learning spaces - Carol Shergold's blog

Approaches to learning: deep and surface approaches

2009-05-09T09:45:00.006+01:00

This week I've been reading a paper by John Richardson, Students' approaches to learning and teachers' approaches to teaching in higher education.

The paper outlines a number of ways of categorising how students and teachers think about learning and teaching.

One classic approach is that of Marton from 1976. He identified three approaches to learning:

deep, where the student takes an active role and attempts to relate what they are learning to their existing knowledge
surface, where the student is unreflective and focuses on the facts and details of what they are learning without attempting to synthesise or integrate them
strategic, where the student concentrates their efforts on passing the exam

I wonder, in passing, whether the deep / surface distinction relates to a construct I have found helpful in understanding different thinking styles. One factor in the Myers Brigg Type Indicator Instrument is how people prefer to process information and it distinguishes between "N" people (whose standard approach is to find the big picture) and "S" people (who focus on the details). Are "N" people more likely to be deep learners?

In Richardson's paper the distinction between deep and surface is normative, and it is "better" to be engaged in deep rather than surface learning. However, other commentators point out that for some higher education endeavors, the surface approach is probably the most effective. Examples here would be disciplines where there are vast amounts of facts that need to be learned before the student can move on to achieving full disciplinary mastery such as law and medicine (see Atherton's page on deep/surface learning for a summary of this http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/deepsurf.htm).

I found it interesting to see how the deep/surface distinction mapped onto Sfard's distinction from 1998 between the acquisition metaphor and the participation metaphor in learning. The acquisition metaphor is the classic view of learning as the "getting" and "having" of knowledge. It is everywhere in our language when we try to talk about learning. The participation metaphor is harder to pin down as it is the less dominant metaphor. It relates to learning as a process, a process of becoming which crucially occurs in relation to others. It is particularly useful when trying to understand learning within communities of practice.

Quadrant diagram: Sfard and Marton
Click the image to load a larger version

Finally, there is a resonance in the distinction "deep" and "surface" - it calls to mind the work of Chomsky around understanding how language is structured (see brief note below). Does this connect at all?

References
Marton, F. (1976) 'What does it take to learn? Some implications of an alternative view of learning.' in N. Entwistle (Ed.) Strategies for research and development in higher education, 8.

Richardson, J.T.E. (2005) 'Students' approaches to learning and tetachings approaches to teaching in higher education', Educational Psychology, vol.25, no.6, pp.673-680.

Sfard, A. (1998) ‘On two metaphors for learning and the dangers of choosing just one’, Educational Researcher, vol.27, no.2, pp.4–13.

The deep structure of a sentence is the core semantic relations of that sentence (what it means?) whereas the surface structure relates to the particularity of what was said. E.g. the two sentences

Richardson wrote the paper
The paper was written by Richardson

would have a similar deep structure but a different surface structure.

So deep and surface are important words that are carrying with them some complex intellectual freight.

Scholarly bookmarking - sharing links across institutions

2009-04-24T19:33:00.002+01:00

Academic institutions often manage access to their electronic resources by creating institution-specific URLs. For example, one particular electronic library database within the Open University generates links like this to be saved to bookmarking tools:

http://libezproxy.open.ac.uk/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/login.aspx?direct=true&
db=a9h&AN=11830244&site=ehost-live&scope=site

This link ties us into one specific (OU) library in two ways:

it specifies a proxy server tied to the OU which will require authentication prior to resolving the variables within the link
the data identifying the particular resource is an accession number relating to the OU

So if you can't authenticate with the OU, you also can't dig the article details out of the variables encoded in the URL.

For social scholarly bookmarking, we ideally want to find ways of bookmarking that are meaningful for users regardless of their institution ..

I've started to use the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) for scholarly materials I'm bookmarking in delicious. Basically a DOI points to an underlying object rather than any of its attributes. So the current URL of an article can be viewed as an attribute as it may be subject to change, for example if the publishing house is taken over. But the DOI is permanent so it will not change. Resolver systems can take a DOI and return a current URL. This has huge benefits for managing scholarly resources.

Article on use of DOIs for library services: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may06/apps/05apps.html

Of course, delicious doesn't have a specific field for storing the doi, so at the moment I'm saving it as a tag containing the prefix "doi:" followed by the key

Bookmark: academic paper on elearning spaces
Originally uploaded by carol shergold

It should then be possible to manually plug the DOI into a tool like Google Scholar search for any individual to see where they had access. It would be feasible to write a bookmarklet that scanned delicious looking for DOIs and adding a link for objects that were available in a given individual's home instititution.

Personalised search and retrieval in Google scholar

2009-04-20T19:11:00.007+01:00

A very useful feature of Google Scholar is the Library Links feature. Using the "Scholar Preferences" link, you can record what institutional memberships you have, and (assuming the librarians have got it set up) Google Scholar will then produce links to scholarly materials tailored to give you access via these institutions. Here's an illustration.

The first image is from Google scholar before I've told it about my institutional access:

If I then use the Preferences link to tell it I'm an Open University student, and return to the search page, I now see:

a new link "Find it at OU" has appeared, which gives me direct access to the article as long as I've logged in to the OU Student Home.

I'm a relative new-comer to Google Scholar, but for me this "Find it at" feature is fantastic. It saves all the complexity of working out how to access resources. If you have more than one institutional affiliation, you can record them via the preferences.

This is a step towards a personalised learning environment, as the materials that are available to you will be there regardless of which institution they are derived from. The institution/s are responsible for managing the resources and for running the services that provide the authentication. Google Scholar (or equivalent tool) is integrating your access across all of the institutional boundaries by aggregating your permission sets. Revolutionary stuff, in a quiet way.

Blogging for course collaboration and discussion

2009-04-20T17:20:00.004+01:00

On h800 at the moment, we are using blogs for collaboration and sharing of ideas - hello fellow h800-ers, if you are stopping by here.

We've only just started blogging on the course, and I think the real advantages and disadvantages will start to emerge over the next few weeks.

But straight up at the beginning, I have observed one quite large inconvenience/inefficiency about the process. We're all supplying our blog URLs via the course forum. But obviously in order to manage potentially 20 or so blogs in an efficient way, we need to be using some kind of blog feed reader (such as Bloglines or Google Reader). Even then though, you have to add each blog individually and possibly a separate feed for its comments too (I haven't actually got around to sorting that out yet, argh).

I just did a little screen cast of the process of me adding a blog into the feed reader that I'm using (Google Reader). I did this partly because I wondered if it would be helpful for anyone, and partly to document just how long this took me. I think it's important because in terms of supporting blogging for teaching and learning, we have to find ways of making this seem simple and seamless.

(This is rendered small, or here's a full size view)

There isn't any explanation in the H800 literature for the week about what feed readers are and why you might need one, and this is probably an omission ..

How are other people getting on with trying to make the process workable?

