ignored or sidelined by those you were hoping to engage with can be enormously frustrating even in an informal context. In an academic context this aggrevation is substantially amplified by the sense that in some way those you are suppossed to work are having a detrimental effect on your own academic experience and performance. I felt the responses in the discussion of this case study were largely in agreement since all focused on the lack of direction and moderation which had contributed to the problem. Interesting also that many felt, like me, that non-academic social interaction was a good thing on the whole as long as the cat chat, etc. was in an appropriatte arena. Intriguingly as conversation moved more off topic I did start to wonder how much a discussion should be allowed to develop organically and how much this should be controlled in order to retain structure. I think it would be interesting to see how the use of tagging/keywords to describe discussion posts (much as this and other blogs allow) could help to retain navigatability even when discussions roll off on valid tangents that cannot be easily encapsulated by the subject line of posts/threads.

The Flamer was an interesting case as initially I wondered if I was, in any way, responding appropriattely in thinking "that's not flaming!". Very early in my internet life I had experienced a quite severe level of flaming on a mailing list. In contrast I have often had my comments responded to argumentatively or occasionally with ridicule, something which isn't particularly pleasant but not something I think unreasonable in an open discussion forum. In the case study the student had been flippant but had, in a rather unreasonable way, raised a point that was valid for discussion. The tutors intervention might not have been neccassary but was proportionate. Though the discussion that arose from this case was fairly unified the case itself raises one of the core problems of communicating online, that of perception.  This was a theme of all of the case studies and something that offers real challenges to working online rather than face to face - however I think this is more appropriatte to the Invisible Student case so I'll come back to it then. One other interesting item mentioned in the discussions was the idea that someone who you already know may be easier to communicate with online than someone you have never met. This was intriguing in the case of the Flamer as the students were part of a combined face to face and e-learning course meaning they were likely to have seen and possibly worked together away from the online discussions.

This idea of communicating online with known people is something I can understand well as I work and communicates largely via computer ever day at work - including real time chat with colleagues. For me one of the perks of talking via typing (whether realtime or asynchronous) is that you can talk out being overheard - something that is obviously useful in an office context. When that is in a synchronous way you have the ability to exchange information, get instant feedback and also access all of the computer-based resources/programs you might be discussing.  I am usually talking about programming glitches, files on the server or discussing responses to emails from external prokects and for all of the above it is more efficient to work with the discussion alongside my work. This is something that I think would translate well to e-learning experience. Indeed I am, on the whole, opening multiple windows to allow me to see the task pages alongside the discussion areas and dipping back and forth into my blog to allow me to add to it as I work. This is not going to be how everyone likes to work and it has resource implications (many windows equalling quite a heavy load on most home PCs/Macs) but it is something I have seen applied very effectively in the People's Network Enquire Service, where a chat windo, connecting the user to an information professional, is anchored to one side of the screen allowing you to navigate suggested links, etc. in the rest of the browser window. Although this is digressing away from the original case study I have been reminded this week - by the case studies and the variety of access points in WebCT to their related discussions - of the importance of clear online navigation and the difficulty in predicting a user's progress and understanding of a remote environment.

The Sabateur was a case study I felt drawn to discuss as I suspect I have been, in some ways, a similar disruptive element in certain academic and professional discussions and I was keen to understand what causes that disconnect with the group. I found it interesting that there seemed to be two readings of the student's behaviour: he was a trouble maker; he is a vulnerable student in need of help. My own reading was that the student was most likely both of the above but there was also an attitude being passed from tutor to student that included a negative sense of value towards the online course. I understand, having recently attended the eLLP group (see earlier blog posting) that there have been some quite similar experiences with students who initially signed up for a physical set of lectures and tutorials but were, as part of a pilot driven by an unexpectedly successful recruitment year, delivered a half physical, half online course. What I was suprised to hear was that this was substantially unpopular with students and it was unlikely to be repeated. It seems that there is a huge debate about the real cost of education that fits into the wider context of the cost, pricing and monestization of internet content which is currently raging across many sectors, not least the businees and marketing communities and those involved in the protection of intellectual property. There is a popular perception that everything on the internet is free to have and use and this could certainly have contributed to the Sabateurs sense of injustice that course content was being delivered online rather than in a university building. As the tutor pointed out in her initial response the course was actually more expensive to run online than in person, what I am surprised the tutor did not point out were the benefits of being online for tutorials. I think there is significant value in being able to track back over conversations, archive contributions and consider the wider picture of a course where a physical tutorial will often be quite self-contained in nature with a particularly stimulating discussion often permanently paused due to the real world constraints of room and tutor availability and the schedules of fellow classmates. There is a loss of non-verbal communication but sometimes the practicalities of running between courses/tutorials or making all activities exactly fit the allotted time makes little logical or educational sense and merely meets key administrative requirements. The comparable/higher price of delivering the materials is not nearly as compelling an arguement as prooving the added value in taking a less traditional approach. Related to the above case study is an interesting JISC survey on the expectations of young people/university entrants to technology which shows a more negative than perhaps expected attitude towards technology in education perhaps informed by the increasing omnipresence and hyper enthusiasm for technology in education earlier in the educational process though their expectations of ICT service provision are, at the same time, very high: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/studentexpectations

Above and beyond these initial issues of attitutude this case study raised a problem student the likes of which, in my own profession, I do not really encounter although in my undergraduate days I did share flats with students in perhaps comparable situations. There is a deep moral dilemma at the heart of whether you punish or empathise with a troubled problem student. Though I gave an opinion of possible approaches in the discussion this week I did, in fact, find my opinion fluctuating each time I came to it. There is simply no simple answer beyond the basic realisation that other students academic experience shouldn't be disproportionately be disadvantaged by one colleague. Once at the point of intervening however there are no certain answers and, in this case, it is hard to know if the tutor responded fairly or whether her lack of interest in engaging with the student personally to get nearer to the root of the problem and instead passing him onto other colleagues could have, to an extent, reflected a dereliction of the tutor palliative responsibilities for her group. If the student had already been branded a trouble maker by the department it would be easy to assume any poor behaviour from that student had little or no relation to the actions of academic staff trying to teach and tutor him when that might not be the case... It is a case I find difficult to resolve as, as in any area of life, it is difficult to know when to give up on a person and when to keep on trying. I realise now that in my own life I have been lucky that few people have given up on me and I have subsequently been able to step up and proove myself worthy of the trust and patience shown by them towards me.

The Idler was a case study I didn't feel I had much to comment on really. The student at the heart of the example was clearly a "lurker" reading everything but not commenting. Where participation is clearly expected and required is it clearly appropriatte for a tutor to intervene and I agreed almost universally with the comments made by colleagues that the tutor should have made direct contact with the Idler rather than pressuring another student to engage this  student. Possible lack of confidence and literacy issues were raised in the discussions and I felt these were interesting takes on the situation. Certainly confidence not just of the validity of ones opinion but of ones ability to express this in a way appropriatte to the technology and the context can form a powerful barrier to contribution. A number of surveys looking at the readership and interest in web 2.0/social softwares vs. the active participation in these have been appearing in the Library and Information Services sector lately including a substantial report by OCLC, Sharing Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World, which found only a small proportion of respondents actually participated in creative elements of social media. In the Idler case it is clear that participation was expected but had not been clearly enough outlined making direct intervention by the tutor neccassary to clarify the expectations of the student. However the popularity of being a passive participant rather than an active creator is something that is interesting to consider in a wider context. E-learning would seem to involve a careful balance of passive and active element but how you remove the barriers to creation is a broad question which I look forward to exploring further in the course of the next few weeks as I think that many more interesting views on this will be raised in discussion of other educational technologies, not least the weeks on Second Life which even I (as a fairly tech savvy person) find to have quite a steep learning curve and various technical and intuitive barriers.

The Cheeky Student was an interesting case as it seemed a straightforward matter of saying online what you would in reality. It was surprising that a student would be willing to expose their own weakness so blatently though by effectively admitting they were leaving a substantial amount of work until the last minute. There are two issues here for me: the sense of authorship and originality of work; the challenges of online availability. It was therefore enlightening this week to see various news reports regarding a survey into the widespread problem of plaguerism amongst A-Level students. Although this study seems to consider a relatively small sample size the use of TurnItIn and the statistics that did come out of this study (See Schools Sign Up for Software to Tackle Internet Plaguerism - Anthea Lipsett, Guardian Unlimited, 19/01/20008 - http://education.guardian.co.uk/1419education/story/0,,2243323,00.html) suggest that young people are unaware or uninterested in the difference between references and plaguerism. If this is true it may in part account for the bare faced cheek of a student happy to ask for unreasonable levels of help just before an assignment deadline and suggests that the barriers and guidance need to be clearer at an earlier stages of teaching as, perhaps, an understanding of "normal" or reasonable practice is not a given. I am not sure what type of introductory training is given to students entering university at present but when I started university an introduction to the library and correct usage of material were standard whilst guidance on email etc. were minimal. As user interfaces become more intuitive and basic IT skills are expected from new entrants to courses it can, perhaps, be forgotten that skills like referencing, researching and perhaps even some IT skills may need refreshing, teaching or guiding early on.

The issue of apparent permanent availability online is difficult. On the one hand tutors and lecturers will be available and working at certain times of day and may be happy to take questions. The idea of assigned "office hours" for online interaction makes a good deal of sense but does not address the fervant need for feedback that many people expect. And if you are in contact with academic staff through the non-academic software/services as well - say in facebook - the gap between that staff members personal time and work time may become difficult for a student, who may study at any time in the day or night, to fathom. And if your tutor is online why wouldn't they respond to the query you've sent them? I do not have an answer for this but it is a balance I have mentioned before and continue to try to explore as I think the differentiation between work/home/study is blurring ever more and that some approach must be worked out even if this is a permanent blurring of lines and of the way in which time in a given role is measured.

The Invisible Student seemed to be far and away the most discussed topic this week. Many of my ideas are best represented by my posts to the boards but the issues of trust and confidence that were raised in the discussion were wide ranging and sometimes divisive. My own position was largely summed up by the idea that someone cannot fully hide their identity successfully but aspects of their physical person do not always effect personality and may not therefore be carried over into their disembodied internet persona. I found, and have shared, an interesting article on this which I am still digesting:

Personality and Social Psychology Review 2000; 4; 57
Katelyn Y. A. McKenna and John A. Bargh
Plan 9 From Cyberspace: The Implications of the Internet for Personality and Social Psychology

The online version of this article can be found at:http://psr.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/4/1/57

 

In general I have found the interactive nature of this week's task to be enormously rewarding although the sheer volume of activity has made it difficult to read only one or two threads at a time as I had a feeling of wanting to keep up with everything and perhaps therefore posted too rarely and too verbosely when I was contributing. It was fascinating to read the debates in all cases and to feel assured that others were interested and also participating in the task as it can feel quite isolating participating in some activities. For instance this blog, because it is not public, does not provide the instant feedback often associatted with this sort of tool. It can therefore be hard to know how much or what type of material to post and whether the right thing is being done. This is not to criticise the format as the ability to comment and reflect freely is a great benefit but the absence of information on what everyone else is doing can be difficult. I am increasingly finding that Facebook and email provide that missing connection to peers on the course though and have found reassurance in chatting with others on the course about how things are progressing which makes me surer than ever that there is a crucial social element to an learning experience that must be present alongside any learning materials, no matter how well structured, in order to boost confidence, create a sense of comaradery and to anchor less tangible "virtual" course elements to the practicalities and corporeal realities of the rest of daily life.

extracts from Feenberg, A (1989) 'Written world: on the theory and practice of computer conferencing' in Mason, R and Kaye, A (eds.) Mindweave: communication, computers and distance education(Oxford: Pergamom Press) 22-39

I was intrigued by the core reading for this week as, with a date of 1989, I had expected it to be somewhat dated in it's approach to communication through networked computing. However I did find plenty to agree with, take issue with and think about and found the absence of current zeitgeist jargon liberating.

It was interesting that Feenberg frames his views on the written word with Plato's views and the concept that "speech itself was an imitation of thought" (Plato, page 1 of extract), understand this view as it is certainly not always possible to put into words the multi-faceted way in which thoughts appear and connect in your mind. For me that makes text and the world of digitised images, sound and rich objects a better carrier of thought but I will return to this later.

The Platonic hierarchy that there is a superiority of the "original" is one familiar from my own professional arena (library and information services) where the concept of the "golden copy" - one single trusted archived original - exists even centuries after the invention of the first commercially scalable printing press. In contrast Derrida's quoted suggestion that the copy is a portable (time and space) version of text/thought is a concept amplified by the effect of technology where material can be copied, cached, archived and in fact arguably never deleted (or can be restored once deleted through the use of Computer Forensics - see Computer forensics: a critical need in computer science programs - FERNANDEZ, John D; SMITH, Stephen; GARCIA, Mario; KAR, Dulal in Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges (20:4) - download-able from: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1047894). 

This situation sees a copy being as good in terms of intellectual content as the original even if the format is changed. Although this is not a major part of Feenberg's piece it is an area of great interest to me as digitisation is, and remains, a key concept for the library world. Professional cataloguers frequently make reference to the "item in hand" and the idea that it is the physical form as well as the contents that has intrinsic value. The emergence of high profile digitisation projects, most notably the well funded and very fast moving Google Printinitiative which has seen the wholesale digitisation of out of print works held in key libraries across the world (see: http://books.google.com/intl/en/googlebooks/about.html). Many library professionals and academics argue that there is nothing like holding the original copy and that much information can be gleaned from physical factors such as the type of paper and binding used and the array of possible notes added by owners over the centuries. However it is almost impossible to argue that there is not huge value in being able to read, search and download the whole intellectual content of the classics and other antiquarian and long since out of print materials. There may be additional value in seeing the original but preservation of the copy, carbon implications of travelling to the originals and the cost barrier to doing this so any measure that archives the contents in the order intended, replete with illustrations etc has clear value for longevity for the work. In a networked world this value extends beyond the archiving of one copy of the data but also ensures that accidental archiving takes place on computers, formats and in locations far more diverse than the original could reach.

Where this issue interfaces with e-learning (other than in the debate of using electronic texts themselves and the possible benefits and disadvantages of reading from screen - or "electronic paper" devices like Amazon's Kindlerather than from a printed source) is in this conflict in establishing the value of the format versus the value of the intellectual content. Feenberg suggests that there is something integrally impersonal about any archived communication:

"Authorship seems drastically reduced when messages entered into the computer's memory are accessed in accordance with the recipient's interest rather than the writer's agenda"

This seems like an odd argument as it is not one made about, for instance, the use of Dictaphones or answering machines although Feening tackles this inconsistency in his discussion of "phatic" functions which I will come to later. However the idea that any communication with another human is free from a clash of agendas is perhaps an unlikely assessment of human discourse. Any participant in a discussion will have their own agenda and the listener will likely interpret that participant's contribution through their own personal filters, in this way CMC is no different from any other communication medium: the full context, emotion and the complex weave of ideas that form an argument cannot be easily expressed. These challenges to communication can occur for a plethora of reasons including but not limited to: cultural background; language or dialect; sense of humour; attitude; ettiquette; apparent or hidden disabiliy; attention level; education levels etc. I therefore find Feenberg's surprise at the humanity of CMC to be peculiar since at the heart of the communication are individuals with ideas and the format of communication may necessatate modifications to the manner of expression but will not change the participants desire to express themselves nor their ability to adapt their communication skills. Indeed arguably the way in which virtual social communities tend to form - through academic or interest overlap rather than through casual acquiantance with strangers - actually provides an immediatte link through shared hobbies and interests, or common use of academic language, business jargon etc. Additionally the argument that communication is difficult when made formal by permanentl archiving discussions is balanced by the informality of online discussion spaces, giving an entirely different weight to the discussion's textual form as Feenberg himself reflects:

"we may no longer assume that writing is more fomal and less personal than speech"

With the emergence, subsequent to this paper, of blogging, chat rooms and the now ubiquitous use of discussion boards for all sorts of informal activities I would actually argue that it is becoming the case that not only is the above statement true but that there is even an attitude that text online is so informal and personal that material which is more professionally prepared and edited for use in formal speech and broadcast media contexts has greater authenticity and validity. There is a personal authority and engagement in textual forms online but there is also now a widespread awareness that not all text accounts can be trusted which relates in part to technological advances which also makes sound and, more importantly, video capture available to anyone with a digital camera, relatively modern mobile phone, current MAC or cheap and widely available video cameras for their PC. As bandwich increases communication is becoming increasingly visual perhaps representing a temporary blip in text-based CMC, or perhaps indicating that CMC is ever evolving into a virtual version of traditional face to face communication where the video camera is augmented with a textual commentary and metadata about the partipants.

The potential benefit of a more holistic form of communication are the phatic functions Feenberg discusses. These not only consist of the type of welcoming signals used in face to face communication ("hey how's it going" being the example Feenberg gives) but also of tacit information given out by the speaker. This may be body language, tone of voice etc but I would think of them as the stage directions you would get in a stage play, where the content of communication is merely a given character's lines. My choice of this comparison is to highlight the idea that often the tacit factors may not add very much to the conversation but sometimes they are crucial for activities such as dealing with conflict, indicating agreement without interrupting, suggesting a point to close a topic or the conversation in general. Emotions, conversational triggers and other phatic functions can, of course, be indicated in CMC but have to specifically and conciously stated which can be difficult not least because it is hard to discreetly state something in front of other participants if the issue directly involves them. It may also inappropriattely raise the stakes of the issue if it is deemed important enough to state. Thus "I'm tired so we should probably round this up" could happily be stated both in person and in a CMC context but it might be difficult to whisper or make an eye movement that indicates "don't go there!" would be difficult to subtley convey online.

Something that Feenberg does not mention but I would be interested in exploring further is the way in which the removal of phatic functions provides a levelling of playing field for those less capable of observing or processing phatic functions - for instance those with visual or hearing difficulties or people with Aspergers or Autism whose communication difficulties stem in part from an inability to interpret tacit signals and emotions and also in part from the distraction of other stimuli (for instance see: Gnanathusharan Rajendran and Peter Mitchell, Computer mediated interaction in Asperger's syndrome: the Bubble Dialogue program, Computers & Education Volume 35, Issue 3, 1 November 2000, Pages 189-207).

The liberation of CMC is however, as Feenberg highlights, tempered by insecurity particularly when contributions are made asynchronously. I agreed heartily with his statement that:

"Communicating on-line involved a minor but real personal risk, and a response - any response - is generally interpreted as a success while silence means failure"

This chimes not only in the context of discussion style CMC but also in the context of emails where a lack of response can be an isolating and difficult experience. In all CMC there is a potential disparity in the frequency of participation between those communicating: individuals may access email/discussion areas weekly, daily, hourly or have them accessible whenever logged in. This can cause extremely varied expectations when communicating with those you do not know well enough to understand their habits. As Feenberg says:

"speeding up and improving asynchronous exchanges causes unexpected dstress"

It is interesting to bear this in mind when looking at current social networking trends which undoubtedly benefit from the tacit encouragement to comment and share information on your most recent login/activity. I will be looking at this in a separate post to this blog where I want to talk about what I think of as the trend towards "passive participation".

Of course insecurities also come out of the fact that online communication is observed and fraught with potential Intellectual Property issues if there is any intention to reuse communication in another context.

