Matthew Allen

See also other posts including the first one, on Web Communications 101, which explains more of the context.

Internet Communities and Social Networks 204

(basic unit description)

One of the most authentic learning experiences we try to offer students in the BA (Internet Communications) is the network conference, the focal point and driving force for the unit NET204. In this unit, the whole learning journey is designed around a 3-week online asynchronous conference in the latter stages of the study period: the first part of the unit involves writing the conference paper, improving it after feedback, and also designing and discussing how to run the conference and promote it.

Because every element of the unit is designed ‘around’ the conference, this unit is more than just an authentic assessment task: rather, it is an authentic learning experience, with the assessment almost ‘blending’ in with that experience. For example – the ‘conference paper’ is submitted, assistance given and then students can improve it, rather than in traditional approaches simply being done and marked. Very few activities in the real world involve submission of intellectual work that can’t be improved once completed.

While we set up the website and managed submissions, the academics were not the only ‘producers’ and users of the web for knowledge networking, producing a Youtube video, using a NIng group and promoting the conference through Facebook and Twitter.

Tomorrow I move out of my comfort zone in presenting on the uses of online learning in higher education. I am at the University of Newcastle and will, in the morning, give another version of my presentation on Web 2.0 tools for online learning at university (search for “Matthew Allen”). This presentation will be fine: it has worked well before but is very didactic and controlled.

In the afternoon I am giving a “blogshop” which is my neologism for a workshop-involving-blogging. It involves co-present, computer-mediated interactions in which the users (aka labrats) will join and participate in a collaborative blog just for the period of the workshop. The blogshop is called ’5 Steps Towards new-fashioned online learning’ (at http://knl.posterous.com ).

Amongst other things, the blogshop is going to involve Todaysmeet back channelling, identity creation and management via Gmail (for Posterous and Slideshare) and exploring another ‘top 10′ Web 2.0 tools. I’ve already been extolling the virtues of Posterous, Slinkset, Mind42 and others. Now we are going to start exploring:

• Chartle (Chartle.net tears down the complexity of online visualizations – offers simplicity, ubiquity and interactivity instead)
• Flexlists (With FLEXlists you can create simple databases of anything you want, with every field you need.You can share the list with others, invite them to edit the list or just keep it for yourself)
• Groups (Roll your own social network)
• Moreganize (Moreganize is a  multifaceted organisation tool. It is suited for both professional and private use and is especially convenient if a larger group of people needs to get organized!)
• Planetaki (A planet is a place where you can read all the websites you like in a single page. You decide whether your planet is public or private.)
• Qhub (Qhub is a platform you can use on your blog or website that allows your audience to ask questions and get real answers, it doesn’t just help answer questions it allows a genuine community to develop around your site.)
• Scribblar (Simple, effective online collaboration Multi-user whiteboard, live audio, image collaboration, text-chat and more)
• Spaaze (Spaaze is a new visual way to organize pieces of information in a virtual infinite space. Your things, your way.)
• Squareleaf (Squareleaf is a simple and intuitive virtual whiteboard, complete with all the sticky notes you’ll ever need. Unlike the real thing, our notes don’t fall off all of the time.)
• Survs (Survs is a collaborative tool that enables you to create online surveys with simplicity and elegance.)
• Voicethread (With VoiceThread, group conversations are collected and shared in one place from anywhere in the world. All with no software to install.)

(all quotes from the websites concerned)

Posterous rocks. I am now too wedded to the flexibility and power of WordPress to change my main blog, but I think Posterous really has a great ease-of-use factor that, if you want simplicity, recommends it.

The substantive point is this:

developing people’s ability to engage in innovative online learning design is not about the software per se: it is about their ability and attitude to work with the cognitive engineering available via the web to create interactive learning experiences (where interactive implies interactions between computers and humans, as well as humans themselves). Therefore the blogshop provides, I hope, an experiential learning activity: learning by doing, while thinking, and communicating about that experience.