Scholarly bookmarking - looking for tools

2009-04-18T14:19:00.013+01:00

I'm taking an Open University course on Technology Enhanced Learning (H800) at the moment, and some of the learning activities for this week (week 10) involve us using delicious for bookmarking journal articles.

delicious has many fantastic features, but inbuilt support for scholarly material isn't one of them.

In order to support the use and management of academic references, it would be great if some or all of these were added to the feature set of social bookmarking tools:

standard bibliographic fields such as author, journal, volume
the ability to pull in references automatically from web pages that contain this material such as journal pages or bibliographies
support for exporting of references in a standard format (to make it easier to create references sections)
notes sections where short comments about the resources could be made
the ability to group and organise resources

And then there are functions that support the location and identification of resources:

manage resources in terms of their digital object identifier (DOI)

This last point is particularly important. In academic publishing, the same resource can end up with different URLs. The URL is just an attribute belonging to an object; the DOI is directly represents the object itself.

Potential tools with support for scholarly bookmarking are:

http://www.bibsonomy.org/
http://www.connotea.org/
http://www.citeulike.org/

and there's also an excellent firefox plugin Zotero, which differs from the others in that it resides on the client rather than being a cloud computing service.

Has anyone got any suggestions about tools?

Characterising learning designs

2009-04-18T09:16:00.008+01:00

If we want to support the design of high quality learning, and to promote the reuse of designs, then we need to find suitable ways of both representing designs and of utilising those representations.

I've been reading a paper by Grainne Conole that focuses on these issues and in particular on how representations of learning designs can be used to scaffold and support the generation of new designs.

The paper focuses on two central questions:

How can learning designs be captured and represented?
What best supports the process of designing/creating learning activities?

Conole identifies the contradiction that:

(a) in order to be easy to understand and apply, designs need to be simple but simple designs may fail to capture enough detail

(b) rich, detailed descriptions can be 'difficult to understand and time consuming to apply' (p189)

She identifies 5 types of design:

narrative or case studies
patterns
vocabularies
diagrammatic or iconic representations
models

Learning designs differ in a number of respects:

their format of presentation - text, visual, auditory, multimedia
their degree of contextualisation (from abstract to contextualised)
level of granularity
degree of structure (flat vocabulary v typology)

The table below maps the characteristics of designs created with three different tools:

Characteristics of 3 learning design representations

Click on the image to view the full-size table.

References

Conole, G. (2008), 'The role of mediating artefacts in learning design' in Lockyer, L., Bennett, S., Agostinho, S. and Harper, B. (eds) Handbook of Research on Learning Design and Learning Objects: Issues, Applications and Technologies, pp. 187-209, Hersey PA, IGI Global.

E-portfolios: "what is it you want your learners to do?"

2009-03-12T15:57:00.008Z

This post follows an earlier one reporting back from the workshop on 9th March 2009, "How can e-portfolios support 21st century learning?"

As part of the event, Geoff Rebbeck talked about the way that e-portfolios have been used at Thanet College, a Further Education college in Kent.

For institutions thinking of implementing an e-portfolio system, Geoff asked the question "What is it you want your learners to do?". He stressed the importance of the pedagogy driving the process of procuring an e-portfolio system.

He raised some interesting questions:

Purpose: what do you want? is it for records of achievement, or is it for reflection? If reflection, how do students currently reflect? How do you teach it?

Ownership: who does the data belong to? Is it administrative data that can be mined by the institution to generate statistics on student achievement? Or is it owned by the individual student themselves?

Access rights: linked to ownership; who has access rights to the data?

Transferability: what happens when students leave? what happens when students arrive with existing portfolios?

At Thanet, they took the interesting decision to implement e-portfolios first of all with staff, on the grounds that once staff really understood what an e-portfolio could mean for their development, they would be much better placed to support students' use of e-portfolios. They worked in conjunction with the Institute for Learning (IfL), the professional body for FE lecturers.

A statutory part of Continuing Professional Development for IfL members is Teaching Observation, and Thanet took an institutional decision that all Teaching Observations would be reported and discussed via staff e-portfolios. Staff began to realise that the e-portfolio made appraisals easier to manage, and a couple of staff applied for jobs within Thanet by using their portfolio. A number of mentoring and critical friendships developed on the platform, and they have found that a broad group of staff have set up community areas.

Here's a YouTube video Geoff made in which 20 staff at Thanet answer the question "How did you last use your portfolio":

It gives a good feel for the varied use of the e-portfolio and of how it's been embedded into life at Thanet College.

An early account of this project can be found here:
http://excellence.qia.org.uk/page.aspx?o=157923

The Thanet CPD e-portfolio initiative is featured as a case study in JISC's Effective Practices with E-portfolio report.

Effective practice with e-portfolios

2009-03-12T12:03:00.012Z

I attended a JISC-funded Netskills event on Monday 9th March 2009 on the topic "How can e-portfolios support 21st century learning?"

Definitions of e-portfolios tend to include the following elements:

A collection of digital resources
that provide evidence of an individual’s progress and achievements
drawn from both formal and informal learning activities
that are personally managed and owned by the learner
that can be used for review, reflection and personal development planning
that can be selectively accessed by other interested parties e.g. teachers, peers, assessors, awarding bodies, prospective employers.

(Helen Beetham, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/themes/elearning/eportfolioped.pdf)

The discussion stressed that effective practice with e-portfolios isn't just about the final product - the process of arriving there is crucial.

This diagram from the JISC InfoKit summarises the relationship between process and product from a slightly more systems oriented perspective:

We mapped the current or planned uses of e-portfolios at our own institutions onto a useful matrix designed by Elizabeth Hartnell-Young and Gordon Joyes. I found it particularly helpful to identify how different projects and initiatives I was aware of fitted in to the matrix.

view a version of this matrix, partially annotated by me in relation to local projects

This was a helpful activity because it clarified the different kinds of purposes that e-portfolios are used for, along with the different tools that are used as part of the process of building a portfolio.

The focus on purpose was maintained in a presentation by Geoff Rebbeck, which I'll make the topic for a separate post.

The "Effective Practices with E-portfolios" handbook outlines 6 steps for e-portfolio based learning:

define: what is the purpose of your initiative, what are the issues you are aiming to address, think about the support needs of the users and the nature of the learning environment
understand: how will this impact on other pedagogic practices in the institution, what kind of learning outcomes do we require, will this impact on practitioners, admin staff, technical staff?
prepare: e-portfolios raise issues around ownership of data. There are questions of accessibility, copyright, IPR that need to be addressed in advance. Risks and benefits can be identified
engage: what is your strategy for engaging and sustaining commitment of learners, staff and everyone who is involved in supporting the initiative?
implement: identify factors such as timing, involvement of champions etc that might influence the outcomes
review: use a range of methodologies to explore how people feel about the service

Useful resources:
Effective practices with e-portfolios publication : "investigates current good practice in the use of e-portfolios as a support to learning and as an aid to progression to the next stage of education or to employment" - gives a good overview and a series of case studies

E-Portfolio InfoKit : recently launched from JISC, with background, policy drivers, purposes, case studies and support for selecting and implementing an e-portfolio system

http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/e-portfolios : a useful page with links to all audio resources etc from the InfoKit

Evaluating the learner experience : resources from JISC

Pedagogy and distance learning in Uganda

2009-02-15T22:18:00.010Z

Uganda has a population of 29.9 million people (World Bank 2006), with literacy levels of 62% and a ratio of Gross National Product per person of just $320 (World Bank 2002).