Identity

Feenberg's assertation that CMC allows the curation of new identities is one which I believe may have dated somewhat with the increasing sharing of personal data through OpenID, OpenSocial etc. The written "I" may be in many respects the same as the face to face "I" as a Facebook, MySpace, Bebo etc. account may immediately expose your appearance, interests, friends etc. as part of your identity to those who you communicate in another CMC context. For instance I had a regularly updated and well populated Facebook profile before beginning this course so, without substantial changes to my profile or editing and applying the "restricted profile" option, all of the classmates from this course will know immediately my gender, sexuality, appearance, partner's name, interests, workplace, the books on my bookshelves, my taste in music etc. A google search would tell them my preferred films and opinions voiced on message boards, my job title, my roles outside of work and participation in events, and a google scholar search would tell them about my (one) scholarly publication to date. This is in extreme contrast to my first experience of being online in 1997 when little of my identity was online and searching for what was there was complex and, with dial up connections, tiresome. The most identity I shared at this point was an AOL profile which was very much about a curated identity as my name was masked behind a user name unconnected to any other web service. I would imagine that in 1989 this sense of your online identity being wholly isolated would have been more profound with an increased potential for creativity in curating this identity.

Whilst environments such as Second Life and World of Warcraft allow a greater degree of anonymity in CMC there is a temptation to link online identities together with facilities such as a facebook application to tie your facebook profile to your Second Life character making this a particularly easy way to enrich your curated identity with your real life social network whether for better or for worse.

Conduct

Feenberg's definition of flaming as "the expression of uncensored emotions on-line" seemed to suggest a hyprocracy at the heart of dealing with flaming behaviour: that uncensored positive emotions are appreciatted or tolerated whilst equally passionate negative or critical emotions are what most CMC would recommend as flaming. The reaction to negative contributions is, much as in face to face interactions, based on the breaking of careful communication etiquette - indeed this is the type of social etiquette that could be linked to game theory, something mentioned in this weeks Skype session. There is certainly a level of informality that may encourage unguarded emotions with people one hardly knows (something which occurs less often in day to day activity) who you may not meet again and that will certainly encourage mischievous or aggressive behaviour in some but to suggest that flaming is uncensored emotionality seems to overlook that in a community regularly communicating via CMC such "flames" are more likely to be a negative contribution rather than a deliberate act of aggression (a a rather non academic real world comparison would perhaps be the difference between a friendly discussion in a pub that goes a little too far causing short term conflict, and a friendly discussion into which someone unknown walks and starts attacking one of the participants. The latter chimes with flaming as I would see it but the former can also be seen as flaming particularly if adhering to Feenberg's definition).  

Something which Feenberg uses to back up the idea that CMC "weakens social control" is the idea that "It is difficult to bring group pressure to bear on someone who cannot see frowns of disapproval". I can see the validity of this argument in very subtle cases but where inappropriate behaviour has widespread disapproval a group will often make it's case known either through personal messaging or defensive behaviour in the given CMC forum. Indeed when trying to illustrate this case I was reminded of two examples, Jon Ronson's strange relationship with a niche virtual community of 9/11 conspiracy theorists ("We rationalists are the oppressed minority" - Jon Ronson, Saturday November 4, 2006, The Guardian - accessed via Guardian Unlimited, http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,,1937479,00.html) and the tabloid press attempts to report Kevin Greening's death via friends and family on Facebook (best illustrated by the Facebook group's discussion area: http://ed.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=8164471213&topic=3589). Both cases demonstrate that virtual communities are at least as efficient at swiftly taking action to defend themselves when a serious threat is identified. Smaller infractions such as inappropriate language or an out of turn post are often, as in face to face life, overlooked or only briefly considered problematic.

Self-Awareness

Feenberg's noting of the peculiar "social memory" that occurs when a CMC community can inspect it's whole history, in entirely literal terms and often searchable forms, is valuable as it has perhaps even more relavence now - where that memory extends to video, sound, and immense quantities digital photographs. The fragility of all one's triumphs and mistakes being public is fraught with potential problems - from sheer embaressment to such serious consequences as being fired for blogging (a number of cases spawned articles such as, Avoid getting fired for blogging, By Kate Lorenz of CareerBuilder.com for CNN.com, Wednesday, April 6, 2005, http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/Careers/04/05/blogging/) or being turned down for universities based on social networking profiles (Would-be students checked on Facebook - Jessica Shepherd and David Shariatmadari, Friday January 11, 2008, The Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2238915,00.html).

Feenberg talks about Marshall McLuhan's pronouncment of the end of literate culture and further suggests that the distance from what is said and the use of certain words for effect is the essence of modern individuality. This seems to be, as described, a generational shift but it is hard to see this as a modern phenomenon, rather it seems inherant in the change of generations at any time (certainly any dictionary of slang will show a deliberate codification of language from generation to generation to create a private creative form of communication). Feenberg also talks about the "decline of individuality in mass society" which I cannot see myself though I do see a substantial rise in the growth of niche communities which connects geographically detached parties through common interests, beliefs or attitudes.

Absorption and Moderation

Feenberg's comparison of CMC to sports or games seems very valid and remains timely - there is certainly a degree in many forms of communication but particularly the recorded CMC that you wish your voice to be heard at least as often as everyone else's and you must therefore skillfully negotiate the shape of the "game" in progress. I think that the reluctance to make the last move is a phenomenon more recognisable from older forms of CMC as it now seems more common that a thread (or game if we see it that way here) is often abandones for another more recently updated discussion before it has run (or overrun it's course). This is perhaps a reflection of the speedier internet connections and the decreasing price of memory which allows everything to be kept going without maintanence so that no "game" ever really ends, it just becomes the least recently updated discussion, like the dusty file at the back of the cabinet - you can still add things to it but you're unlikely to look at most of the time.

Again Feenberg's suggestion that a moderator is a "social host" seems to be rooted in very formal or unchecked systems. In many modern forms of CMC there are automatic checks for spam, obscenities etc. built in automatically with the moderator acting less frequently to occasionally nudge conversation along, branch off new threads/boards if appropriatte and occasionally act as a firefighter when problems overcome the automatic barriers and intervention is required. The role is important and highly skilled, much more so in e-learning contexts where moderation doubles as a form of tutoring and guidance, but is far less essential for general order and confidence building than has previously been the case in most CMC contexts not least because tacit information on the topic of conversation, context etc. is almost always a feature of CMC services these days where they may not have been 10 plus years ago.

Feenberg's final discussion is of Meta-communication and so called "weaving" - the drawing together and description of ongoing communication. This is part of a moderators role but with the recent idea of "tagging" and the less recent concept of "keywords" coming as part of many web services there is a meta-communication role for participants in modern CMC as well. Weaving as an overview of discussion points is something I am relatively new to but finding very beneficial in this course as a way of summarising thought. However in non academic contexts (or informal/ungraded academic areas) it is perhaps too hierachichal a tool to work well since it implies one moderator's view is sufficiently broad to take in all perspectives.

I found this evening's Skype session really useful for batting around ideas, discussing the readings but perhaps most notably for feeling I was making more of a connection with others on the course after last week's more isolating discussion sessions. Although I am finishing a blog post on the readings for this week which will cover this a bit it seemed worth mentioning in it's own right. The discussion boards are a great more formal way to communicate but the usually slow response time can mean you post a long statement or thought rather than a brief dynamic set of comments which is why tonight's synchronous session was a complimentary activity for me and an excellent illustration of the validity of McInnerney & Roberts' "Three Protocols to Aid Online Social Interaction".

A significant advantage of the chat sessions was also that, after the initial few minutes, conversation could follow a natural path without introductory or context setting statements and without polite closure each time a point was made making it more akin to a tutorial than the discussion boards' more formal debating-style structure. This is not to say that the discussion boards are overly formal as a communication method but they are just substantially different and whilst they require less fully absorbed time to read they can actually take far greater time and discipline to contribute usefully to whilst synchronous communication can be more flexible and dynamic. Although it can also have a slightly chaoti but lively feel.

In tonights session the main benefits for me were:

• Getting to know coursemates better in terms of personality rather than just ideas and views one-learning
• Feeling engaged with the readings in a way that, because of the absence of live moderating/prompting a blog posting cannot
• Gaining a better sense of the more emotional side of people's opinions (their feelings rather than their response
• A feeling of participating in a co-operative way rather than as an individual contributing to a debate shared with others
• Finding that the discussion led to a discovery of new material I wasn't aware of - a recommendation to read up on troublesome knowledge 
• Extablishing an informal connection that can be followed up on facebook/webct chat/skype etc.

The main downsides for me were:

• Coherantly following the course of conversation (mostly this was fine but there were some moments where I wondered if I'd missed a comment)
• Not always knowing when to drop a subthread
• Not always being able to finish/remember the end of a point I was making due to the speed of discussion
• Not being able to predict the structure of the discussion (mostly this was a benefit but at a few moments there was definitely a lull)

I think these pluses and minuses reflect much of what this week's readings indicated about the benefits of using the appopriatte communication technology for the appropriatte context. I did also feel that my "online identity" was, if not developed exactly, more effectively exposed to colleagues on the course in a way that I feel is true to my full identity and will be useful in communicating with classmates in future weeks. To some degree such identity forming had already taken place in Facebook with members of the course with common interests but this added opportunity to connect to those with very different personalities but good senses of humour, interesting views on e-learning etc.  will enhance and extend those connections.

What I also found interesting about today's chat session was the various threads about the type and freedom in discussion in an online versus a real context. This is of particular interest as my day job involves face to face, email and synchronous chat (via a locally managed jabber system) communication. Although the face to face elements are useful almost all of the technical and detailed work conversations take place in Jabber as we can have various relavent system windows open concurrent with the chat. More surprisingly the most useful non-work bonding communication - even between people sat next to each other - also takes place in Jabber as the office is fairly quiet and the politics complex. Being able to have dialogues which cannot be overheard and which build on and compliment the working relationship already built in synchronous chat makes this a key part of office communications crossing team and office layout factors.

This blended communication approach seems to be equally valuable in the e-learning landscape as well with the ability to instantly message a colleague when lacking inspiration or looking for moral support a key tool in feeling part of the learning community. This in-course social aspect is something which I feel I am more engaged with on this course as it is something which is explicitly encouraged in contrast to the attitude that group work is essential but study is essentially a private matter. I think human nature requires most of us to have peers to be empathetic to our experience and to make an experience concrete rather than something which might all exist only in our imagination. It can also be reassuring to have peers who can help with goal setting and a sense of achievement or adequate progress as they provide a contrast and context for ones own personal work which, in the e-learning context may or may not otherwise be apparent to others. Whilst I have previously considered and/or attempted to build information for learning via computers I think there is a part of this essential social identity that I have not yet successfully addressed despite my own personal interest in it. This session has therefore left me with food for though...

I wanted to write something about what I see as the growth of passive participation. One of the criticisms of interactivity and web2.0 type functionality is that statistically there are a large number of passive consumers compared with a very small number of creators of content. However a number of features of popular web services are encouraging participation even from more traditionally passive users.  This post is more a brief overview but whilst this is a list very much inspired by thoughts in my working role in delivering information services I think there is equal relevance for delivery of e-learning.

Commenting

Commenting has been present on a vast array of websites for years but there has been a particular growth of commenting sections on news media - led by http://news.bbc.co.uk/ - which have attracted a wider range of participants to engage more actively with, and augment, content.

RSS Feeds

The ability to produce RSS and Atom feeds is now built in to most content management systems, blog software, message boards, wikis etc. The idea of pushing contents to users is not only convenient for users but also initializes real engagement with a website. A one-off or occasional visitor to a website will not necessarily have a commitment or interest in returning to that site again. If a user receives a regular reminder (particularly if on a weekly or daily basis) via RSS or Atom feeds to their email, feedreader or website they are significantly more likely to click through to the full article or to comment on the site itself, or at least they will regularly be aware of changes and content. Feeds can, at their best, build a feeling of a community of readers/participants in a website/blog which creates a very different relationship between the user and the site creators.

Twitter & Facebook Status Updates

A concentrated version of feeds is offered by the much more recent phenomenon of providing very brief very enigmatic comments on your daily activities. Both Twitter and Facebook make it very easy to update statuses by logging in, emailing, using chat software such as googlechat, jabber etc. or, crucially, by texting. These updates are around 140 characters and therefore the temptation is to update with brief comments very regularly and also lack the pressure of blogging or writing articles which must have structure and conclusions - a status update can just be a thought or snapshot in time. Although on first impression it may not be a terribly useful tool for expression these brief updates can be useful and interesting. They also provide updated content to any site they're fed to and, in the case of Facebook, provide another trigger to participation. Whilst Facebook is popular because of the social networking aspect one of it's most successful and perhaps insidious features is the use of feeds detailing the activities of friends every time you login to your homepage. This feature is so successful as it capitalizes on natural curiosity about the activities, gossip and personal relationship between friends: not only will you read updates but you click through to those activities that interest you.

This latter form strikes me as the most obvious and effective form of what I'm classing "passive participation" - you may not enter into a virtual space intending to do anything other than read  and browse but you are triggered by other people's actions to create your own content, if only a brief edit of your status or Twitter or a note on a friend's wall. I think this casual participation is distinct from being an aggressive creator who regularly writes content, blog updates, flickr contributions etc. although the same person may be both an active and passive participant on different occasions.  The benefit of getting users to create content casually is that they will do so regularly keeping other participants interested and motivated to create further - I think this is of obvious benefit to e-learning contexts as part of not feeling isolated and keeping motivated is knowing that others are participating. Thus even a brief glimpse of the most recently updated content can keep a wider community motivated, connected, and keen to add their own comments, content etc.

I got a little verbose on the discussion board about e-portfolios here so thought it was probably worth duplicating the post here as it puts into words many of my feelings on the topic thus far. This will also mean I can refer back to it in other posts on this week and next weeks WebCT work which will be going up in due course.

Having had a good look through other people's metaphors (on the WebCT discussion boards) and having really struggled with some of the ways in which e-portfolios appear to be delivered it's been a slightly ambivalent week for me thus far. I do appreciate the concept of the e-portfolio though and it's potential for value and therefore offer my own metaphor: The Director's Cut...

My thinking is thus:
An e-portfolio may be being prepared for different purposes and audiences but it will always have many of the same components with additional bits and pieces here and there. This for me echos the idea of re-editing a film: you start with mostly the same shot footage but with a tweak here, a tweak there, some new editing to subtly alter the narrative, a flashy new improvement on a few scenes and maybe the addition or deletion of some scenes that fit differently in this version. However the original cut can still be available, you might offer other cuts on a DVD - multiple versions can exist all at the same time and all utilising the same core components, they may be generally released or they might be a private project and there might only be one or two versions or, like Blade Runner, there maybe loads!

However thinking of e-portfolios, and particularly with the tension between the potential uses of them, outlined so well in the Barratt & Carney article, makes me think of something that may be a metaphor or may be a suggestion of an alternate way to deliver flexible e-portfolios: wikis.

Wikis allow the addition of information in a loosely structured but easily linked format, they are perpetually changing (there is no "final" version that you close off and call done but you can always save a snapshot version, e.g. for assessment), every version can be retained, you can (depending on the wiki software) have different levels of page or topic access and - unlike a lot of the e-portfolio systems I've been reading about - you can easily make your data portable whilst also making use of your portable data elsewhere. This means that rather than duplicating entry and/or formatting of data, you can pull in existent data from other services you already use such as feeds from other web services such as project blogs or flickr, citeulike, slideshare, googledocs etc.

For a portfolio that will have a lifespan longer than a given academic course this seems far more likely to encourage continuous updating than a less portable/integrative system.

To give some context to my thinking here I would echo what was said elsewhere about the CPD value of an e-portfolio as well as the potential personal/marketing value (updating a cv, list of projects and publications etc as suitable rather than when you come to change jobs, have appraisals etc).

As a student I kept an portfolio of my artwork as a record of development and reflection as well as for assessment. I still tend to record what I've made - even if only a quick photo - for reflection and reference. 

As an undergraduate I made use of the suggested IEEE & IMechE portfolio formats and had I decided to go into engineering properly these would have made a big difference to proving my knowledge and experience for chartership. 

Currently I keep a personal website (using pbwiki as my structure - software I also use at work hence my passion for wikis) and a cv (held on my PC and my partners MAC but likely to end up, like our christmas card list, on googledocs with invite-only permissions) which I update periodically. I think this combination acts as a reasonable basic portfolio of my skills.

This week's readings and examples have inspired me to add some of that information to my website so that an area of it acts as an e-portfolio tying up existing links to projects, articles etc. and also some cv type information.

What I find harder as a concept though is the idea of starting again on a new closed system which may not meet my current software expectations. For instance even on Facebook most of the information I add to my profile is/has been fed in from other services that all do a better job in their specialist field and who all allow me to share the data they hold for me. They are also all free (though I have a paid account on flickr which is still very cheap). I think that type of decentralized system utilizing mostly free web services is a great way to build your online world as it's impossible to expect a single central system that can't be expected to do everything that anyone might want, and do it really well.

Something I did also wonder about - both from Jen's comment earlier today, Phil's comment on marketing (again, these comments are on the WebCT discussion boards) and Barratt and Carney - was the idea that if you are marketing yourself you will only want to present the best version of you and that you will therefore not want to make reflected or assessment material public.

Perhaps it is the sector I work in or just a very personal mentality but I think good marketing *can* be more honest than that and most employers will ask you about the most difficult situation you've had to deal with. Obviously they don't expect an "I went to pieces" confessional but I think an "I made a mistake but it was the best learning experience and here's why" is usually a very honest and highly valued response. Which is why I'm usually happy to make just about anything public. As a footnote to that: I also really wouldn't want to work in a situation where mistakes are never ok (or can't be admitted to) so maybe a more open portfolio takes over a little of that flirtation of candidate and employer/college/institution that you usually get at interview as you size each other up. If they don't like you in honest mode do you really want them to take you on/work with you/be your bosses?

Something B&C also touched upon was the value of peer contributions - they help make work dynamic and can keep you motivated at times when you are not feeling as confident or need inspiration in a new direction. Thus I have a question regarding use of the more closed e-portfolio systems is: are all your peers automatically in your immediate institutional vicinity?

I would be interested in how others feel about that. I think that for an undergraduate that may possibly have some degree of merit, but for post graduate students, academics, CPD candidates etc. I believe that more often than not your peers are scattered further than your institutional computing systems... 

Before I post my main blog contribution for the day I have a related comment on the state of e-learning technologies and expectations that comes from a very personal perspective. I have just typed up a significant chunk of a post, formatted, with links etc. only for it to wiped when internet explorere reacted less quickly than my clicking of buttons. This is a silly error and entirely my own but I think it raises general issues with a number of expectations that I already come to various e-learning environments with and which they do not always deliver. One of the main problems I have is the intuitive design and simplicity (or lack thereof) compared to systems of similar type I already have experience with. For instance my personal blog or wiki would autosave data regularly enough that a paragraph or two is the maximum you are likely to lose if you somehow accidentally exit the system. This function combined with the special and limited functionality of most WYSIWYG editors makes editing live the best option in most cases. Thus habitually I have been trained by intuitive systems that blogging is most effective when conducted in the live system. I do find the ELGG system used here very intuitive on the whole such tiny differences in expectations as expecting a save/save as draf option AND automatic saving can add up to a lot more irritation when things go wrong. This minor personal accident makes an immediatte and obvious gap between my experience-based expectation of web tools and the selected technology for this course. This is surely comparable to other students' experience and expectations of e-learning and particularly VLE systems and tools.

Indeed if there is a small gap between ELPP and Blogger, how much greater is the gap in usability between a modern web landscape and the realities of many of the functions of, this fortnight's topic, webCT/Blackboard.