Contact me if you want to repurpose, reuse or otherwise mashup the knowledge networked learning blogshop – it’s creative commons

I recently answered an email from a colleague asking for advice about wikis, especially in the face of his university’s (inevitable) suspicion about anything that is not authorised, locked-down, served from the campus and generally (IMO) unusable for agile teaching and learning. I thought I would share an edited version of my views, since it neatly captures some of what I’ve been thinking about as part of my ALTC project on Web 2.0 and online learning.

Agile teaching: responding to needs and concerns in the learning design of students’ experiences, activities and tasks which takes account of current events, new technologies in ways that institutionalised curriculum design and enterprise technology practices can’t cope with because they are too structured, clumsy and slow-moving. Agile teaching implies agility of mind as well as design and technology – it’s being playful, picking up and putting down, making limited and short-term commitments to particular ways of teaching and content, on the basis that it’s more fun, more engaging and ultimately more realistic as an educator and thinker to be moving forward, not circling the bureaucratic wagons

 

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Yes, we use wikis in our teaching, in two ways. First, some of the students naturally set up wikis to work on collaborative projects or similar without us telling them to – we leave that up to them! They also use other technologies, such as Ning and similar networking sites/services and, of course, simpler forms of communication and collaboration. Wikis perhaps are suited only to some kinds of people for this task?

Second, we run a unit of study in which students are required to author their first assignment in a wiki – but not collaboratively (they look at others, but don’t edit). Then, their second main assignment – a group report – must be online and while we provided an alternative publishing space (openzine.com) they didn’t like it and so all, I think, ended up using a wiki. This year (semester 2) we will require them to use a wiki. Elaine Tay and I have written a paper about this unit and how we use wikis – currently about ready for submission for publication. Briefly, we concluded, it’s not the wiki itself, but the social affordances of groupwork that are the most important learning design consideration: wikis are too open a technology to really constrain or require a form of collaboration unless you create the social context for it. Note that an unexpected outcome was that students benefited from seeing each other’s individual work and, as far as we can tell, there was no great worry about it. Some ideas about this were presented to the Teaching Learning Forum in Perth this year.

I should add – we also used to use a wiki as the place where students doing a whole-of-group collaborative project on virtual communities would create and publish their material. We used a wiki like this in the mid-2000s and it has been a great success though, recently, as numbers have grown (that unit now has 100+ students online), it has not worked as well and we’ve changed our thinking (see below re the online conference). What we loved about this wiki environment is the way it challenged the students to imagine the form and structure of the collaborative presentation, not just the content. It enabled task division – some people did more design work, others more content work. It also promoted a sense of student ownership – what made this task authentic was the students’ own taking of responsibility in the snowfield of the blank wiki!

So, in short, you can and in some cases should use wikis in teaching. I think the most important affordances of wikis are as follows.

• The fact that the process of creating and editing wiki pages is relatively simple, and yet produces a shared resource, makes this software a very powerful tool for managing knowledge work within a group whose abilities and knowledge of the content of the site varies as much as their technical skill.
• Wikis permit (and even promote) collaborative individualism. Traditional cooperative publishing activities tend to require a lot of discussion of what to change and how to do it, before you actually make changes, create content etc. Wikis allow individuals to jump in and work relatively safely and the collaboration – the forming of the group happens in the process of editing and developing the content.
• Plus, at a very simple level, a wiki rapidly allows us to get material online, shared, reading and writing and thinking about audiences – whether all the other students or (preferably) a real audience of web users

If you look at http://www.wikimatrix.org/ you will see a listing of 100s of wiki engines and sites. Some would need to be installed and run from a server (think mediawiki for example), others are hosted (like pbwiki). I’ve not looked at a lot of them in detail recently but have been using http://wikidot.com – this is free, but with ads and some restrictions. It’s cheap to buy a license however. Personally I like it, but my colleagues think I am nuts! They tend to go with pbwiki, now available via http://pbworks.com/ but the cost is an issue. Just had a quick play with wikimatrix and I suspect you will find better free solutions. The key reason to pay money is to get finegrain control over access / publicness etc and/or lose the adverts. I doubt size is an issue that would make you pay money.

