I remember three years ago having a debate with Alexadra Toedt at a SIGOSSEE meeting in Denmark on why I thought there was no future for VLEs. I was a bit torn between wanting to promote Open Source software alternatives to Blackboard and the like but also frustrated by the pedagogic restrictions of institutional systems for managing learning. Needless to say I convinced few people at best they thought I was well meaning but hopelessly impractical.Nowadays it is becoming almost respectable to predict the end of the VLE. But fortunately we have well developed alternatives to the VLE. In any case students are voting with their feet (or mouse). Better still we have an increasingly sophisticated argument not just as to why VLEs are bad (which I have to admit was the heart of my argument but why “loosely coupled, freely available third party systems” can be better. This is from The Ed Techie blog by Martin Weller:

• “Better quality tools – because offering each of these loosely coupled elements is what each company does, it is in their interest to make them really good. This means they stay up to date, have better features, and look better than most things produced in higher education.
• Modern look and feel – related to the above, these tools often look better, and also their use makes a course feel more modern to a user who is raised on these tools compared with the rather sterile, dull systems they encounter in higher ed.
• Appropriate tools – because they are loosely coupled the educator can choose whatever ones they want, rather than being restricted to the limited set in the VLE. This is one of the biggest draws I feel – as an academic if I want a particular tool I don’t have to put a request in to IT and wait a year to get a reduced quality version, I just go ahead and use it.
• Cost – using a bunch of free tools has got to be cheaper hasn’t it?
• Avoids software sedimentation – when you have institutional systems they tend to embody institutional practice which becomes increasingly difficult to break. Having loosely coupled system makes this easier, and also encourages people to think in different ways.
• Disintermediation happens – this isn’t really a benefit, just an observation. If a services can be disintermediated then it will be. In this case the central VLE system is disintermediated as academics use a variety of freely available tools.”

Brian Kelly writes about using social software services in education: “I think we’re revisiting …f fears that popular Web 2.0 services (not just Facebook) are challenging IT development plans. However rather than simply asserting limitations and implying that these are the overriding factors (with the “Web links are easily broken” argument being updated with various concerns over privacy, rights and interoperability) I feel that we need to engage with successful widely used services.”

Whilst I agree with many things Brian says, I think he misses the point. The issue is not technical development – yes lets socialise education software – but the issue of values and control.

Take this story from Labourstart: “The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) was organizing casino workers in Halifax, Nova Scotia. They set up a page on Facebook. Facebook later took the page down, claiming that groups like a union were not allowed to have pages, and that Facebook pages could only be setup by individuals. The union responded that many companies had set up Facebook pages including Tim Horton’s (of donut fame).
The story has a happy ending. In early September, the results of the vote came in — and the workers overwhelmingly chose to be represented by the SEIU.”

The lesson of the story, says LabourStart’s Eric Lee, is “that by “outsourcing” our online campaigns to social networks like Facebook and MySpace — which are for-profit, commercial organizations — we are more vulnerable to this kind of thing than when we build websites ourselves, using freely-available tools.”

Eric is not opposed to using social software services. He goes on to say: “That doesn’t mean we should avoid using Facebook — after all, LabourStart has 998 members in its Facebook group. But it means that we should aware of the risks and limitations.”

I think in education we also must be aware of the risks and limitation inherent in Facebook and similar services. I tend to agree with Steven Downes who sees these as interim applications. And I think that we also must educate learners in to understanding the benefits and the limitations of such services. that is one reason I am so in favour of e-Portfolios: to ensure that learners themselves have a copy of their own data.

Technorati Tags: social software

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Interesting article in the Guardian about a new guide by the UK Trade Union Congress on using social networks in work.

The guide points out that employers can legally ban the use of social networks and take action against employees who break such a ban. It also says that employers are entitled to consider social networking content if an employee has applied for promotion.

The General Secretary of the TUC appeals to employers to be reasonable pointing out employees should be able to have a life outside work. The guide goes on to give some sensible advice on the use of social networkls.

But it is this paragraph that I find most interesting:

“Work is a major part of our lives, and staff have always discussed aspects of their jobs in private. Now that online social networking is becoming mainstream, many of these private conversations are searchable by the public.”