Having had my first indepth play with creating - rather than just using - our VLE this week I find it's speed, it's dependence on rather clunky applications of Javascript, it's obsessive use of pop up windows for almost all functionality and the comparitively short automatic logoff intervals enormously frustrating. The look and feel is clunky and looks rather out fo date both in terms of graphic design and in terms of the flexibiliy of structure. I also find the idea that a relatively modern VLE requires intense duplication of effort quite shocking (for instance there is an implicit duplication at the heart of the fact that this week's course readings are different depending on whether you reach them from the course content>block b>weeks 4&5>readings access point or the course content> library> readings access point. The tiny discrepancy of a missing article highlights that the list has been generated twice for the same course rather than being linked to from two different places. This seems unintuitive and somewhat bizarre but in the very structured, rigid and text-biased WebCT presentation based upon a rather staid version of delivering course content it is perhaps, regretably, inevitable.

In trying to play with my playground course and portfolio I found that the insistence that every item is specified in prescriptive chunks quite difficult to cope with. In a universe where systems such as slideshare, google (via googledocs) and open office make format a relatively unimportant issue and embedding the norm, it is strange to be thrown back into a world dependent entirely on upload/download of data presented as, at very best, links. Embedding objects fully is made difficult if not impossible and reformatting pages is a slow and old-fashioned affair. The design is perhaps the result of not consulting with e-learning professionals, as Kimball, M. (2005). "Database e-portfolio systems: a critical appraisal." Computers and Composition 22: 434-458 calls for, but I think the look and feel of this system is largely the fault of the cost, speed and practicalities of enterprise scale adoption of software. My own experience of trying to get my organisation to adopt web2.0 systems demonstrated the speed at which decisions move in a tentative committee-driven academic context concerned with sustainability and control rather than innovation. The speed at which a largescale but relatively uncontroversial project such as the moderate redesign of the University of Edinburgh website moves is widely incompatible with personal technology experiences and very informative in terms of the speed at which any large institution applies proven technology and the way in which technologies are selected and applied. In some ways this is an unmoveable issue, however updates and add ons to an already selected system should pose far smaller policy, cost and technological knowledge delay and it is a shame that such add ons/evolutionary changes to software are rarely demanded by the educational sector at the pace that the private sector demands improvements to it's own core systems.

This is an issue I have seen from various points of view in the library sector, an area where I feel software vendors have an improbably dependent consumer base that are only now slowly beginning to rebel with open source and/or hosted web service equivelents that provide equal levels of customer service and superior levels of flexibility, modernity and customisable design. I assume that the parallel involvement in SAKAI from many of those already delivering courses using existing commercial VLEs highlights the knowledge that students expect a more dynamic environment, as does the popularity of open source systems such as Moodle (Smart, C. (2005) 'Choosing open source solutions', JISC e-learning focus). Such uptake of systems often requiring more in-house expertise demonstrate the greater value in systems which are provided cheaply or for free* (without long term contracts/maintanence fees) and with an infinite scope for customisation, add ons, developement and evolution.

* excluding human time, training and machine costs in house though these are often encountered in the installation and maintanence of commercial as well as open access software.

However I also feel strongly that there is a strange sort of snobbery about the format in which information should be shared in a formal academic setting. This is something I am hoping that a fuller reading of Cousin, G. (2005) 'Learning from cyberspace' in Land, R. and Bayne, S. (eds) Education in cyberspace. London, RoutledgeFalmer. pp. 117-129. will help me articulate better. However I do think that user-friendly and graphically driven interfaces with video and audio content are too often thought of as gimmicks (and, in fairness, often produced in a way that upholds this preconception) rather than alternative way of reaching users who may need more that text-based learning to feel connected. Or merely appreciatte a good looking interface. Or are hoping to learn the content of a course NOT to learn a number of clashing and perhaps not widely used systems required to access said content (my own motto for interface design is that if you need train people how to use it, you've done a bad job of designing it.

There are measurable "information skills" of great value to learners in any environment but I feel that there is currently an awareness of widespread use of "easy" systems and thus a real battle to defend the importance of intuitive design and characterise it as making the best of the technology rather than "dumbing down". In this regard I find the recent UCL report on the Google Generation (Information behaviour of the researcher of the future: A ciber briefing paper, 11 January 2008, University College London - http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/reppres/gg_final_keynote_11012008.pdf) very troubling as it characterises the ability to use systems as almost more important than the intellectual skills of differentiating between and absorbing key elements of various sources. The report's insistance that students do not know how to select information intelligently has, for me, very little to do with the existance of Wikipedia or google and everything to do with the way in which perpetual assessment and behavioural control issues in primary and secondary learning can mean the prioritisation of rote learning over inquisitive discovery and questioning. The report also suggests that scanning text rather than reading it fully is lazy - this seems odd as it is a technique used by many extremely intelligent and well educated students, academics and intellectuals to quickly assess material and draw the core meaning of the text. Whilst the authors claim that "the Google Generation is a myth" it should be noted that the systems used in this research do NOT include Google and I find it interesting that whilst happy to characterise poor information seeking behaviours as a result of simple user interfaces such as Google they did not actually question their subjects on their experience of, or test their information seeking behaviours within Google itself. The systems used were in fact those funded by JISC and the British Library, the same organisation that funded this report which raises some questions over the reluctance to blame the design/usability of interface of those systems tested rather than the skills of the users. Both funding parties are key players in the UK HE & FE information sector and the keeness to dismiss popular systems combined with a reluctance to examine the strengths or weaknesses of their own much smaller systems has serious implications for bridging the gaps between user expectations and institutional realities and attitudes.

For now I have two thoughts that have come to mind this evening of relavance to the above debate but also to the further VLE readings I will be commenting on this week:

(1) Invisible lectures

Something I feel the structure of WebCT has given me in this course so far is a sense of an absence of lectures. This is not to say the content per se is absent but the structuring of content dictated by the VLE makes it seem like a support environment for something else, a more traditional sort of course, rather than being fully an e-learning solution. Thus it can feel that a lecture or podcast is the one thing missing from the menu of tutorial-style tasks and material, informal spaces and readings.

(2) Learning Objects in repositories - an observation

When thinking about embedding objects in VLE's I was reminded of a problem encountered in my own organisation. An easy to use repository was set up for learning objects for both HE and FE institutions. Whilst FE material for courses such as hairdressing proved very easy to attract, it has been very difficult to recruit depositors from the HE sector. I think this is caused in part by the absence of materials to deposit perhaps because highly visual learning resources are often seen intellectually as appealing to the lowest common denomenator and therefore well suited to such un-intellectual persuits as hairdressing whilst high academia is the preserve of formal often textual material to which the student must adapt rather than the other way around. There are of course other issues here: time and equipment availability varies across institutions; copyright issues restrict deposit and reuse of material in some cases; territorial concerns over sharing resources. But the idea of providing substantially different learning approaches built around the student or user rather than built to suit the institution and/or academic does seem to be something more strongly associatted with the teaching focus of the FE and commercial sectors rather than the research-focused and more hierachichally concerned (and funded) HE sector.

What I find interesting is that the disciplines that are embracing more varies approaches to delivering material are those with the strongest CPD components, most notably Medicine where visual marterials have high intrinsic value for learners and sophisticated learning objects are therefore commissioned rather than merely digitising/replicating traditional resources. This seems to be a pragmatic approach to the physical dispersal of students, the visual nature of the course but I think perhaps there is also the possibility that technology *can* be embraced because educators are also practitioners engaged in CPD themselves and therefore having a more long lasting connection to the student/lifelong learner experience than those engaged only in niche research or in teaching alone.

This week I have had a real problem with not regarding e-portfolios as the e-learning equivalent of the Emperors New Clothes. Although I can see the enormous potential of tracking progress, reflecting on studies, goal setting and preparing material for assessment and employers I do not see these as necessarily being a stable combination not one which should be contained in a closed wall system.

 

I found Barrett, H., & Carney, J. (2005). Conflicting paradigms and competing purposes in electronic portfolio development a very useful introduction to the concept of e-portfolios which, previous to this course, I had not come across. My own initial interpretation of an e-portfolio was that it was, in essence, an online CV. The examples provided for this course and the exploration of WebCT’s portfolio features as well as PebblePad and Carbon Made’s e-portfolio software gave me a more varied idea of the e-portfolio as personal development tool. I do however find the conflict between assessment tool and personal development portfolio (Ayala, J. (2006). Electronic portfolios for whom? Educause Quarterly, 29(1).) very difficult to overcome. The buy-in essential to a student feeling motivated and interested in maintaining an e-portfolio is tied strongly not only to that e-portfolio’s flexibility and location (a lifelong resource cannot sit on a university’s time limited computing resources for students for instance) but also to it’s usability.

 

This week as part of my exploration of e-portfolios I decided I would try the WebCT tool to build something as a test of the technology and to get my head around the issue in a more practical context. I decided to begin by uploading my CV and was then expecting to edit, format and add to this basic structured overview of my skills, experiences and current projects. I found the software hard to use – slow, not intuitive and frustratingly inflexible. After several hours I had successfully added new icons, created a portfolio with some links out to relevant websites and was generally appalled by the amount of editing of images, text etc. which I had to do outside of WebCT since, once uploaded, objects became essentially static. As my day job is obsessed with the updating of data in a database this is the type of software issue that I deplore as it encourages the upload of numerous versions of files (none of them obviously definitive) whilst also creating a final digital object which is unlikely to evolve organically and must instead be manually updated. I was somewhat disillusioned with the process of creating an e-portfolio at this point and was beginning to lose sight of any benefit of having and updating one.

 

Next I tried out an arts portfolio system called Carbon Made – this offers a free capsule portfolio for graphic artists, photographers, website designers and those creating digital objects in image or shockwave formats. Within a few minutes I was registered and had created a skeleton profile. Within half an hour I had the first content up on the site, had played with presentation options and had added a profile. Within an hour I had uploaded several photography projects to the site and was left with a portfolio that can be edited and evolve but looks, already, well designed and easy to navigate. Images are resized easily, upload is simple, editing and uploading takes place from an interface in the same window and in a very visual template. And once a basic portfolio was up I was listed in the site’s index and the main portfolio list of the most recently updated sites. Though a simpler and smaller scope portfolio the immediate win of being able to generate an attractive page quickly was very appealing and encouraged me to be selective in choosing and adding images.  

 

Finally I tried to build a hybrid resume/e-portfolio – to be developed into a more sophisticated e-portfolio at a later date – on my own website using PBWiki (the wiki software I use for my whole personal site at present) which essentially uses a WYSIWYG editor but with the added ability to quickly embed a wide variety of content and create new pages easily. Like the WebCT portfolio I started with my CV. A quick copy and paste and I had the bulk of material added with formatting carried with the text and /or altered in either the WYSIWYG or an HTML editor. This meant that most of my time could be taken looking for and adding in relevant links to external resources and working out what should or should not be in the e-portfolio. For instance this instance will be fully public so some contact details immediately had to be removed whilst other computer-related contact details (such as Skype name) could be added in. Next I added links to all educational bodies and workplaces mentioned to give any reader further context at the convenience of a click. Looking over the CV the only projects I could immediately link through to were my film writing work and my recent work publication. This was easy which means that, in terms of film writing at least, I did not need to be immediately selective in order to put something useful up. However in roughly a third of the time spent in WebCT it was possible to have something better presented and more informative up.

 

 All three tools above have pluses and minuses but my key observation here is that enthusiasm was tied strongly to immediate reward. In WebCT I became obsessed with my own frustration at the speed and navigation of the interface and the inflexibility of the appearance of the information. To create something that looks the same as my WebCT portfolio in any WYSIWYG editor would take half the time because of the number of extraneous clicks, the inability to view and edit simultaneously due to WebCT’s blocking of opening new tabs or windows in a given browser (with an error message to the effect that there is already a WebCT session open). Whilst Kimball, M. (2005). "Database e-portfolio systems: a critical appraisal." Computers and Composition 22: 434-458 condemns the speed with which students can create a database-based e-portfolio he overlooks the satisfaction of creating something satisfying quickly. If a system and the requirement to create an e-portfolio is thrust upon a student and they cannot create something useful and inspiring quickly they will not be likely to return or maintain that e-portfolio. However if they can create something basic quickly and easily they have both a sense of achieving something and a sense that it can be improved, added to, developed. This week’s readings all seem to agree that the blend of technology, purpose and student buy-in are all crucial to making e-portfolios of long term use and value. And certainly I now feel inspired to go back and add more and more content, better edited content and maintain my personal webpage’s e-portfolio as I know it will be simple but that I have done that first bit of work to make tweaks, formatting and additions much less laborious.  

But what will I update it with?  

In an assessment e-portfolio situation I see the e-portfolio as a collection of documents, objects and reflections on a course. But I do not see this as a resource a student will want to maintain beyond the assessment hand in date. The idea of adding projects and goals may fit with this model but it also has use in an e-portfolio with more long term potential along the lines of an enhanced cv and almost a portal to a person: a collecting and entry point to all manner of material relating to that individual. Initially this week I compared e-portfolios to a Directors Cut or a personal webpage. I think the former remains a good description now that I have read through more on the topic and played extensively with building a portfolio. You may have an academic, professional and/or personal web presence which is easily found via Google but which is in bitty parts, is not backed up or archived by you and may in some cases be out of your control. It therefore makes sense to curate (or re-edit) the best representative collection of this material as well as complimenting this with new material, updated work, academic and personal achievements and projects (and, if not goals, perhaps forthcoming projects and ambitions) and examples of your work both as a personal record and a presentation portfolio.

For the last few days I have been, after reading a number of thought provoking and interesting e-portfolio readings (which I'll be blogging on next time - I think they belong in clusters so will work out the best way to analyse them in this way and post then), really finding myself swearing endlessly as I read through: Kimball, M. (2005). "Database e-portfolio systems: a critical appraisal." Computers and Composition 22: 434-458

Kimball compares the technological development of portfolios with the pedagogical development of portfolios and is particularly concerned that technology leads padagogy rather than the other way around. Whilst I fully agree with Kimball that the key to any successful software implementation is adequate preparation, reasearch and a very well curated brief, I find his anti-database stand troubling for a number of reasons.

Kimball approaches portfolios, unlike many of his peers, from a fairly strong personal perspective of what a portfolio is and how it should be developed. Kimball characterises e-portfolios as a space for reflection that, whilst it is combined with other materials, projects, objects etc, has that reflection and personal assessment as it's core quality. He also sees the curatorial role of putting together portfolio objects as secondary to the accompanying commentary on them in his response to the mnemonic "collect, select, reflect":

"The saying also makes the three activities sound equal, when in fact few portfolio advocates would see them as such. Collection, a mechanical process, requires only the commitment to collect and some system of collection. It is an activity well suited to the arbitrary ordering of number or alphabet, as well as to the tools we use to manae such ordering: filing cabinets, computers, and databases. Selection is more dynamic, requiring choice and discretion. But neither collection nor selection are worthwhile learning tasks without a basis in reflection"

This attitude underpins the whole paper whilst highlighting the hypocracy at the core of Kimball's arguement: he does not value the inate skills of building a portfolio BUT he believes that a system producing quick results cannot result in a valuable portfolio; he wishes portfolios to be a source of academic record and achievement as well as reflection BUT he is wary of any integration with "records management systems"; he wants students to make honest, considered reflections that they update BUT he wants objects in e-portfolios these reflections relate to to be erased automatically after a time has elapsed; and, most frustratingly, he advocates web forms BUT distrusts databases despite web forms generally generating pages which will be held in databases.

I cannot fault Kimball's belief that the e-portfolio pedagogy should be the thing around which the software fits but his technical knowledge, particularly given his professional role in Technical Communication, is woefully inconsistent. Throughout the paper it was impossible not to be frustrated by his irrational suspicion of databases as being somehow more long lasting, more pervasive and less secure than randomly hosted HTML pages. Aside from the fact that most web pages (whether database, form, manually or otherwise generated) are repeatedly copied and archived on many thousands of machines from the Waybackmachine to the cache of a strangers laptop, Kimball shows a serious misunderstanding between the structural functionality of a program and the interface to that program. Databases meanwhile enable, as Kimball admits, a level of sophistication in linking together and searching content which is harder to replicate in manually written pages. They are however often more secure and, because of the way in which most databases are updated, no more or less permanent than any other form of website. The only difference in longevity being that for a large institution the whole database will not be deleted every few years and will remain archived with data potentially overwritten, suppressed or remaining public depending more on institutional policy than database design.

As someone who professionally works every day on editing, updating, manipulating and analysing a major database of partially IPR protected material I can attest that a system is built to the purpose of a design specification so Kimball should not, perhaps, be rallying against databases. I believe he should instead by making a clarion call for academics, e-portfolio experts etc. to make greater strides in understanding how to create a design brief and to form more practical course design briefs that can act as real examples to be translated into new/existing software by coders or by the academics etc. themselves. This would be, in effect, a blended pedagogy that takes the desired learning outcomes from traditional portfolios and adds the dynamism of what is technologically possible to create something usable, appropriattely structured and with long term (in terms of roll-out and maintenance even if kept in house) flexibility.

Such an approach of course will only work best when a strong engagement with student research and an awareness of marketing and good design are included. This may sit uneasily with Kimball's attitutude towards monetarizing and dumbing down (a phrase he does not use but elludes to in his scathing attack on the "40 minute portfolio") educational resources but would provide a lot of the type of information needed to ensure users had a good experience with an e-portfolio system rather than a frustrated one. In the modern web landscape an unattractive or behind the times system - whether pedagogically driven and structured or not - will not encourage regular reflections to become a pleasant and regular part of the studying regime. And if, as Kimball feels, there is not an intrinsic value in being trained in how to use a system for it's own sake, it seems better to design a system that is intuitive.

I would however also like to take some exception to Kimballs characterising collection and selection as non-reflective activities. I work in the Library and Information Services sector where collections management, metadata (which reflections, to a small extent, are) and curation are all valued highly and I therefore find it hard to see a parallel between collection/selection and inanimate filing systems as being duly respectful of the time and skill required to build a collection well. Indeed as any artist, photographer, writer, etc. who has had to built a traditional paper portfolio will atest clever editing is one of the most crucial elements of any successful portfolio. The process of looking over all collected available materials and thinking about what you will pick, why you will pick it and how it works or does not work with other examples of your work is painstaking and difficult. A paper portfolio for artists will go through many many iterations before any one version is finished. Similarly I see the first stage of creating an e-portfolio as being to deposit everything in one place. From there however the portfolio must evolve with items being removed or organised in priority so that a true picture is built up in a coherent learning story. This whole process - from reminding yourself of what you have collected to finding the narrative through the objects - is one of reflection. As an outsider looking at a well curated portfolio you may not be able to see this type of reflection but you will see a coherant whole and a journey in a way that will not appear in a poorly curated portfolio. Of course you then want to add more obvious commentary in the form of notes, reflections, and also practical elements such as tags and links to other materials.

Kimball does call for engagement with the commercial sector but I would argue that the difference between communicating pedagogical requests and being able to provide adequate design specifications is vast and can cause substantial problems in the long run as commercial companies will usually take a cheaper and more literal rather than a user-focused, pragmatic approach to build something truly fit for purpose. As e-learning becomes mainstream and all face to face courses begin to have some online element (if only for storage of archived lecture notes, exam papers etc) the teaching community must communicate their needs more appropriattely to the providers of e-portfolio (and VLE) systems if they are to be able to deliver what will be expected by students and users of these systems. Ease of use benefits less technically adept academics as well as students who have come to learn a given subject NOT the systems that their subject utilises for teaching. This does raise information literacy questions and the type of information literacy we wish to teach. I however believe that technical systems training is quite substanstively separatable from information gathering, comparison and assesment skills. Indeed Kimball suggests that e-portfolio systems could be the modern equivelent of pen and paper. If this is the case I would suggest the example of handwriting - we no longer try to train everyone to be right handed calligraphers and instead teach a pragmatic level of handwriting which is fit for purpose - can indeed be compared to the idea of teaching students how to reflect and analyse on their achievements (entirely the responsibility of the institution rather than the software in my opinion) rather than focusing on how to use WebCT or Boolean searches etc.