In 1998, 55% of primary school teachers had attained the required qualification level (UNESCO EFA year 2000 assessment). Just 2% of the populated are educated to tertiary level (http://www.iucea.org/?jc=papers-01).

The introduction of Universal Primary Education in Uganda in 1997 had the effect of almost trebling student numbers; annual spending on education increased by only 9%. The introduction of Millennium Development Goals for 2015 has pushed many African countries including Uganda into introducing Universal Secondary Education too, again with a massive impact on conditions in the education sector. Class sizes of 70 are common and many schools face huge shortages of furniture, basic equipment and books (http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/katineblog/2008/may/23/ugandawillachieveitsmillen).

Distance learning in Uganda
Uganda has a long history of distance education, which was first used in the colonial period as a way of training civil servants for administrative duties (Binns 2006). From Independence onwards, a key use for distance learning has been for the training of teachers. Since the 1980s there have been a number of programmes that have used distance education as a way of providing in-service training for primary school teachers. The main mode of distance education has been the use of printed texts, with radio and cassettes used to a lesser extent due to scarcity of required resources. Television and video are rarely used (fewer than 5% of households have a television according to http://www.nationmaster.com/country/ug-uganda/med-media).

Pedagogy
Distance learning requires access to resources such as a reliable distribution network (which could be postal, based on internet technology, based on mobile phone network etc) and to resources to be distributed to students. It can be argued that it also requires an educational system in which it is generally agreed that learning can take place without a teacher at the centre of a classroom (Rennie 2007). For example, in Nepal a style of distance learning that appears more acceptable than the distribution of printed resources is the use of video conferencing, which can replicate the dominant model of the expert teacher giving an oral presentation (Rennie 2007)

There is clearly a relationship between the dominant pedagogy used in an education system and the access to resources in that system. If 70 children are being taught by a single teacher with few books or other materials, then inevitably the pedagogic method will rely on the teacher's presence and his or her ability to impart information to pupils.

Reports show that even where Sub-Saharan African school curricula encourages investigational or activity methods, the majority of lessons rely on traditional rote-learning (Mereku, 2003; Mirembe, 2002).
Building an effective ‘Open Education Resource’ (OER) Environment for Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa: The TESSA Experience (http://www.wikieducator.org/images/6/6a/PID_402.pdf)

However, even if the teacher is the major "resource" available to pupils, that does not necessarily imply that the pedagogic approach has to be teacher-centred and that all learning has to be rote learning. O'Sullivan (2006) surveyed a number of classrooms in which teachers were teaching large groups of students. Successful strategies were identified by analysis of video recordings and interviews with students. The author's findings were that successful teachers:

praised children
looked around the classroom frequently to keep scanning all children, and used a lot of eye contact with students
used some repetition but did not resort to long periods of it
provided group tasks for students to work on and had established with students how group work was to be carried out so that it was efficient and effective
did not rely solely on rote learning and copying from the blackboard

(see http://www.id21.org/id21ext/e3mo3g1.html where O'Sullivan's findings are discussed in detail).

Binns (2006) describes efforts to ensure that distance learning for teaching training was student-centred. The Northern Integrated Teacher Education Project (NITEP) trained 3000 student teachers using distance learning. They evolved methods they described as a 'culture of care' which aimed to support students with their learning in very practical ways. This places students at the centre of their learning through their needs and difficulties being taken extremely seriously.

References

Binns, B. and Otto A. (2006). Quality assurance in Open Distance Education - towards a culture of quality: a case study from the Kyambogo University, Uganda. In Perspectives on Distance Education: Towards a Culture of Quality. (eds) Badri N. Koul and Asha Kanwar, Commonwealth of Learning 2006. Accessed as
http://www.col.org/SiteCollectionDocuments/PS-QA_chapter2.pdf

Rennie, F. and Mason, R. (2007). The Development of Distributed Learning Techniques in Bhutan and Nepal. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning. Volume 8, Number 1, 2007.

O'Sullivan, M. (2006). Teaching Large Classes: The International Evidence and a Discussion of Some Good Practice in Ugandan Primary Schools. International Journal of Educational Development, no 26, pp 24-37, 2006.

Tagging ambiguities

2008-11-16T11:04:00.011Z

I blogged a couple of months ago about taking part in the ReScope study on delicious usage. It's encouraged me to reflect on the way I tag.

Open tagging leads to relatively chaotic tag choices. This is often raised as a criticism of the "widsom of crowds" approach to tagging, where a community owned folksonomy of tags emerges (as opposed to a centrally managed taxonomy).

Marieke Guy and Emma Tonkin published a paper in D-Lib magazine on this entitled Folksonomies: Tidying up Tags?, in which they explored the extent to which tags used in delicious and flickr were based on dictionary words. They drew up a list of some of the possible ways that tag usage can be ambiguous.

Polysemy relates to a word being used in different contexts with different but related shades of meaning. So for example in my own tagging practice I have sometimes used the tag identity to refer to the ways that subjects construct and assert their own identities, with particular reference to activity on the web. Other times I have used it in a more technical sense, around the validation and authentication of tokens to confer access to resources.

Homonyms are words which are spelled the same but actually have different roots and therefore not related. For example, I have used the tag owl to refer to the bird that hunts by night (and in particular to the Owl of Minerva, that Hegel says does not take flight until darkness falls). But I've also used it in its sense as an acronym for Web Ontology language.

There is also a problem with synonyms. For example, I have used the two tags "QR" and qrcode where it would have been more useful to have used a single tag (and I will unify on "qrcode").

Guy and Tonkin also identified problems where different users chose to categorise similar phenomena at very different levels. I have tagged at different levels of categorisation for example where I have sometimes tagged an event as a conference, but other times used a shared specific "channel" style tag for it such as altc2008.

Finally there are differences in spelling, use of plurals, simple data entry mistakes and so on.

And these are just issues that arise with one single user tagging over a 3 year period.

Delicious had 1 million registered users in Sept 2006 and 5.3 million in Nov 2008 with 180 million unique URLs saved.

So clearly there's a rich and complex tag soup out there.

And yet .. there is absolutely no way that I would use a formal classification system to add metadata to the web pages I am interested in. Folksonomy is noisy, but at least there's some signal in there.

Owl of Minerva image from: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Owl_of_Minerva.jpg
Licensed under: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentation_License

Splashing out

2008-10-14T20:54:00.000+01:00

In a previous post I was thinking about the complexity of managing your identity on the web, particularly in relation to education.

