At Open University Learning Design "Cloudfest" or Cloudworks Summit, with U&I colleague Jim Hensman, Steven Warburton, Yishay Mor, as well as many other educational developers and LTs.

Cloudworks (CW soon to move to will move to cloudworks.ac.uk) is a nascent site/service to support (a community of) practitioners interested in learning design (LD) and the design cycle as it relates to LD. For every answer there are 10 new questions and many contradictions, such as:

• process v product
  
  
• tacit v explicit
  
  
• best v good-enough
  
  
• metadata v folksonomy
  
  
• text v image
  
  
• web site v web service
  
  
• input front end v "cloud this" button on your own page
  
  

The team wants to be one node in a wider community and are trying to create a culture of openness in terms of systems, content and community. It was suggested that they might be a Flickr for LDs. At the moment there are no permission controls; anyone can join. The site uses Drupal underneath. They are taking a rapid perpetual beta approach: release early, release often. And indeed it is not working "perfectly" at the moment. But, there are some tacit assertions about what and how the team are trying to shape the site. There is a reluctance to define who the site is for? But it should not try to be everything for everyone. It is acknowledged that it is not Ning or Facebook.

It is asserted that the site has to be social but it is being content-led. I suggested that the developer team has to model the behaviour of the community. After all they are a group (community?) of people interested in LD. How to grow the site? Steven and Yish suggested appealing to the more selfish needs of the wider community. Various suggestions included:

• offer useful stuff
  
  
• help steer the folksonomy (autocomplete tags, my tags, popular tags)
  
  
• provide a discipline-based structure; most teachers identify with their discipline first; if the nuance of the disciplinary discourse is absent from the design, no matter how general, it is unlikely to be adopted
  
  
• separate visual designs from verbal designs (show me the pictures)
  
  
• map between learning designs and other representations of learning processes such as patterns (see PlaNet)
  
  
• expand into a wider ecosystem of tools, such as a Database of Compendium learning designs
  
  
• be clear about the boundaries of the site (bounded openness) and its primary aim
  
  

Marion Manton, later, offered a very clear explanation of the dialogic nature of learning design practice in the "real world". Most learning design takes place with a lot of conversation. Yet, most LD tools do not recognise or serve this dialogic function. CW, through a social networking approach wishes to provide this dialogue space.

Critical mass and sustainability are big issues. Many communities exist. CW wants to link with other communities, not to be the only community. A low barrier to entry is key. Be able to share things that are just good enough.

For me the service aspect of the site rather than the community aspect would get me interested. Feeds in and feeds out are essential. Again, as Yish said, "give me a cloud-this button".

Ownership and attribution issues are important. Who "owns" an LD? Upload should include a CC button for easy licensing selection. In a webbed world you need a licensing regime based on CC, to assert what is yours

Martin Weller also introduced Social Learn, an OU ecosystem, including:

• cohere
  
  
• cloudworks
  
  
• OpenLearn
  
  
• Facebook
  
  
• Microlearner (Twitter for education)
  
  
• 2Learner
  
  
• exclusive OU content
  
  etc
  
  

Sarah Knight suggests looking at the QIA Excellence gateway, who had a resource sharing site when they were a part of Ferl.

See also the Canadian LD repository.

Who was there: Juliette Culver (OU, lead developer), Martin Weller (OU), Andrew Brasher (OU), Marianne Shepherd (JISC InfoNet), Jim Hensman (Coventry), GR (Brookes, JISC Emerge), Paul Clark (OU), Michelle Bachler (OU), Patrick McAndrew (OU), Shelia MacNeil (JISC CETIS), Sarah Knight (JISC), Sue Bennett (Wollongong), Liz Masterman (Oxford), Marion Manton (Oxford), Perry Williams (OU), Henning Mohren (Fern Universitat), YoHan Ling (?), Steven Warburton (KCL), Yishay Mor

On Monday 21 July four Emergers, Paul, Josie, Joe and I went to the OSS Watch Symposium, "Profiling the Community". I hope the Emerge community perspective added a dimension to the discussions, to which I'll post a link when I get it. I found the research communities' directions and nascent VRE (see here and here) very interesting. The model of the Experiment Life Cycle (ELC) has affinities with our own Users and Innovation Development Model (UIDM). The official Emerge presentation in slideshare is here. Or, you could read the story starting here. Some digital video is here.