Data privacy issues

Though Kimball does raise valid concern about current access to archived data, particularly in regard to the passing of the Patriot Act, I find his tone more reminscent of a paranoid survivalist than an academic working in a democratic country. As I mentioned earlier there are in fact more safeguards on databases than on random HTML pages as most require access permissions and closed wall and student records systems are particularly security minded. It is also far easier to detect security breaehes in enterprise level database systems and to assess any impact as a result of a breech. However what I find more interesting is Kimball's suggestion that there is inherantly something dangerous or theatening about work completed more than a few years ago. Whilst individuals and societal ideas will change this seems overtly paranoid. After all any thesis or journal article was, pre e-portfolio age, still retained and accessible in libraries, it was just less easy to find and harder to ensure the permanent archival of. Although I would not personally be delighted to show a handful of first year undergraduate or school level essays to the world I do not find anything inherantly threatening about the concept as almost all such documents are, in some way, timestamped. Any reasonable reader will be able to look at that timstamp as a context for what is said thus removing the threat of all but the most extreme previous work.

I do however think that Kimball may be alluding to the Patriot Act again here and worrying that any subversive comments could be taken to be a sign of threat to the state. Certainly there have been some decisions made, often at times of heightened emotions, that do not bear up to scrutiny: academics and aid workers arrested effectively for speaking to the wrong person or having once visited the wrong places*; arrests based on downloads of books (albeit those detailing terrorist methods); loss of private data (such as the UK Child Benefit and NHS student doctor records); censorship/exploitation of open data for poltical ends - China's very real response to the virtual recording of the work of political disserdants offering one of the most unsettling current issues of trust and security.

However it is almost impossible and rarely desirable to wipe any record of one's previous work and I therefore think Kimball should instead be encouraging e-portfolio updating - which would include removal of work from display as required - rather than advocating a high level of personal paranoia that a single juvenile essay showing some sort of interest in the activities of Gramski, Mao, Castro or even Hitler or Osama Bin Laden will be your downfall. Surely they will look embaressing - for quality as well as content if they are many years old - but few, even in suspicious time, would look first to a decade old essay for an indication that you should be investigated or incarcerated.

Overall I found Kimball offered me a great deal of frustration from a technical perspective though he does raise interesting questions on the potentially vast divide between e-portfolio/e-learning pedagogys and traditional face to face course design. Perhaps because of my natural tendency towards the technical I find myself thinking that pedagogy should lead technical designs but that more technical consideration and learner experience must be integrated and have influence on the pedagogy so that new specifically electronic pedagogies emerge. For instance I now understand substantially more about the eLLM's distinction between electronically supported F2F courses and wholly electronically delivered courses. This is perhaps something I'll come back to when I blog early next week about the Troublesome Knowledge article I have been mulling over and VLE's,

*There are several This American Life podcasts that I feel add a really personal set of examples behind this type of justifed paranoia in a time of heightened political and public sentiment including:

"Habeas Schmabeas 2007" an increadible piece of journalism revolving around Guantanamo Bay and the legalities, farcical court proceedings and dubious reasons for detentions: http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=331

"Shouting Across the Divide" includes a long piece on a family targetted as hate victims after 9/11 purely for being Muslim: http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1163

"81 Words" details the history of homosexuality in the American Psychiatric Association's definitions of mental health conditions and the career effect that publishing or speaking out on the subject had in the long term: http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1188

 

BBC Mobile: Content in Context

 

This session took place in the Board Room of EDINA, 11.30am - 1.30pm on Friday 15th January 2008 and was presented by Jane Murison of BBC Mobile.

 

The session started with a wide overview of what the BBC does now.

 

 

Current BBC Output

 

TV

Interactive Content (via digital tv)

 

Radio

  

 

Online Content (including streaming, archive and podcasts)

 

 

 

 

Events & Big screens

 

 

 

Mobile Content & SMS alerts

 

 

Commercial Arm

 

 

 

Through Delivery Mechanisms

 

• Terrestrial TV
• Digital TV - direct offerings with different content/packaging for broadcast and extras (red button) for each of Terrestrial Freeview, Cable, Satellite
• Digital TV through indirect channels - Dave, UKTV Gold etc.
• Podcasts
• Radio
• Digital Radio (DAB)
• BBC Online (including iPlayer and BBC Archive)
• BBC Mobile & SMS
• Big Screens (those at train stations, public areas etc)

• Bluetooth - at special events
• DVD/recordings/Commercial routes

 

iPlayer was  set up to be sensative to geo IP thus allowing BBC content to remain commercial outside the UK (non licence payer area). Indeed BBC News is available but with adverts outside the UK now (very controversial).

 

BBC.co.uk is one of the top 3 websites in the UK with approx 30.7 million global weekly users (about 16 million weekly UK users) and around 2 million podcasts are downloaded each month.

 

BBC mobile is the most used mobile site outside of those provided by mobile companies (usually the entry page by default on mobile browsers and usually also free to browse unlike other sites). Indeed mobile use has doubled year on year since 2004 and the team has gone from 4 experimentors to around a 30 person team (including developers, interface designers, project managers and producers). Mobile is a very big strategic growth area.

 

80-90% of BBC Mobile use is in News, Sport and Weather, in fact Sport is by far the most popular thing on BBC Mobile with particularly high usage - 2 million hits - on Saturday afternoon when users are looking for football and other sports results. In part this is because the BBC is one of the fastest places to add these results and is conciously trying to make it faster [NKLO's note: this competes with the Sky/Sun/O2 football service]

 

 

Mobile Devices

 

BBC Mobile tend to try all new platforms and devices as they come out. The hope is that the browser service will be equally open to all as much as is possible.

 

"Content appropriatte to context" is a key concept especially as with iPhones and mobile browsers many mobile devices can now use the main web browser so it's more a matter of selecting content that is edited down to relavent/most attractive presentation (many phone will require you to browse/scroll endlessly even if accessible) rather than just making an alternative browser.

 

For instance Bluetooth is a mobile option that is very specific to context but it is a great opportunity to engage with the public as it is free to all (unlike 3G/Wap etc). "Bluecasting" is still however very niche as the range is only 100m to, at very most, 1000m at the moment. It therefore can work for Glastonbury, sports events etc. but is too geographically limited to broadcast elsewhere. However "kids" use bluetooth widely and in preference to MMS for file transfers (songs, ringtones, pictures etc). It's completely uncontrolled which is great, in terms of opportunities, but comes with serious issues over tracking usage, gathering information on how much it is used and by whom. There is also an increasing trend for Bluetooth Spam (especially in large public areas where marketers want to make a hit e.g. the London Underground, mobile conferences etc) and the BBC does not want content delivered by Bluetooth to be seen as unwanted spam but as extra free content which may require some very careful thought in some contexts.

 

Mobile TV

The BBC Mobile unit have been conducting some Mobile TV trials recently but these are very much in the pilot stage still and any actual roll out would need to go to the BBC Trust first for approval.

 

The pilot has involved delivering BBC1, BBC2 and BBC3 on 3, Orange and Vodafone. There was very low take up and this is because there are a lot of barriers to wide usage as you need:

• 3G phone
• Good reception of 3G signal
• All you can eat data package

 

This is a fairly unusual set up in the UK - signals vary wildly, many of the phones people already have are not 3G and even new phones are often only 2 or 2.5G (iPhone is only 2.5G). The data packages are expensive and most people aren't seeing the value in taking them up yet. 3 does have packages set up for this sort of delivery but most of the other networks price as a service and don't want to be competing for commodities yet (bandwidth being equitable with power or water etc. in theory but currently being packaged in bundles of quirky and often network-specific services).

 

It is also possible to deliver content via streamed internet. This works better (and coveredge is more reliable) but it also requires the download/installation of software to handsets. For instance even the iPhone and some of the newer perkier 3G phones don't support flash at the moment which is one of the better technologies for delivering high quality but highly compressed streamed data.

 

Jane added that in Japan and Korea mobile phones are very much the "fallback TV" - if the TV isn't tuned to your choice and everyone else in the house is watching, you watch your choice elsewhere on your phone.

 

iPhone

BBC Mobile have been doing a lot of concepting for iPhone. Although these are, obviously, specific to the iPhone, the BBC tries not want to work on tailored services for every phone model. Their reason for doing concept work for iPhone at this point in time is because there is very much a feeling that iPhone constitutes a major - and indicative - move forward in interface design and styling. The feeling is that it is where the market is moving so hopefully concepts that work on iPhone will be broader interface and delivery concepts not just for iPhone but for the next wave of similarly visual and interface led phones.

 

 

The iPhone developers kit has just been released. However the phone is not 3G and the phone and browser does not currently support flash. When asked about how video could be delivered Jane said they hadn't worked that out yet but are looking at it.

 

Access For All

The BBC feels that access for all is key and BBC Mobile try to ensure they adhere to this ideal. There are a wide variety of strands for delivery at the moment into which Mobile fits right now:

• Mobile
• TV
• Set-top box (TV)
• Satellite (TV)
• Digital terrestrial (TV)
• Cable (TV)
• Internet
• Wireless
• DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting)
• Big Screens (see below)

 

"Big Screens" is the term used to describe the large screens placed in various cities which have been set up in cooperation with local councils (the BBC also used to run screens in train stations to stream news and relevent content but these screens have now been taken over by commercial companies, generally ITN and Sky News). At the moment the screens can be found in cities including Manchester and Liverpool (where they are being used for City of Culture events - see the BBC page on how to submit content to the Liverpool screen, Liverpool Big Screen is pictured below).

 

 

The Big Screens aren't just for delivering TV material to passersby, instead they allow for content and programming specific to their local context, they also are set up to incorporate various forms of interaction. At the moment the BBC are experimenting with Big Screens ahead of the Olympics in 2012 when they hope to be using them widely and with rich interaction. This is one of the contexts in which Bluetooth can work in context to help deliver and enhance the experience of viewing and participating with broadcast content.

 

Example Big Screen & Mobile Trials

The Big Screens can be used to deliver games where the screen detects users in the near area via bluetooth - this has included playing digital football by moving around a virtual ball (shown on the screen) with players formed from the movements of people with bluetooth activated phones near the Big Screen.

 

Big Screens can also be used in a very basic interaction such as voting by text message on polls. In a large crowd it is much for effective to encourage participation through small gestures. Larger gestures (such as the digital football) work better in small groups where there is less to lose by participating.

 

 

Interaction between Mobile Phones and Broadcast Technologies

Some Mobile phones allow more complex interaction with broadcasts. BBC Mobile have been looking at the Nokia N95 Simbiant software that ties the phone to a set top box, this means that in theory a group of users (presuming all had a similarly equipped phones) can watch the same thing with their own customised content delivered as an addition via their mobile phone and/or their phones could be used as a remote control for the set top box.

 

Trials of Mobile Interaction on TopGear

BBC Mobile have been doing an experiment with TopGear using Timed Text cues (Jane wasn't sure if it was Timedtext or InTime - online searching suggests the Timed Text format is the one in use) which up noise cues in the programme and triggers quiz questions to mobile users related to that cue. See the Topgear Website with info on and WAPpush instructions for TopGear Mobile Site for more information or, when it's next being broadcast, to try the quiz. The idea is that you sign up for the quiz and then when the programme plays any number of people watching in a room can all individually take part in the quiz (submitting different answers than each other) from their phone so they have a mixed group and individual experience with the broadcast programme.

 

Although the BBC has offered quizes via BBCi (accessed via the red button on any digital TV device's remote control) but these limit interaction to one answer per set of viewers allowing only the room/one individual to take part. The TopGear trial allows individual, and therefore more personal and potentially more rewarding, interaction. This also allows for better quality data on viewers/participants when such TV events take place - the one answer per TV model only tells you where a programme is being watched, not how many people are watching nor their individual inputs. This also means potentially a better quality of customisation - in terms of other offerings, tailoring of programming and interaction features etc - for individuals using their mobiles to participate.

 

 

BBC Mobile Usage and Stats

Loads of the BBC mobile traffic comes from Africa. At the moment the top 25 list of users by country shows England at the top with 38 million visitors, the US is second with 7 million visitors, but most of the remaining top 25 countries are those in Africa. This can be explained by the fact that fixed line infrastructure has not traditionally in place for many African nations, particularly outside of big cities. The cost of adding new fixed line infrastructure is such that such nations have moved straight from having little or no telecoms to using mobile phones which are far more flexible and cheap to provide. This is a factor noted in various computing and telephony applications which have similarly noted that many African nations are now high volume mobile users but still may not have access to fixed phone or internet connections outside of cities (see various references below).

 

Interfaces

BBC Mobile try to make the interface to services consistent across loads of devices but this can be tricky, for instance: Motorola phones have a huge font size which seriously affects possible structures and rendering of content; new Sony Ericsson, Nokia and PDA devices render pages as intended and look much like the web; older phones look like WAP which is significantly more basic in appearance than 3G internet-style browsing. Obviously catering to all browser, operator and connection possibilities raises issues but is particularly important for some of the key users who may be using older phones, low quality connections etc.

 

Cascading Handsets

BBC Mobile have done research that shows that in a family the parents often receive free upgrades on handsets but that they do not tend to keep these, they get cascaded down to children and particularly teenagers whilst the people who have actually, in theory, had the upgrade continue to use the oldest handset in the family. This can be confusing both in terms of catering to all users and in terms of speculating which users have which phones (on paper the 3G, larger screened, jave enabled phones are in the hands of the adult billpayers but in practice they may be used by their children) and therefore how content should fit with this.

 

Customising Appearance for Varying Handsets

There are 2 styles of template in use by BBC Mobile: XHTML and WAP.  XHTML caters to most old and new phones. WAP 1 is used rather than the newer WAP 2 standards as this allows backwards compliance with almost all internet enabled phones.

 

Currently BBC Mobile are looking at conditional CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to allow for better customisation to different devices.

 

Statistics

The quality of statistics on BBC Mobile usage is fairly basic and so gathering statistics on what type of mobile phone and what model of phone is being used are pretty crude. The Operating System or browser info only is recrorded. This is very frustrating as BBC Mobile can't tell what the most frequently used formats are, which would allow beter support and an insight into suitable and popular formats for new content. 

 

The BBC are currently looking at device detection services (various companies offer delivery and statistics services, such as Bango, and the BBC do not therefore intend to develop their own device detection). At present around 120 devices are supported by BBC Mobile. This is a substantial number especially considering that there are effectively no standards for Mobile Phone browsing capabilities and this means that formats and development are entirely in the hands of commercial companies that are all competing nastily. This means that the formation of Open Standards for mobile devices have suffered greatly.

 

With this situation in mind RSS(Really Simple Syndication) is a very very valuable tool. Most phones can handle data in XHTML or XML so can cope with RSS feeds.

 

BBC Mobile also support WAP both as it is basic enough to mean they support just about all possible users but it is also supported on the grounds of pricing:

 

 

Page Type	Page Size
XHTML Page	~ 12k
WAP Page	~ 2 to 4k
New BBC Mobile max. Page size	20 k or less

 

WAP pages are very very small so are subsequently very cheap to access. The new maximum page size will allow very small images and similar content on BBC Mobile, this will enhance the look and feel of Mobile pages (indeed the preview shown in the presentation look like substantial improvements on existing pages).

 

Mobiles & HTML5

A question was asked about the Mobile tag proposed for the HTML 5 standard. This is something that would be looked at by the BBC Desktop team not the BBC Mobile team. However this question was also considered by implication in various other questions during and after the session regarding the normal "fat web" on mobile phones. It is possible that specialist mobile sites will not be required after a certain point and that one site can be repurposed with CSS and/or device detection for all devices. For now however the web and the mobile web are seen as separate but complimentary entities at the BBC though content is usedand reused across differening platforms.

 

 

Context Considerations

Jane outlined some of the key aspects to thinking about delivery for Mobile. For a start it is literally mobile and therefore pretty much everything is variable, including the location, reception and the needs of any user. There are lots of other distinct qualities because of this.

 

Key Factors in Considering Context

• Relevance
• Time
• Place
• Technical
• Social
• Physical

 

 

Wifi

Though there is some crossover with wireless laptops they are not looked at by the BBC Mobile division on the whole as browsing is more comparable to the Desktop experience. The BBC does have a relationship with some wireless providers though - for instance they provide content for free on the otherwise paid for The Cloud wireless broadband network - this works as a lead in to paid for content for the provider and gives the BBC a presence and connection with users in diverse locations. This of course also has impact for wireless enabled phones (though the iPhone is one of the minority of wireless phones on the market).

 

Social

Bluetooth is the obvious way to deliver content to connect mobile users in specific social areas.

 

Technical

Is the signal present? Is it good quality?

The ideal would be a service that holds up even when the mobile signal drops intermittently.

 

Physical

Am I free to use my hands? Has the user got the ability to use their hands? Are they carrying shopping? 

BBC Mobile can provide information through car radios connected to handsfree devices (e.g. through timed text). Streamed content can work in these scenarios.

 

Accessibility

BBC Mobile really haven't looked at this very much at accessibility outside the idea of being available on multiple devices. There is very little data and a real lack of even basic knowledge about disabled users and their use (or not) of mobile phones. There is apparently a version of JAWS screen reader (for blind and visually impaired people) for mobile phones (possibly just for windows mobiles of which there are currently several models). 

 

Jane expressed a hope that the BBC would lead on this issue and commission research on accessibility and mobile phone usage.

 

GPS

On the BBC website Geo IPs are used to present BBC Local content relevent to the user (for instance a user in Edinburgh will see Scotland as their local area). It is easy and effectively free to use IPs to detect location. BBC Mobile does not present localised content for mobiles yet as the method to do this involves a costly triangulation process to trace signals and that is neither practical nor affordable. Also not that many mobile devices currently support GPS. BBC Mobile have experimented with using GPS but there is not much progress or development on this for the time being.

 

Language

There are some alternative languages supported on the News area of BBC Mobile but this is through the World Service area and is limited to a core group of Spanish, Urdu, Arabic and a few other languages.

 

Syndicated Content

Syndicated content is key to fitting round people's lives as it pushes information out to them as they want it and across the multiple possible platforms.

 

 

Approach to Mobile Service Design

BBC Mobile undertakes substantial amounts of both qualitative and quantitative research. This includes the monthly The Pulse survey which asks the vast pool of BBC employees various questions again and again to gather data which tracks trends and attitudes over time.

 

Qualitative Research

BBC mobile bring in groups of between 10 and 20 users for testing of services, interviews etc. These are used to create "personas". These are user personas which can be mapped to other BBC marketing personas (though the names for these personas are, apparently, top secret).

 

There are plenty of different demographic groups represented but at the moment there are 3 key groups who they are researching with a view to increasing interest in the BBC brand through BBC Mobile.  In particular a lot of younger users aren't as aware of the brand and aren't even aware that they are experiencing BBC content. Young people are typically watching less TV, use the internet more but in particular have very high and varied mobile phone usage. They also do not have desks so fixed internet connections aren't a major part of their lives though they may have access to the internet at home, school etc. This type of user are generally those unaware of the BBC brand. Even if they regularly watch BBC programmes on television they may be on satellite or Freeview channels such as UKTV Gold or Dave rather than directly on a BBC channel or on DVDs which are distributed by BBC Worldwide or production companies so again not obviously branded as BBC product.  Thus mobiles are and can be a key access point for these users.

