Emma Duke-Williams :: Blog

I posted a comment on the Eduspaces Central page asking about the removal of the messages feature that I had enjoyed for a long time.  Dave was kind enough to explain that a security problem had developed with the messages service and that this was the reason it was deleted from Eduspaces. I can understand the action.  Definitely makes sense.

Dave asked me an interesting question.  He asked if I would be willing to work on the replacement messaging system and/or pay for the original developer to rebuild it?

I replied that "no" I do not do coding; however, I would be willing to pay a fee for the messaging service.  I suggested to Dave that many Web 2.0 services (e.g., Skype) offer "extras" for a fee.  Why couldn't Eduspaces take this approach?

For example, I subscribe to Skype's voicemail service.  The service is now packaged with Skype's outcalling feature (i.e., Skype to land-line telephone service).  I pay a flat fee for unlimited use for a year.  The cost of the service is very reasonable.

I use Skype voicemail with my university classes.  I subscribe.  My students do not need to subscribe.  Students can leave me a voicemail message.  I can leave them a voicemail message.  Using Skype voicemail has greatly reduced the number of traditional emails that I receive.  That's definitely worth the cost to me.  "No cost" for my students is an excellent benefit for them.

The messaging system in Eduspaces provided a means for private communication within Eduspaces.  When someone sent a message, the system forwarded an email message to me telling me about the message.  This was a great feature.  The "system" spoke to me, rather than my having to look to see if I had any unread messages.

I have not posted to Eduspaces for quite a while.  Many of the people who used to post regularly do not seem to post often or at all any more.  Maybe they are too busy to post and share their ideas.  Maybe they gave up after the disappointing events of last December-January.

Whatever the reasons, I truly hope that my friends will begin to post again.  I miss their insights, feedback, and humor.

Dave's question about my willingness to pay for a service is a fair and most reasonable question.  I pay for premium features offered by Web 2.0 services.  Perhaps, a blended approach (i.e., free service + premium fee service) along the lines of what I described here might work for Eduspaces.

Recently, Eduspaces was refreshed.  The updates were welcomed.  However, those who monitor Eduspaces need to pay more attention to the service and be more responsive to questions about the performance of Eduspaces.

What do you think?  Would you pay for a premium service if included in Eduspaces?  Reply to this post.  Tell me what you think.

Rick Lillie

 

 

Hallo
I have uploaded on elgg community site new language pack for Georgian language.
Dear Administrators, please look http://community.elgg.org/pg/plugins/highlander/read/9324/georgia
and add it to eduspaces too.
Thank you much in advance!!!

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Socialtech/~3/402179481/being-there.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Socialtech/~3/302862833/young-people

http://francesbell.com/2008/11/19/education-futures-in-an-open

How can education change in a connected world?

This blog post was in answer to a question on the CCK08 forum, but I enjoyed writing it so much, I thought that I would post it here as well.

Illich identified three purposes of a good education system:

1. “it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives;


2. empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them;


3. and, finally, furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known.” http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich/Deschooling/chap6.html

I thought that I would examine those by exploring some current ‘free’ and ‘open’ models related to software and web services to relate to a possible future scenario for education.

What is the best model for providing access to available resources sustainably throughout the future?  At face value, a distributed ‘web’ model, where multiple copies of resources are available seems attractive.  This approach can protect us against us failure at a central point but raises the problem of knowing which version we are looking at. Let’s compare that with Open Source Software where multiple forks exist all over the place but there is likely to be a version-controlled store at the OSS web site - hmmm! sounds like a library. A big incentive for the investment of resource involved in the management of this configuration-managed code library must be the possibility for the volunteers in OSS communities to make money on their day jobs, offering paid-for professional services (training, hosting, consultancy) associated with the OSS.

(Semi-)’Free’ services like flickr offer structured and more imaginative ways of finding and managing content but how sustainable are they?  A future where the plug was pulled on a service like flickr is not inconceivable.  I have backups of all my flickr images but what about the links to others, dialogue, etc.  Alternative approaches to the quasi-commercial and commercial described above have been public service organisations like libraries and non-commercial organisations (e.g. BBC) that become ‘institutions’.

Now let’s look at “those who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them“.  To me they sound like people who become some of the best teachers.  So for fun and delight, they could do this on open online forums, but how do they eat and buy the baby a new pair of shoes?  In the OSS model, they could make their ‘content’ freely available but offer add-on services for payment.  What are the consequences of this for the availability of high-quality learning support across society?  There is a (compelling) theory that the middle classes create structures for education (often with the most respectable of motives) from which their offspring derive the maximum benefit.  The ruling elite are not constrained by these structures but know how to get a very effective education for their own, networking being an essential component.