A recent interesting development which might work for a small group (since I am unsure how stable it is) would be http://www.springnote.com. The beauty of springnote is that it wraps up a wiki approach in a metaphor (the notebook) and some visual clues. It’s primarily aimed at private (eg not publicly accessible) work by individuals OR groups Or both in the same space. But it can be exported to a public site. I’d caution against using it with more than 10-20 students at first, and you should download / backup regularly. I discussed Springnote recently at the University of NSW:

Part of the problem with wikis is that they are highly unstructured and can be challenging to manage in terms of access / revision etc. It was a 3-week online conference, students submitting 2000 word papers in 1 of 4 streams (after major assistance with improving the papers). Students then read papers, commented and replied to comments on their own papers. We used WordPress (a blogging engine but which actually is more like a content management system these days) installed on a server I pay for in the US. It worked absolutely fine – 85-90% of students have said they learned more this way than from normal study mode. Most students were external, but not all. The challenge, though, is to design the learning experience – this approach worked because it was a social event, culturally encoded and built into the assessment, teaching and feedback structure of the unit.

So, in short: wikis work. Choosing a wiki is a personal matter and thank goodness for wikimatrix! Making it work, however, remains an exercise in teaching – that often-forgotten aspect of ‘learning technologies’, ‘the student experience’ and so on. Teaching with a wiki involves careful assessment design, strong encouragement and endorsement of its use and, in the end, a realistic and believable purpose for it. Otherwise students will simply dismiss it as ‘technocrap’.

Update: as evidenced by this report, on unique visitors to FB and Google, industry commentators still don’t get the difference between these two giant net companies. Equally, FB putting realtime search into its environment (acquiring FriendFeed) also doesn’t in any way demonstrate equivalence between the two. Both reflect a relatively simplistic understanding of the net as a place for searching and for getting lots of visitors. (Think, for example, of google search is embedded inside many applications and services – Google doesn’t need people to go to its hompage!)

Ultimately, reflecting on some twitter comments (thanks @baym and @amuir_netecol) from my last post , I am drawn to the comparison between Facebook as the massive department store within which all wants and desires are collected, strucutured and offered: some of the ‘departments’ are franchises, essentially leased from the main store, others are owned by the store. Just like department stores are designed to lure customers in, and make it hard to leave, with astute physical environments that prevent ‘walk through’, so too Facebook acquires as much of a user’s attention as possible and then distributes it across several applications, engagements and the like. While much of what is there is equivalent to each other, there is also a lot of care taken to avoid direct competition inside the store – there is one shoe department, not 10. Google is like a bazaar or marketplace in which there are numerous identical stalls and services all being offered at once, in a rowdy, complex way, built into the fabric of the town or city.

These are neither better or worse models for online living (though I know which I prefer personally): but they are very different, non-competing modes of online exploitation. Perhaps then it isn’t ever a question of Google vs Facebook: it’s another sign of the divergence in media models (channels, brands, etc) when they fall into the formless, malleable world of the Internet.

I commented recently on Twitter that Facebook = the new AOL and, not surprisingly, then discovered that many others (e.g. Kottke.org had already had my apparently novel insight! (This effect can either deflate one’s confidence or increase it – I am not the first, but I am as wise as the crowd – some examples from the crowd thanks to googlesearch). And, clearly, Facebook is trying to create an experience of online life / augmented reality / social and cognitive networking that stands apart from, or is potentially isolated from the ‘web’ within which Facebook exists – though it claims to be embedding itself into the web, of becoming a sort of underlying social networking of people, data and places throughout the web, I actually see the plan as one to enable its users to never leave the facebook environment except when prompted to do so by something in facebook, and then be returned to facebook. So, in this model of online behaviour, Facebook users would look out over the low walls of the garden and observe interesting things elsewhere in the jungle of the net; would at times scurry out into that jungle, but otherwise would remain safely inside the habitat of Facebook. As Siliconbeat reports, Google should be worried about this new wave of Facebook’s expansion of the way it will encompass online behaviours into a single space: communities that serve Facebook.