 

Younger users have a very different attitude to media and that is something BBC Mobile are researching and trying to meet.

 

SMS Services

Jane said that the BBC does these quite poorly at the moment but SMS is just about the only unique feature of mobile phones vs. any other delivery mechanism so it can be important. However SMS services need to be a valuable service or they're not worth providing and may be seen as spam. There is also a phenomenon known as "Bill Shock" in the mobile phone industry which refers to the reaction of customers when they realize they have signed up (knowingly or otherwise) for a subscription service - this happened with the Crazy Frog ring tone for instance where a download via a mobile triggered an ongoing subscription service which was only discovered by most phone users once the next bill arrived or pay as you go phones ran out of credit quickly.

 

In addition to these concerns there is the additional issue of the competition scandal regarding voting on television shows late last year. Although the scandals affected all broadcasters the BBC has been particularly scarred by allegations and revelations of faked phone ins, rigged votes etc. Whether this is because of the type of shows involved - Blue Peter, Children in Need, Radio 5 Live in contrast to talent shows, Big Brother and quizzes on ITV and Channel 4 - or because of the BBC's unique position as a publically funded broadcaster and it's trusted neutral status, it has suffered the harshest criticism, press coverage and subsequently retains a poor trust level with the public at the moment. At the time the stories broke there was a total shutdown of ALL SMS participation in programmes (and this had been widespread for both voting and input to shows) and also research to find out the perception of BBC text services. They found that users did not neccassarily see the BBC as better than other broadcasters, indeed some see them as much worse than, for instance, ITV though the scandals were of similar severity. However the public specifically see BBC text voting as more expensive than other broadcasters despite it historically only ever charging normal text message costs in all but fund-raising contexts. The BBC try not to indicate a cost per text as these vary extremely widely between operator and calling plan, this possibly fuels the feeling of expense - many text services on other channels or contexts state the cost as, for instance 8p* (*plus your standard SMS charge) which may appear cheaper to some users than a "your normal text charge" note on the screen.

 

BBC Mobile are still looking at how to deal with the fallout with these issues and still provide text services. Those that continue to run and/or have been reactivated are at normal network costs but are limited to far fewer programmes and contexts than previously.

 

 

Future Plans

At the moment BBC Mobile are moving to new ABBA testing of a prettier and more visual design. This has an appearance far closer to the desktop browsing experience.

 

Upcoming Activities

BBC Mobile will be looking at personalised news SMS alerts (previously they have had problems with SMS news services prioritising, for instance,'s  Paris Hilt's arrest on as a high priority story and received substantial criticism for this)

 

 

Current 2008 BBC Mobile-related Activities Schedule

 

March 2008

Newsbeat

 

April to December 2008

Mobile Broadcasting work (BBC Mobile)

 

 

May to August 2008

Browser Refresh 1 (BBC Mobile)

3G TV Trial (BBC Mobile)

Messaging Upgrade (BBC Mobile)

 

May to September 2008

Summer of Music and Sport (Cross BBC Project) covering: Radio 1's Big Weekend; Proms; T in the Park; Glastonbury; Euro '08; Notting Hill Carnival; Olympics.

 

September to October 2008

Browser Refresh 2 (BBC Mobile)

 

November to December 2008

iPlayer developments

Autumn Schedule

International Service

New Projects

 

Personalisation

BBC Mobile want to make the architecture more malliable for mobile screens and to allow personal re-ordering views, removing unneccassary/unwanted data etc.

This personalisation strand is focused on adding personalisation via phone handsets themselves via the use of cookies. However cookies are only supported on some handsets and different phone browsers allow different numbers of cookies per website which causes some issues: you might only be allowed one cookie for any BBC website but you might want custom views on sport, news and other specific mobile sites rather than just a preference set across all sites.

 

One personalisation option is to use WAP Push ID (WPID) which can assign a unique user ID to anyone who ever receives a WAP Push message. This can be done anonomously with data on a unique ID separate from the identifying factors of who that user is. That's important as BBC Mobile don't want to be storing lots of users personal data, particularly as some people already views on the BBC and it's relationship to the state so there is a keenness not to be seen as monitoring users too much.

 

At present there is some repackaging of data for different contexts but this is not specifically repackaged for the personas developed elsewhere in research on users. There is some cross linking and aggragation across the various sub sites but this tends not to be persona based. There is however an acknowledged weaknesses at linking up BBC offering across different platforms with content siloed due to the separateness of different BBC teams.

 

BBC Website Developments

The presentation included a showing of the public beta of the new BBC website which looks very like iGoogle and allows lots of cookie driven personalisation and the addition and manipulation of lots of components. Jane is hoping it will be possible to do a mobile takeaway of this page. There is an issue in that no mobile content has metadata.

 

Semantic Layer (Mark-up) and Style Layer (Colours, Formatting), thus customisation is done via on the fly CSS.

 

 

About the BBC Mobile Team

The mobile team is made up of around 30 people. Currently there are 5 designers but there is a real need to have more client side developers. At the moment BBC Mobile want to update their CMS (Content Management System) which will add the capability to search BBC Mobile content. The team's 5 or 6 producers work to pull together and broker different areas of the team's work. In some cases they have more of a technical bent, others are more content orientated working on ways to support programme makers with mobile content. There are various managers in the team which perhaps looks excessive for the size of team but this is because the Mobile Team has to fit with the many different areas of the BBC that Mobile links to thus managers are specifically in place to liaise with various units elsewhere in the BBC. 

 

BBC Mobile are a growth area and are dealing with loads of programme makers looking to create mobile content linking to programmes and projects.

 

The Team is part of the BBC Future Media and Technology division with Ashley Highfield it's Director. The division covers the BBC's web, mobile and interactive TV content. Currently web and mobile teams are very separate but they should be more linked. However at the moment there is definite benefit in having the Mobile Team's specialist knowledge of tailoring content for context and indeed Jane recommends any technology project of this sort should be taking context as it's starting point to working out what and how to deliver content.

 

 

Questions, Answers and Further Resources

 

 

Q1: Intellectual Property Rights for Mobile Use of Content

 

What is the situation with regard to the rights to stream and deliver programmes to mobile users? Are these already built into contracts with programme makers (a very large percentage of BBC progamming is made by external production companies) or does this still need to happen?

A: This is just starting to happen now although obviously those programmes made by the BBC directly can be used for trials etc.

 

Q2: QR Codes

Have the BBC Mobile team done any work with the 2D QR codes which allow a URL, WAP Push link, text etc. piece of information to be encoded and read by software that can be installed on camera phones. This is big in Japan and other asian countries but has only really been promoted in the UK since the launch of the DVD of 28 Weeks Later (see this blog entry from Iain Tait including a photo of the billboard used) in 2007.

A: We have looked at these but the software that inteprets QR codes is not on most phones as standard and the technology is seen as being more for marketing than useful content so it has not really been looked at further.

 

 

BBC Blast

BBC Blast is a youth creativity project run by the BBC across several platforms which includes a core mobile component. 

 

Jorum

During the question and answer session EDINA raised the fact that the Jorum repository is working on ensuring mobile compatibility with learning objects so that it is possible to provide some of it's core content where it's most relevant, for instance delivering modules on hairdressing, to practitioners in their day to day roles on the salon floor via mobile devices.

 

 

Links

 

BBC and BBC Mobile Links

 

Contact info for Jane Murison, Senior User Experience Designer for BBC Mobile

Email: jane.murison@bbc.co.uk

 

WAP push link to BBC Mobile Site

Text: BBC

To: 81010

 

 

About BBC Mobile

http://www.bbc.co.uk/mobile/web/index.shtml

 

BBC Homepage (current)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/

 

BBC Homepage (Beta)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/home/beta/

 

BBC iPlayer

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/

 

BBC Archive

http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/

 

BBC Big Screens (Wikipedia entry)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Big_Screen

 

BBC Big Screens (Liverpool European Capital of Culture Big Screen page)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/liverpool/big_screen/index.shtml

 

 

Devices

 

Nokia N Series Phones

 

N95 (silver phone on left above)

 

http://www.nseries.com/index.html#l=products,n95

 

N96 (black phone on right above)

 

http://www.nseries.com/index.html#l=products,n96

 

 

iPhone

 

Apple iPhone page

http://www.apple.com/iphone/

 

iPhone Developers Kit/Info

http://developer.apple.com/iphone/devcenter/

 

 

Eee PC

 

Eee PC from Asus (mini PC)

http://event.asus.com/eeepc/microsites/en/index.htm

 

Info/Review of Eee PC on Guardian Media Podcast

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/01/29/tech_weekly_start_your_engines.html

 

 

Software

 

Timed Text

 

W3C Timed Text standard

http://www.w3.org/AudioVideo/timetext.html

 

"What is Timed Text?" - article on Indelv.com

http://audio-video-images.indelv.com/timed-text-the-basics.html

 

 

Other Related Articles/References

 

African Telephony and Internet Access

 

"Again, Mobile Phones are Africa's PCs" - blog post on Africa & Technology blog, WhiteAfrican.com

http://whiteafrican.com/?p=663

 

"Upwardly Mobile in Africa" - Business Week Special Report

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_39/b4051054.htm

 

One Laptop Per Child - project hoping to bring basic computing to children in the developing world using completely re-imagined tough and cheap laptops, some relation to the Eee PC (though much more kid focused), also relavent to the African lack of fixed line telephony issue.

http://laptop.org/ 

 

 

BBC blogs

 

BBC Internet Blog

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/

 

Is the Future Mobile in 2008 - Jan '08 posting to BBC Internet Blog reviewing Mobile at CES (Computer Electronic Show) 2008

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2008/01/is_the_future_mobile_in_2008.html

 

 

RSS

 

RSS tutorials and set-up info on W3Schools

http://www.w3schools.com/rss/default.asp

 

RSS on Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(file_format)

 

RSS Advisory Board site - tutorials etc.

http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification

 

 

Geo IPs

 

Wikipedia page on IPs - links out to geographic information and services and tables of IPs by country.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_address

 

 

Text voting scandals

 

Phone-in Scandal a "wake-up call" - BBC News item

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6463901.stm

 

BBC to Bring Back Phone-In Contests Following Deception Row

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2007/nov/21/tvfakery.bbc

 

ITV Admits Fake Phone-in Scandal Will Cost £18m

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2007/oct/19/5

 

 

AQA Service

 

Any Question Answered Service

http://www.issuebits.com/

For the last few weeks I have found it tough to know what I want to say about web2.0. Although I love many of the services that are bundled under that heading I find the various definitions often overlap but also vary greatly and increasingly I find I take many web2.0 services for granted but that this is not necessarily the experience of colleagues or friends who do not necessarily see the value in such services or see them as crossing a difficult line between the personal and the public.

 

I found Tim O’Reilly’s article (O'Reilly, Tim (2005) What is Web 2.0?: design patterns and business models for the next generation of software ) from September 2005 really fascinating. In part it is a prescient and relevant view of the move to Web2.0 and gives some good illustrative examples of the difference between web1.0 and web2.0. However I also found it very interesting how many of the sites and services mentioned are no longer high on the agenda. Napster seems the most obvious of these as this has more or less been obliterated by the success of the iTunes Store which only launched in the US in late 2003 and in the UK in June 2004 and took some time to grow it’s market. Interestingly Napster was flagging up DRM (Digital Rights Management) and proprietary format issues with iTunes in an August 2005 BBC News Online interview (Napster boss on life after piracy – Darren Waters, BBC News, 22^nd August 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/4165868.stm - accessed 24th February 2008) but in doing so failed to point out what has led the brand to a dominance of the download market: attractive and intuitive design, ease of use, brand coolness and an in-built marketing and technology tie to a significantly smaller, stylish and more intuitive MP3 device than had previously been on the market.

 This example brings to mind another possible distinction between web1.0 and web2.0. From my perspective (as a fairly early adopter) web1.0 was functional and used in workplaces, libraries, institutions and at home only for very basic email and browsing except for a minority of geeks, outsiders and people interested in the web for its own sake. The web was a tool not a destination and those online tools for participation were often specialist in nature and required some knowledge to participate (e.g. basic HTML, understandings of different file formats etc), thus content tended to be created by authorities, commercial companies or (often at the controversial forefront of technology, the porn industry). Web2.0 is intuitive, almost unnoticeably part of everyday life and easiness, fun and intuitive interfaces make it ok for everyone to be enthusiastic about spending time online including trend-makers and even your granny (humorist David Sedaris’s take on the point at which the web becomes inviting in Nutcracker.com (a chapter in Me Talk Pretty One Day, Abacus, 2000) hints at the gap between the interest of geeks vs. everyone else in the web). Content is created by anyone and everyone (though still a minority of those online) with services flourishing on popularity and brand more than by offering a particularly unique product or service. The change seems to have been precipitated by the changing critical mass of who is online (cheaper home computers and laptops, cheaper and more widely available broadband, peer and educational pressure to have a computer in the home) and subsequently the people who have moved online as a result of the process and services becoming much easier to use (pensioners, a wider variety of educational and class backgrounds, etc). O’Reilly’s Meme map and The machine is us/ing us (which was also used as an example at a catalogues Web 2.0 session I attended this week - both further explain this idea that the web has gone from being something that we need to learn how to use for basic functions to being a dynamic place where services meet user requirements by being intuitive, continually evolving and interacting. I’ve talked about phenomena such as OpenSocial before and this is also important as the less logins you need, the less manual porting of data required, the more services you can use in parallel to meet different requirements. I think this is also a web 2.0 phenomenon and one that has special interest for e-learning applications as you can pool the best service for many disciplines in one place and connect all of them together, something difficult to do seamlessly until recently. Even the most basic of html badges and the personalization of URLs in various web services enhance this interaction.  

Mashups and APIs have enormous potential for delivering e-learning content mapped to data already available (linking reading lists to Amazon as well as the more traditional library catalogues for instance) or presented in familiar terms to learners (for instance the APIs for Google Maps and). However for me there is an uneasy dichotomy at the heart of Web2.0. The important characteristic traits of services that include intuitive and flexible design (opening services to less traditional participants such as pensioner vloggers), connectivity and mashups to other, live editing, upload etc. over the web rather than via downloaded software, etc. are based on technology that is not always compatible with the broad and varied user group that e-learning needs to be accessible to. Whilst it is fantastic to not have to download software to use a service the way in which this is achieved is by utilizing local computing capacity and network bandwidth. Most services rely on javascript, flash and other client side software which require particular types and configurations of browsers and plugins, does not always support differently abled users (via screenreaders, locally customized font sizes/colours etc.) and, particularly in the case of video, music and dynamic services, expects a high quality and high speed internet connection accessed via a relatively high specification (and/or recently purchased) and speedy computer. Thus web2.0 services are often both more and less accessible than their predecessors and offer difficult decisions in terms of providing e-learning in a way which treats the differing types, locations and resources of students equitably. 

 

But can you ignore exciting web 2.0 opportunities because it may isolate some students?

 

I have huge problems drawing conclusions on the best way to resolve this. This is magnified by the fact that I work in the academic sector where an assumption of reasonably fast internet access and reasonably recent computer access can usually be made, partly due to the facilities of universities, partly because a large proportion of students now arrive at university with their own computer, often a laptop, partly because funding of technology developments for the sector follow a very strange route often influenced heavily by historical politics and very blue sky thinking (for instance the excellent overview of web 2.0 given in Anderson. P (2007). What is Web 2.0? Ideas, Technologies and Implications for Education, JISC is not actually reflected well by the type of funding calls and project briefs so far put out by JISC for tender, nor in the less than collaborative and very hierarchical way in which projects are taken forward). Indeed in a traditional learning context (even if e-learning is a component) there is a degree of flexibility as, in theory at least, it is possible to ensure computer labs and facilities meet requirements of selected services. However in a pure e-learning context you cannot be sure of what facilities students will have – whether they will have access to a high spec. computer, whether it will be mac, pc or linux, which browser will be in use, which plugins will be available. My PC is only around 4 years old but it struggles with the level of multi-tasking required to work for long periods with web services, video, browsing etc. in parallel which, for various reasons, makes more sense than looking at each item in isolation. My partner’s Mac is 2 years old but even it struggles to run some software, Second Life being one of the most bandwidth and processor heavy applications which also obliterate the opportunity to multi-task whilst participating ruining the dynamic feel one would want from that environment. Being a Mac there are also some issues with plugins and DRM issues for some softwares. My work PC is a little newer and faster and my internet connection is a lot faster than at home but it would not be appropriate to access some services from there most of the times. However I am fortunate as many of my peers and colleagues at other institutions have most Web 2.0 services blocked for a variety of cost, historical, political and policy reasons. A one size fits all option becomes difficult in this landscape but catering to the most accessible formats and services will not provide as intuitive, visually exciting and often lower functioning solution than a set of services which a minority of possible students may have trouble accessing.

 

 Data Control, Privacy, Public Access

Something that I think is key to Web 2.0 is the currency of data and the backbone of databases – O’Reilly phrases this as “Data is the Next Intel Inside”, YouTube has the most content of the online video providers, so a bigger audience is drawn, so people make sure their content goes there to catch as many people as possible – it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy once a site reaches a critical mass of data. In the case of FaceBook people *are* the data which is one reason why FaceBook has tried to retain it’s controversial policy of retaining all user data even when profiles are deleted (Quitting Facebook Gets Easier, Maria Aspen for New York Times Online, accessed 24^th February 2008,  http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/13/technology/13face.html?em&ex=1203051600&en=540adbdfc508f401&ei=5087%0A and How to Permanently Delete Your Facebook Account, by Steve O’Hear for ZDNet, accessed 24^th February 2008, http://blogs.zdnet.com/social/?p=392) . It is not as if customer data were not always seen as commercially valuable – hence the price of mailing lists and the hefty contributions many sites and services will pass on to fundraisers who generate trial signups (such as LoveFilm on easyfundraising.co.uk) – there may be a financial gain but it is the long term value of having the contact details of a potential subscriber that ensures value for money even if an initial subscription does not occur. The print press has long favoured subscriptions with a measurable audience who can be contacted, surveyed, marketed to and interacted with.

 

The difference now is that this data is almost the only unique asset of Web 2.0 companies. Facebook without it’s active community would merely be another abandoned Friends Reunited, Friendster, Orkut etc. with little or no residual value.

 

Thus control of data is key and it actually a series of extremely un-exciting databases connecting services together that provide the real power of web 2.0. The problem is using some of these Web 2.0 applications can therefore be the fact that learners may not want to expose their valuable personal data in order to access free and useful services. There is a growing backlash against the most populus social networking sites at the moment (their very strength being their biggest weakness: people always want to contact only those they want to connect to but they become findable by anyone in possession of their full name or email address and the etiquette of rejection in social networking is still evolving) and, even if learners are happy to sign up in theory, the ownership of these sites grows more controversial by the day. Rupert Murdoch now owns MySpace, YouTube and Blogger are owned by Google, Flickr (via Yahoo!) may soon be owned my Microsoft. As occurs in any developing area of the economy companies are involved in a key round of mergers, acquisitions and strategic alliances that will see the most used services owned by a few infamous key players. Some may retain their original intentions and policies but many will change as a result of ownership. And membership will certainly change with ownership – already MySpace has lost some of its cache since it was purchased last year (so much so that Murdoch has been reported as saying that he wishes he had purchased Facebook). This is not new. Friends Reunited lost significant appeal when purchased by ITV for an inflated price but with little strategic direction to counteract public perceptions that the data on the site was now commercially owned and dubiously utilized. Trust is key on the web and particularly in the personalized world of Web 2.0.

