The changing Web

This is number 4 in the series of blog posts entitled 'Shaping Education for the Future.' Yesterday's post can be found at this link.

The web is constantly changing. Social media - often referred to as Web 2.0, or the participatory Web - is shaping up to be one of the most important tool sets available to support the promotion of change in education. Almost everyone, it seems, is using some element of social media in the planning, development, delivery, management or evaluation of teaching and learning. One of the greatest changes (and challenges) for education over the last few years has been the proliferation of user generated content. My own students create a lot of their own content during their study, usually in the form of podcasts, videos, wiki and blog content, and are encouraged to share these publicly online to gain additional feedback. Doing this, they tend to engage more deeply with learning, and find themselves collaborating more and learning from each other, as a result of using Web 2.0 tools. Essentially, Web 2.0 enables them to take more responsibility for their own learning. They like to share their ideas, and they enjoy playing their part in the production of knowledge. Learning is changing, and their experience is being shaped by the participatory Web. The Web is constantly changing, but it is also a change agent.

We need to acknowledge that 'Web 2.0' remains a contested label for new and emergent properties that are found on the Web. It is a complex network of dynamic resources that we all acknowledge is constantly changing to adapt to the growing demand for entertainment, communication and access to knowledge. Debate focuses on whether the emerging social applications constitute a sea change or revolution in the Web (cf. Van Dijk, 2002) or simply another phase in its relentless progress. Personally, I find myself in agreement with Brian Winston (2003) who views the Web as a facet of gradual evolution rather than symptoms of sudden revolution. Essentially, the Web has become more social. As with most other technology innovations, Web 2.0 applications have grown out of the need for people to connect together, share experiences and knowledge, enhance their experiences and open up new possibilities in learning. Social software is software that enables people to both read from, and write onto web spaces. It truly is the ‘architecture of participation’ (Barsky and Purdon, 2006) and demands active engagement as a natural part of its character (Kamel Boulos and Wheeler, 2007).

Web 2.0 tools include popular applications such as blogs, wikis and podcasting; social networking sites such as FaceBook and LinkedIn; photo and videosharing services such as Flickr and YouTube; familiar utilities such as RSS feeds, social tagging (e.g. Delicious, Diigo), microblogs such as Twitter, mashups (e.g. geotagging). Web 2.0 has spawned concepts such as folksonomy, ‘Darwikianism’ and the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ (Kamel Boulos et al, 2006). Also, we need to pay attention to the growing power, ubiquity and utility of the mobile phone and the central role it is already playing in enabling ‘anytime anyplace’ learning for students.

More is becoming known about the effects the changing Web is exerting upon teaching and learning. We know of some of the benefits and the limitations it brings to education and training. But there are still many questions to be answered. How for example, does this architecture of participation help to scaffold remote learners and how can it promote quality learning outcomes? What is the extent of the capability of social software to encourage a culture of sharing and collaboration? How much will Web 2.0 applications help to shape the education provision of the future? What roles will online games and mobile, personal technologies play in developing the skills young people need to study independently? These are questions we are beginning to address in some of our current research. More on this in future posts on this blog.

References
Barsky, E. and Purdon, M. (2006) Introducing Web 2.0: Social networking and social bookmarking for health librarians. Journal of the Canadian Health Libraries Association, 27, 65-67.
Kamel Boulos, M. N., Maramba, I. and Wheeler, S. (2006) Wikis, blogs and podcasts: a new generation of Web-based tools for virtual collaborative clinical practice and education. BMC Medical Education, 6, 41. Retrieved 14 April, 2008 from: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6920/6/41
Kamel Boulos, M. N. and Wheeler, S (2007) The emerging Web 2.0 social software: An enabling suite of sociable technologies in health and healthcare education. Health Informatics and Libraries Journal, 24(1), 2-23.
Van Dijk, J. (2002) The Network Society. London: Sage.
Winston, B. (2003) Media Technology and Society: A History: From the Telegraph to the Internet. London: Routledge.