The use of social networking is redefining conventions around private and public discourses. Many of these conventions are implicit and tacit and of course are heavily culturally defined. In Germany people are much more ‘private’ than in Wales where we quite freely share information about our personal lives – and gossip happily about friends and acquaintances – with relative strangers.

It may well be that to move forward the debate we need to take what has previously been tacit and implicit and transform to explicit knowledge. Handbooks like the TUCs are part of this process.

Postscript: Just a short moan. News web sites like the Guardian are getting very lax about citations. Whereas once they always linked to original source material now they next to never do. I spent a good few minutes searching for the handbook. If news organisations are going to quote extensively form such a source I think they must provide a direct link. End of moan/

Technorati Tags: social software

I am underwhelmed by most of the Facebook plug-ins (although overwhelmed by the number available. And I totally fail to understand the attraction of applications like Zombies

But the one application which I think is really useful – as opposed to decorative – is my questions. I have tried asking questions a few times on my blog – and have got a reasonable response – but the blog display is in no way as useful as the plug-in for this sort of discourse. My questions is really handy for quickly gathering different people’s views on key issues.

And – 9f you do have a Facebook account – my question is “How can we support informal earning?”. For those of you without an account I will publish the relies on this blog some time in the future.

The UK telecommunication regulatory body, Ofcom, have just published their annual report.

It is a substantial body of work and I have to admit I haven’t read it myself – relying rather on press and radio reports.

There seems to be much of interest in the report. For the first time women webusers have taken the lead in key age groups. At the same time an army of silver surfers has emerged and the over 65s are spending more hours online than any other age group, according to the Guardian.

Predictablyyoung people are spending more time on line, with growing use of social networking sites. This time spent appears to be at the expense of watching television.

Much of the BBC radio coverage was taken to the emergence of older people at heavier internet users than youth. Commentators speculated that this was due to the rise of internet commerce and to women using the web for social networking.

However, the preponderance of older users bares out the survey we carried out of the use of ICT for learning in Small and Medium Enterprises. We found older workers far more likely to use the web for learning than younger employees (albeit for informal learning rather than pursuing formal e-Learning courses). We speculated at the time this might be due to wider web access for more senior employees.

However, we felt, although could not proof, that older workers felt more at home using the internet for informal learning. Tomorrow I will have a look at the Ofcom report to see if it has anything to say about learning. But it remains my feeling that educational technologists have over-focused on developing learning applications and content for younger students and have failed to see the potential for extending and supporting lifelong learning and continuing professional development through the internet.

The term social networking also covers a multitude of activities. the radio reports tended to assume social networking as a leisure time activity – a replacement or chatting on the phone. Women do more of this than men, the reasoning went. I am unsure of this is true. But I would certainly suggest that much of the so called social networking is actually the use of social software for informal learning.

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Back from holiday (I didn’t look at a computer for a week!) and back to the blog. And what better start to the autumn season than this new report from the US National School Boards Association — a not-for-profit organization representing 95,000 school board members.

The study, funded by Microsoft, News Corporation, and Verizon, found the internet isn’t as dangerous as people think, and teachers should let students use social networks at school.

Tech. Blorge.com say the report warns that many fears about the internet are just overblown. “School district leaders seem to believe that negative experiences with social networking are more common than students and parents report,” the study reports. For example, more than half the districts think sharing personal information has been “a significant problem” in their schools — “yet only 3% of students say they’ve ever given out their email addresses, instant messaging screen names or other personal information to strangers.”

This chimes with my long held belief that in a risk adverse society educational institutions spend far more time worrying about potential dangers and ‘what if’ scenarios than they do in helping students learn how to use the internet safely and creatively.

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Students’ trial by Facebook | Media | MediaGuardian.co.uk:

I haven’t much time for rowdy, middle class, over-proveledged Oxford students. But I have even less time for the University internal police, archaically called proctors.

And now it looks as if the proctors are hacking Facebook to cause a bit of grief for the students.

But it is going to take some time before we sort out what can and should be shared through social networking sites and what rights of privacy – if any – we should be entitled too. And – I’m not paranoid, honestly – but if a few dozy Oxford proctors can hack their way through Facebook access controls, I sort of think that security services are not going to find it tricky. Are we all monitoring ourselves these days?