There’s a real sense of imperialism about Facebook. Sure we worry about the approach to privacy (see Raynes-Goldie, First Monday and the casual manner in which Facebook treats its users, by changing rules on them, making them feel (and indeed be) disconnected from their data bodies. But what worries me more, at this stage, is how Facebook is attempting to exploit more and more of the Internet for its marketing purposes (through the ‘like’ function, and by embedding internet affordances into its environment) and to claim that what matters in information acquisition and production is what is liked, or networked, between its users. (note too – Facebook acts as if everyone online is a Facebook user – a lot of them just don’t know it yet). So the challenge we face in responding to Facebook and its extraordinary (and network-effect growing) power is not how Facebook works in its own terms (after all, one can opt out, to some extent, if you don’t like it), but how it acquisitively eyes the Internet as the source of the raw informational material which it needs to sustain itself.

Google has an equally imperial view of information – witness the book digitisation issue, the constant acquisition of individual online behavioural data. What I find interesting to consider, though, is the difference between how these two behemoths of the online world approach their activities. Google achieves its empire (an empire of mind and data) by networking diverse nodes together – there is, really, no one place where Google ‘is’ and can be found / managed or located. Googlemaps tells us that Google is everyone and nowhere all at once. Note how Facebook is absolutely locatable – it’s all about what happens inside that Facebook environment (content brought into that space); Google is all about what happens everywhere else (but monitored by Google). And, while Google ‘profiles’ us when we sign up for its services (and even when we don’t), there is one key component of most online activities which we don’t find through Google – the public profile. Google is, truly, ‘faceless’ book – except that your face is very clear to google, if you choose to embrace its multitude of data services.

Facebook, then, strikes me as the inheritor of Yahoo!’s location in the web-world of the 2000s – a place for ‘us’ to form networks; the networks are a consequence of accepting what we give up when we use Facebook. Google is the service where the network is t he starting point: the network of data, the networking of us within the infoverse of the Internet. While Facebook might be viewed as a force for the enclosure of the net, as a company that seeks control (and market profitability) through a very explicit presence, an overlording curator of those within its domain, Google – equally potent – disperses itself throughout the Internet; invisibility, implicitness and distributed power work for this company.

Since both of them are searching, in the end, for revenue streams from advertising , Facebook and Google compete (though Facebook is far less pervasive, less successful in those terms). But the competition is not just for ‘who wins the most revenue’: like most deep struggles within capitalism, Facebook and Google are engaged in a kind of ideological struggle to define the Internet in ways which (in the minds of users) will constrain and shape the Internet’s future. So, in years to come, will the Internet be – largely – seen and used inside the low walls of Facebook’s crowded gardens? Or will it be itself the garden, and Google a kind of viral thread interwoven with its every use?

Following my presentations on the ‘top 10′ web 2.0 applications for learning which exist in the real world of the Internet, I have started to develop a model of knowledge networking which allows us to understand how the contemporary web (a better description now that Web 2.0?) serves to enable knowledge networks, and how those networks might exist within the complex digital ecology of the Internet. These ideas are still under development.

In 2009, I argued that learning was a special case of knowledge work and, that as all knowledge work becomes, or tends towards, being knowledge networking, so too learning changes in its character (regardless of whether students and teachers actively engage with such a change). In doing so, I claimed that knowledge work is best understood in quite simple terms (at least initially), as involving the classic input – process – output model which has dominated information sciences and systems research for many years. I don’t doubt that knowledge is far more complex than this model at first suggests (see Allen and Long, 2009). But, the complexity cannot be ‘explained’ by making the model appear more sophisticated, for the complexity comes from the social conditions within which knowledge work occurs. Therefore, superficially, we might as well continue to think in terms of knowledge work being done within the input-process-output circuit, and just remember that every output is an input (and vice versa) and processing is also continuous, influencing how information even comes to be considered as inputs and outputs.