Image source


The changing web by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Build a powerful PLN

If you are a professional, you should have a PLN. Your PLN (personal or professional learning network) is the community of people you interact with and learn from on a regular basis. They may be people you meet on a daily basis, but more often than not in the digital age, many PLNs are comprised of people we interact with on social networking sites. In my opinion, the most powerful PLN building tool is Twitter. For me, Twitter is an incredibly powerful yet simple tool that enables me to connect with, and learn from, specialists, experts and enthusiasts in my chosen field of expertise. Put simply, I follow teachers, learning professionals and education experts from all around the world - over 1400 at my last count. I learn something new everyday, usually as a result of dialogue on Twitter, or clicking on a link someone has shared in my timeline. Many people I follow on Twitter I have never met, and perhaps I might never meet them face to face. Some are personal friends of mine. But all are individuals who I personally believe are important in the world of education. These are people I have selected to follow because they are saying things, or sharing content that interests me, and from which I can learn, contributing to my personal and professional development. You can gain an insight into ideas, content and events that would otherwise pass you by, and you can also engage in great conversations with people all over the globe who share similar interests, passions, problems and experiences. It's all a question of finding people, resources and sites that you can learn from. But how to do it, when you are in danger of being lost in a tsunami of web content? Well, there is a growing range of useful social media tools you can use to track down what you need. Such tools can help you to build your PLN into something that is powerful. The possibilities are endless, but let me share just five ways I have personally used:

One really easy way to find and connect with people who have the same interest as you is to follow hashtags on topics or events that you have an interest in. If you are a teacher for example, you may wish to follow #edchat or a Teach Meet event. If you do so, you will discover who else is following and participating in the discussion or event. Simply check out the profiles of these participants, and if you find them interesting or relevant to your own interests, click on the link to follow them. You can always unfollow later if it doesn't work out, but many Twitter users will also follow you back if they discover you have similar interests to theirs.

You can also scan the list of people other Twitter users are following and see if there are any there who might be of interest to you or relevant to your subject/topic. Select someone you are following whom you hold in high regard, and click onto their profile. Next click on the list of people they are following. If you find people on the list who interest you, click to follow them too.

Another way to find people who have a similar interest to you is to subscribe to a social bookmarking tool such as Diigo or Delicious. Such tools enable users to share URLs of web resources they find interesting. By searching and then saving useful website addresses to Diigo or Delicious, you will automatically be presented with links to other people who have also found the site interesting. One click enables you to subscribe to the feeds and bookmark collections of these people. You can also send them messages.

Still another way to build up your PLN contacts is to visit the Slideshare site and search for topics that interest you. You will quickly discover a rich vein of slide sets that have been shared by people with similar interests to you. Again, you can subscribe to their feeds and receive notification when they share a new slideset that may be of interest to you. Many of the slidesets on Slideshare are presented under Creative Commons license for free use - but do check the wording to see what the licence allows you to do.

Finally, a number of high quality blogs already exist, in just about every field of professional life. You can search for them using Google or another search engine, by selecting the 'blog' search section. When you find a blog you are interested in reading, you may be able to subscribe to it using the on site widget if there is one. If not, bookmark it on Delicious or Diigo for later use. Before you leave the blog, check to see if there is a blogroll. This is a list of other blogs the blog owner recommends, usually focused on the same or a related topic to the blog hosting the list.

Do you have other ways that are effective in building up a powerful PLN? Please share them with us in the comments box below...


Build a powerful PLN by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Digital footprints

Increasingly, as we ask our learners to engage with social media as a part of their study, we are also asking them to leave a trace of themselves on the Web. Whether it is writing a blog, posting a video on YouTube, working collaboratively on a wiki, or simply bookmarking a site on Diigo or Delicious, students are leaving their digital footprints - evidence of their presence - all over the internet. And there may be ethical issues attached. Digital footprints are persistent, with artefacts and traces remaining visible and searchable for many years. Should we therefore be more careful about what we ask students to do and where we ask them to go on the Web?

These questions were addressed by Dr Jenny Waycott, of the University of Melbourne, who was our final speaker today at the Inaugural Technology for Learning and Teaching Forum. Jenny talked not only of the benefits and potential of social media to enhance learning, but also gave a critical review of some of the issues and challenges. She asked her audience to consider not only the opportunities that are presented to transform learning, but also to think about how we might minimise the risks associated with learning while using the social web. She argued that although social media can change the way students communicate and share their work, there are hidden dangers and controversies we need to be ready to counter.

