I am still in Porto, at the Faculty of Engineering , in the University of Porto. Yesterday I did a short presentation about the use of Social Media in Higher Education for the eLearning @FEUP workshop. I mainly focused on some projects I have been developing at the University Salford, but everything went so quickly […]
Social Media in Higher Education and Beyond
New forms of collaborating and developing team work
A presentation for the interdisciplinary seminar “Future Social Learning Networks” at the University of Paderborn and the Knowledge Media Research Center in Augsburg.
Tag for this event is #fsln10
Below is a voicethread with some ideas about Social Media for collaboration […]
Antother fascinating study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project on Teenagers and Mobile Phones. As I have said before, I wish we had such a similar research project in Europe.
It is well worth reading the full report. But here are just two sets of figures to give an idea what the survey is about:
Of the 75% of teens who own cell phones, 87% use text messaging at least occasionally. Among those texters:
Once more, of tjose who owned mobile phones:
Through the Mature project I have been invited to submit a proposal for a lecture or workshop for the JTEL Summer School to be held in Ohrid in June. The JTEL summer schools, the publicity claims, usually attract about 80 researchers, providing an exciting forum for cross-disciplinary dialogue, fostering new research collaborations and partnerships, and an opportunity for the next generation of TEL researchers to gain insight from leading experts in the field.
The summer school is being organised by the Stellar network and proposals were asked to explain how they contribute to the network’s three Grand Challenges:
So here’s my proposal. I enjoyed writing it and if anyone else is interested in us running such a workshop juts get in touch.
Short description
The workshop will focus on the use of internet radio in education.
1) An exploration of the use of media (and particularly internet radio and television) for learning and shared knowledge developmentThis will include looking at issues such as:
a) The appropriation of media
b) The change from passive media to interactive Web 2.0 supported media and the changing distinctions between broadcaster/program planner and listener/consumer.
c) How media such as radio can support the development of online communities
d) The use of media to bridge contexts and provide spaces for exploration and shared meaning making.
2) A practical hands on session on how to plan develop and broadcast live internet media. This will include storyboarding, interviewing, finding Creative Commons licensed music, making jingles, mixing and post processing, directing and producing and using the technology for live broadcasts.
3) The third session is planned to take place in a lunchtime or evening session. This will be a live 45 minute to one hour broadcast “Sounds of the Bazaar – Live from Ohrid”. It is hoped to involve all summer school participants in the broadcast. The broadcast will be publicised in advance through iTunes, Facebook, Twitter and other social software platforms. It is also intended to use the boradcast to link to other researchers in TEL from around the world not able to be at the summer school. The programme will be recorded and made available through the Summer School web site, the Mature project web site, the Pontydysgu web site and through iTunes.
Contribution to the Grand Challenges agenda
The workshop is primarily designed to contribute to the Grand Challenge of Contextualising virtual learning environments and instrumentalising learning contexts.
Live internet radio provides both a shared context and space for learning, with universal reach outside of institutional or national boundaries, whilst at the same time allowing individual to collectively contribute to the development of shared artefacts, which in themselves can become part of the repertoire of a community of practice. Radio also offers a means of actively engaging learners in a community and through appropriation of what was a push (or broadcast) media, through merging with Web 2.0 tools and standards allows community participation and self expression.
Earlier this week, I wrote a post on issues in transitions between school and work, school and university and university and work. This is part of Pontydysgu’s ongoing work on the recently launched (no web site yet) G8WAY project. the project seeks to use social software to help learners in transitions. We are working at the moment on developing a Pedagogical Framework.
This is not so easy. I used to rail against the idea that educational technology is pedagogically neutral as so many vendors used to say. All technology has affordances which can facilitate or impair different pedagogical approaches. And whilst the educational technology community has tended to espouse constructivist approaches to learning, the reality is that most Virtual Learning Environments have tended to be a barrier to such an approach to learning.
However Web 2.0 and social software opens up many new possible approaches to learning, largely due to the ability for learners to actively create and through collaboration and social networking. But teachers constantly ask what software they should use and how they can use it in the classroom. What software is good for what pedagogic approach, they ask?
The idea of the G8WAY framework is enables us to map onto digital media and e-tools with regard to their learning characteristics, such as thinking and reflection, conversation and interaction, experience and activity or evidence and demonstration. This can then be used as the basis against which to benchmark pedagogical principles for any particular learning scenario developed within G8WAY.
So, for example, a learning activity that enables learners to reflect on their experience, say for example, in a work-based learning context – would map to ‘thinking and reflection’ and ‘evidence and demonstration’. In contrast, a learning activity that supported collaboration would map to the first three characteristics. Of course any one individual using this schema would map particular instances differently, depending on their interpretation of the framework and the context of use of the tools; the point is this framework provides a useful schema to think about tools in use and how they map to different characteristics of learning.