This is one of the reasons why I really welcome the advent at Sussex of SPLASH. SPLASH is a new service run by the university web team. One of its features is that it offers a blog to everyone at the university. In common with other systems such as Elgg, people can choose exactly who they want to make their blog posts available to. Each post has separate permission settings. There is quite a fine-grained set of options available, including:

no one at all (except you)
people on your friends list
class-mates from one or all of the university courses you are recorded as studying
tutors on one or all of the university courses you are recorded as studying
anyone

That should make it possible to design interesting learning activities using blogging and peer review without staff and students having to get into complicated management of private groups.

Nice one SPLASH!

Pencil it in - thoughts on identity and permanence in relation to learning

2008-10-13T00:21:00.005+01:00

At the Technology and Technology-Practice: Re-shaping 21st Century Higher Education (Uni21HE) event last month (see http://carolshergold.blogspot.com/2008/09/thinking-spaces.html), one of the factors that helped me to get a lot out of the day was the plentiful provision of pencils ..

At the start of the event, we were asked to write down on a PostIt note an output that we wanted to get from the day. I wasn't really sure what I wanted to write, and using a pencil made it easier to be tentative, to try stuff out and then erase it.

A bit later on, I decided to join a group that was thinking about identity. And the thing that struck me most as we started our discussion, was the ease with which I had been able to write down and erase and then write down again using the pencil. But it's very hard to rub out the traces that we leave on the web. Many of us will have web sites and web services we've started using, abandoned, forgotten about, can no longer access the password for - and yet they come up when someone does a web search for your name.

So you start to realise that you're scribbling on your own name-space and leaving behind all kinds of identity detritus. And it can be really hard to do anything about it if you aren't happy with some of the traces you're left.

Human social behaviour can be a complicated dance between the anxiety of revealing something, and the desire to show it. Getting lost and being found are structurally important states. Here is Freud for example on the way his grandson was able to find a way to manage his anxiety about separation from his mother by playing a game with a cotton reel:

What he did was to hold the reel by the string and very
skilfully throw it over the edge of his curtained cot, so that it
disappeared into it, at the same time uttering his expressive
'o-o-o-o'. He then pulled the reel out of the cot again by the
string and hailed its reappearance with a joyful 'da' ['there'].
This, then, was the complete game - disappearance and return.
[..] The interpretation of the game then became obvious. It
was related to the child's great cultural achievement -
the instinctual renunciation (that is, the renunciation of instinctual
satisfaction) which he had made in allowing his mother to go
away without protesting. He compensated himself for this, as it
were, by himself staging the disappearance and return of the
objects within his reach.

Beyond The Pleasure Principle, Volume 18, Standard Edition

It seems that getting lost and being found might be important parts of a learning experience too. I lose my way, lose my place, lose my certainty. I find a new way to think about something. I let myself be seen not knowing in order to learn.

The key thing here is fluidity, and the ability to pose and retract.

The little boy's predicament was being lost. But the predicament I'm thinking about it the one of being found, when you didn't expect to be or necessarily want to be.

Web 2.0 systems offer us exciting environments for experimentation and for testing out fluid and changing ideas and identity. But paradoxically they can also raise the potential cost of experimenting by placing the outputs beyond individual control so that people discover they have written in indelible ink.

Image cropped from a photo in Flickr by viagallery.com licensed under a Creative Commons remix license

Delicious research .. and potential reflection design pattern?

2008-09-30T23:54:00.006+01:00

I've just registered to participate in a study called rescope that is looking at what individuals can learn about themselves and their thinking processes by reflecting on their delicious tag clouds.

Once you've signed up and given your delicious username, you are able to view a rescope visualisation page. This presents a standard view of your tags as a tag cloud with frequency of use represented through font size.

However, rescope have added in a further dimension, which is that tags for the last 20 sites you bookmarked are analysed, and the tags in your cloud are colour coded to show whether you have used them in your last 20 saves, and if so with what frequency.

There's a little micro-blogging style window that lets you save a 140 character reflection, and a neat feature that takes a snapshot of your tags at the point at which you save this reflection, so you can go back and review it later.

The experimenters are encouraging the use of # tags, again Twitter-style, for creating in-line tags.

Key to tag colour coding

screen shots from http://lnx-otecexp-005v.ou.nl/rescope/

How am I going to use rescope? I'm not really sure yet. I have definitely found it interesting to reflect on my use of tag clouds. See for example my posts Detail and the long tail and Presentation of self on the web (part 2). But I haven't ever managed to do it in 140 characters!

And I really like the way the rescope tag cloud shows data simultaneously in 2 dimensions - where size represents lifetime frequency of use and colour represents recent frequency of use.

But I'm not sure just seeing a slice of the last 20 sets of tags is enough to get me thinking.

However, if I look at the tags that are not in grey, which are the tags I used for the last 20 sites I bookmarked, I can see some themes emerging:

I am following up on the ALTC 2008 conference, by bookmarking resources relating to podcasting and a couple of blog posts I published here on podcasting.

So terms like education, student, altc2008, audio and tool are all relevant for these activities, and are the ones that are showing up in blue and green.

But why isn't the term "podcast" showing up as having been used fairly frequently?
Hmm, maybe I need to clean my tags up a bit.

But another useful thing I to reflect on here is the design pattern of offering a space for reflection next to a tag cloud. That's something that we're thinking about for our SkillClouds project, where we are encouraging students to engage with their transferable skills by visualising these skills as a tag cloud.

I like the idea of short reflections that are kept available on the main page, the way that rescope have done this.

Tasty tags

2008-09-17T23:58:00.004+01:00

A friend just pointed me in the direction of http://wordle.net which offers a text cloud service with some extremely flexible and tasty rendering options. This is a cloud generated from my delicious tags:

It's possible to generate clouds from 3 sources:

directly entered text
an rss feed
a url

The tags in the cloud don't link back to the resources they are associated with. The other limitation is that you can't embed it as a widget, and you can't set it up so that it polls the feed/url and updates itself. But - hey - you can't have everything, and it provides some stunning display options.

It was developed by Jonathan Feinberg, an IBM employer, with support from IBM. Thanks Jonathan :)

ALT-C: Beyond podcasting. Andrew Middleton and the Closer project

2008-09-16T23:14:00.014+01:00

Report from ALT-C 2008
Beyond podcasting: creative approaches to designing educational audio
Andrew Middleton from the Closer project, Sheffield Hallam University
Listen to a recording about the Closer project: http://teaching.shu.ac.uk/podcast/07-06-05-closer.mp3
Visit Andrew's blog: Reflections on Educational Podcasting
SlideShare version of Andrew's ALC-C talk: http://www.slideshare.net/amiddlet50/beyond-podcasting-altc-2008-presentation

The Closer project has enabled staff and students at Sheffield Hallam University to experiment and explore the use of audio in a wide variety of teaching contexts.