Dr Waycott told the story of one student who was also developing a fledgling music career. The student was careful that her digital footprint as a musician (which was already well established) was not contaminated by her presence on the web as a university student. She took great pains to separate out her two identities, and made sure that those who knew her as a student did not confuse her other online persona as a musician. The ethical implications of this for university staff are less than clear, but the student's wishes to keep her two digital identities separate need to be respected and treated with care.

Other students, she told us, were worried about copying on the web. Not plagiarism, she added, but other students copying their work and then claiming credit for it at the author's expense. What if another student learnt something new from the writer's work and then gained a higher grade than the originator of the ideas? What would be the ethical implications of this? She counselled that asking students to co-create or share their work on a wiki or other online social space could have detrimental effects on intellectual property if the guidelines are not clear. The jury is still out on these questions. What are your views?

Image by Wesley Fryer (remixed)


Digital footprints by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Not so tasty now

"You are salt for the earth. But if salt loses its taste, how will it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled on by people". Matthew 5:13 (New Testament)

The Delicious social bookmarking site used to be one of my favourite social media tools. Not any more. When Yahoo bought Delicious back in 2005 for an estimated $18 million, we all expected great things, and we got them. It was a great place to post a link, share it and watch it blossom. The tagging facility was second to none, and it was easy to see who else was interested in the same links as you, and then discover what other links they had bookmarked that might have passed you by. It was both creative, and a voyage of discovery. A lot of that functionality has changed since Delicious has been sold on to AVOS (known as founders of YouTube) for a reported $5 million. This represents a significant loss of capital for Yahoo.

Since the launch of new Delicious this week, the Twitterverse and blogosphere have been buzzing with scathing commentary and complaints, stories of lost bookmarks, mislaid tagging bundles, personal networks that have simply disappeared. This post from Pulp Tech is particularly critical of the new Delicious. The old maxim, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, seems to have passed AVOS completely by. People don't like change, so when AVOS relaunched Delicious on September 27 this year in a 'back to beta' state, it went down like a lead balloon. Too much change too quickly is a big mistake. Many are migrating their content to other bookmarking sites such as Diigo, because they can't see any point in using Delicious anymore, given that much of the useful stuff they spent years becoming familiar with, is gone. That also has a compounding influence on the personal networks users have built up of course. Many of us wish that AVOS would put Delicious back to its previous state, where everything was familiar and where we knew exactly where our tags and networks were. AVOS has done more harm than good changing things so radically and so quickly.

It is annoying when you rely on a service as a knowledge tool, and then suddenly, your content isn't there anymore, or it's there but you can't find it easily. To be fair to AVOS, they gave advanced warning that changes would be made. What they didn't do very well was inform users fully to what extent those changes would affect everyone. Now they have a bit of a crisis on their hands. Amidst the storm of criticism they are weathering, Delicious is struggling to put things right and while it's doing so, appears to be leaking many of its previously loyal followers. I don't blame people for leaving. Delicious just isn't that tasty anymore.

Have your say: What do you think about the new Delicious?




Not so tasty now by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The great collective

When there is live TV coverage of an event do you watch the entire broadcast or just the highlights? The answer of course will depend on a number of factors, including how interested you are in the event, and how much time you have available to you. It's exactly the same with content on the web. Earlier this month I wrote about the 'tsunami of content' online that threatens to swamp us all. Just about everyone using the web today is creating content on a daily basis. How do we find the gold dust content amidst all the dross and trivia that exists on the internet?

Search engines have their place, and of course, we tend to use them a lot. Some of the more intelligent search engines are morphing into answer engines, computing your question against highly structured data (see for example Wolfram Alpha), and providing focused information. Often, for busy professionals, even this is not enough. Then there is problem of how to organise your content when you actually find it. Many are using tools such as Delicious.com or Diigo.com to tag, store and share their favourite content. These tools are also excellent and well used, but are they enough to cope with the vast quantity of content we want to keep? Wouldn't it be nice to have up to date, regular content, all presented in one place?