It’s easy to see the problems with schools, but somewhat more challenging to replace them with social organisations that can still address underserved communities and disadvantaged individuals without acquiring some of the undesirable attributes of institutions. Open source/content teachers may or may not become more effective outside do of ’school’ as we know it now.  The question is  how do we find out if and how to make those changes?

Our last challenge (should we choose to accept it) is to “furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known.”  An education systems that wishes to do this can certainly take advantage of the affordances of the web in making public the ideas of a wider range of people.  Unfortunately, this does not guarantee an increase in influence, and the reality of making your challenge known may be much more to with pre-existing power relations.  Herring et al’s findings would suggest we should not be too sanguone about the democratising effects of blogs and other ‘read/write web’ tools and services with regard to public discourse.

“The observation that men are more likely than women and teens to create filter blogs provides a key: It is filter blogs that are privileged, consistent with the notion that the activities of educated, adult males are viewed by society as more interesting and important than those of other demographic groups. ” http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/women_and_children.html

I remain an optimist who believes that a ‘good’ education can offer the chance of empowering individuals to influence the power relations within which they may struggle, as well as  expanding their knowledge networks.

http://francesbell.com/2008/11/19/a-networked-conversation/

Stephen Downes posted a reply to my blog post http://francesbell.com/2008/11/09/cck08-is-connectivism-a-learning-network/ at http://connect.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=44375.  I tried to reply there but my comment was not accepted so I am posting it here, hoping it gets picked up automatically.

I was very grateful for Stephen’s comments, as there is plenty still be ironed out (from my persective at least).  I found it interesting that he said that the application of networks to the social domain is not a metaphor. Presumably it is not a ‘literal truth’.  I can imagine that there could be some links between the social behaviour of individuals in a group or network and their brain activity relating to it, but I don’t know that this has been researched and presented.   It is seductive to think that principles from networks in neural science apply in social networks, actor-networks and connectivist learning networks but I think that we would need some evidence (from neural studies and/or rich case studies of human and non-human behaviours).

I am not holding out on Stephen - but rather still studying this from reading about connectivism and actor-network theory. 

I was interested that Stephen claim a clear distinction between social action and learning theory.  One of the things that has slightly surprised me on CCK08 has been the boldness and desire for radical change, informed by connectivism.  When cast in this light, connectivism seems as much about social action as about learning (though of course the two are intertwined).

I hope that my modest critique can contribute but what I really hope to see are empirical studies (case studies, action research, etc.) that apply ANT and connectivism to educational change and processes (radical and otherwise).  That will really move things forward, I think.  Mine is a developmental critique - not a complaint.

I like to consider myself a liberal-minded person, open to various perspectives and points of view quite different than my own. With this premise in mind, I want to share a situation which I am having great difficulty wrapping my head around.

As part of my course on integrating technology into the secondary curriculum, I have students create learning logs as a way of introducing them to weblogs and their many uses. I gave students an opportunity to pick from a number of free, online weblogging applications. Several of my students chose to host their learning logs using Edublogs which seemed at the time to be a reasonable solution.

As I was reading through students weblogs I found links embedded in their content that seemed rather odd. For example one student mentioned the word "energy" in her blog entry and I found a pop-up link directing me to Exxon/Mobile. Hmmm? I thought and I read on. This same student also mentioned "college" in her entry wherein a hyperlink associated with the University of Phoenix popped up. I found this rather odd, since the student was currently enrolled here at the University of Florida. I left a comment on her site asking her why she chose these odd links, only to find that when I returned to her content, the links had disappeared.

I checked my other student learning logs in Edublogs and found a similar pattern. It then dawned on me that these links were being added to their content without their notice.

I quickly dashed a note to Mr. James Farmer, the CEO of Edublogs, asking what was going on here. Were these hyperlinks intentionally being embedded? Was there a disclaimer that users of this free site signed acknowledging that hyperlinks to different advertisements would be embedded in their content? What was going on?

I never heard back from Mr. Farmer, so I decided to go see what information I could find about this situation on the Edublogs site. I found a forum discussion where several Edublogs users were concerned about this practice.