To gain more understanding, however, and to emphasise the way that the Internet promotes distributed and collaborative knowledge work (why it is networking, not just working), I want to now model knowledge networking in the contemporary Internet in slightly different terms, though the relationship to input-process-output should be obvious. I identify four crucial elements which, collectively and interactively, generate the system of knowledge work conducted through and for the web; in doing so, I hope to provide a better way of thinking about the purpose and possible application to elearning of the entire system.

First, we can identify online behaviours and web services that work as information pumps: these pumps draw on the apparently infiinte (though actually limited) reservoirs of information within and around the web and then circulate the information with various degrees of filtering, flavouring, and transformation through many different channels and pipes. Note that information pumping involves both humans and computers. Some examples of the web services that might naturally appear as information pumps can be found at Newsmap, or at Evri; but do not think that it is the ‘sites’ alone that are the pumps. Delicious also serves as an information pump, distributing the work between its users and the systems maintaining the lists of tagged links. Pumps can either be sites that are visited (such as the innovative new instance of Cuil, Cpedia ; or they can be feeds (primarily RSS) from sites, gathered and analysed in various ways and presented to users (see RSS Voyage for an elegant version; and many different variations thereof.

Second, we can observe that many web services entice and require uses to engage in the manipulation, creation, re-expression or other forms of cognition using the service as a partner in these activities. Thus, the second element of knowledge networking online is the existence and use of cognition engines: these engines – fuelled in part by the information pumps – work with users to ‘do’ the knowledge work. There is an incredible variety of cognition engines, from complex and highly structured (Cohere for example), to deceptively open and simple (wikis would serve as these kinds of engines – a current personal favourite is Springnote, with its elegant notebook metaphor). Engines can involve innovative creative activity (making simple movies from text at xtranormal; the delights and frustrations of Prezi) or some traditional cognitive forms – the visualisations that can be made at Manyeyes for example, or mindmapping as at Bubbl.us. Cognition engines can promote reflection, too – like a personal current favourite Betterme

Cognition engines often contain significant affordances for collaboration: yet we can also see that many web services are specifically designed for the kinds of collaborative endeavour, which generates the third key element in the knowledge networking system: social environments. Ranging from loose social networking utilities (Ning), to detailed groupwork systems (Wiggio), but also including real-time interaction channels, such as the simple Tinychat conference room system or more sophisticated systems like Elluminate, these environments establish an array of spaces, mediated by technologies, within which people can act socially in knowledge work.

The fourth and final element discernable within the contemporary web as a knowledge work system is the publication outlet.

In conclusion, then, we can say that the knowledge networking dynamics of the web involve distributed, conjoint action by humans and computers through web services which serve as information pumps, cognition engines, social environments and publication outlets. But, to be clear, it is not the case that each web site we encounter online serves for just one of these dynamic elements. Indeed, most web services include a combination of features which means they serve as all four elements at once, whether closely coupled (as for example in facebook), or more loosely. That said, individual users, as they form and participate in networks of knowledge, traverse several sites, use many services, to carve out from the available opportunities their own particular kinds of knowledge networks. Let me finish by providing two examples: one that is contained largely within a single service; and one that spans several.

Diigo, a bookmarking, collaborative research and web annotation service, is a clear example of how one single website can host services and permit user behaviours that constitute an entire knowledge network. Diigo pumps information (both from the web and within its own system), with a significant degree of filtering and enrichment by users; in the work of organising, analysing and reframing information, it serves as a cognitive engine; yet, since many people are engaged in that task – often in well-defined and purposive groups – it is a social environment as well; finally, the results of this knowledge work can become public, so Diigo serves also as an outlet, with an audience, for publication.