Enter the digital curation tools. There is a very special breed of web users out there that we call 'the curators.' In a sense, curators are a little like their counterparts in museums, because they tend to trade in very specialised, focused content. Anyone can be a digital curator. As a part of the great collective, curators choose a topic they are interested in, and then search and display dynamic content related to this topic, using one or more digital curation tools. They are collectors of the virtual and ephemeral and they have some great tools. Scoop.it is a very useful and attractive curation tool, enabling summaries and snapshots of related content from blogs, media sharing sites and other social media to be displayed, usually in two columns. Check out my own Scoop.it site Future School. Storify is another style of curation tool, enabling the curator to search for specific content from social media sites that can be sequenced into a blog style story. The curator can add their own text, and embed the final product into their blog. This short video explains how it's done. A third curation tool is Pearltrees, which works as a kind of connective network of content, which can be shared, repurposed and linked in a number of ways across social media platforms. The Pearltrees Teams group function also enables users to collaborate to create shared curated collections of content. Here's the video demonstrating how Pearltrees works. All three tools allow conversations and further sharing, and all three are very attractive as a means of making sense of the vast amount of content there is on the web. There are of course many other tools being developed that can also perform similar tasks of consolidating and accumulating content, and offering it in a digest form to busy professionals. The great collective it seems, are becoming the great collectors.

Image by Dieter Drescher


The great collective by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Digital literacy 7: Organising and sharing content

In yesterday's blogpost, I talked about why students should create their own content. The very act of creating content, whether it is a video, blogpost or podcast, is often with the intention that it will be shared in some way, usually on the web. Now we have the social web, there are more ways than ever to make your content available to a vast audience. But how do you share in such a way that makes it visible to the web? Answer - you organise it by 'tagging' it. You think of words that best describe your content, and then insert them into the appropriate box within the tool you are using.

Tagging content is a bit of an art. Choosing the correct descriptive words to tag your content with, can sometimes be a little hit and miss. But tag you must, if you want your content to be searchable. So this blogpost for example is tagged with a few key worlds such as 'digital literacy' and 'content creation' as well as more generic terms such as 'social web', 'blog', 'podcast' and 'video', because these terms have appeared in the text (see labels below). Because I have tagged this blogpost with those words, anyone who is interested in any of these areas, and who types those words into a search engine will, if they drill down far enough, be able to find this blog post. Tagging will also make finding content within a large list of bookmarks a lot easier. You can search for content in 'bundles' - this is useful if you only want to see the links in your list related to 'podcast' or 'audio', for example. Some tagging tools also offer tag clouds - clouds of labels that have larger or smaller font size depending on the amount of times they appear in your bookmark list.

But we can go further using tagging, so that content becomes a community artefact around which groups can discuss, interact and collaborate. Using a web service such as Delicious for example, will allow you not only to make your content more visible to those who are searching using key words, but it will also reveal to you (and to the other users) exactly who else may be interested in the same, or similar content. This is more than just bookmarking. It's social bookmarking - organising your content, and the content of others, into sets that are more useful and more socially coherent. The blue box at the end of each hyperlink displayed in my own Delicious account indicates the number of other people who have bookmarked the same link. If you click on that box, it will display them. Click on any user and you will see what other links that user has bookmarked. Some of these may have slipped past you, but you can now see them and also visit those sites and then bookmark them if you think they might be useful to you. You can also hold conversations with those others around you about the sites you find interesting- and perhaps learn even more about your mutual interests. This is the power of social bookmarking - just one of the many ways you can organise and share your content on the social web.

Image source

Organising and sharing content by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Web feats 1: Social bookmarking

There are many social web tools that I have adopted into my every day practice. It might sound a little daft for me to claim that I couldn't do without them. I suppose that without them, I would still be able to teach, research and otherwise just about function, but I might also go stark raving mad too if I couldn't use them to make my life a lot easier. Over the next few days I want to list my top social web tools (my Web feats) - the ones I probably couldn't do without... Here's the first in the series: Social Bookmarking.