Here is a sample of what they said:

I was updating one of my blogsites this weekend. I noticed that when I changed the theme "ContentLinks" ads started randomly appearing. I cannot have this on my school's blogs. I changed the theme back to "Borderline Chaos" which doesn't appear to have the pop-ups. Is this a feature on all themes now? Is there a way to turn it off? If I become a supporter, would this feature be removed?

I also noticed this issue. I'm using the "Blue Moon" theme. I will try changing my theme. If this is a new edublogs policy, there should have been some notice ahead of time. This is unacceptable for a school blog and I am quite offended by having these ads forced uppon us! Edublogs, do you have an answer??

Content Links in the middle of my posts which include unauthorized advertisements is unacceptable. One of the reasons I moved my blog to Edublogs was to avoid ads in my blog, and this is even worse than Adsense found off to the side which people can easily ignore. Please remove these or let us know if they are here to stay, I will move my blog to another more school friendly blog host if thats the case.

These comments were made 5 months ago when this new "feature" was turned on. They mostly continue in this vein from a handful of the hundreds of Edublogs users. Mr. Farmer offered this response to the situation within the forum as follows:

Apologies for this, it was a bug in our system and should be fixed now, we have been experimenting with (extremely occasional) advertising in order to support Edublogs and you can find more information here: http://edublogs.org/forums/topic.php?id=5303&replies=3

It should be fixed up now.

Cheers, James

The link then takes you to another forum post which is dated "8 months ago" which suggests that this feature was in the works longer than Edublogs users were aware:

Andrew and I have been giving Edublogs and revenue some serious thought of late.

In particular we've been trying to figure out how we can best support the growth and development of the site - both in numbers of users and in terms of functionality (we've got much bigger plans than the forums up our sleeves).

We're thinking about the costs of servers and of development and support staff.

As you know, we've got Edublogs Campus - but as you may not know, it's actually a really competitively priced product... for the amount of support, development and server space it occupies it doesn't really pay for more than itself.

So, we tried the 'Supporter' route and while we've had some great feedback from a lot of people on this and quite a few of you signed up it's not coming anywhere close to paying the hosting bills at the moment.

For example, our monthly hosting costs are around $3.5K, 'Supporter' is $25 (annually) and we've had about 30 - 40 people sign up for it.

I know that improving it still further will assist... but you can see where I'm getting at.

So, we're considering trying out some adsense, in the same way that wp.com do it.

What this would mean would be that:

- You would never see any ads
- Your students would never see any ads
- Your regular readers would never see any ads
- There wouldn't be any ads in feed readers
- Noone who has bookmarked you or types in your URL would see any ads
- No logged in Edublogs users would ever see any ads

In fact, very few people would see ads at all, but enough search engine visitors might in order to help us cover the bills and continue to grow and develop Edublogs.

And (and this makes us very different to wp.com) if you are an Edublogs Supporter there would never be any ads on your site ever.

And of course no Campus sites would have ads either.

I have to be honest, I was first very opposed to the concept (as you might have guessed!) but something I've figured out over the last few months of talking about it to people online and face to face is that not many people actually care.

I have never, for example, heard of a user saying that they don't want to use wp.com because of their ads, or that they'd choose Edublogs over wp.com based on their ad policy (that I mentioned above).

Also, our idea with this is that we try it out temporarily and if it doesn't work out or upsets people too much - we'll look into other approaches.

But at this time we'd love to hear your thoughts, so please, um, let us hear your thoughts below :)

Cheers, James

While Mr. Farmer offers a cogent explanation for the need for revenue to support free, online hosting of Edublogs, he never says anything about embedding advertisements in user created content. I am not opposed to advertisements on free online applications. However, there is a big difference between placing an advertisement on a free site and placing an advertisement in the user's content. Huge difference. Major fucking difference. By doing such, Edublogs has crossed a line that is highly unethical in terms of having user's unknowingly endorse corporations or advertising content within content they have generated. Again, having a widget or a sidebar filled with advertising content is one thing; embedding advertisements in user generated content is another. The differences are not in the same ball park, not in the same area code, not in the same hemisphere.

What makes matters a tad worse is the defensive posture assumed by Edublogs and "drmike -- Volunteer Support Guru." They seem to be missing the point. Very few users are complaining about adverts. What users are concerned about is the way in which this situation is being managed. Since "drmike" is an anonymous unpaid professional, I suppose... you get what you pay for. You might think with the new advertising revenue being generated by Edublogs, they could afford to hire a less cynical customer relations person.