This seems a useful approach – the question is how to do it? Does anyone have any references to previous approaches like this?
One thing we know about social networking is that it doesn’t stay still. Witness the decline of Bebo and My Space, which only two years ago looked all conquering. Now Facebook is in its zenith but how long will this prevail?
I am interested in the connections between the different affordances of social network sites and how we communicate (both on-line and face to face).
My Space was above all a site to talk about music and for bands to communicate with us and with each other. In those terms it remains highly stressful.
Facebook could be said to inherit the mantle of Friends Reunited. Whilst the latter sought just to allow us to stay in touch (or get back in touch) with friends from school or university – interestingly the attempt to extend it to the workplace didn’t really take off – Facebook started out primarily as a place to connect with present friends in college or university. Even following its expansion outside education the principle remained the same – friends mutually followed each other with both having to consent to the connection. Twitter changed all that by allowing non reciprocal connections i.e. I can follow people without them following me. And people rapidly grew long lists of followers. Different people use Twitter in different ways. For me, it is a great resource repository – an informal, real time feedreader if you like. And despite the long running debate as to whether Twitter is killing blogging, I find myself reading more blogs as a result following links in tweets.
Bit I wonder if the social is missing somehow from these social networking services. In an article in Wired Magazine, Clive Thompson says:
socializing doesn’t scale. Once a group reaches a certain size, each participant starts to feel anonymous again, and the person they’re following — who once seemed proximal, like a friend — now seems larger than life and remote. “They feel they can’t possibly be the person who’s going to make the useful contribution,” ….. So the conversation stops. …. At a few hundred or a few thousand followers, they’re having fun — but any bigger and it falls apart. Social media stops being social. It’s no longer a bantering process of thinking and living out loud. It becomes old-fashioned broadcasting.
In that respect I think the rise of ‘extreme; social networking site Chatrouette is interesting. According to the Guardian newspaper:
Chatroulette, which was launched in November, has rocketed in popularity thanks to its simple premise: internet video chats with random strangers.
When users visit the site and switch on their webcams, they are suddenly connected to another, randomly chosen person who is doing precisely the same thing somewhere else in the world.
Once they are logged in together, chatters can do anything they like: talk to each other, type messages, entertain each other – or just say goodbye, hit the “next” button and move on in an attempt to find somebody more interesting.
Perhaps predictably, Chatroulette is reportedly host to “all sorts of unsavoury characters” and the Guardian quotes “veteran blogger Jason Kottke, who has spent years documenting some of the web’s most weird and wonderful corners, tried the site and then wrote about witnessing nudity, sexual activity and strange behaviour.”
But I wonder in Chatroulette is a sign of us wanting to use the internet as a social space to meet new friends, in the way we might face to face in a bar or at a party. Despite the attempts of Mr Tweet or of Facebook to introduce us to new people, they lack the randomness and intimacy of human face to face serendipitous encounter.
And I wonder too if that may be some of teh thinking behind the new Google Buzz social networking service. I can’t find the link now, but when I first looked at Buzz (in the pub!) on my mobile phone, there was a tab for ‘local’ allowing me to specify the geographical radius for activity I wanted to see. Along with us wanting to recreate the opportunity for meeting new friends, I think the future for social networking may be local, with us wanting to use such services to be able to find out what is going on around us, at a distance in which we can physically reach.
So as social networking becomes part of our everyday life, it may be that we want to integrate it into our everyday physical spaces, rather than extend the range of the everyday to unreachable zones of cyberspace.
Just an idea.
Comments and informal discussions about my past post on virtual classrooms and online simultaneous meeting platforms seem to confirm my feelings. Adobe Connect is seen as very good, but also very expensive. Elluminate is also pretty good, but also costs money. DimDim and other Flash based systems are trying – but the audio is extremely unreliable. I was interested to see today that Scribblar is adding skype support to its platform – although at the moment only for one to one communication.
For meetings, I still think FlashMeeting, free and supported by the UK Open University, is the best of the bunch. The design does not really scale for large groups, neither is the feature set particularly extensive. But it is adequate and functional for project meetings.
Last week we were asked if we could support a board meeting of VETNET, the vocational education and training network of the European Educational Research Association (EERA). With little funding not all the members could afford to travel to a meeting in Germany. Around seven would be present face to face, but would it be possible to link in with four more members online?
Of course there are wonderful video conferencing suites which make this very easy. But once more they cost money. How could this be done on the cheap?