Andrew's focus is on moving beyond a transmission model of podcasts as a means of conveniently distributing lectures, and moving towards use of non-didactic media interventions. He urged us to think of audio as 'provocative, not passive'.

In the session, he distributed a handout with 20 models that had been discussed as part of Sheffield Hallam University's Closer project. For example:

professional briefings - invite professionals to provide a brief to an assignment that establishes its context
learning stories - students reflect on their learning and create podcasts
tutor feedback to group - tutor provides generic feedback to the whole group, to review key concepts, point out common misunderstandings,
audio feature - students work in groups to create short presentations on a given topic
skills vodcast - staff and students work together to create recordings/learning objects about skills required in professional practice

(paraphrased from Andrew's handout)
(see also report back from Educational podcasting benefits workshop)

Andrew then offered a quadrant diagram outlining educational approaches. I can't find Andrew's model on line so I have reproduced it somewhat simplified from the version on the handout.

Key: 1=professional briefings; 2= learning stories; 3=tutor feedback; 4=audio feature; 5=skills vodcast

The audience were then invited to locate each of the audio interventions onto this quadrant, which enabled Andrew to emphasise the range of different pedagogic approaches that audio can support.

In the diagram I've located the five examples I described above onto where I think they fit on the quadrant diagram. (These are the red circles.)

Andrew suggested that one of the key contributions to the use of audio was its ability to bring 'voice and presence' into the VLE, and to 'soften the hard edges of the text-dominated VLE'.

It was an exciting, buzzy session, with a lot to take back to an institution such as Sussex which is at the fairly early stages of exploring what we can do with audio.

I like the idea of audio introductions from tutors available on course sites. Particularly for 1st year students. It could be really encouraging to hear a friendly sounding message from your tutor/tutors when you logged on to have a look around the university sites in the couple of weeks before you arrive on campus. I wonder if the same thing would be true at the end of the year before exams start, to give a sense of containment and stability.

ALT-C: Sounded good, but was it? Bob Rotheram and the Sounds Good project

2008-09-10T14:18:00.010+01:00

Report from ALT-C 2008
Sounded good, but was it: a review of the 'Sounds Good' project
Bob Rotheram, Simon Thomson
abstract (on ALT-C 2008 website)
project web site

The Sounds Good project is funded by JISC. It aims to answer the question 'Can digital audio be used to give students quicker, better feedback on their work?'

The project has involved 15 teachers and around 460 students, ranging from 1st year undergraduates to post graduates.

What did students think?
Bob reported that students were overwhelmingly positive about the audio feedback. Some students reported that they found it more personal, and that they felt that the lecturer had actually engaged with them and their work. Some students stated that the audio made it possible to grasp what the lecturer felt the most important points in the feedback were. A few students requested written as well as audio feedback.
(see Sounds Good blog post What do students think?)

What were staff impressions?
Staff in the pilot group were generally in favour of giving audio feedback. Several staff members felt that the feedback they gave was higher quality and more detailed as a result of using audio. They liked the fact that it brought the human voice into the assessment process.

The only staff member who does not intend to continue to provide some feedback in this way was someone who used extremely short comments, and who was a very quick writer/typer.

Staff generally were able to operate the recorders they were given (Edirol R-09 hand held recorders) but did find some practical difficulties with actually making the recordings. Sometimes this was due to high levels of noise where they were trying to record, some staff found the re-naming of audio files to be time-consuming and sometimes there were problems with getting the audio files to students. There were concerns from 3 members around how easy it was to scale up this mode of feedback to larger groups.
(see Sounds Good blog post What's it like?)

Bob gave out a sheet giving his practice tips on using audio for feedback. I can't currently find this on line, but there are a number of documents available on the Sounds Good website that cover the topic:
http://web.mac.com/simonft/Sounds_Good/Documents_files/Giving_audio_feedback.doc
http://web.mac.com/simonft/Sounds_Good/Documents_files/Administration.doc
http://web.mac.com/simonft/Sounds_Good/Documents_files/Technical_tips.doc
http://web.mac.com/simonft/Sounds_Good/Documents_files/Saving_time.doc

I can definitely see how audio feedback could bring something rich into giving/receiving feedback, and could provide voice and presence for a process that can feel disappointingly perfunctory to some students.

My biggest question would be how feasible it would be to scale it up across an institution. There is quite a lot of potential for recordings to get muddled unless the audio is captured directly into a system that manages the mapping from audio to student record. Checking and double checking details might be more cumbersome where a 4 minute recording needs to be reviewed rather than skim reading a sheet of comments. This could have an impact on exam meetings. For summative assessments, the audio recordings presumably need to be retained until paper copies of scripts are destroyed, and then removed from the system. This could require records management. (Although the same can be said of any electronic artefact stored as part of a student record).

But perhaps focusing too hard on large scale provision misses the point. An initiative like this might have the potential to support individual lecturers to change the way they provide written feedback due to their reflection on the efficacy of audio feedback. And it might make students reflect on the way they use feedback too.

I wonder too whether it would bring something important to distance learning.

Thinking spaces

2008-09-09T15:01:00.008+01:00

I've just been a participant at the Technology and Technology-Practice: Re-shaping 21st Century Higher Education (Uni21HE) event in Leeds on 8-9th September 2008 organised by Lawrie Phipps, Programme Manager of the JISC Users and Innovation programme.

It's been a very interesting 24 hrs, with no pre-determined structure, just spaces to meet as a group (around 20 people) and then break out into smaller rooms for discussion.

First of all, Lawrie got us to write onto PostIt notes :

a technology that we were interested in and
an output that we would like to end up with.

We stuck these onto a flip chart, and then spent a while looking at them and thinking whether there was a discussion topic that we were interested in. If there was, we wrote up a discussion title onto a sheet of paper and pinned it up at the back of the room. People were then free to sign up for as many of these as they wanted, and to make suggestions about which topics could usefully be merged together. Lawrie picked out the topics that had the highest number of sign-ups and we then went off into groups and grappled with ideas.

What I liked most about this event was that at no time did any of the smaller groups 'feed back' into the large group. In fact, one of the groups formed early and basically disappeared, we never really saw them again. So we avoided almost all of the cumbersome processes that stop you from thinking by making you bored, and we managed to hang on to all of the interesting stuff that makes you just want to keep connected.

But don't we spend a lot of time generally boring each other? Does being bored stop you from learning? And does it stop you from thinking? It certainly feels as though it does.

What could we do to turn more of our spaces into thinking spaces?

Image from Flickr by Liz Marionga licensed under Creative Commons

Twiddla - collaboration space

2008-07-19T02:08:00.008+01:00

Next academic year we are going to explore and evaluate some synchronous collaboration tools, and have identified WebEx and Elluminate as products we are interested in.