Yet, knowledge work systems can span several services and sites as well. RSS feeds found and managed through Feedmil can push information into a cognition engine involving Listphile: the cognitive work here is to array and manage individual items within a pretermined list form; and, while listphile is itself a social environment, the collaborators using it choose Wiggio as the locus of many of their active collaborative endeavours. Finally, the list – while available in Listphile for public consumption – is pushed to the world as embedded code within a blogging-based website linked to Twitter, using Tumblr. Note that, in this example, the Tumblr site is itself also serving as a cognition engine at times; the listphile service involves collaboration, social action and a degree of publication, but that the specific knowledge network formed emphasises specific uses for these services within the model I am outlining.

Ultimately, the contemporary web demonstrates the fluidity and agility of the so-called Web 2.0 approach – data and human endeavour is no longer necessarily concentrated at specific places and times, in forms that are unique or limited in their re-usability. Within such a web, many forms and examples of knowledge networking, using countless varieties of applications, will occur. But, in general terms, I would argue that all knowledge networking involves the collective activation of the four distinct elements I outline – information pumps, cognition engines, social environments, and publication outlets. Higher education must learn to imagine and build its own knowledge networks that draw on this model, and on the many excellent services for knowledge work available on the web.

Here is the first of ten application posts I will make in coming weeks – based on my Web 2.0 presentation. I am going to take each of the 10 apps I am presenting and turn them into a single post, with a cut from my slideshow. Of course, you will only really learn to use these apps by playing with them

xtimeline

This application is xtimeline, which is a public timeline generating system. First of all, it’s creative and clever and has many features which make it work as an example of granular, distributed and collaborative knowledge work. See the slideshow below for more information. I can see this being used as a ‘plugin’ to a normal university unit of study – it’s an equivalent of an LMS (thank god!), it’s a short, snappy app which can be used to make student do some private or public collaborative knowledge work.

Two things I love:

• timelines are a really good example of a knowledge form which contains a ‘whole’ made up of many discrete ‘parts’ which are structurally linked to make that whole is a really good genre for collaborative co-creation of knowledge objects. Imagine 100 people writing a report -arghhh! but 100 people can work in parallel and series to make a timeline very easily. Collaboration depends on the type of knowledge work, not just the inbuilt toold
• xtimeline has many features: but I LOVE the upload / download a .csv file – now that is smart.

Beginning today (April 12) at the University of Adelaide, I will be presenting a ‘show and tell’ on Using Web 2.0 in your teaching: ideas, applications and affordances for enhanced educational outcomes.

I am going to look in detail at the following applications:

• xtimeline – great collaborative timeline tool
• listphile – lists and database tool
• slinkset – ‘open’ social news builder
• posterous – blogging flexibly
• mind42 – mindmapping collaboratively
• quizlet – flashcards are more than you think
• reviewbasics – co-annotation of documents
• springnote – wiki for personal and group use
• knol.google – publish your knowledge
• wiggio – great groupware

These and more are summarised in the handout for this presentation.

Formal abstract
The presentation focuses heavily on the way that a wide array of Web 2.0 / social media applications can be used in higher education, whether in distance or on-campus learning. The presentation will demonstrate the ‘top 10’ innovative applications which exemplify the different ways in which Web 2.0 can make a difference for university learning. Designed to provide practical, usable ideas, the presentation emphasises how the technologies which might be chosen must be understood in terms of their relationship to the content, assessment, outcomes of learning, and the particular context provided by students and the subjects they are studying. The presentation will involve detailed visual display of various applications. It moves beyond general discussion of blogs, wikis and social networking into consideration of unusual and valuable online services and sites which are not well known to educators.

Thanks to Elaine Tay, Tama Leaver and all the people at the 14+ universities who have helped organise this; thanks to the generous support of the ALTC

Attending a workshop / roundtable as part of the “Web 2.0 Authoring Tools in Higher Education Learning and Teaching: New Directions for Assessment and Academic Integrity” Project.

[Discovering the difficulty of jumpong between twitter and blogging: need to learn to use RSS feed from my twitter stream! Raises the question: how the hell can students and academics keep up with the opportunities when so much changes, so rapidly? It requires a remaking of the everyday business of knowledge work - eg do I read that article or learn RSSing twitter]

Summary of morning session

Several things emerge from this morning discussion which focused on seven broad groups of technologies (see website above):

• further evidence of significant differences in how people understand the term Web 2.0, even while recognising its useful role to open debate and create interest in new approaches to teaching.