We used FlashMeeting. The remote participants simply logged in as usual from their computers using headphones for audio. All but one also has a webcam. In the face to face meeting we used a video camera with a gun microphone and projected the Flash meeting with a data projector onto a screen.
At first everyone was a bit concious of the technology and we made a few mistakes with people speaking when the microphone feed form the camera was not being broadcast into online meeting. But soon people seemed to forget the technology and the meeting was highly productive.
For Angelika Wegscheider, the EERA Administrator / Geschäftsführung from the European Educational Research Association and based in Berlin, it was the first time wshe had taken part in such a meeting. Afterwards she commented: “I would also like to thank your for having me virtually in your board meeting. Two reflections on this: I found it fascinating how much I felt to actually “be” in the meeting. I did most of the previous skype and online meetings without a camera and was surprised what value was offered when almost everybody is using a camera.
What I felt a bit difficult – and this might be lack of experience with meetings like that – is the following: if you speak as a virtual participant you see the same picture as all others – which is you yourself. I a way this is irritating, because you do not reactions of others on what you said. You have no means to check if people got your point. On telephone the second signals understanding with small words, in face to face you have body language in addition. Having none of both, mislead me in talking longer and explaining more than was probably necessary ….”
Angelica’s feedback is interesting. Not only do we need better technology, but we also have to look at how we can organise such meetings to overcome some of the social limitations of online meeting software,
I have just come back from the Joint Technology Enhanced Learning Winter School. It brought together young and senior researchers in the field of TEL in meaningful discussions. It was great fun too.
Each day new topics were introduced and there was an effort to make the sessions as much interactive as possible. In […]
I spent a lot of time yesterday evaluating ‘virtual classrooms’ or spaces for online simultaneous communication.
The background: over the last two years I have recognised, presented and participated in a considerable number of seminars, workshops and conferences using Elluminate. Whilst it has its bad days, in general Elluminate is reliable and I am fairly confident in getting people online and in facilitating communication on the platform. So when I was asked to help organise an online course for careers guidance professionals, I based it around a mix of self directed activities using PBWorks and simultaneous online sessions in Elluminate.
Then came the problem. Elluminate is a Java based application and requires both Java to be installed and the opening of a couple of ports which are sometime closed by systems administrators. Indeed the ports had been closed but that obstacle could be overcome. But, for one reason or another (I am not quite sure what), the application could not be got to run on Windows XP machines on the clients network. So I was left looking for an alternative.
First on the list was Net Webinar. I was not much taken by this given the web page marketing hype (and the price) but we had been recommended to use it by our client. It is Applet based avoiding the need for Java or downloads and I could set up a free month’s trial. The application seemed very much to emphasise the role of the presenter. There was no shared whiteboard and the main role of participants seemed to be to ask text questions. Sadly last night the person I was collaborating with was unable to access the webinar I set up (I suspect an issue with Windows 7 netbook version). Today I tried again with another colleague and it all worked quite well but I couldn’t hear any audio from her. The manual is also curious, seeming to focus more on toll paid telephony than anything else!
Next we looked again at Flash meeting. Although I use it regularly for project meetings I had never tried it with the whiteboard and tools enabled. For interactivity, this requires each user to have their own account. Furthermore the design does not really work, neither are the presentation tools far developed. Flash meeting is as the name suggests a meeting tool, I think.
On to DimDIm. I like the design, although functionality is limited by only five microphones being available. And the big failing of many of these system seems to be that the Flash system they use is unreliable. When switching between modes – whiteboard, presentation etc. it seemed to do things to my audio. And this morning, trying it amongst three of us, one person could hear everyone, whilst two of us could not hear each other. Promising but two buggy to risk with a non techie audience.
At this point I tried a skype shout out. The first reply was from Nergiz Kern. “NergizK @GrahamAttwell @cristinacost Maybe a bit unconventional but what about http://www.scribblar.com/ ? (If all else fails).” I liked the approach , unconventional or not. But once more the audio failed miserably. On skype someone (by now I have forgotten who) recommended WizIQ. oh dear, the moment I tried to invite Cristina Costa (who by now I had inveigled as a fellow tester), the whole site went crazy on me. Things were moving all over the place. More Flash problems I suspect. Another one ruled out.
I tried another two systems this morning. Similar results. With he notable exception of Flash meeting, the implementation of Flash in these systems seems very buggy. It might work on a good day for most people. Or it might not. And even in Flash meeting we spend a lot of time saying “can you hear me.”
I didn’t try Adobe Connect. I cannot afford it. And the trial version is too limited to use for the sessions I am trying to organise. It should also be remembered that Elluminate is not free – it is just that I am lucky to have access to an install.
