Education and Web2.0

Working with EdShare and OneShare building resource collections for use in education brings up a whole variety of discussion topics about the nature of Web2.0, the social web, and the role of sharing and repositories in UK Higher Education.

Our project ran a very interesting workshop on this topic early in November 2009. Below is a collection of notes and observations, plus a few photos, which capture something of the day.

we made lots of time for group discussions, folk here are considering issues around metadata ( or does it matter data as I like to think of it).

As you might imagine there is space for a variety of views between the hard line, information scientist formal categorisation

and the more pragmatic what can be generate automatically,

and do we need that information anyway, lets just get it tagged by users, kind of approach.

Ali Dickens from the subject centre for Language, Linguistics and Ares Studies (LASS) is involved in Language Box (for Linguists), and Humbox (for humanities).

She is planning to run a full day session on copyright on December 14 2009. At our workshop she led a session where she asked folk to do a risk analysis on issues around copyright.

Its a topic which attracts a lot of interest, and we like to call our interactions with the lawyers on this one poking the dragon. You can see from the flipcharts what we might poke the dragon for.

the final session of the day was another practical task, using post it notes to look at our favourite web2.0 applications, and think about the technology affordances within those categorisations.

TEL Tales: stronger methods for understanding 2.0 Social Networks

not sure about this, but think I will be posting my TEL stuff on tell tales, and my running stuff on runningsu
wonder then what I should put on shirley knot...
just for today I think I will put tell tales here too, then maybe someone with wisdom could advise me on the best thing to do....

Towards stronger methods for understanding Social Networks - today and tomorrow

Been talking with one of my students about doing some facebook analytics as a part of a research project looking at social networking. One of the things which interests me is the appropriate research methodologies to actually get to the bottom of why and how people use these sorts of networks.

Two publications in the near past (Dec 2009) give clues to why we need to get our research methods sorted.
1) Peter Schwartz in the Huffington Post blogs on the proposed death of facebook (well I paraphrase)

2) a paper from Huberman et al on Social Networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope

so my student wants to do a bit of traversing of networks and mapping patterns of connections. and it would be good if we could identify any markers for behaviours - there have been a few posts on that stuff too - something like "ten types of twitter users" I seem to recall

And after we have collected our first set of data from the network traversal, we want to talk to different user types and get some backfill on their actual usage, motivations etc etc. The whole task would be monumental - or at least suitable for some extended study, but this is going to be short and to the point.

The issue I have with both the Schwartz blog, and Huberman et al, it that they leave dangling more questions that they actually answer.

Looking at what Schwartz offers in anecdotal evidence about user preferences, what Huberman et al suggest about evidence of real network (the little networks within networks that really matter - my phrase not theirs) reminds me that I also have anecdotal and personal ethnographic evidence of a more complex set of connections, and values.

and what I want is a method of exploring this sort of network, both by physically getting the evidence from the networks, and from identifying and gathering personal data from Representative selections of those users.

I 'know' from discussions with active users whose posts I value, that there is mileage in this area, the question for me (and my student) is how are we going to get to that precious data, and therefore, what can we do to get a bit further down the methodological minefield

Building our EdShare and Sharing educational resources

Went to our regular weekly EdShare  update and planning meeting today ( http://www.edshare.soton.ac.uk/ ) We are making amazing progress in developing the interface. The basic structure is designed around EPrints ( http://www.eprints.org/ ). Les Carr is leading on EPrints, and he's leading the team, along with Hugh Davis from our Learning Societies Lab.  The project is being funded by JISC as an institutional exemplar. 

We are working on the principle that academics will be familiar with using a shared space to store their research outputs. We already share educational materials on an informal and ad hoc basis. EdShare is a way of enabling such processes while storing them on a common place. Plus we will be adding tools like tagging to increase their visibility. Early targets are likely to be materials used in teaching which look at generic skills-based areas of the curriculum.  We also planning early sharing of slides used in interactive lectures which use with zappers (personal response systems).