I do become concerned that modeling-based (UIDM or ELC or any) investigations work best in reasonably narrowly defined domains where the orders of complexity are constrained. But, then can you extrapolate? Can you extrapolate from a FLOSS community forge perspective to a wider community perspective, e.g. teachers, lecturers, faculty, admin, staff and students using software at university anywhere? Or rather, what can we learn from FLOSS communities that can be applied elsewhere?

I found the visualisation of data shared by Isreal Herraiz, of Libresoft, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain, very useful, though I would like to see such visualisations map exchanges and other connections between people. Larger communities, I suggest, will tend to be multi modal, with clusters (or mountains) of activity in particular areas. Some of these areas will be inter-dependent. Others will be independent and could spin off to form separate self-sustaining communities, but may stay for reasons of affinity and preference.

OSSWatch asked about next big things. Josie exposed the growing world of OSS social network solutions (slides). I put two related issues into our sights: widely distributed peer-to-peer (mesh) networks (I wrote about them here and here); and widely distributed data stores (bit torrent); or, One Laptop per Child and Pirate Bay.

Yes, there are questions about security, trust, authentication and all that on massively peer-to-peer networks. But, I expect there are solutions in a combination of small to medium-size institutional and civic federations with a trust ranking system like the Google page-rank and ad-rank algorithms (who trusts whom). Rather than striving for a pure binary trust/don't trust, zero/one, access/not in a situation you make it fuzzy 0.0-1.0 and all points between, and decide how tolerant you will be. This, I suggest, will be a new direction of challenge to the institutions of society: public and private. For instance, peer-to-peer, fast, VOIP networks (Skype) constitute at least a disruption to the telcos' markets; now imagine a world of peer-to-peer Skype phones (that work).

Similarly data integrity, provenance and related source criticisms are severely challenged by widely distributed data storage technology. Are there persistent watermarks that can authenticate data? If not, what knowledge can be trusted?

Analysis and synthesis, i.e. teaching and learning, in such a peer-to-peer, distributed-data environment will require fresh approaches a long way beyond the vle.

I enjoyed our discussions.

I look forward to meeting OSSWatch at ALT-C.

Thematic clusters are a component of the new environment for the U&I programme as we move into the benefits realisation phase. The purposes of clusters are to help support projects, to create a synthesis across project outputs, and facilitate serendipity.

Those of you who are following Emerge developments on the platform may have noticed this post: “Emerging Clusters”

The community needs a chance to define its internal dimensions of demarcation. I used a survey to interrogate the community members about their views of dimensions of participation.

The result has been four clusters:

1. Social networking and collaborative learning through information discovery and exchange
   
   
   • Awesome
     
     
   • Helmet
     
     
   • Content Integration
     
     
   • GoldDust
     
     
   • SkillClouds
     
     
   • TicTocs
     
     
   • Streamline
   
   
   
2. Multimedia social technologies for engagement, reflection and learning
   
   
   • MOOSE
     
     
   • Habitat
     
     
   • Reflect2.0
     
     
   • ASEL
     
     
   • PLaNet
   
   
   
3. Shifting centres: time, place, agency and technologies for learning
   
   
   • M3
     
     
   • Argosi
     
     
   • SoundsGood
     
     
   • MacFob
     
     
   • PreView
   
   
   
4. Web2.0 platforms for learning, teaching and skills development
   
   
   • APT STAIRS
     
     
   • Persona
     
     
   • UKCAN-Skills
     
     
   • eTutor
     
     
   • Flourish

I first wrote this piece in 2002. It is still true. It is both the selfish thoughtlessness of many cyclists and the boorish hostility of motorists that is the direct link to the yet un-won war against fascism.

The greatest struggle of the last century was against Fascism. But, we have forgotten what this struggle was about. It was not a war against foreign nations and evil rulers. Fascism is incipient in our own society too. I am not writing about right-wing racist hooliganism (although that is part of it). I am writing about that tendency in all of us to say that the rules that apply to others do not apply to me; I only obey the laws that suit me; I am above the law.

What does this have to do with cycling? I cycle to and from work five days a week in Oxford. It is warfare on the streets. The contempt with which motorists treat cyclists is frightening — and life threatening. But, in some part, cyclists are to blame. Red lights? Not for me. One way street? Not for me. Lighting up time? Not for me. Pavement? I'll have that. The contempt with which cyclists treat the rules of the road leads to the contempt with which motorists treat cyclists.