I first began to use Delicious about two years ago when I stumbled upon it while digging around for some way to store and organise my best internet 'finds'. There are a number of other social bookmarking services available including Diigo, Connotea (academic users), and Citeulike (for referencing) and recommender sites wuch as Stumbledupon, Reddit and Digg. Not everyone likes it, but Delicious is my favourite bookmarking tool because not only does it store away all of my favourite websites (it asks for the URL, a title and some key words), it also has a neat social dimension to it - and it's a lot less messy on the screen than most of the others too. When you save a bookmark on Delicious, it is likely that someone else (and sometimes if it's a very popular website - many other people) has also done the same. A number in a coloured square appears on the right of the bookmark showing you exactly how many other people have saved the URL you have just bookmarked. Click on the number square and you will see all the other people listed in chronological order. Click onto any single user and you will see all of the other websites they have saved. You can choose to visit these websites, bookmark them, tag them and even connect with the other user. I find this an incredibly useful function - it allows me to connect into a ready made community of interest to find people who are interested in the same stuff as me. When you find someone you would like to connect to, you can add them to your Network using the apropriate linked function, found on the top right of the screen.

Delicious also allows me to see who has bookmarked my own blog posts too, as shown in this example. So Delicious can be a very useful tool not only for organising and storing links to your favourite websites, but it's also a very useful way of connecting with people who have similar interests to you.

Image source

Web feats 1: Social bookmarking by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Learning spaces and places

This entire series on technology affordances was started off by a remark I made during the 5th Plymouth e-Learning Conference, and my subsequent blogpost which I called 'Angels in the architecture'. I kicked off the series proper with a post called 'Can we afford to ignore student perceptions?' in which I highlighted the fact that affordances are emergent attributes of the design that are based on perceptions, and we must therefore be careful how we select technologies to support learning. Sometimes, if the design affordances do not match the needs of the learner, the result can be disasterous. More recently, in posts entitled 'Push or Pull' and 'Squeezing out the good stuff', I tried to outline some of the important affordances that have become evident when people use social media for learning.

In this part of the series I want to identify two more key sets of affordances that I believe will affect the success of technologies when they are applied to learning. The first I will call the 'synthesised space' affordances - the capability of the tool to create mixed media or blended spaces. I began to discuss this in a paper I published last year in Future Internet entitled Learning Space Mashups. What I was referring to was not a mashup in the strictest sense of the word, but rather a blending of reflective (blog) and collaborative (wiki) web tools to create a synthesised space where students could benefit from the best of both sets of affordances. There are many other web based tools available that can be combined and experimented with so that new spaces can be created. We just haven't got around to it yet, but the true mashups are a good start. Google Maps and similar mashup spaces are leading the way, and I believe we will see more tools combined in the future. Opening up API and allowing users to become developers is the main reason why some start ups such as Flickr and Delicious became so popular so quickly.


The second set of affordances I want to highlight we might call 'navigation' affordances. By navigation, I mean the visual cues that enable users to find their way around to learn spatially, both visually and in terms of hyperlinked pathways. If a web tool is badly designed, as is the case with some institutional VLEs, students become confused and disoriented. They know where they need to be and what they want to find, but can't easily find their way there. They then waste too much time trying to work out how to navigate themselves, or go off to try to find someone who can help them. If the 'browsability' element is lacking, or the tool has a poor capability to search for content, more problems are caused for learners. Broken links or links that are not adequately signposted/hihglighted are also annoying and are usually a problem caused by lack of maintenance, or simply poor design.


Navigation affordances are all about getting about - where the learners find themselves, and where they want to go to can be interrupted if the tool has not been designed effectively. The end result of any of the above problems, is that students spend more time thinking about how to navigating their way around in their study space than they do about the content and the learning. Opaque technologies need to become more transparent. Designing the correct features into the tool will enable the affordances of the tool to come to emerge.

Image source


Learning spaces and places by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Tools of my trade

For a while now I have been thinking about the impact Web 2.0 has had on my life and my career, and often wherever I am speaking, I talk about one or more of the tools I have listed below. Here they are - the 10 Web tools I could not possibly do without...