So my conclusion – Flash doesn’t really work. And none of the free systems are yet good enough for working with non technical first time users. Disappointing really. My latest thinking is to re-jig the session and use an embedded slidecast, along with an embedded chat room in PBWorks. It is all free and with a bit of luck and a following wind it might work. Or perhaps to use Edmodo.
I’d be very interested to hear of your experiences of using these, or any other online seminar or workshop tools.
I was idly wasting time reading my twitter stream and it occurred to me that I seem to be getting less tweets these days. So I twittered out “Is it my impression or do i get less tweets these days. Following more people so are they just tweeting less?: And in the wonderful way that twitter works back came a reply from @paulbrichardson: “I am getting fewer tweets too. But there is more substance to them – usually expressing or referencing an idea..” This was quickly followed up by “Worried that my last tweet points to an attempt at a taxonomy of tweets. I am definitely not going there though…” And of course @tmartinowen couldn’t resist the bait: “here is a totally unsubstantial tweet – just to keep the classification going – or does the parenthesis give it substance?”
Nor would I wish to risk a classification. But there do seem to be a few things going on in the way we are using twitter (or at least the people I follow). There are far less of the straight forward “good morning Twitterverse” or “had a great lunch” or “tired and going to bed now” type tweets. u suspect this was a leftover from the Facebook status update days (in the same way few people are bothering to update their skype status nowadays). Have we simply become bored with our own mundane lives?
And Paul is right – most of the tweets I receive do seem to be on points of substance and many point to a resource. This may be due to the increasing use of sophisticated Twitter clients and to cross application linking through the API (e.g posting Diego links to twitter). Twitter is becoming a rich repository of links to resources. However discovery remains problematic and harvesting is tricky due to lack of longevity.
This is all to the good. But I am increasingly missing the social nature of Twitter which also seems to be on the wane. We are using twitter for reporting and shouting out but does it still retain the social and collaborative nature of its early days? Of course there remain the odd maverick – @johnpopham’s #uktrains series is strangely compulsive.
A further trend is to increase the ability of machines to read twitter through hash tag taxonomies. As reported in the ReadWriteWeb a group of hackers ” in collaboration with Project EPIC, developed a new syntax to make it easier for computers to read tweets from areas that are affected by a disaster. If adopted widely, this new hashtag-based syntax will make it easier to automatically extract data about locations or the status of a road or person.”
But as comments on the blog pointed out such taxonomies are far from people friendly. is there a trade off between machine readable functionality and human and social uses of media?
Twitter is an interesting platform because of the wide affordances in its social use. The changing ways in which we are using Twitter may point to the evolution of the use of wider social media in the future.
Anyway – time to send a tweet announcing this post 🙂
Cyborg patented?
Forbes reports that Microsoft has obtained a patent for a “conversational chatbot of a specific person” created from images, recordings, participation in social networks, emails, letters, etc., coupled with the possible generation of a 2D or 3D model of the person.
Racial bias in algorithms
From the UK Open Data Institute’s Week in Data newsletter
This week, Twitter apologised for racial bias within its image-cropping algorithm. The feature is designed to automatically crop images to highlight focal points – including faces. But, Twitter users discovered that, in practice, white faces were focused on, and black faces were cropped out. And, Twitter isn’t the only platform struggling with its algorithm – YouTube has also announced plans to bring back higher levels of human moderation for removing content, after its AI-centred approach resulted in over-censorship, with videos being removed at far higher rates than with human moderators.
Gap between rich and poor university students widest for 12 years
Via The Canary.
The gap between poor students and their more affluent peers attending university has widened to its largest point for 12 years, according to data published by the Department for Education (DfE).
Better-off pupils are significantly more likely to go to university than their more disadvantaged peers. And the gap between the two groups – 18.8 percentage points – is the widest it’s been since 2006/07.
The latest statistics show that 26.3% of pupils eligible for FSMs went on to university in 2018/19, compared with 45.1% of those who did not receive free meals. Only 12.7% of white British males who were eligible for FSMs went to university by the age of 19. The progression rate has fallen slightly for the first time since 2011/12, according to the DfE analysis.
Quality Training
From Raconteur. A recent report by global learning consultancy Kineo examined the learning intentions of 8,000 employees across 13 different industries. It found a huge gap between the quality of training offered and the needs of employees. Of those surveyed, 85 per cent said they , with only 16 per cent of employees finding the learning programmes offered by their employers effective.
Our Wikispace for teaching and learning
Join our Sounds of the Bazaar Facebook goup. Just click on the logo above.
We will be at Online Educa Berlin 2015. See the info above. The stream URL to play in your application is Stream URL or go to our new stream webpage here SoB Stream Page.