 

Additionally there are privacy concerns that override the control of data issue. Even if personal data ownership is entirely retained by the user of a web service, and that company has an open and ethical policy about data use there is always what I consider “the Google Factor”. What you contribute can be found quite easily in most cases as almost nothing on the web permanently disappears thanks to caching and often the inclusion of an email address or reused pseudonym can make it excessively easy to build a portrait of a person online from their work there. Because learning requires an individual to open themselves up to new knowledge it involves vulnerability and the reflection on and development of areas of weaknesses and gaps in knowledge. In a safe closed environment it is relatively painless to begin admitting weaknesses but if this activity occurs publicly, or in a forum which may be made public, it can inhibit, change or damage the honesty and comfort level of the participant. Those who do not already have an online presence may have less to lose and be able to find the medium freeing. Those who are already very tech savvy will have educated concerns about placing material online as in all likelihood they have already got some form of conscious web presence. However more concerning are the digital natives who automatically deposit information publicly without being aware they are doing it – something alluded too by the “Life 1.0” experiences outlined in Elliott, B (2007) Assessment 2.0: assessment in the age of web 2.0, Scottish Qualifications Authority (a paper which raises interesting ideas about what you should be assessing in pupils and how you go about doing this).

 

It is one thing to offer people a chance to place ideas and vulnerabilities  online if they are skeptical and make an informed decision but it can be a great responsibility to know how to handle a very open and interested student who may or may not be aware that material will have longevity and potential implications – as has been shown in the use of Google and Facebook to check potential university and job candidates and the limited but significant practice of firing bloggers who write about their work  Free speech is enormously important but for the first time in history almost any form of what is said can be recorded, archived and distributed with ease. This has implications that are still yet to be realized but the increasing legislation of the web, the subtle censorship present in several Web 2.0 sites through their extremely carefully drawn up “Terms & Conditions of Use” policies (once merely a brief disclaimer these are now extensive documents that aim to avoid legal problems and thus allow the removal of a wide range of materials that may be legal but controversial). The Google agreement to filter content for China is merely the most extreme example of the idea of the web as a sanitized data framework rather than the utopian free speech space of 10 years ago. This means much that was bad about the web has gone but as with real world law this comes at the cost of restricted rights for all and with educational use of the web pitched to an ever younger group of users it seems likely that we have not yet seen the completion of this process to increase the safety of the web. This has run in parallel to the previously discussed issue of being able to find many, if not most, people in some form online often interconnected with all manner of information about workplace or location. One therefore thinks twice now about content, language etc. when blogging, for instance, since it is increasingly the case that any post may be read by colleagues, employer, friends, family etc. As vlogging gains in popularity it will be even harder to distance a long distant thought from current reputation.

 

 RSS

To me one of the most underrated elements of Web2.0 is the distribution of information via xml in RSS feeds. These are more flexible as the xml defines both the contents and definitions of how it should be formatted which allows the content to be accessed by various browsers, feed readers (including those on mobile phones), email etc. Like databases RSS is one of the hidden core engines of Web 2.0. Feeds connect sites together providing dynamic content and links that would take infinitely too long to manually add to sites and services. RSS also acts as a preview service for blogs, websites, news stories etc. enabling a faster, local, customizable sifting of the relevant web. Indeed with Netvibes, Pageflakes, iGoogle, and similar customizable portal-like sites people are starting to build their own personal view of the web. Since this can be done with point and click interfaces and can include infinite feeds it may be that the future of the VLE is not a closed wall system but a network of web services that each learner can add, for the duration of study (and perhaps beyond) into their own existing spaces. Certainly the days of custom portals seem numbered when users can build custom pages, crude but usable federated searches (e.g. Swicki) and interconnections between and feeds from all the sites they wish to keep up with.

 

 Mobile Devices

As I blogged last week I recently attended a fascinating BBC seminar on delivering content to mobile devices. At the moment there is a subtle battle between laptops and mobile phones with palm tops and mini computers sitting somewhere on the outskirts of the action. Laptops are in theory everyone’s preferred device for accessing the web on the go: screen resolutions and quality are excellent, flexibility is high with numerous applications available, keyboards are full size and a mouse/trackpad provides easy navigation. Web enabled mobiles have historically have small and poor screen resolutions, unreliable connections and appalling interoperability with data. However laptops (especially PCs) can be difficult to configure even if they have a wifi card, videocalls can take place via skype but this appears odd in public spaces and may not be acceptable on free wifi networks where bandwidth capacity is iffy, what’s more wifi is often not free. Mobiles meanwhile have begun to include large high resolution screens, easier and more varied possible connectivity methods, navigation is improving and more phones are now java-enabled and thus able to make use of many of the most popular web services. Browsers such as Opera Mini also provide desktop or laptop type browsing on a tiny handheld phone, albeit with a large amount of scrolling required.

 

It seems unlikely that people will be throwing away their computers for their phones but it does seem likely that there will be some convergence of mobile devices over the next few years. With most UK citizens owning a mobile phone it seems that it would be foolish to write off their potential for browsing, using and learning via the web, not least because content generation including photo, video and audio via mobile phones (and instant upload to the web if desired) is now easy and present in most new models with users fairly unself-conscious about using these features. At the same time laptops (such as the smallest Sony Vaio and the Macbook Air) are getting smaller and multipurpose devices (Blackberry, EeePC, Amazon’s Kindle, iPod video) between the size of a laptop and a phone are appearing in less expensive, more compact and more sophisticated forms all the time. The problem with all mobile devices though is there is an apparent lack of open standards and, in mobiles and similar devices, detecting browser capabilities and software is currently difficult and, when possible, can be expensive.

 

Thus I feel, particularly having attended the BBC Seminar and heard about the usage of mobile devices rather than desk-based computing amongst digital natives (Jane Muirson’s assertations about the dramatic different behaviours and technical skills of different generations is something supported by Boomers, Gen-Xers & Millenials: Understanding the New Students, Diana Oblinger, 2003), that when creating any dynamic learning content it must be essential to factor in the fact that learners may want or expect to access some content on the move. This is perhaps most easily achieved through feeds of time sensitive content (discussions, blogs, alerts, announcements) that can be read easily on mobile devices without any major redesign of content required. For cost, convenience and flexibility reasons we may reach a point at which mobile devices start to become the one device used for all needs or at least a point at which smaller laptops are the only computer many learners use for the majority of their learning. At the moment most content expects reasonable screen estate but VLEs in particular will need to look quite different if learners of the future are only ever going to access content via A5 style laptops.

 

 Web 3.0 – the semantic web

If web 2.0 has seen the building of folksonomies through tagging (del.icious.us, Flickr, LibraryThing etc), the emergence of almost common-language search terms with Google’s mysteriously successful algorithm delivering answers to questions, suggesting related topic or alternate spellings etc. and the growth of applications with simple point and click functionality, WYSIWYG edit-ability and customizable looks (usually through cookie driven CSS (cascading style sheets)) then web 3.0 (appearing alarming swiftly on the tails of web 2.0) promises further evolution. The semantic web seems like the natural extension of the computer to computer communication which has allowed web services to thrive and create web 2.0. In the semantic web data is encoded with not only formatting but descriptive markup which allows infinitely richer and more flexible portability of data. Whether it will be an evolution as immediately obvious to the general populus is dubious but the eventual cascading down of these technologies will have a definite impact on the navigation, readability and appearance of the web and will provide the ability for a more intelligent interaction between computers and data that makes far better use of the ever cheapening computer power to organize the ever expanding web. This has to have an impact on e-learning but at this point in time the only important factor I can see is that any new or existing system must be able to handle XML, the language of the semantic web, or it will not be ready for the semantic web as it occurs.

  

Hypertext

The semantic web seems a suitable point at which to look back to the past evolution of the web through descriptive text. I was mildly bemused to see Hypertext listed as a learning technology for this course as, to be honest, I take it for granted. Indeed I find the idea of typing and storing data as a document without linked content somewhat retro and bizarre but I realize that I may not be with the majority of people on this. However what I find so important, and thus almost unnoticeable, about hypertext is that I assume I can move from one source of information to the next. Indeed it is to my eternal frustration that common practice, copyright and license restrictions mean that you cannot click through to read the actual items referenced in scholarly papers, e-books etc. Having used the web as my primary leisure and working tool for a decade I am accustomed to linking to anything I reference whenever I can and thus forget that this is a fairly new concept and not in wide use outside of those publishing exclusively to the web.

 I was interested to look at the examples of hypertext given this week as some were deeply disappointing whilst others genuinely seemed to inhabit some of the possibilities of the format. I did find that design wise most were somewhat crudely and inconsistently designed and in some cases the differentiation between web essay and website seemed fairly dubious although that did not diminish the interest in the content. Whilst it was not the most sophisticatedly formatted example I found This is not sex: a web essay on the male gaze, fashion advertising and the pose to be a genuinely valuable piece of work as I could see clearly why this had been constructed as a hypertext and not as a more traditionally formatted essay. The use of images, so key to the text, and linking (crucially via a new window) to relevant related texts made this feel like a true discovery item. Meanwhile Mystery web essay really plays with the format albeit in a lovely baffling way.  Despite it’s abhorrent (but understandably out of date) graphic design I really loved the flexible navigation of The postcolonial and postimperial literature web. Whilst the possibility of navigating on a grouped or hierarchical route is retained, there is also a serendipitous and/or flat browsing style made possible by the icons on each element in this hypertext. Whilst the style of hypertext writing from any web period may be somewhat recognizable in some area of current web practice I found something which should have perhaps been obvious from it’s collaborative and experimental origins: it resembled a wiki. Specifically it reminded me of the flatter wiki structures of web services such as Wikispaces or PBWiki rather than the popular but less flexible hierachies of Mediawiki or Confluence. There is something integral to this almost random connectivity which is extremely appealing since natural instinct is not to think in structured topic silos and then drill down to detailed information, thought processes tend to form apparently random links between thoughts and creative sparks are often formed from unlikely combinations of thoughts – indeed the origins of many great scientific, artistic and culinary turning points are in the coincidental combination of extremely different thoughts, concepts or components. Indeed the extracts from Landow, G (1997) Hypertext 2.0: the convergence of contemporary critical theory and technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press) are inspiring as, whilst the technology has moved on, the desire to look ahead, connect ideas together and link up many elements of a subject to create context, perspective and spark interest remain highly relevant. Most crucial though is Landow’s broader assertion that students must not only learn their subject but also the skills to critically assess, intelligently communicate (including the skills to do this via hypertext/modern methods) and interact collaboratively with their subject rather than just learning passively.  

Interesting I found some of the more recent hypertexts a little disappointing given the thought behind the older Landow work which was constrained by technology. I therefore expected the images and crude design of his late 1990’s design to be replaced by use of clean lines, more relevant visual cues and content beyond text such as embedded video, sound and perhaps even interactive elements – I assume such content counts within the definition of hypertext though they are not, for obvious reasons, really present in the earlier examples. Thus I expected Of serendipity, free association and aimless browsing: do they lead to serendipitous learning? To feature mind/browsing maps with clickable elements, screen shots etc. Similarly I would have liked to see some embedded social media elements in the otherwise cleanly designed and structured A web 2.0 education. I do think form, function and content should be linked together and I therefore did appreciate the thought behind The Internet, memory and medieval rhetoric which genuinely tried to give a medieval ambiance appropriate the essay’s topic. Indeed it is interesting how often appearance on the web can affect readability in a way that is comparable to, but also more amplified than, the print world. It is not just the intuitiveness that must be considered but also the more shallow visual elements as well as readability and image created by selections of font, structure etc. Though apparently a simpler technology (in terms of this course) Hypertext does therefore raise complex issues about just how many considerations must go into the design of effective e-learning context and how much more time-consuming this is to both conceptualize and create than more traditional stand alone teaching materials.

 

 Assessement 

I have given a lot of thought over the last few weeks to the assessment for this course and have been batting various ideas around. One idea that has persisted since the idea was raised was the mediation of open collaborative working with privacy concerns, this would tie into the issues of copyright, closed wall systems, and the issues and benefits of interconnectivity. Another idea has been the exploration of the web 2.0 extensions that I have recently helped the SUNCAT team deliver, the selection of third party services, why such outreach activities can engage users and how this could be applied to an e-learning context. Another possible idea would be to consider how existing training in the use of services delivered by EDINA could be moved to an e-learning format in part or in-whole based on the type of technologies and community building ideas explored in this module. I had some other thoughts but these three are the most focused of them so far and I am thus trying to select the best focal point at the moment as I sort through the whirl of ideas from both this course and a succession of interesting seminars lately.

Ahead of my main post today on Second Life I thought I would post a few thoughts on online identity and technophia or perhaps rather techo-agnosticity.

In today's Guardian Graduate Section an article called "Blog Off" by Natalie Boxall (not/not yet online itself) talks about those young creatives rebelling against the idea of placing your work and your profile online. What's interesting is that the person speaking against social networking, blogging and similar online profiles is a young, educated, technologically adept writer (Richard Milward - he's very easily found via google even without a profile). Those voicing a cautiausly positive tone in the article are older writers unlikely to have grown up with the same ubiquity of connectivity. 

Although there is an element of "geek chic" that is acceptable to the mainstream these days - with everyone expected to own a computer and an email address and be able to find and use youtube, ebay et al - there is still not an acceptibility in liking technology for, effectively, it's own sake. Whilst blogs are widely talked about and just about every journalist has been told to keep one the statistics on how many people read blogs vs. writing their own are informative (as discussed in "Online Activities", part of section 1 (pp. 22-29) in "Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World" an OCLC Membership report on internet usage. Also of interest is "Our Online Personality" and the privacy discussions in section 3 (pp. 92-98) which includes responses to questions regarding online vs. real life identities).

Despite having grown up with technology many digital natives seem to have little interest in the way in which technologies work or what may be possible with them. By contrast some of the most vocal technology evangelists are those from the tail end of the Baby Boom or Gen X ers who have had access to the internet and daily computing from secondary or tertiary level education onwards. Taking the example of that Blog Off article it is interesting to think that the arts encompass both the most technophobic and the most tech evangelistic behaviours at the same time but even here this generation split perhaps currently most notable from the rise of lo-fi music (gritty production is a key component of The Kooks, The Wombats, The White Stripes and even MySpace and MP3 off-spring such as Kate Nash, Lily Allen or The Artic Monkeys have a distinctly cheap, basic and low tech sound and image (including their web presence) in stark contrast to those of (older) technology-positive artists such as Bjork, Martyn Ware, Autechre or even David Bowie).

Some of those varying web presences are shown below. The tech-savvy but relatively lo-fi younger artists (with a mizxture of more homemade and record company designer sites) are using visual language quite different to their technophilic and slightly older peers. Fonts, screen estate etc. are quite differently used although all have an active and updated web presence:

 

 

 

 

This apparent trend for lo-fi may be a fashion thing, it may merely be a resurgent appreciattion - as in many of the visual arts - for the key physical skills of the musicians or it may be part of a genuine rebellion to the authoritarian respectibility of slick technology by a generation raised on computers, gaming and the internet. Though the use of mobile phones and instant messaging will almost certainly not be threatend by such a rebellion, engagement with electronic content and educational creativity - particularly if part of a paid-for curriculum - may be at odds with a culture that embraces technology for entertainment but is suspicious, disdainful or simply too cool to want to use the same sites or skills for formal assessed work. 

This is in interesting contrast to a presentation I stumbled upon earlier this week via Susan Mernit's blog. "The Future of Social Networks" (available on Slideshare) is an interesting mini presentation on social networking and marketing with an eye to future developments by Charlene Li.

 

After having been away last weekend and now taken part in the Second Life tutorial and building session, I have finally been able to pull together my thoughts on Second Life.

Before beginning the MSc I had heard about Second Life and had signed up to try it out following various press articles and a series of Channel 4 "3 Minute Wonders" called Second Lives which gave an overview of Second Life from the perspective of several individual users.

The first few times I used Second Life (SL) I found it took a lot to get started: not only did I have to register as I would expect for any new website or piece of software but I had to download software, choose a personalised name but from only a very limited selection and then, when logging on, I effectively had to sacrifice all of my screen estate to SL in order to use it. I also found the controls less than intuitive and the customisation of my avatar a fun but very slow process. I also found that processing power of my own computer and connection speed made a big difference to the successful use of SL. As I had no special need to be in SL I decided to keep the login but stop using it for the time being.

Fast forward to this month and I have had a new and better experience of SL (and indeed a new and more memorably named avatar – the automatically restricted name choices can make it hard to recall your login!) for this course but some reservations remain for me.

I found the Gee article perhaps more informative as an examination of role and game playing rather than of virtual worlds per se. This is not so much because of the specific games or software mentioned but because of the approach to identities and assuming roles. I was not convinced by Gee’s discussion and characterisation of learning identities. Whilst I agree that every individual has many components to their life and some, perhaps most, may adjust their behaviour in different environments I do not believe that these are as distinct as the various identities suggest. In particular I found some of Gee’s examples to be troublesome (indeed borderline racist at times) and I found it odd that whilst he was happy to talk about identities he did not specifically talk about peer and parental culture and circumstance. It may be a subtle difference but the choice to be generally academic and/or interested in a particular subject may have some serious practical causes rather than purely being about a theoretcial identity. For instance if it is not possible to find a suitable studying environment at home that will inevitably affect the actual performance of a student in comparison to a student with a supportive and well equipped home environment. Thus for instance the gap between low income and middle or high-income students may not be simply an issue of “identity” but of opportunity.  Whilst I can see some merit to an argument that peer pressure can be a major factor in a person’s behaviour I am unconvinced that this can so specifically define identity (e.g. Gee’s suggestion that listening to rap music in some way defines an identity that prohibits learning).

This identity driven concept seems to fit with an apparent current turned to identify “role models” for students (and others) of all types. A role model may help a student realise what is possible for them but so will a positive culture of inclusion. More importantly such thinking does not genuinely address equality of opportunity as witnessed by the fact that “household income is still the biggest predictor of a child’s academic success” (Free school meal pupils lose out in race for top A-levels by Polly Curtis, Gaurdian Unlimited, Saturday February 23, 2008). Thus I think it is rather patronising to suggest that it is a student (and particularly a child’s) awareness of their identities that blocks their interest in a subject, rather I think it is the relevance, communication and practical support that seals and maintains a student’s interest. Gee may talk specifically of identities of low income African Americans but I see that he does not talk of a “dyslexic” or “disabled” identity in his examples. In part I think it is because it is recognised that such students have specific practical requirements (which should be addressed at an institutional level with additional support) but their circumstantial identity has little or nothing to do with their potential cerebral interests. And to suggest that students are, in effect, play acting at possible, for instance, “scientist identities” to utterly belittle the process of individual discovery and to take an extremely static, authoritarian view of what learning and thinking actually is. In the real real world there is no day on which you become a finished article having completed your exams for life.

Any profession may have a sliding scale of involvement but (again using the science example) even discovering for yourself how a seed germinates is still as much the practice of science as a professor developing sophisticated vaccines in a lab. To try out a practice version of a scientist would surely be to put on a white coat and randomly pour coloured liquids around or pose with a bubbling flask. That however is miles away from a science lesson where students practice science starting from first principals rather than pretending to be scientists ahead of some long specialised career path of identity formation. To suggest there is a “scientist identity” also seems as facile as suggesting there is a single British identity or female identity or muslim identity for instance. What there are a number of professional and academic disciplines (which often blur together) in which individuals take part. Indeed I did not buy into the idea that everyone looks for an academic or professional identity to work towards. I do not feel I have ever adopted the path to a particular identity in this way and have never thought “when I grow up I want to be…” and had any sort of idea of how to complete that sentence as it seems so limiting and unrealistic and always has to me (indeed as a child I would only ever give flippant answers when asked such questions by adults). Either I am untypical or the concept relies upon the idea that all individuals have some sort of specific single disciplinary calling which I feel is inherent in the single minded CV requirements of some professions (such as medicine, law and indeed academia) but experience would suggest that in reality many people do not fit such moulds.