While I am not a legal scholar, I have requested legal counselors to consider this situation and will be reporting on their findings in the near future. I am not sure how "in-line" advertising in this manner will lead to better service for users, nor are users given any indication of what these services might be.

Overall I am quite perplexed by this situation. My students using Edublogs report feeling violated and that their content is being mis-represented by the hosting service. Myself and my students are clearly okay with advertiser-supported services. What we do not like is having words or brands put in our mouths that we have not chosen to support. Legally, in certain circumstances, this action is close to vilification or libel and it should not be tolerated by any user of any free service unless you have legally agreed to allow the host to do so.

While I am clearly late to this discussion, I am angry at myself for not looking into this before recommending it to my students. There are many free sites used by my class that advertise, but none, zero, zilch, nada, that embed advertisements in the content created by us, the users. And why haven't other free applications done this? I can only guess it was for legal and ethical reasons loosely considered by the Edublogs administration.

More to come...

 

Image from here and here

http://carolt.edublogs.org/2008/11/13/week-4-and-5/

Week 4  was working on the research design. It’s been slow going and I felt bogged down and wanting to start work on the course building before I run out of time.

In the middle of all that took a few days “out” by way of a diversion to do a bit more family history research. Anyway as sometime happens, when busy at work and study, a ”mental break”  renews one’s energy to get back to the task at hand.

So to week 5 and a bit of excitement the first tangiable object resulting from the project, the results of my training needs survey are in.

Here the beauty of using Moodle comes into its own. The survey was done on line and the built in reporting tool has already done all the analysis work for me and provides the results in graphical and numeric form.

 

Comparing this with the effort of the last piece of research I did on the pupils on paper I recall the hassle and inaccuracy, double checking, inputting all the data into excell and then figuring out the correct equations to get a meaningful result.

 

Granted it took me several hours to build the questionairre, but it was a fraction of the time I spent on other recent paper based surveys. The last time this survey was issued the results were looked at briefly but never analised at all statistically.

 

All I had to do this time was observe the number of participents entries rising until after a couple of e-mail reminders all but one of my study group complied. I deliberately did not look at the results until they were all in having learned from my previous research that the full picture often looks different from the interim result.

 

Here is an example showing the way the results are presented for a rating question.

  

I found that by scanning through the 16 questions I could quickly identify the gaps in knowledge, and those areas where a whole topic was not well understood. For a busy teacher with several hundred pupils this must be of great benefit.

Authored by carolt. Hosted by Edublogs.

http://francesbell.com/2008/11/09/cck08-is-connectivism-a-lear

CCK08

Connectivism is presented as a theory of learning for the network age, where learning is something that takes place within networks of humans and non-humans, including objects, and connections mediated by digital networks and devices.  The growth of the Internet, connected digital media are seen as the backdrop for the development of a new theory of learning.  In this blog post, I am questioning how connectivism itself stands up as a learning network.

“At its heart, connectivism is the thesis that knowledge is distributed across a network of connections, and therefore that learning consists of the ability to construct and traverse those networks.”  http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2007/02/what-connectivism-is.html

Siemens offers eight principles of Connectivism that promote diversity, connection, inclusion of non-human appliances, know how rather than know that, maintenance of and ability to spot connections, currency of knowledge, learning nature of decision-making http://www.itdl.org/journal/jan_05/article01.htm

So is connectivism a network in connectivism’s terms?

Connectivism comprises a network of people (such as George Siemens, Stephen Downes and those who have blogged about it ), things such as published papers, blog posts (see previous search), and events such as the recent MOOC CCK08 and the 2007 Connectivism Conference.

Connectivism shows evidence of porosity:

• links with Cormier’s ideas on rhizomatic knowledge (that draws on Deleuze )


• biological models where Downes draws in his (and others’) earlier work on Connectionist knowledge


• inclusion of Chaos Theory


• and other examples

We have also had examples of diversity within connectivism.  George acknowledged the difference between his and Stephens views of Networks and groups in his mid-course reflection, Dave Cormier’s comments at EVOLVE MOOC online event on 3 Nov 2008  .

Early in CCK08, George Siemens seemed to recognize that the MOOC might be a site for critique of connectivism saying:

“I hope we can make progress in this course [on critiquing Connectivism], but I don’t think we’ll achieve the task in only 12 weeks. Exploring, critiquing, extending, and revising a theory is a task of generations.”

http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/moodle/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=808#p4369

If we position connectivism in a historical trajectory of knowledge we can identify research/theories that:

• influence connectivism


• could (or could have) influence connectivism

This can help us identify connectivism’s (potential) contribution to broader networks of knowledge.