Facebook - I tried several other social networking tools before Facebook, including Myspace and Bebo, and toyed with LinkedIn like everyone else. Although I'm a little tired of Facebook now, I still use it to keep in touch with friends and to send occasional messages. I got hooked on Farmville for a while, but it became a time-sink for me, so I have now kicked the habit. Facebook has a lot of potential to be harnessed as a learning tool, but there are questions over whether such an informal tool could, or should be used in formal education.

iGoogle - I use this tool to organise my weblinks and other content. It's simple and easy to use, and keeps all my important tools, including currency converters, news feeds and language translators in one convenient space.

Wiki - I use this tool (usually Wetpaint or Wikispaces) as an open, collaborative space for my student groups to work with. Several exercises are built into and around the communal use of wikis to create content throughout a module, and students generally get to grips with it very quickly and produce some valuable content, which they can return to time and time again.

Google Scholar - I come back to Scholar time and time again, often several times in one day, particularly when I'm doing some literature searching for an article, or simply to see who has cited who on a particular topic. You can track through the history of an article, and get a full picture of its influence and impact.

Flickr - I keep all my favourite photographs on four Flickr accounts such as this one and this one. Again, as with all Web 2.0 tools, Flickr allows people to share their content, and receive comments back from viewers. You can also join groups that have a similar interest to you, and exhibit your photographs to a specialist audience.

Delicious - Once I have found the stuff I want to keep, where better to store a link to it than on Delicious? If you haven't tried it yet, you will find that it is quite easy to use, and all you need do is to copy and paste the URL you wish to keep into the appropriate box. Once you store it, you can return anytime to access the content, and you can also see who else has stored it, search through their favourites, and find related stuff that is just as interesting to you.

Slideshare - I love this tool, because it enables me to keep all my slideshows, and also other documents, such as published articles (usually stored as pdf files) in one place. I can share them with anyone who is interested in seeing them, and can track the number of people who view them, receive comments from them, and converse with them through the discussion tools on the site.

Blog - My blog (Learning with 'e's') is probably my most powerful tool for reflecting, learning and professional development. Right here is the space on my personal web where I put down all my thoughts, ideas (some of them half-baked) and questions and share them with my personal learning network. The comments I receive back from you and other readers are invaluable to me, often cause me to think again, and provide me with further fuel to go away and create more ideas and content. Don't forget to comment today :-)

Search Engine - I almost always use Google, but increasingly other search engines are on the horizon for me including Bing and Yahoo. The concept of a search engine is not new, but we now tend to take it for granted, and it would be an impossible or extremely time consuming task to try to find what you are looking for in the huge storehouse of knowledge and content that is out there on the Web without the humble search engine.

Twitter - For me, Twitter is the ultimate tool for social networking, because its simple and easy to use, concise, and yet has a substantial power behind it. Many people don't get Twitter, because it takes some effort over a period of time to build up a critical mass of contacts within your personal network, but once you get over that hurdle, it is amazing how much content you can receive and send. Used in combination with other tools such as bit.ly (a URL shortener), Echofon or Tweetdeck, it is a deceptively powerful web tool.

I use all of the above tools fairly regularly, and most on a daily, or even hourly basis. Without their combined power of connection, sharing and amplification, it would be impossible for me to do my current job. In fact, I would go as far as to say that my current job would not exist without these tools. They are the tools of my trade. What are your top ten?

Image source

A Web 2.0 wonderland

Instead of simply recommending some Web 2.0 tools to you in the traditional way, I thought I would do something different. It's the festive season after all, and if that's not a licence for a bit of fun, then what is?

So here are the links to some tools some of you already know about and may have been using for some time, and perhaps a few tools you have not heard of, or would like to try out. Many more Web 2.0 tools can be found with links on the Go2Web20 Website.

And here's a little Christmas gift from me to you.... I had fun creating it, and I hope you have fun reading it and exploring some new tools.

An API New Year to all!

'Twas Brizzly, and the Stixy Hyves
Did Plurk and Tinker in the Waze;
All Moomeo were the Blogger posts,
And the Jing Googlewave'd.

"Beware the Jabbify, my son!
The apps that bite, the widgets catch!
Beware the Joomla blog, and shun
The Posterous Bricabox!"