I've just come across Twiddla, a free whiteboard solution that has a remarkably rich feature set and offers extremely flexible access. One of Twiddla's strengths is that you can surf the web in real time whilst treating the web pages you visit as whiteboard pages capable of being annotated.

I've tried to describe and demonstrate a few of its features in this brief screencast created with jing:

Features include:

ease of access (no registration required)
ease of creating a whiteboard/chat space simply with one click
ease of sharing via email invitation or by distributing the url of the space
math notation managed via LaTeX
extremely easy to upload and share images onto the whiteboard
live surfing plus site annotation via whiteboard

It also looks extremely good.

Of course, it's not trying to do exactly what a tool like Elluminate does with group management tools , but for informal, peer activity in small groups I think it could be very useful.

SkillClouds meme

2008-07-18T23:55:00.002+01:00

In fact I'm not sure if it's a meme as it appears to have spontaneously arisen in two separate locations, but here is Chris on the CrowdSpark blog using the term "skill-cloud" to describe a tag cloud of skills:

http://www.crowdspark.com/2008/03/04/rethinking-the-resume-skills-experience/

Chris's interest in the skill cloud is as a way of communicating a job applicant's skills to potential employers, and he demonstrates how a tag cloud of skills could be used to highlight key skills, such as in the example below which is a screen shot from the site.

CV visualisation with Dipity - displaying key work deliverables

2008-06-11T23:13:00.011+01:00

I was thinking that Dipity might be an interesting way of visualising a CV (see this previous post), but was aware that uploaded photos, blog posts, twitter feeds and delicious links might not necessarily capture all of the various responsibilities and requirements of a job ..

How useful it would be if you could supply Dipity with a feed that represented your work achievements, captured in an ongoing way! This list of key work deliverables would be a subset of your completed tasks. But I wasn't sure what would be a convenient way of generating an RSS feed of completed work tasks.

Shortly after discussing this with my colleague Paolo Oprandi, I came across Remember The Milk, which has been around for some time but had somehow eluded me up until now.

Remember the Milk (RTM) is a web app for managing task lists for individuals and groups, and it enables new tasks to be input and task lists to be output in a variety of useful formats. For example, you can add a new task via a Twitter direct message, or via an SMS message from your mobile phone. There's gmail integration, iPhone and Blackberry apps and an iGoogle widget. It outputs data in icalendar format so it can be easily integrated into a calendaring app such as the Apple iCal.

And - yes - it offers RSS and Atom feeds.

I've tried aggregating a task list of imaginary completed tasks into my Dipity timeline.

First point to note is that the completed tasks are displayed at the point when they are added to the feed rather than the date that's been specified within RTM.

I started off by creating a special task list for completed tasks - this is how I have been managing them in iCal. However, when I dug around a bit more I discovered that I could use the RTM "smart list" feature, through which RTM enables you to save a particular search and then automatically updates it for you. Once you've saved an RTM smart list, then an Atom feed URL is created for it. So it was easy for me to add a dynamically managed list of completed tasks into Dipity.

Oh, and RTM has tags too, as well as the option to have as many task lists as you need to organise your life. So it would be extremely easy to narrow down the smart list query so that it only included tasks that were relevant for your online CV.

Marking a task as completed and then displaying that list to colleagues could be a satisfying way of keeping people up to date with your progress on a project.

Once you've got a task into Dipity, the viewer can drill down into that Dipity entry for a bit more information. The image on the left shows the data as originally displayed, and on the right after a little editing.

I suspect the most complicated issue would be sorting out authorisation. In order for non-logged in users to view the feed from RTM as part of my Dipity CV, I would have to publish the entire task list from which I wanted to extract my completed tasks. For some work tasks, this might not be a very safe approach.

Possibly the safest approach would be to create a task list specifically for "CV tasks", publish that list, and then move tasks in there once they had been completed.

Anyhow, I think the possibilities are definitely worth exploring with students to find out whether they find this time line approach a helpful way of addressing the skill visualisation question.

more on Dipity

2008-06-04T22:14:00.003+01:00

This is an embedded view of my sample Dipity lifeline, which has currently got this blog, the SkillClouds blog and my delicious links aggregated into it. (It would be great if I could persuade it to pull in all of my delicious links and not just the last couple of month's worth).

Have a go and see what you think of Dipity!

Dipity - finding structure in time

2008-05-29T18:10:00.014+01:00

I've just come across a system called Dipity, which is currently in alpha.

It aggreates your photos, blog entries, any RSS feeds you care to throw at it, and builds them all into a neat timeline. Here's a timeline that I've just added my delicious links into as an RSS feed:

If I aggregated various work project blogs into this, it feels as though I would end up with something pretty close to a dynamically generated online CV - which reminds me of the CV Lifeline project that was prototyped as part of Social Innovation Camp this April.

The Dipity team have just released TimeTube, a mashup between Dipity and YouTube, which locates YouTube clips based on search terms you supply, and then displays them on a timeline.

This is a pretty powerful way of seeing the evolution of an idea, or the development of a politician or musician.

For example, here's a screenshot of part of a timetube I created for the search term 'web2.0':

This is particularly interesting for the SkillClouds project as Stuart and I have had a number of conversations recently about the temporal aspects of the project. It's likely to be the case that students will start to want to think about their skills at particular critical moments in their lives. Until these moments come along, exposure to SkillClouds might not make much sense to them.

Stuart was connecting this with an interesting talk he attended given by Pete Gale, head of User Experience at Cogapp. Pete's talk, 'Understanding Users' Engagement with Online Health Information' was part of the HCT Seminars series here at Sussex. He talked about supporting peoples' journeys towards using online health information systems. Anyway, hopefully Stuart will blog about this himself!

Edit on 20th June: Stuart has posted about this session now at http://stuartlamour.wordpress.com/2008/06/18/epoch/

But wouldn't it be powerful if we published feeds that students could then aggregate into a CV time line? For example, at the start of a given course, the feed might contain a brief description of the course contents. Each assessment could then be made available in the feed, with a description of the skills that were being explored. At the end of the course, a summary of skills could be included in the feed. If the feeds for all of a student's courses were then aggregated into a time line, you'd end up with something that would definitely help when putting together a job application.

And if we could tackle the authentication issue, we could enable students to have feeds that included the marks they received for assessments etc.

Reflections, reminders of particular achievements, photos of events etc could all be added in.

Aquabrowser

2008-05-05T17:37:00.001+01:00

MediaLab Solutions (now acquired by Bowker) have been developing a product called AquaBrowser for some time, and part of its interface involves a neat 'word cloud' to enable library users to disambiguate their search terms as easily as possible.

For example, this first screenshot shows the Queens Library (New York, US) public library search interface after I've done a search for the term cloud.

Various associations and spelling variants are displayed in the word cloud to the left of the screen. Each term is a link to another search.

The list of resources on the right show the most likely resources that match my search.

Looking at the cloud might help me refocus my search. For example, I might have been looking for a play by Aristophanes, so I click on his name to get a new search.

