(Photo by tankgirl) Yesterday I was talking with Cristina Costa on skype about supporting communities of practice with social software. Talking about one of the groups she works with she said: “getting this community to twitter is proving harder than getting a donkey to walk downhill.” LOL. Well I nearly fell off my chair. I didn’t know that it was hard to get a donkey to walk downhill but it seems it is. I feel a graphic coming on.

But seriously, Cristina’s point does raise some issues. Much of Pontydysgu’s work is developing applications to support social networking in communities of practice and, perhaps more importantly, facilitating the process of social collaboration and learning. Most of the communities we work in are not techy. They are not interested in the technology itself but the affordances it provides in their work and work-life.

It is not easy. Many people are unsure about technologies. Even simple interfaces can be confusing. People are especially confused by us using so many different tools. And for the more techncially confident, people often have their own favoured tools and ways of working. What one person likes is not necessarily what suits another. My friend Jenny and I both have the same Ibooks. We have much the same software. But we use the machines in totally different ways. She files things carefully in a well organised folder structure. She closes one programe before opening another. I only close a programme if the machine starts grinding to a halt. I tend to leave things lying around everywhere and use the search function when I want to find something.

People are also struggling with multiple community sites. We cannot blog everywhere. And only a minority are used to using newsreaders so tend to feel every new community is an imposition to have to log in to find out what is going on. More fundamenatelly, many people are not comfortable or do not wish to share personal data and be so open in their personal lives in the way that we have come to associate with social software. Many people value their privacy. Twitter seems to be for those who make little distinction between their personal and work lives. Yet many of those we work with do make a distinction.

Communities of Practice are bound by a shared practice and shared artefacts of that practice. ICT based applications can support the sharing of practice but are not in themselves an artefact of the practice. There is no reason why members of Communities of Practice will have the same experience of using software or have the same attitudes towards personal openness and sharing.

One of the big problems we constantly face is terminology. On one site we run I had used the term ‘About me’. The project co-ordinator was insistent we changed this to ‘profile’ saying this was the accepted term. Others of course will find such a term less friendly. How do we resolve such issues. Sometimes I fall back on that old idiom that our software would work perfectly if it was not for users! But, at the end of the day, much is down to the motivation to learn – what in Germany is called ‘Bereit(schaft)’. However we design the software it will always require some learning and without an openess to trying things , to experimenting, to learning, we will fail to involve individuals in the community.

The challenge for us is to overcome these issues. Be interested to know what you think Cristina.

I,m working on a new paper on PLEs. I’m finding the idea of Rhizomatic learning extremely useful. Here is an extract from the paper.

‘Technologies are changing fast and our use of technologies is changing faster. In looking to the future it may be worth returning ot the them of rhizomatic learning (Cormier, 2008). Dave Cormier says the rhizome is a botanical metaphor. “A rhizomatic plant has no center and no defined boundary; rather, it is made up of a number of semi-independent nodes, each of which is capable of growing and spreading on its own, bounded only by the limits of its habitat. In the rhizomatic view, knowledge can only be negotiated, and the contextual, collaborative learning experience shared by constructivist and connectivist pedagogies is a social as well as a personal knowledge-creation process with mutable goals and constantly negotiated premises.”
Such social processes in the use of technology for learning and knowledge creation have been seen in a conference and a summer school which I have recently attended. In both, we created a tweme for the event, a mash up of delicious, twitter and flickr based on a common tab. In neither case did we pre-announce the use of the tweme, neither was the use of the particular technology officially prescribed nor indeed endorsed by the event organizers. However the use of the tweme for knowledge sharing was adopted organically by participants and became the main means of ICT based communication and sharing. In one case the conference organizers had established their own NetVibes site for the mash up of blogs; however by the second day they recognized what was happening and emailed participants to inform them that the tweme was “ the main channel for information” going on to say “Please have a look on it because the freshest and the hottest information can be found only from there.”

One interesting effect of the use of twitter and twemes was to facilitate the unplanned participation of researchers and practitioners from all over the world in the vents and a consequent wider and open dialogue than the original programme and curriculum design had envisaged. The curriculum was being increasingly developed by the community and the community extended to include participants who were not present face to face.

The technological development facilitating such change was the availability of connectivity and the use of different devices. In fact at the first conference connectivity was problematic. The wireless network became overloaded. Nevertheless, participants found ways of communicating, using other mobile phones or a skype to twitter interface which required less bandwidth than a browser. Those with access to neither simply recorded their observations and rushed off to find better bandwidth in the coffee break.

The agenda and curricula of the vents became extended through participants negotiating topics they wished to explore through the ongoing discourse and organising ‘unconferencing’ events outside the main programme.

Such experiences may point the way to how personal learning environments will evolve in the future. The PLE will not be one application running on the desktop or in a web browser. Rather, it will be multiple applications running on may different devices. It is also important to understand that learners will use different devices in different contexts and for different purposes. The PLE will be based on networks of people with whom learners interact, they may adapt a particular tool for communication and interaction in a particular context but then cease to sue that tool when that context has passed. In previous projects linked to mobile learning we have tended to focus on how to transmit standardised learning materials and applications to different platforms and devices.