Furthermore I find Gee’s suggestions for bridging identities is more an answer in need of a question as most of his suggestions seem to be me to already be addressed by any intelligent teaching practice concerned with engaging students by making studying relevant to them.

However something I found particularly difficult in both Gee and Taylor was the idea that virtual worlds automatically equal a sense of anonymity and separation from RL baggage (whether matters of learning, appearance, etc). Whilst this certainly can be true in opt-in gaming and leisure uses of virtual worlds there are substantive practical issues in carrying such thinking over to a virtual world used for teaching and learning activities. For instance where a course is paid for, where assessment is required to be recorded, where potentially vulnerable students (e.g. under 18’s) are working, where intellectual property rights issues may arise out of sharing teaching materials and simply where a sense of continuity needs to be maintained there will be a desire for some sort of exclusivity of access. In the case of this module for instance we all need to be members of Holyrood Park to have full rights to create and interact with all the features of the Virtual University of Edinburgh. And in order for tutorials not to be chaotic and to be able to sort troublemakers from genuine learners at least one member of teaching or support staff needs to have confirmed the RL identity (that is name and enrolment on the course) and also know the SL name. Anonymity, for practical reasons, is immediately out the window.

Now whilst it is possible for students not to know the identity of their peers in a virtual classroom environment it is also true that many people will be happy to reveal this information whilst others will make themselves apparent via the views expressed in that virtual world. This is particularly the case when any extended social interaction takes place in a virtual world as RL interests, occupation, sexuality will all reveal the identity of person regardless of whether they themselves have tied their virtual name or appearance to their RL selves. Crucially teaching staff will almost always know the “real” names and backgrounds of students. Where a mixed e-learning and classroom approach is being taken it is therefore reasonable that any preconceived notions of a student’s potential will not magically change because their avatar looks different to them in RL. And in my own personal experience it is often the opinions, treatment and grading of teaching staff that can be the most potentially positive or negative part of a student’s confidence.

Confidence is perhaps the ultimate learning identity alluded to be all of this week’s readings and the (fairly negative) initial responses to SL seen on the course discussion boards. Any student who is not confident in their skills will feel less empowered to do well. Where those skills are required only as a secondary activity to the core learning it can be even more disheartening for those struggling to learn. Using the SL example for instance it is humiliating to not know how to sit down or not flash your fellow students (as one student at my tutorial did on arrival and as I recently did in the SL Facebook application area) when you are there not just to learn about SL but to have a tutorial or learning activity in that environment. This is for me one of the biggest issues with SL in particular but other virtual worlds as well: the barrier to usage is set quite high. By which I mean that it certainly takes hours and arguably several days of usage before you can feel comfortable moving around and interacting with others in a virtual world. Some things are intuitive but the sheer complexity of possibilities means that many actions and activities take some learning. And this is assuming that you are both technologically equipped to take part (I have found my partners 2 year old mac slowly copes with SL whereas my 4 year old PC can barely start it up let alone allow real time rendering. Similarly I have found the response and interactivity possible when using SL at my workplace - on a T1 connection -infinitely more rewarding than my home broadband) and financially capable of doing all that you want (many additional options in clothing, building options, etc. require the purchase of virtual Linden dollars using RL money. A financial exchange conceptually troubling to many people since there is no physical or even electronically transferable (outside the software itself) product that has cost real money.

My employers have, on occasion, talked about SL and it’s possibilities but they have so far steered clear as it is seen to be a commercial site with somewhat difficult to control security (we are publicly funded and most of our work is driven by specific and prohibitive licence agreements), SL has scalability issues (many events needing to be limited to around 40 people to run properly), high technology barriers and, perhaps most importantly, is seen as having too small a user base to be of interest. Additionally it is another closed wall system and, unlike Facebook, it more or less takes over your computer once it is running because it uses large amounts of screen estate and processing power and, indeed, runs a great deal like a computer game (such as the Sims – a game to which is bears a significant resemblance) rather than a tool to be used in conjunction with other working tools for a richer working experience. For instance if you were able to satisfyingly used SL as a more visual and informative version of an IM client it would be much more useful for both professional and educational outreach. As it stands it is a nice looking but work-intensive alternative to discussion boards that will, inevitably, always exclude a core group of students for a variety of reasons be they technological, financial or even political.

Something that is far vaguer to define but important in both articles to me, as a woman, is an additional musing of identity. Taylor looked at the portrayal of sexuality to some extent and to sexual practice in Dreamscape in particular. The assertion that virtual worlds are not necessarily free from prejudice is an important reminder that virtual worlds are populated by digital images representing real people who may have far less liberal views than the alleged community view of a particular environment. On a related and more troubling note was Gee’s decision to become a female avatar, Bead Bead, in his virtual world/gaming explorations. Gee treats the avatar as a character, something separate from himself but created by him. To me this raises both an issue of detachment (if you are playing a role in a learning experience do you learn or does your character? How involved or invested are you really?) and of the objectification of women in digital landscapes. The default avatar for male characters in SL looks like a fairly un-extraordinary man whilst the female avatar is, by default, a very idealised, sexualised and disproportioned (by RL standards) shape. This is not solely the case in SL however as it is also true of many games or virtual environments with customised character options including the Sims, Tony Hawks’ games GTA, etc. all of which present women who are sexualised by default (with tools which limit customisation to a narrow body type) whilst offering a less defined and therefore more flexible base male avatar. Avatars are not abstract and androgenous but specifically gendered and stereotyped in appearance by default from the outset. Indeed on my first foray into SL with my current login I was chatted to by an avatar that looked like a 25 year old model being controlled by a 14 year old girl. She may have just picked the standard avatar to test or may have decided that this was how she wished to present herself to the world. It also slightly disturbs me when male SLers adopt female avatars in skimpy clothes as this seems to be less about  adopting an alternative version of self (in which case alternating to having breasts and female genitalia does not automatically mean you must stop wearing trousers for instance) and more like the use of the avatar as a sexual object with which to make the environment look more exotic. In a leisure usage this is a personal issue but in a classroom (in SL) setting this can be quite difficult to see as appropriate since in RL clothing and appearance signal ideas and tone that cannot entirely disappear in a virtual world. In any case additional identity, confidence and online safety issues could be raised by encouraging students into such an environment, particularly when the end goal is to learn rather than by experts at the world.

For my own avatar I chose to present, as best as I could, the RL me with, for instance, only the subtle change of a brighter hair colour than I have (so far) been able to dye my own hair and (partly because of the poor editing options) a slightly changed shape to get over my general appearance rather than appearing more accurately but less realistically (the relative proportions inherent to editing, particularly away from the default shapes, dictate a thinner and stranger shape for any plus size avatar unfortunately!).






Although I want to wrap this rather random set of thoughts up I do also want to make a mention to the hyping of SL and the outside view of virtual worlds. Press coverage such as the recent BBC 2 Wonderland documentary alternate between enthusiasm for the potential of such worlds and the sleazy carnival aspect of watching strange people at play (as the internet itself was once portrayed). For an important but nonetheless niche technology  (currently about 1.5million users worldwide dwarfed by Facebook’s UK membership of around 8.3 million) SL gets a great deal of press coverage. This is perhaps in part because there has been a corporate embracing of the technology at quite an early stage (doubtless connected to it’s unusually strong income generation model for a start up) but also because there is an amusement factor not just in the rubbernecking at outsiders but also in watching familiar faces turned into avatars (as in Newsnight’s Geek Week experiments on SL).

To those who do not spend a core part of their leisure time online though SL and virtual worlds can be a total mystery. Last week when I was visiting friends I mentioned the upcoming SL tutorials and there was a look of mild horror around the room as every individual (ranging in age from 26 to 70) declared the idea to be “weird”, “geeky” and pointless despite all being daily computer users and generally progress positive. Whilst I have enjoyed my virtual/SL weeks I would have a tough time fully rebutting my friends’ claims as I have a rich and busy RL and a strong practically focused mind which, I feel, rather prohibits me from exploring SL as a fully immersed member with a regular in-world time commitment. I also specifically do not enjoy acting nor fantasy/role play at the level of inhabiting another character (always one of my big problems with computer games in the past as I have a very strong character which I wish to retain in any virtual adventure) as an escape or alternative strange to RL though this is a way in which I see it as possible to successfully immerse fully in virtual worlds such as SL.

Whilst I did enjoy building items in second life (I build a blue rubber ginham teepee as my pet project) it seems extremely labour intensive for the end result (a sense of pride, something to interact with and something saleable to the community).

 

Having been so negative though I do see the potential of SL and other virtual worlds as a place to host specific types of learning activities and particularly, were scalability resolved, as a way to link up activities and speakers across the world. Indeed my own colleagues travel regularly around the UK delivering training at times that are relatively random to the students learning needs. Being able to deliver these on a remote basis (or, even better, as recorded but partly interactive sessions) would make immense environmental, business and financial sense if possible and virtual worlds could be a solution.

However I also know that I do not want to invest huge amounts of time in SL when I prefer the way in which I move and can communicated and vary my appearance in RL without requiring immense amounts of conscious thought and effort to do so, and when creatively I feel far more fruitful, far less frustrated and frankly I can work far more quickly with tangible textures, materials etc.

In today's Observer Magazine a their list of the 50 most influential bloggers were included. It is an eccentric and subjective list but does give a snapshot of some of the most read blogs on some of the topics currently seen as key by the online community.

I do not know if there are specific e-learning lessons to be drawn but would see qualities in many of those blogs that could be seen as also applicable to e-learning, including the knowledge and tailoring of content to audience and the importance of having a clearly defined and regularly written about content area. The list also therefore highlights the impact of blogging above and beyond it being a convenient capsule (and usually free) publishing system.

The article can be found here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/mar/09/blogs

It was suggested that I should make sure I record my notes from this weeks discussion board sessions here to my blog as, to my pleasant surprise, it sparked a lively debate in my group. I may add some of my other contributions here but my key post addressed Dreyfus' theory of the 7 stages of learning:

 

One of the things I found most troubling in Dreyfus' justification for F2F learning was what I felt to be a rather patronizing view of the teacher-student relationship.

Though I recognize most of my learning experiences have been structured according to a similar way of thinking to Dreyfus' 7 stages I could not help but notice that many of my personal problems with formal education have roots in this approach.

As someone with an analytical mind and a fairly casual disregard for authority I have always struggled with the idea that I must be treated as a machine with no intelligent mind in the early stages of learning something. I have never been good at memorizing by rote or following rules without knowing the reason or context for them. If I deem a rule illogical and without use I am very unlikely to obey (you can imagine my popularity with teachers at school on such occasions!). As a result I have always learnt facts, methods, skills far more effectively when presented as part of a greater whole.

Thus I struggled to memorize quadratic equations at school because the staff would not explain how they worked or why, we merely had to learn their use. In fact I would get angry every year when a previously thought technique was then revealed to be a simplification that we must now forget and that we should use a new technique (again not explained) which would have to be memorized. When it came to learning more advanced mathematics at A-level we would occasionally get more information about how and why a method worked and I found I understood and could only then retain the knowledge I was required to memorize.

Similarly I could not deal with chemistry as there were so many concepts you had to memorize that I lost interest long before the level I would have enjoyed. In physics meanwhile I had teachers that would encourage and explain the wider context and would be honest about those things that did need to be memorized.

When it came to undergraduate study I already knew what eventual area of interest I wanted to know about and, whilst understanding you need a grounding in a much wider set of topics, found myself incredibly frustrated that we were never quite able to see ahead to how anything we were learning would be used, nor allowed to follow a concept through to it's higher level progression so that even when an interest was piqued it had to be suppressed until the appropriate time. Two years into my degree I changed course as I knew I was at least a year and probably two and a half years away from going near anything I had originally been interested in.

So. I have two thoughts/questions:

1) Why is a distance or e-learning course any less able to produce experts than a F2F course. In particular I would ask why courses that require a genuine practical element (medical courses, engineering, carpentry etc) cannot be taught via e-learning plus some sort of practical experience in the learners local area. So for example in an engineering degree you will, after a lot of years of studying, need to take a placement. This may be closely associated with the university you are in but equally it can be geographically located anywhere (colleagues on my course had placements across the UK and Europe and were eligible for placements via several US universities) and generally were not with academics but with private companies. I see absolutely no reason why such placements could not link up to an otherwise e-only course of study since feedback from these placements usually takes place by email, phone or letter rather than F2F conversations between academic and local trainer/mentor. Indeed many work-based distance degrees already combine these remote and localized learning experiences.

2) What other successful models of education take a more holistic structure in mind? Since I don't come from an educational background I am interested, particularly after reading Burbules agreement with Dreyfus over the learning stages, to know what alternatives exist for teaching in a more holistic way that embraces original thought, analysis and contextual study from the outset rather than taking the rather authoritarian approach that you must be molded by rules and traditions before you are allowed to think for yourself. I find this approach understandable from an administrative and financial point of view but in terms of enjoyable and enriching education I find it harder to sympathize with.

I also can't help but that historically much of the most innovative and ground-breaking thinking comes from those with little formal education or, especially thinking back to the renaissance, the enlightenment, or even the industrial revolution, those grounded in extremely holistic, critical and discursive education rather than those taught through didactic mass learning techniques.

Thus (and I'm possibly going to be more provocative here than is warranted by Dreyfus') does modern education constrain the potential of learners by training them to be good at academia? Would it be better to instead train learners to be intelligent multidisciplinary thinkers with a an appropriately critical - and therefore flexible, creative and confident - expert knowledge of their given field(s).

This week I found the mix of my work schedule and the course reading strangely at one as I attended several events and meetings very much focused on policy and the adaptation from traditional to electronic measures in library and information services contexts. 

 

On Tuesday I attended the SLIC (Scottish Library and Information Consortium) Electric Connections 2008 day. This is an annual mini conference on electronic library and information services developments with a cross sectoral group of speakers. This year the subtitle was "Collaborating on Content" with the focus very much more on policy and planning than on technology itself. The day included discussion of the (JISC) Strategic Content Alliance (an inititaive for cradle to grave coherant electronic access to materials in the UK) and the official announcement of DASALM (Digital Access Scotland: Archive, Libraries and Museums), an initiative to make publicaly funded materials more readily available online from a single or linked access points. A similar aim was at the heart of a talk by representatives of IRIScotland (Institutional Repository Infrastructure for Scotland), a project lobbying for recognition of items in IRs in the successor to the Research Assessement Exercise, a process to assess HE research contributions usually based more on the quantity and location of research outputs (usually publications in scholarly journals) than on their usage or impact, measures which IRIS believe would be possible using data from IRs if these were the primary locations for depositing work. 

All three of the aforementioned projects are looking at above institutional level policies but are driven by institutions who are already engaged in adapting to a changing information environment. Interestingly the BECTA, NeSC and organisations such as the BBC are all key stakeholders in the Strategic Content Alliance presumably as they are looking for ways to manage and disseminate already created material in strategic contexts such as e-learning. SCA is a 2 year project funded to produce a plan for future progress which is likely to be adopted using the political and technical alliances formed through the UK Access Management Federation for Education and Research, a sort of educationally driven version of OpenID which incorporates licenced resource authentication. DASALM and IRIScotland are similarly focused on reusing existing content and, although these projects are both focused on free and open access, the driver is similarly to ensure the best and most widespread dissemination of knowledge to ensure maximum benefit from academic effort often with elearning, CPD and public interest/general PR all driving factors in the format and presentation of material.  This is perhaps like selling old films on DVD - it is cheaper and easier to create a critical mass of material and interest from created and adapted content than starting with new context-specific resources. 

In happy contrast to these excellent but less technically innovative (though highly innovative in terms of policy) uses of intellectual output was a project on the First World War. In 1996 an experimental "electronic seminars" project on Wilfred Owen was funded. 10 years later this widely used but now dated looking resource has been funded for major expansion as a digitial archive for many more war poets and contextual resources. The project blog (informative if out of date) and project website - including updated e-learning materials - are currently live but the full project will not be launched until November 2008. In the mean time a major public engagement project - the Great War Archive - is taking place for 3 months in which anyone can submit their own items to a First World War archive and some of these items will be catalogued by the project and added to the full war poets resource. Facebook groups have been set up, podcasts launched and press items generated to gain publicity and public emotional investment in the project which means by the time the archive launches a community of interested individuals, educators and students will be ready to keep the site updated and developed beyong the funding period. Most inspiringly the website that will launch in November will allow people to build and share their own trails through the archive's content so that new educational packs can be generated and used by the project's community. It is a very web 2.0 approach to the normally staid preserve of archival work. Content has also driven format and educational resources as this archive includes, for instance, lots of unpublished material. Thus the software selected (a paid for but open source solution) has been picked for features that include the ability to compare many manuscripts side by side in order to consider the differences and similarities and to view footnotes, scribblings and non-textual data from material now held in physical archives located across the world. 

In comparison to the this War Poets archive example the discussion of digitising a missle at the Renfrewshire Public Library (using costly Microsoft software provided as part of the British Library Hidden Treasures competition which curates material for their Turning the Pages electronic collection), and of converting parts of the National Museum of Scotland's catalogue to an online resource with digital images of collections seemed positively old world. More interesting was a plea from a career archivist to look at coherant and intentional preservation techniques for digital materials. IRs may address this in part but formats of e-learning materials may quickly become outdated and it is fair to say that thinking in the field of electronic archivism is still under development. 

 

Also this week I have been preparing to present a case for funding for a digitised content project for ELISA, the Edinburgh Library and Information Services Agency, an organisation I am involved in through work. Like many of those ideas presented at Electric Connections this would be a way to highlight already produced work through, in this case, a federated search across all Edinburgh held libraries and information services (as well, potentiall as commercial providers such as the Scotsman Digital Archive).  Whilst many of the resources we wish to highlight have been funded with hundreds of thousands of pounds of public funds we anticipate problems in attracting the approx. £6k needed to fund such a facility for a year as, in the time of google and web 2.0 there is a battle between what is desired or expected and what people are willing to pay for it.

Compared to the actual costs of spending marketing money on individual projects the spend for such a collaborative project is minimal but, despite rhetoric of sharing, reuse of expensive data and the maximising and public access to resources, the funding and policy structure of HE, FE and local authorities (the major digitisers of library resources for the project we are involved in) is still very devisive. Perhaps this is one of the major blockages to institutional support of e-learning. The same freedom and collaboration possible in a connected world undermine the funding structures, culture of extreme competition and protective subject and research silos of individual institutions. This may be generational or it may be a more deep seated function of the nature of large institutions but either way it is not a set of attitudes that will go away any time soon. Thus fear and the interests of every possible stakeholder must all be addressed in pitching the project whilst many of the non-stakeholders (the public users of any service and the smaller less well funded stakeholding organisations) who may benefit will not be considered until funding is secured and a decision made by a few territorial key players. Indeed, briefly returning to Electric Connections, even DASALM has tighter territorial limitations than it's utopian concept suggests: the culture minister who launched the initiative earlier this week made clear that no project at odd with current government initiatives would stand a chance of any funding. 

 

Later this week a further meeting I attended looked at policy and elearning. EDINA, the organisation my project is run by, is preparing it's strategies and business plans for the next 3 years (these will shortly be public) with personalisation, web2.0 and engagement with the community key to all business areas particularly the e-learning and related learning and teaching resources operated by the organisation. It was interesting what had (and had not) been identified as priorities at this stage of planning and the focus on social networking technologies and policies to distinctly support and communicate with users through these routes is one of the key changes from previous plans. It will be very interesting to see how this is taken forward over the coming months both from my own position as someone interested in but not (currently) directly involved in our organisation's elearning activities, and also as part of a team already trialling and discussing these social networking, personalisation and more collaborative working ideas. 