As the second screen shot shows, the word cloud has now changed so that it is focused around the term 'Aristophanes'. The list of resources for Aristophanes appear to be ordered according to relevance in relation to my previous search as well as to the current one.

According to the AquaLibrary website, this word cloud is designed to support novice searchers, who tend to rely on single word searches, even though a single word is not normally sufficient to narrow the search. It also supports users who may not know exactly what it is that they are looking for when they start their search.

In our paper on students' use of tag clouds at the recent Shock of the Old conference in Oxford, we drew on some work by Gary Marchionini which distinguished between analytic and browse style searching strategies. Some students in our study commented that they preferred to use the tag cloud because it was easier than typing terms into a search input box. Aquabrowser makes browse style searching a possibility for large scale collections. However, this posting from the blog Infonatives offers some criticisms of it from a librarian's perspective ..

Southampton university's site redesign

2008-04-15T23:13:00.006+01:00

Southampton University's new site redesign involves a page iSoton where various feeds are aggregated - including this tag cloud from their corporate delicious user.

Identity in academia

2008-04-13T23:40:00.001+01:00

A previous post here mused on tag clouds as a kind of statement or badge of identity, and I suggested that the representation encoded in a tag cloud of (for example) del.icio.us links was both emergent and evolving.

I recently saw a couple of visualisations on Xia Lin's site, relating to tools that use academic paper's citation data to produce maps.

The first one shows a map based on the citations made by authors who cited Xia Lin's papers. It shows the areas of similarity with other researches and uses area to represent frequency. To someone within Professor Lin's field, it would provide a very quick snapshot of the kind of research that he was carrying out.

The second representation is of the relationships between the journals in which he is cited:

To find these, go to http://faculty.cis.drexel.edu/~xlin/index.html

and click on 'research' in the left hand navigation bar.

Visualising semantic connections

2008-03-28T23:11:00.005Z

One of the suggestions that has come up from students encountering tag clouds in relation to the SkillClouds project is that they would find it useful if the tags were organised in a terms of how skills were related together, rather than in alphabetical order.

So for example, one group drew a sketch of a skill cloud in which skills were grouped according to whether they were analytical, organisational or people-based.

This has started me thinking about way of presenting semantic connections.

Thinkmap's Visual Thesaurus java applet is a superb example of how to do this. It's an interactive thesaurus. When you enter a search term, it creates a word map to enable you to visualise the shades of meaning for your term, and to explore the word space that it displays for you.

Thinkmap itself is a software platform for developing sophisticated visualisations and animations of structured data.

In the case of Visual Thesaurus, this underlying data is based on Princeton University's WordNet project, which makes a lexical database of English available to linguists and software developers.

Qualitative data coding visualised as tag clouds

2008-03-20T20:15:00.007Z

While we've been developing a data coding scheme for the search/navigation experiment we've recently done as part of the SkillClouds project, I've been thinking how interesting it would be to visualise the frequencies of the resulting codes as a tag cloud, where each tag would lead back to all the segments that were coded using that term.

I've been thinking about ways of slightly subverting del.icio.us to get it to manage qualitative data segments and their codes.

But I've just found out about ATLAS.ti, a major qualitative data management tool, and read on its front page that it provides output in the form of tag clouds.

See the screenshot.

Tag histograms - an alternative to tag clouds

2008-03-10T22:27:00.003Z

I've just come across this rather elegant tag histogram - or content taxonomy as it's called on the site - at Ohmpage, which describes itself as providing content covering the zeitgeist across the various planes of existence in today’s reality.

It's got a number of advantages:

the numerical information of tag frequency is readily available
the eye isn't tricked by interaction between font size and word size, as can be the case with a standard tag cloud
the ordering method of the tags (alphabetical order) is much more apparent than is the case with a tag cloud
the user only has to integrate information from the vertical dimension, rather than from vertical and horizontal, as is the case with tag clouds.

I suspect tag histograms would offer better accessibility to dyslexic users - see http://skillclouds.blogspot.com/2008/03/tag-clouds-designing-for-accessibility.html
for some discussion on potential issues for tag cloud usage by people with dyslexia.

Of course, what is lost is the compression offered by tag clouds.

Also worth noting that with its regular pattern of tiny histograms it offers a nice version of Tufte's working principle of 'small multiples' (see Envisioning Information).

Using tag clouds to express information about jobs

2008-02-25T14:55:00.004Z

The SkillClouds project is currently recruiting for an E-learning Developer/Integrator, with closing date of 6th March 2008.

I had a chat with a potential applicant last week, and out of that discussion came the suggestion that we could try to express information about actual posts using tag clouds. This wasn't something I'd thought about, but I have added a cloud expressing the skills required for the post to the description of it on the SkillClouds web site:

(click on the image to see a larger version)

Of course, it isn't a "real" tag cloud, because the tags in this case are all skills required for the same post, so in this case all the tags link to the same document - the job application pack.

But it gives an interesting visual representation of the kind of person that we're looking for.

Now I suppose we just need a tool that roams delicious-space looking for delicious users with tag clouds that approximately match this one, and we can then invite them to apply for the SkillClouds post.

Wired Sussex - tag cloud job search

2008-02-05T22:52:00.001Z

John, Judith and I were talking yesterday about the SkillClouds project, and about the various services for students that could be navigated to from a skill cloud. John suggested that what he'd be looking for as a job hunter was for the skills in the cloud to be mapped into job searches in various job databases. We thought this was a nice idea ...

So it was interesting to find this on the Wired Sussex jobs page - a tag cloud of frequently occurring terms in job descriptions on the site:

Each tag is set up as a link that passes the tag term back into their jobs search engine. For example, here's the link for the "design" tag:

http://www.wiredsussex.com/jobs/JobSearchResults.asp?textSearch=design

Detail and the long tail

2008-01-17T23:18:00.000Z

I've been reading Edward Tufte's fantastic book Envisioning Information and thinking about tag clouds as an approach to data visualisation.

Tufte's strategies are to find approaches for representing data that:

increase the number of dimensions represented on a plane surface
increase the data density (e.g. the amount of information represented per unit area)

By representing frequency data, tag clouds increase the dimensionality of the data if a tag cloud is compared to a list of posts.

Since a tag cloud is a compressed, compact structure it also increases data density.

Tufte uncovers an interesting paradox for data representation:

to clarify, add detail (Tufte 1990, p. 37)

He disagrees with chart-wisdom that data representations need to be simplified to communicate, and argues that:

panorama, vista, and prospect deliver to viewers the freedom of choice that derives from overview, a capacity to compare and sort through detail (Tufte 1990, p.38)

So what about the question of detail in tag clouds?

When you generate a tag cloud from a dataset, you are displaying the frequency distribution for the most commonly used tags in your set. One of the choices that you are going to have to make is how many tags to include. At the extreme case, if you only include one tag, your cloud will simply display the tag you have used most often. If you include all of your tags, your tag cloud may be enormous and hard to deploy as it won't fit onto the screen.