He took his Skrbl sword in hand:
Long time the Meehive foe he sought—
So rested he by the Twitter tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And as in Qwiskish thought he stood,
The Chatterbox, with eyes of flame,
Came Mixin through the Digsby wood,
And Yoople’d as it came!

One, two! One, two! and through and through
The Skrbl blade went Flickr-Flock!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went Twalkin back."

And hast thou slain the Chatterbox?
Come to my arms, my Bebo boy!
O Delicious day! Yahoo! Yuku!"
He chortled in his joy.

'Twas Brizzly, and the Stixy Hyves
Did Digg and Dropbox in the Wayn;
All Memoove were the Blogger posts,
And the Moof Feedjit Scribd.

(With a tip of the hat to Lewis Carroll)

Image source

Learning with 'e's by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Folksonomies, memes and misunderstanding

It all started with a message on Twitter from @stephendale who stated: "A taxonomist: One who organizes information in ways that makes sense to content providers, rather than content users." I thought this was a real gem, because it represented all that is 'corporate control' and 'top down' on the Web. I responded (as you do) with my own version: "A folksonomist: one who organises information in ways that make sense to his/her own community of practice or interest." It was retweeted several times by others and they seemed to like my definition. I was thinking about individuals tagging and organising their own content using tools such as Delicious, and then making them available to others. When we tag an object says Mike Wesch, we 'teach the machine'. In other words, the more we tag objects, the more they become visible to others who may be interested in them, and as Andy Clark has suggested, the more they become visible, the easier becomes the pathway to finding them.

@patparslow didn't like my definition though. Taking issue with it in his blogpost he says: "A folksonomy loses its qualities as a folksonomy once you have someone 'organising' it, and will quickly become a taxonomy." I hear what he is saying, but this wasn't what I had in mind and what he describes sounds suspiciously like a meme to me. Memes are units of information or ideas that are transmitted from mind to mind through speech, written word or, more than likely in the digital age, through a social network. They tend to emerge without being planned and spread virally. Look at the trending topics column on Twitter and you will see what I mean. Folksonomy is not chaotic though, and does require some organisation by individuals - there is always some intelligence behind it, or as James Surowiecki has aptly suggested - the 'wisdom of the crowd'. There always has to be some organisation at an individual level, or there would be no folksonomy at the community level - all would remain chaotic.

Then @3quarks said my definition of folksonomist sounded a little like a 'spin doctor'. Well, it might I suppose, but for the fact that the community of interest I intended was one in which people were not trying to influence each other, but simply going individually about their personal learning through organisation of content. The Holistic Web blogpost Taxonomy vs Folksonomy says it all really - a taxonomy is predictable, whereas a folksonomy is flexible. Taxonomies are imposed, but folksonomies are democratic.

Here's my opinion on this for what it's worth: In a taxonomy, the community defines the content. In a folksonomy the content defines the community. So, I don't want to be misunderstood, but neither do I want to misunderstand. Are we all singing from the same hymnsheet, (or are we independently harmonising)?

Thanks to Stephen Dale, Pat Parslow and Mel Phillips for kicking this one off. :-)=

Watching the paint dry

It's been a busy day teaching with two of my BA groups having a stab at creating their first blogs here at the University of Plymouth. I have shown them how to integrate these into a Wetpaint wiki (probably the best of the bunch at the moment for functionality, ease of use and ad-free response). 'Watching the paint dry' is usually a euphemism for boredom - but on this occasion, I found it truly rivetting to watch them explore Web 2.0 tools. Time will tell what content is generated, but I'm encouraging the students to read and comment on each others' postings so that they can get the feel for how blogging works and the benefits it can accrue. Hopefully this will encourage all to create content that is engaging and informative. I also touched on social tagging and the theory behind it - the use of Delicious tagging was a particularly popular part of the session. My slideshare set has also created some interest.

In future sessions we will examine a number of other Web 2.0 tools including aggregators (probably Crowdvine and Twemes), microblogging (probably Twitter) picture sharing and podcasting. I'm impressed with the manner in which the students (almost all of whom have never done any of this stuff before) have taken to the concept of Web 2.0 and how enthusiastic they are to learn more about how these tools can be used to promote collaborative learning, encourage knowledge generation and create new educational experiences in schools and further education.