 

Digital Natives.  Last week’s Digital Natives work coincided with a busy work week of meetings all of which, to some extent, touched on the subject so I’ll come back to these later.  The two readings this week were, for me, a really easy and comfortable read because I have been trying to persuade colleagues of the merit of Web 2.0 over the last 6-12 months and therefore the study of changing user behaviours online and the emergence of generationally defined user groups are very familiar.  

 

In Oblinger (Oblinger, Diana (2003) Boomers, Gen-Xers and Millenials: understanding the new students Educause July/August 2003) a number of very interesting issues were raised particularly regarding the changing face of the “average” college students (in the US) and the particular challenges of combining teaching for incredibly culturally and technologically mixed groups. By raising defining experiences of the generations she considers Oblinger puts in perspective the cultural challenges and gives some idea of the age at which these groups reached the internet. Rather frustratingly though Oblinger does not outline the behaviours of Boomers & Gen-Xers whilst she cannot define many of the experiences of Millennials (in part because they perhaps haven’t occurred yet) which makes for tricky comparisons. Millennials also do not bring us wholly up to date. Those born in 1982 are now 26 and thus many will have completed their undergraduate education. There is therefore a further generation, now around 18 years of age, born in 1990 which is surely, in terms of computing and the internet, substantially different technological generation wise. Additionally there will soon be a group of students entering education who have been born into a world where computers are everywhere and internet access is a given, defined by some as Screenagers (loosely described as 12-18 year olds (some of whom would be included in the “Millennials” tag) raised with computers and “screen” based technology effectively from birth – OCLC have done some interesting information seeking behaviour research on this group: Connaway, Lynn Silipigni, and Marie L. Radford. 2007. “Service Sea Change: Clicking with Screenagers Through Virtual Reference.” Presented by Lynn Silipigni Connaway and Marie L. Radford at the Association of College and Research Libraries 13th National Conference, “Sailing into the Future – Charting Our Destiny,” 29 March – 1 April 2007, Baltimore, Maryland (USA), and forthcoming in the conference proceedings. Pre-print available online at: http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/archive/2007/connaway-acrl.pdf).

Something I find quite interesting in reading both Oblinger and Monereo (Monereo, Carles (2004) The virtual construction of the mind: the role of educational psychology, Interactive Educational Media, 9, pp.32-47) is that the convention is to define technological comfort and expertise in terms couched in age, birthdate or “generational” groupings. However reading these I find that, applying the characteristics to my own attitudes and behaviour, I fit into several of the defined groups and perhaps further groups defined more by discipline, interest, profession, and peer groups than by age per se. I find this particularly interesting as psychologically I have always found I do not fit with my peers but with older groups – I was once defined as a 40 year old in an 18 year old’s body – however I find that in terms of technology my behaviour and interests fit far more with millennials/digital natives than the Gen X tag which would more accurately fit my age. And this leads me to wonder (1) if you can evolve with generational groupings if you are actively engaged with technology and (2) if generationally defined groups are too broad and sweeping to be useful.

If (1) is possible that I think this is what has been happening to me over the years. As a teenager I was behind the curve but in my eagerness to catch up I became more computer obsessed than my peers. Latterly I have moved into social networking with enthusiasm and a fairly relaxed attitude to privacy not always shared by my peers. I have also found myself move from a faith in solid state storage (CDs, DVDs etc) to a passion for network level information and storage (MP3s, Google Docs, etc) such that I have no great problem paying web services to store and backup my data (at an enterprise level of security and backup) rather than store it on my local machine. These seem like behaviours more in common with the younger generational groups and odd but not exceptional when compared with Gen X peers. However my critical view of what I find on the web, my attitude towards copyright and my memory of the web as a sort of chaotic frontier-land without rules definitely marks me out from the millennial crowd. I may operate on an instinctual, trusting, exploratory way but I do so grounded with traditional information seeking and cynical analytical skills honed in dusty libraries and very low tech classrooms.

By contrast both my sister and my partner –borderline Millennials having been born at in 1981 – are less technologically interested than I am, publish little of themselves online and are suspicious of those that do so energetically. Indeed they are more cautious than much older friends and colleagues I have had. And this is one of the reasons why I cannot help wonder if other factors are more influential than age. Interest seems to be the strongest factor and this is perhaps the reason why, almost without exception, peers from a science background are much more interested in working online than peers from arts backgrounds. This may be because of inherit concepts of interest and the value on the intangible (since many scientific concepts are inherently invisible whilst the arts are, by their nature, focused on the detail of tangible creative enterprises), because of teaching and presentation style in differing disciplines (engineering, physics etc. requiring analytical and mathematically driven computing activity whilst, say, literature only requires the use of computers for typing up assignments if at all), or it may be because of the forums in which scholarly communication takes place in different disciplines (sciences barely using text books whilst open source science journals thrive, arts by comparison still benefiting from published work in book and journal form but with many journals available primarily or solely in printed formats). In any case it seems to me that disciplinary background and wider cultural factors (for instance the freedom with which you have had early access to the internet) could be at least as important to technological culture as the year of a person’s birth.

This belief, that usage and learning behaviour online is only partly dictated by location and era of birth, is part of what makes Monereo’s extreme view of the virtualized child troubling for me, not least because the core concept of a wholly virtual existence is, at present, quite ridiculous. Whilst I agreed with many of Monereo’s characteristics of natives – the chart analyzing the “two cultures”  and his use of Comba and Toledo (2004)’s ideas – I feel  this are positive attributes rather than dangerous behaviours. Perhaps this is because I resemble the creatures Monereo describes and/or perhaps it is because I have a different way of valuing differing skills. I also find Monereo’s support of Dreyfus’s theory (2001), including the assertion that the flatness of hyperlinked documents lends them an automatically flattened authority, somewhat bizarre. I do however think it is interesting to note this theory at a time when wiki services seem to be moving towards more hierarchical structures (e.g. PBWiki 2.0’s Beta, the popularity of software such as Mediawiki - http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki) as their usage increases, particularly in education. Whether this reflects the hierarchy required for human organization or by the traditions of education is unclear. Personally I find freeform linked information a far more logical way to explore information but I may be less that typical. The three issues raised by Dreyfuss and quoted here seem to overlook some of the social tools of elearning which can not entirely be explained by the date of publication (when chat, discussion, commenting and basic social networking was already in place). Similarly some of Monereo’s personal additions seem to show a lack of awareness of what it is possible to do on the internet:

“Crashing on the Internet” raises a serious concern about educational practice – I am unaware of the current state of information skills in primary and secondary schools but it seems clear that these skills must be built into early curricula in order to ensure native users are able to use resources appropriately. When I was at school no such skills were taught for the internet with all computing skills focusing on typing or software and all information skills training being related purely to the physical library and it’s CD ROM collections. As expectations of the sophistication of students increases so must the support for information literacy at an early point in development and as a part of general literacy and numeracy. If natives do trust material uncritically then by the time the validity of sources is raised in the curriculum (often well into secondary school) it will be too late to make an impact on day to day online behaviour whether educational or recreational.

Infoxication, aside from being quite a catchy buzzword, is a concept that does not bear up to scrutiny. Monereo asserts that it is almost impossible to establish the credibility of material found on the web. However there are several very basic tools that enable this quickly. Most notably WhoIs (http://www.internic.net/whois.html) will give you the information on the registered owner of any domain in the world. Whilst owners can restrict their data here the details of the company through which a name is registered will be shown. The service is free. Tools like the Internet Archive WayBackMachine (http://www.archive.org/web/web.php) and Google’s search cache allow you to check that a page hasn’t suddenly changed. URLs and IP addresses hold a wealth of information – I have seen scam versions of AOLs webpage which I have spotted because the URL is inconsistent with the usual and expected URL for the site with images backed up to a remote non AOL address. Meanwhile any website stats package (including many free services such as Google Analytics (http:// www.google.com/analytics/) or SiteCounter (http://www.sitecounter.com/)) will tell you the location and IP of users. That IP can then be looked up if desired. Similarly names can be searched on and the trustworthyness of sites judged both by visual criteria (name, brand, design, expense of website etc) and by looking for sites linking to that site (something possible in Google and Yahoo (http://www.yahoo.com)). Meanwhile sites involving financial transactions can be monitored by using the opt-in security warnings on browsers, looking for https in the URL and by ensuring only trusted e-purchasing systems (such as Paypal, worldpay) are used.

This is not to say that the internet is inherently safe of course but it is fair to say that it is easy to instantly check the validity of data online, sources and references given etc. in a way that is faster and often more thorough than in a physical printed environment – being in a more expensive to produce format does not ensure authenticity even if it suggests some safeguards. Arguably the timelines and budgets of modern printing is such that the printed word is often less trustworthy than material published online. If it’s on the internet material is indexable, exposed and open to comment, feedback and checking. By contrast legal checking is the preserve of only well funded and controversial items in the major print press whilst spelling, grammar and factual errors are increasingly commonplace in not only the daily press (who’s current finances and speedy turnaround has some controversial knock-on effects as outlined in Flat Earth News: an award-winning reporter exposes falsehood, distortion and propaganda in the global media" by Nick Davies, published by Chatto & Windus, and discussed in How the Spooks Took Over the News by Nick Davies – The Independent, Monday 11th February 2008, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/how-the-spooks-took-over-the-news-780672.html - accessed 26th March 2008)  but also longer production time novels and non-fiction books.

“Informalisation of education” is outlined by Monereo as a negative concept. I however have found, like many others on this e-learning course, a far greater level of engagement in the course because I am able to make my own decisions about how to interact with material and fit studies in an informal structure. It is also hard not to note how much the knowledge you gain by choice is retained compared by that which you learn in formal teaching environments. There will always be some sort of structure of rules and guidance – if only deadlines – whilst the “voice of authority” is not, in my experience, the most necessary part of education although this is a view born of a skeptical approach to authority. Indeed many learning experiences can be stifled by their own personal learning styles fitting poorly with the preferred style of an authoritative figure. Having the freedom to find your own way may require a degree of self-discipline but it also seems a way in which to foster active enthusiasm and active (if virtual) participation unthinkable in a crowded classroom where it is not only education but also areas such as appropriate behaviour, social interaction, bullying, timetables which must be enforced. Though not all of these issues disappear online in a well developed environment the role of educator emphasizes the educational over the practical online in a way that will never be possible in a complex physical academic environment. The limitations and/or distractions of illness, room booking clashes, fire alarms, broken equipment etc. may all eliminated from the educators online responsibilities allowing more time to foster discussion, interaction and fruitful learning.

“Infoautism or technoautism” is a concern of the connected tech-driven age. However without reading a substantial amount of the referenced literature as well as further studies it is hard to know whether use of technology drives communication problems or if those people who are already having real-life communication problems are predisposed to prefer online communication and/or activity. Certainly I have personal experience of preferring online communication at times of depression or difficulty and I have a friend who is profoundly uncomfortable with small talk and informal face to face conversation but who is an extremely eloquent and educated communicator in written formats. Before he was on the internet this was through writing, now it is through writing for the internet and the use of social networking sites. It is arguable that these social skills did not diminish with his use of technology but rather that technology allows him to overcome these problems with in-person social skills. In combination with this I find Wolton’s (2000) quoted discussion of the lack of active listeners to be at odds with current virtual practice of commenting and responding to writing, blog postings, uploaded images, status updates etc. This may be a phenomenon that post dates Wolton but in my experience of using the internet at far back as 1997 I remember that emails or instant messages would often be generated by an interesting comment in a chat room, a posted article etc. Active and engaged listeners find it easy to respond online and therefore often do so more quickly and more honestly than they would in person.

Infopariahs, as decribed by Monereo, is a group I broadly agree with although for obvious reasons I do not think age to be the most important of the factors he outlines. Indeed Monereo’s identification of niche social groups seems somewhat lazy when compared to some of the greatest qualities of the internet. Technology skills certainly limit the possibilities of participating in elearning activities. However rural, linguistic minorities, people in “ghettos” etc. may, instead of finding themselves disenfranchised, instead find themselves empowered by being able to connect to peers who may be geographically distant or restricted in in-person communications. For instance in the process of beginning this first e-learning module I was able to identify, connect with and make friends with peers in the information services industry as well as other gay peers in a matter of days. In my in-person academic experience I found it far harder to identify individuals like me with common interest areas and it was particularly difficult to communicate in a casual but affirming way. Similarly I can see rurally based and geographically spread e-learners (again as occurs on this course) finding support, freedom and value through online contact that would not be possible in a locally centred in-person learning experience.   

Educational Infomercantalism is interesting to consider, not least because it denies the true nature of the financing of education of any type – all education is, in effect, informercantalism in that people pay for information and learning based on a number of often very shallow and peculiar criteria. All universities produce prospectuses, advertising, open days etc. in the hope of attracting the fees, government subsidies for or research monies represented by new students. Rarely do such promotional materials include sample lectures or a real idea of the academics or course structure, instead much of the marketing focuses on more emotional factors such as student life, architecture, opportunities, societies and sporting venues etc. To suggest that all e-learning courses are bad because they may generate income is strangely idealistic. It is true however that pre-packaged materials sold as automatic pass correspondence courses could be seen as cynical fund raising without quality control and I think that most educators would see this as a poor way to deliver e-learning properly. It is however worth noting that many evening classes and CPD classes currently run on something close to this “Infomercantile” payment for qualification model (indeed a friend who contributes to several night classes has told me of his frustration in having to allow poor quality work a passing grade for one of the courses he marks) and it is therefore more a matter of reassessing, in general, the perception and delivery of part time study than it is purely a matter of keeping e-learning under control.  I did find Monereo’s comment that “any teacher that can be replaced by a computer… should indeed be replaced” both entertaining and completely fair. I also very much liked the combined advantages of ICTs as semiotic mediators – these all seem to me to be obvious but very useful. Considering Monereo and Adell (1997)’s four broad options for the “virtual mind” I would suggest that in fact all four types are integral to the every day computer activity of (generational or opt in) digital natives. Similarly I find the borders inherent in the quoted opinions of McLuhan (1998) to be somewhat outdated and limited in terms of imagination. Computers are in fact increasingly far more than merely a typewriter and a television – for instance any entry level macbook and many standard multimedia-ready PCs includes not just text/tv elements but also the ability to record sound, video and create and manipulate images as well as the tools to publish to solid states from books to films to CDs to any form of data transfer to connected devices. From a £500 computer connected to the internet you can now write and publish, and distribute and deal with all the associated legal, accounting and promotional paperwork; you can author, promote, publish, share and distribute a film; you can record, edit, manipulate, share, publish, promote and sell your music; you can make phonecalls, videocalls, emails and type up letters or send texts. This is not merely a typewrite and a television anymore.

And though much of the internet is textual the language of computers is not text but binary and any data may be compressed into 1s and 0s with only the practicality of compression limiting the development of speech and image based information. With the compression of JPEGs, Flash, MP3 and other medium-high quality compression systems making files smaller and easier to transmit at the same time as domestic internet access is becoming faster the balance of information on the internet is changing. Flickr, Youtube, BBC iPlayer etc. are providing the platforms for non-text data whilst innovations such as Blinkx (http://www.blinkx.com/) allow automatic analysis of non text data allowing metadata to be created, indexed and searched and I think we are not far away from a more visual way of searching through clickable/constructible template images rather than through the entering of text terms.  Monereo’s suggestions for moving forward are eminently sensible but I would add something. I believe that there is genuinely a difference in the type of skills required by the modern world. If all knowledge can be collated, stored and access then the key to being a high functioning educated adult is the navigation and analysis of that information – this means that some of the current examining that concentrates on memorisation and the limitation of available information may need to wholly reconsidered with so called “open book” examination ever more relevant if it is the critical faculties and the understanding of concepts which is to be tested and valued in an evolving information economy (something I see as a positive term for the current evolution in information storage, sharing and retrieval).   Outside of the additional readings this week I was also considering the age profiles of those contributing to online communities. At present it is the younger and the older members of the population who are most active online (albeit often on very different areas) with teenagers and silver surfers both having the time, resources and the space for this type of activity. I wonder if this magnifies the divide between native and non native users as many of the young professional and/or young parents from Gen X and those late Boomers are in their child-rearing and/or career building years and therefore lack the leisure time to contribute as actively online. Whilst they may use the internet for work and personal emails many of those with, for instance, teenage children will simply not have time to play with social networking, video authoring, new technologies etc. This may in part explain some of the headline findings – largely that teenagers spend many hours a week online whilst their parents are effectively incapable of assessing or generally monitoring this activity -already publicised from a new IPPR report on internet trends (http://www.ippr.org/pressreleases/?id=3059).   On a final semi-related note I will return to the other activities that came into this week and which have some impact on my thoughts about Digital Natives as well as some other aspects of the course: 

• I attended a half day workshop on the use of wikis for teaching at Edinburgh University which gave some interesting examples and which I hope to cover in a separate post. I found a presentation on the medical faculties use of wiki’s (mainly as a simplified web building tool) particularly interesting. I also found the appearance of my own work from this term onscreen a little disconcerting – something which fitted with interesting questions raised by other attendees on the topics of privacy, copyright and longevity of wikis that I am still thinking about.

 

• I, along with other members of my project, met with representatives of OCLC (the organisation that runs the innovative online library catalogue, Worldcat (http://www.worldcat.org/)) to discuss ways to connect together existing online resources to make a seamless discover-locate-request-access process and to discuss the infrastructure required for this. The move to make navigation seamless has many positive possibilities although it increasingly raises the questions of who pays for online resources and how this is indicated to users. I think the cost of e-learning provision can similarly be rocky when compared to popular (mis)conceptions of the lesser cost and administration of electronic materials.

  

• I co-presented a proposal for an Edinburgh-wide digitised material gateway to the ELISA business committee. This is a project I became involved in around 4 years ago and the development of technology and the expectations of both library professionals and users have changed so much that the proposal has gone from being a website to a portal to an £10k+ centralised database to the current proposal – a £6k federated search service funded by advertising and/or subscription and linked/plugged into and well as being directly embeddable into extension web 2.0 services. Most concerns raised by the committee were over whether this technology would be too difficult to use by average public library users; costs including the cost of support and the long term viability of such an online project. The needs of digital natives, amateur genealogists and the wider community who expect central search and web 2.0 services from information services were our major argument for funding the service for a pilot period (during which long term funding could be attracted since most funding bodies will not provide initial funding for such projects, perhaps explaining why so much web innovation is still commercially driven).

 Finally I also wanted to add a resource which I feel is a particularly  friendly to digital natives:  The Global Kids Media Initiative. I particularly like the Second Life comics idea (a friend of a friend through whom I found this project also created the featured example).

As I near the final part of this module I have been trying to select from my various assignment ideas and, at present, I think I have decided to persue the idea of what constitutes "text" and "communication" in a modern e-learning/online environment. The idea is that this will expand on some of my ideas regarding hypertext and it's enriched web2.0 evolution and that the assignment itself will be played out in this sort of format. I am currently thinking of presenting the assignment using wiki software to present a richly linked and enhanced arguement for multimedia communication and the ways in which it can be tailored to specific learning tasks.

Because of the method of presentation and the arguement itself I am also expecting to contribute some assesement criteria as well.

I will be posting more here as and when I have further reflections on the assignment or if my selected topic changes - if there is any feedback at this fairly early stage then I will reflect and consider it here on the blog.