The PLE will be comprised of not only all the software tools, applications and services we use for learning but the different devices we use to communicate and share knowledge.

This if knowledge seen as resting in connections and learning bases on those connections then PLE may be sum of devices plus use of those devices for learning. Another way to view the PLE is to see it as the summation of connections we make in a nodal learning network. This includes, of course, face-to-face interactions both in terms of participation in learning programmes and events but also one to one and informal interactions and an ongoing process of reflection and sense making of such interactions. Learning and learning environments become synonymous with the identity of the leaner, both the self perceived identity and the learner as others perceive them.

I am in Ohrid in Macedonia for the European Summer School on Technology Enhanced Learning & Knowledge Management 2008. As ever it is a pleasure to meet colleagues from all over Europe, and particularly from Eastern Europe. And the school is alo interesting in that it brings together researchers from a series of large scale European funded research projects. What are the themes of the school. It is a bit difficult to say at the moment.

One issue that a number of projects seem to be wrestling with is how to represent knowledge. There is the by now familiar debate about taxonomies, ontologies and tagging. I have a concern as to how much useful software is being created. To soem extent this is a tension within research projects which are both attempting to undertake fundamental research and at the same time involve users.

Anyway, as in Salzburg Cristina and I have created a tweme (a mash up of twitter, delicious and flickr) for the summer school. You can follow our tweme here. Feel free to participate. The tag is #scohrid.

For those of you old enough to remember, the Yippie leader, Jerry Rubin, once said “Do it!”. And at the start of this year we at Pontydysgu resolved that was what we were going to do. We cannot research Web 2.0 and social software tools for learning without doing it. IN May we launched Sounds of the Bazaar LIVE with a regular monthly broadcast Emerging Mondays. We are planning a new publishing venture (watch this space). And we have launched a regular monthly Open on-line seminar series through the Evolve community.

The next Evolve seminar is on Friday 20 June at 13.00 British Summer Time, 14.00 Central European Summer Time.

Evolve is a Community project which aims at organizing a series of Open International on-line events and seminars to:

•Provide a space for participant driven discussion and debate
• Promote critical inquiry and discourse
• Allow for the presentation of ideas in progress
• Share expertise, ideas and future thinking around common research agendas

All documents and products from the events will be published as Open Educational Resources.

This month we will focus on Mentoring and 21st Century Skills. Anne Fox will lead us on this topic with her Keynote Presentation (further information here: http://tinyurl.com/4oetve ). Interesting conversations and discussions will certainly emerge from it.

Do share your thoughts and experiences about this theme, and of course tag it (evolvejisc) ! 😉

Your contributions are invaluable to keep this community going. We want to learn from you!

The synchronous event will take place in June 20 at 1200 GMT (For other time zones please check here: http://tinyurl.com/4u7fp3 ).

The Venue for the presentation is in Elluminate – http://tinyurl.com/4tcmxh (no password required)

Challenge:

We will also be hosting a topical activity around the June topic. See how to get involved here.

And if you still haven’t got your own freefolio spot on the Evolve platform, there is still time to do so. You just need to create an account! 😉

We hope you join us. This is will be a great chance to network, to get to know what other people are doing, and also to share your work and ideas.

If you have any questions, suggestions, problems logging in, etc please don’t hesitate to contact us

Pontydysgu’s work centres on developing and supporting an open community around the use of ICT for learning. The Evolve seminars are a step in that direction.

A busy news day. This press release from Jisc dropped into my in-box.

” New research commissioned by JISC and carried out by Ipsos MORI suggests that students are starting to mix their social networking sites with their academic studies and inviting tutors and lecturers into their virtual space.
The research builds upon on an initial study – Student Expectations – carried out last year when 500 students were asked to indicate their expectations of technology provision when entering into higher education.
This new data is based on students now that they are studying as first years at higher education institutions, compared to the previous study when they were still at school.
Key findings show that:

• General use of social networking sites is still high (91% use them regularly or sometimes). Frequency of use has increased now that they are at university with a higher proportion claiming to be regular users (80%) – up from 65% when they were at school/college
• 73% use social networking sites to discuss coursework with others; with 27% on at least a weekly basis
• Of these, 75% think such sites as useful in enhancing their learning
• Attitudes towards whether lecturers or tutors should use social networking sites for teaching purposes are mixed, with 38% thinking it a good idea and 28% not. Evidence shows that using these sites in education are more effective when the students set them up themselves; lecturer-led ones can feel overly formal
• Despite students being able to recognise the value of using these sites in learning, only 25% feel they are encouraged to use Web 2.0 features by tutors or lecturers
• 87% feel university life in general is as, or better than, expected especially in terms of their use of technology, with 34% coming from the Russell Group of universities saying their expectations were exceeded
• 75% are able to use their own computer on all of their university’s systems with 64% of students from lower income households assuming that they are able to take their own equipment, perhaps due to lack of affordability and ownership.