“Oxford University staff are logging on to Facebook and using evidence they find on student profiles to discipline students.

Photos on the social networking website of undergraduates celebrating the end of their exams have been emailed to students by the proctors, Oxford’s disciplinary body, as evidence of breaches of the University’s code of conduct.

Students now face fines of up to £100 after proctors collected evidence of students celebrating the end of exams by “trashing” their friends, covering them with champagne, confetti, flour, and even foodstuffs including raw meat and octopus.”

Students may be unable to graduate until the disciplinary hearings are resolved.

I’ve been enjoying the the IWMW 2007 Innovation
Competition, run by the ever tireless Brian Kelly (I’ll post my entry tomorrow!). And I’ve been watching the Facebook phenomenon with some interest.

Given how I keep banging on about breaking out of institutional walled gardens and using social software for learning there is much to be welcomed in “MyNewport – MyLearning Essentials for
Facebook” – Michael Webb’s submission to the competition

Brian Kelly says “MyNewport is the VLE/portal used by staff and students at Newport
College, which includes access to course material, news, blogs, forums,
library access etc. MyNewport is a Facebook application that allows
students to access to MyLearning Essentials resources from Facebook. In
effect this allows students to start creating their own personal
learning environment in a platform other than the one provided by the
University. Newport College have targeted Facebook at the moment as
it’s the fastest growing community, but if the users like the idea but
want to work in another environment then that is fine –
as applications can be created applications for them as well.”

Apparently it took about a day and half from conception of the idea and joining the Facebook developer community on 10^th July to launching it as a viable application for our students to use (or comment on) on the 11^th
July. It was straight forward as the college’s VLE is built from
components that can easily be repurposed and uses open standards such
as RSS to allow information to be passed to the Facebook application.

And this is where I start worrying. Yes the college VLE uses open standards. But Facebook does not. It is one thing providing access ot a developers kit to write applications to get data in to Facebook. But what about the other way round. How can learners get their data from Facebook into their Portfolio. As far as I can see they can’t. And that is what distinguishes social software applications like Facebook, privately owned with closed standards, from applications like Elgg – with open standards and the functionality and support for moving data both in and out of Elgg and to using whatever tools the users choose for their interface.

Or am I wrong – if so please write and tell me because I think this is a critical debate.

I like Facebook. It looks good, its fun to use and all my mates are getting accounts.

But the choice of political views in the personal profile is sad. You can describe yourself as:

• Very liberal
• Liberal
• Moderate
• Conservative
• Very Conservative
• Apathetic

or

• other

I’m down as other. I certainly aren’t any of the rest. I am a socialist. I am proud to be a socialist. And I don’t think there is anything to be ashamed of about being a socialist. There are many, many socialists throughout the world. So why can’t I delclare myself as a soc ialist and meet up with other socialist in Facebook? Or doesn’t Facebook want socialists to join?

I only recently stumbled on the Aesthetic Computing Manifesto but I think it is quite important. Aesthetic computing, they say is “the application of art theory and practice to computing. ” They go on to say:

” We wish to strike a balance between cognitive and material aesthetics. Software as written in text or drawn with flow-charting may be considered elegant. But that is not to say that the software could not be rephrased or represented given more advanced media technologies that are available to us today, as compared with when printing was first developed. Such representation need not compromise the goals of abstraction, which is a necessary but not sufficient condition for mathematics and computing, as meaning, comprehension, and motivation may be enhanced if the presentation is guided by a pluralism of aesthetic choices and multiple sensory modalities. ”

Now lets widen this to how we use computing for learning. We have focused for far too long on the written text with other forms of expression being seen essentially as illustrative or additional to the written form. We have failed to develop learning interfaces which allow people to express themselves in forms and ways not only aesthetically natural to themselves but in forms which reflect the nature of the learning being undertaken. Why should a craft apprentice be expected to reflect on their work in writing. How much more natural to use the media of  that craft itself to reflect on their learning. And as the manifesto says “recently, substantial progress has been made in areas such as software and information visualization to enable formal structures to be comprehended and experienced by larger and more diverse populations”

Much food for thought.