• a degree of scepticism about ‘standards’ for judging student work – enthusiasm and interest in the publicness of assessment that is possible via the Internet, utilising the public audience as a way of assessment
• competing and contrasting assumptions about the social nature of technology – environment or tool? Clear that ‘how’ we use technologies in learning is governed by these assumptions
• one difference depending on what counts as Web 2.0 is the time it might take to ‘do’ or ‘use’ it: eg twitter vs vodcasting
• if Web 2.0 is, to some extent, a move to collaboration, how does this fit with the university’s requirement for individual certification?

Summary of afternoon session – principles, do’s and dont’s for web 2.0 assessment

Overall – the session was broken up into several sections (discussed in small groups) which then were combined at a plenary. The following is a brief summary of each sub-section. I would note that, at times, the groups obviously struggled to limit their discussions to the specific briefs given. I think this behaviuour demonstrates the complexity of assessment and learning as a systemic functional construct; it feels more, to me, like an experience whose design is quite personal / individual, and while it is enacted in stages, it is understood as a whole.

Designing assessment
4 principles for designing assessment:

• Reflect on what Web 2.0 means to you as an educator
• Triangulation and Iteration in design: outcomes AND tasks AND applications
• Make assessment tasks pertinent to students (pertinent includes realism, authenticity, relevance, purpose)
• From Feedback to “feed” – feedback is inherent to the assessment process, from students to students, from teachers to students, from students to teachers, throughout the task – continuous error correction

Conducting assessment
Relevance; choice of technology important; is the task something do-able outside of Web 2.0 – if so, why the complexity?; how to assess and grade relative performance? Engaging students in a conversation about why doing this. Weighting of the assessment grade = time and effort required of student. Web environment is more persistent, make for living tasks (relates to students’ sense of purpose); importance of ‘program’ (course / major / degree) approach which generates learning over several units and years. Don’t mandate Web 2.0 unless it actually makes a difference. Don’t confuse the task with the environment. Respecting students as individuals. Important to persevere with one’s innovation and change.

Marking assessment
Consider the relationship between the technology’s form and the assessment criteria; assess across a range of tasks [criteria? components of a task]; importance of audience (in various ways); establish standards for marking; for large cohorts – agreement of standards across all graders and students. prepare yourself and students. Links Web 2.0 to ability to detect plagiarism [hmm?]. Moderating easier with online systems. Peer review as a positive. Dangers in publicness of assessed work, especially in the future.

Reporting/Feedback
Importance of application developers to address the needs of learning online. Ethical standards. Individual and group feedback processes differ. Complications of meeting university requirements vs students requirements.

Quality assurance
[ran out of batteries for this one - that is apposite, eh?]

Reflections
Well, interesting. Very clearly, the phrase “web 2.0″ generates very different perspectives and emphases, to the point where it appears ‘collaboration’ and ‘co-construction’ of knowledge have come to dominate – largely from people’s experiences with blogging, collaborative environments, and wikis. Not clear with Web 2.0 actually the right term, yet. There remains, also, a sense that web 2.0 is a synonym for ‘another go at online learning’ either because it has failed to be adopted in areas prior to this time or because people are unaware of the significant impact of the Internet on learning throughout the 1990s. Difficult, sometimes, to generate broader perspectives because putative benefits, uses, and disadvantages etc are all – actually – specific to a system, or a particular use of system. Fundamentally, we see some new orthodoxies emerging around the term Web 2.0 and its application to learning – orthodoxies that owe more to the way Web 2.0 is positioned oppositionally to prior elearning and to the ‘failures’ in current practice without the Internet that it might solve.

As I head into research for ALTC fellowship into Web 2.0, am starting to gather ideas for how to categorise (or analyse the categorisation of social media)

Periodic Table of Social Media, Liebling