It is both the selfish thoughtlessness of many cyclists and the boorish hostility of motorists that is the direct link to the yet un-won war against fascism. Because fascism is the ultimate political manifestation of selfish thoughtlessness and boorish hostility. Fascism arogates to itself both the "right" to make the law and then the "privilege" to apply the law selectively with respect to one's own self interest and relative political power.

The rules of the road are quite clear with respect to cycles. The rules of the road require us all to forgo a small part of our self interest in order to protect ourselves and our fellow travellers: on foot, two wheels or four. Run a red light? Ride the wrong way up a one way street on the pavement? No lights? Twenty mile speed limit? Park on the double yellows? Those rules don't apply to me.

That's fascism and that is what we still have to fight against.

This is a very rough summary of the excellent presentations from the first round of benefits realisation activities, presented at the York programme launch.

• e-Volve (Graham Attwell),
  
  
• Innovation Networks and Communities of Practice (Jim Hensman)
  
  
• Librarians CoP - LCop (Paul Mayes)
  
  
• Virtual Design Studio (Miles Metcalfe)
  
  
• Personal Learning Environment - PLE (Mark van Harmelen)
  
  
• User Interfaces, Social Software Technologies and Learning Experience (Panayotis Zaphiris, Stephanie Wilson)

These case studies illustrated some of the good that came out of the first phase of the Emerge Project. The overarching concerns appear to be

• data management
  
  
• risk management
  
  
• usability
  
  
• platform-type tools.

Evolve is a group of research groups working through Skype trying to break away from the linearity of traditional research activity. The activity IS (in part, anyway) the research IS (at least one of) the outcome(s). They are developing the concept of a "rich survey" which is

• interactive
  
  
• uses a variety of media
  
  
• has space to share answers and create dialogue
  
  
• and is time bound

Jim Hensman looked in detail at the PlaNet project and compared the practice to other communities and networks that aid innovation in order to explore the potential for transfering lessons from Emerge, or what in an ideal world Emerge could be.

• an innovation network of some form
  
  
• model for community of communities.

Paul Mayes gathered together 10 different small groups of librarians, lecturers and other information scientists as a purposeful "community of development". LCop is "crash testing" the CoP concept and has succeeded in getting his institution to support the development of LCop over 5 years. He particularly found that the concept of "community" (of practice, etc) was helpful in encouraging people to come together in what might be called semi-formal groupings to develop ideas prior to them becoming formalised as projects.

For Miles Metcalfe and the Virtual Design Studio at Ravensbourne College, Emerge was a good network to expand the capacity of a very small institution. The creative industries have been subject to dramatic change, transforming as if from departments of Art into Departments of Computer Science. VDS aimed to create or simulate the studio experience on-line using collaborative images and distributed video. Through the Emerge project he and Mark van Harmelen came together: Mark had the technology, Miles had the need. As a result of the project and the collaboration, Ravensbourne college has created a learning development department.

The problem, for Mark van Harmelen and the Personal Learning Enviroment prototype (Mark van Harmelen) is that there are too many environments. The solution: provide social software substrate, a constructivist environment where people. Support independent learners and change the face of education. Senior managers get more efficient use of studio space. Four universities are exploring the use of the PLE.

Panayotis Zaphiris described the User Interfaces, Social Software Technologies and Learning Experience UI analysis tools: eye-tracking technology monitoring eye movement when user is using an interface. UI analysis is available to all groups developing their projects.

The project is a consortium of many parts, led by Oxford Brookes and the University of Essex.

The aim is:

• To support the JISC’s forming of an effective and sustainable CoP
• To provide an appropriate infrastructure and tool kit for the CoP
• To support the CoP through specific activities
  
• To support the JISC in developing the next generation of learning, teaching and administration technologies through the use of the UIDM
• To support the CoP in understanding the value of the UIDM
• To support project teams in the use of the UIDM
• To have fun!

There is (or would be) a slideshare presentation here that sets out some key principles of the project, but for some reason the link is not embedding either using the rtf editor or naked html. So go here for the dope:

http://www.slideshare.net/georgeroberts/emerge-v7 

Much more soon.

p.s. hmmm and where is that bullet list?