Connectivism is clearly an attractive theory for practitioners wishing to change their practice to take advantages of the affordances of digital media, increasingly available at the location where learning can be acquired and put into practice (witness >2300 people signing up to CCK08).  More broadly, there is an appetite for new models of knowledge, challenges to barriers to the spread of knowledge, evident in open publishing and open educational resources.

I am beginning to construct a critique of Connectivism, based on its own principles and informed by my own analysis and experience on CCK08 as at 10 November 2008 - comments most welcome.

Principle	Comments
Learning and knowledge rests in diversity of opinions.	Diversity is evident in sources that inform connectivism but I question the impact of the diversity of opinions present in CCK08 forums, blogs and events on the theory itself.
Learning is a process of connecting specialized nodes or information sources.	The agency of CCK08 participants in connecting themselves, their writings, and the sources provided has been impressive.The CCK08 wiki will remain a permanent starting point for those wishing to explore the CCK08 archive but they may have difficulty finding the tweets and blog/forum posts, unless more work is done. I am working on simple searched that can locate in time some of these disparate channels.
Learning may reside in non-human appliances.	I cannot understand why that more established theory that uses ‘symmetric analysis’, namely Actor-Network Theory, has not been referenced, if only to say why it is/is not relevant.
Capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known	CCK08 has been an excellent model of this, with participants gaining skills in connection and finding information.  My own network and knowledge have increased significantly.
Nurturing and maintaining connections is needed to facilitate continual learning.	It seems likely that participants have increased connections and learned to maintain them. I couldn’t comment on the protagonists’ extension and nurturing of their connections - scale must have been an issue - promoting filtering that can militate against the nurturing of new connections.
Ability to see connections between fields, ideas, and concepts is a core skill.	Protagonists have shown their ability to connect between fields of their own choosing, but less willingness to explore fields suggested by others e.g. Actor-Network Theory
Currency (accurate, up-to-date knowledge) is the intent of all connectivist learning activities.	I see this as almost a weakness of connectivism. Being heavily focused on Internet sources, it suffers from the >70 years or open sources i.e. avoidance of closed academic sources phenomenon.  This could explain the absence of Actor-network theory
Decision-making is itself a learning process. Choosing what to learn and the meaning of incoming information is seen through the lens of a shifting reality. While there is a right answer now, it may be wrong tomorrow due to alterations in the information climate affecting the decision.	Q.E.D.  If the lens of a shifting reality does not allow connectivism to utilize its networks to look beyond its ‘information climate’, it is inevitably weakened, by its own criteria and more generally.

I am currently working on a comparison of connectivism and actor-network theory, If connectivism isn’t willing to be mutable knowledge as it extends its network, then it is self-contradictory i.e. not behaving like the knowledge and networks it describes in the theory. There are little or no links between ANT and connectivism.  Observing what has happened when ANT has been mentioned in the MOOC forums (by Ailsa Haxwell, Roy Williams and myself) or in Ailsa Haxwell’s blog, for example, then it has not been taken up by more than few participants, and not by connectivism’s chief protagonists, Stephen Downes and George Siemens.  I joined this course to learn about connectivism, and also to try to understand why two theories that are based on networks of human and non-humans are currently latent links (Hayhtornthwaite 2002).  Can we help turn them into weak links, and then influence connectivism?

My question/statement at the MOOC EVOLVE event was

If connectivism isn’t willing to be mutable knowledge as it extends its network, then it is self-contradictory i.e. not behaving like the knowledge and networks it describes in the theory.

Haythornthwaite, C. (2002). Strong, weak, and latent ties and the impact of new media. Information Society, 18(5), 385-401.

Progress after four weeks

I am not quite sure if I am presently moving in the right direction. While I am discovering new information about learning objects on a daily basis, I feel somewhat confused about all the different research methods, strategies and designs. It seems to be a bit clouded at the moment and I cannot really decide which avenue to pursue – am I on the right track, am I behind, ahead?

Various resources suggest regular contact with the supervisor in the early stages of the project. This would help to direct the focus of the purpose of the research in the right directions. It would assist to formulate a tentative research questions to guide the design of the research. I t would confirm that the milestones have been achieved as suggested by Dawson and slides (Act 1.2) of Week 1. https://victory.port.ac.uk/webct/urw/lc5116011.tp0/cobaltMainFrame.dowebct

            

I will keep close tabs on developments and see how it affects the final deliverables and outcomes.