Sadly the press release gave no link to the full report and I could not find it on a quick search. I will come back with some comments on the press release when I have ten minutes to spare.

It is hecti8c here at the Pontydysgu office. We are lining up a great summer of activities, radio broadcast and events. And here is the first. Announcing the the launch of the Evolve Community.

The Evolve project is organising a series of international on-line events and seminars.

The objectives are:
• To provide a space for participant driven discussion and debate
• To promote critical inquiry and discourse
• To allow for the presentation of ideas in progress
• To share expertise, ideas and future thinking around common research agendas

The first event will take place this Fraiday May 30 at 1700 GMT (For other time zones please check here: http://tinyurl.com/5gzysk.

The Venue for the presentation is in Elluminate – http://tinyurl.com/6emm9f (no Password required)

Barbara Dieu has agreed to be the Keynote speaker for our first event, which is organized around the following theme: Social software in Schools and Institutions. Barbara’s presentation is entitled Social Media in Engiahs Langauge Teaching.

We will also be hosting a topical activity around the monthly themes. See how to get involved here: .

And don’t forget to get your own freefolio spot. You just need to create an account! Go to http://www.evolvecommunity.org

We hope you join us. This is will be a great chance to network, to get to know what other people are doing, and also to share your work and ideas.

What do you do when you realise that a post – containing cartoons of cats and entitled “20 Ways to have fun with a pussy” – has been sent not to just your best mate but to all your facebook contacts. Well what my Facebook friend did was send another post saying “”Many apologies for forwarding a funwall message earlier. This was done unintentionally due to my incompetence with facebook tools, yet another reason to commit facebook suicide. While some of you may find the content funny, I am sure others will not and I apologize. Embarrassed.”
Hm – I would have probably ignored the first post if it wasn’t for the second. My most embarrassing moments are chatting in the wrong chat box to the wrong person – a perpetual risk withj 20 or so Skype chats open at any time. And another friend of mine was well embarrassed when he realised that instead of telling his girlfriend how much he missed her at about three in the morning he was in fact talking to a work colleague who was in Canada at the time and hence at his computer.
Here is a lighthearted weekend activity. Use the reply function to tell us your most embarrassing social software moment.

I like this from Cristina Costa who uses Skype in much the same way as I do: “We could create a skype chat log ( this is a feature quite unknown by skype users, but this has become the main communication channel of a  group of webcasters I belong to, and it is incredible how the chat has grown and how we have bonded together. Apart from our blogs we keep this skype written chat open and include new people every time someone asks to join us. It is basically an ongoing IM conversation – every time someone has a question, an idea, etc they just type something in that chat log and the others will automatically receive it when they come online. In other words, what it allows us is to engage in a mix of real time and asynchronous communication).”

The European Commission funded Bazaar project was set up to look at the use of Open Source Software and Open Content in education. The project ended in December, 2007. As ever the work of compiling the reports and different outcomes of the project takes a little time after a project. One output is a new report “BAZAAR Project Scenario Papers “. This report is based on a scenario setting exercise and two workshops – one entitled How Dude -where’s my Data and the other on Personal Learning Environments. However the scenario setting exercise went further and included:

• Social Software, Tools and Content Creation
• OERs and the Culture of Sharing
• Interoperability and Metadata
• PLEs, e-Portfolios and Informal Learning
• Open Educational Resources
• Data Integrity and Storage

The report – which is 41 pages long – is attached below.

Here is an excerpt on short term scenarios for social software in education.

“These short term scenarios are a vision of a future that incorporates the use of social software for knowledge sharing, capability development and education and training delivery. They are presented in order to gauge an understanding of ‘how it could be’ if social software was more widely adopted by education practitioners. This future is very close!

Social software will force us to completely re-think our business and delivery models for many activities. It’s already happening in the media and many other industries from telecommunications to music and book-selling. Usage of social software is way beyond how people learn – it is about how organisations see themselves and how they do business.

Integral to the visions of the future is the realisation that the ‘Generation Y’ is a significant part of that future. They are already engaging with social software and making connections and sharing knowledge. The ‘Generation Y’ is a significant driver in the uptake of new technologies, along with business in its quest for efficiency. Organisations and education need to ‘catch up’.

The sense of urgency for change is perhaps being forced by the convergence of the changing nature of working and learning in a knowledge era and responding to the needs of the ‘Generation Y’. This generation are natural multi-taskers (or, at least, very good fast-switchers). They innately use technology to communicate within and outside of their working lives.”

I thoroughly recommend this report for anyone interested in social software, open source, open content and so on….

Download the scenarios report here.

Get a Voki now!
Having fun making things. For the wiki pages Cristina and me have created for the course in Pesaro (see yesterdays post) we decided to create a couple of avatar based messages. We were going to use Springdoo but there server was not overly responsive (it took 24 hours to confirm my account) so instead we used Voki. Great fun and very easy to make. Here is my voki.