The illustration above is a screen shot from http://del.icio.us/help/tagrolls. This screen enables a delicious user to design a tag roll - a way of presenting delicious bookmarks and tags for example on a blog. On the left, delicious enable me to define my options for the tag roll. On the right, I see the tag roll as it would be if I selected this set of options. So when the size parameter is set close to its minimum value, the resulting tag cloud has few tags in it. If the size parameter is set to maximum, then all tags are shown.

For most people's tags, the frequency distribution of their use of these tags will approximate to a power law distribution. So there will be a small number of tags that are used very frequently, and many tags that have only been used once. This is the distribution from my delicious tags:

There are 188 tags that I've only used once
The tag I have used most frequently has been used 61 times.

The famous long tail of power law distributions is very apparent.

So the detail question really becomes a matter of how much of your tail feathers you're prepared to shake.

This stimulating post by Fred Stutzman: Unit Structures: The Long Tail of Identity explores the idea that the really interesting stuff you can learn from other people's tag clouds is in that long tail. He argues that long tail will show the guilty music secrets, the dodgy movies choices, the strange hobbies that overtake us for a weekend and then pass on.

I guess in terms of the Goffman distinction I discussed earlier, the high frequency tags are what is given whereas the long-tail tags are what is given-off.

Being data

2008-01-02T23:31:00.000Z

I'm still thinking around the implications of Manovich's assertion that creating a work of new media art can be understood as 'the construction of an interface to a database'. This seems like an extremely evocative and rather moving idea to me.

Here are some photos that I took at Tate Modern recently, visiting Doris Salcedo's Shibboleth. I was wishing I had some way of tracing people's paths around the installation, either by tracking individuals and plotting their paths on a map of the Turbine Hall floor, or by video-ing the crowd and playing it back at high speed to create an impression of the flow of traffic. This would create a kind of contour map, or you could think of it as a map of intensity within a field. It would be interesting to find out whether there were particular "hot spots", locations within the art work where unusual patterns of activity took place.

So for me Shibboleth offered a rather powerful vision of an imaginary 'database', in which individual acts of visitor behaviour could be aggregated into a pattern of flow.

That's been true of almost every installation in the Unilever Series of installations for the Turbine Hall .. for example, Olafur Eliasson's Weather Project, where people lay down in groups under the strange misty light of a huge false sun.

Species typical behaviours:

standing astride the fault line with one foot on either side
standing as close to the edge as possible
walking the fault line
kissing across the crack
jumping from one side to the other
taking photographs

Presentation of self on the web .. part 2

2007-12-21T22:37:00.000Z

I've thought a bit more about presentation of self and identity on the web, and it feels as though there are two quite separate dimensions at play in the different ways that we explore and express our identities.

What got me thinking about this was something that emerged in the conversation with Andy. We were talking about tag clouds as being amenable to "thin-slice" type processing, where a single glance enables you to learn something useful about the person or entity that the tag cloud represents. And I was struck at the contrast between that short glance at a tag cloud and at the fact that a tag cloud could easily be representing repeated tagging activities that span several years.

So first of all, there's a distinction between presentations that are basically "one off" activities - such as filling in an online questionnaire and then displaying the resulting badge, or noting down your favourite movies or songs in your Facebook profile. Yes, of course you could go back and edit things, but the basic activity can be completed in a single session.

This is really different from a tag cloud, which evolves over time and doesn't have too much of interest in it until you've added quite a large number of separate tags. A tag cloud really only exists over evolutionary time.

And the second distinction that interests me here is the one between presentations that I have complete control over - such as my list of favourite movies - as opposed to presentations that emerge from the activities I carry out within the system, and where I could be surprised, or even disappointed, by what results. A tag cloud would be an example of this emergent kind of identity artefact. I could look at it and be surprised that, for example, poetry didn't really feature at all in the tags I had recorded.

So all of this can be displayed as a quadrant diagram:

or to use snapshots from Facebook sites:

(as this is all about identity I'll mention that the Facebook music choices and "World's Smallest Political Quiz" results badge are from friends' Facebook sites, but that the list of bookmarks and the tag cloud are mine)

And what's the point of this? Well, from a SkillClouds perspective we are talking about developing a tool that has the potential to be about identity ...

Presentation of self .. on the web

2007-12-13T19:29:00.000Z

I had an interesting conversation with Andy Howard yesterday. Andy is taking forward the University's approach for Personal Development Planning for undergraduates. We talked quite a lot about the presentation of self and identity in an on-line context.

This prompted me to dust down my copy of The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. In Goffman, social interaction is all about impression management, and there are two kinds of communications:

expressions we give - e.g. conscious forms of expression
expressions we give off - e.g. body language, expressions that we may or may not be in control of

Clearly, in an on-line context, the expressions that are given off are not given off through inadvertent exposure of body language. On the web, expressions might be given off when, for example, material intended for one audience was consumed by another, quite different audience. So someone might be deliberately giving an expression to their close friends of their enjoyment of partying, without expecting that this information would be also available to potential employers - given off. See for example this post from the Times Online about how some recruiters use Facebook.

Tag clouds - for example the cloud generated by all of a user's tags in del.icio.us - may tell you something that the owner did not expect to say. It is possible to be surprised by your own tag cloud.

And someone else's tag cloud affords you a thin-slice view on their obsessions, interests, aspirations ..

SkillClouds - all systems go!

2007-12-04T18:10:00.000Z

John Davies and I have just found out that the SkillClouds project is going to be funded by JISC. It's the fourth successful bid to JISC for resources to develop and explore e-learning at Sussex University, and we're delighted.

The project brings together a couple of related areas of research interest for me - first of all, the use of tag clouds as an interface feature, and secondly an exploration of the applicability of social bookmarking methodology in more formal contexts .

We will be working with students to generate tag clouds based on a mash-up of the skills they are acquiring in their formal university studies (derived from institutional data) and the skills they record themselves (for example, in PDP-type systems).

And working with staff to look at how using ideas inspired from systems such as del.icio.us might help us to support e-administration.

Music Wall at the Round House

2007-11-04T11:36:00.000Z

We went to the Electric Proms at the Roundhouse for the Ray Davies gig - and in particular to see the ever-fab Crouch End Festival Chorus.

I was particularly struck by these huge projections onto the brick walls of the Roundhouse, based on SMS text messages that people were invited to text in sharing memories of their favourite gigs:

This seemed a very powerful way of displaying audience-generated content.

Troika, the company who worked with the BBC on this project, have done some great projects around insinuating SMS and mobile devices as neat interventions - this SMS Guerilla Projector made me want to get out there and start playing. It enables you to project the screen of your mobile phone pretty much anywhere you choose to.

But back to the issue of Music Wall. You can imagine that this kind of approach could work in educational spaces, for example with a Question Wall during lectures.

It could even be modified for a tagging approach, where the font size related to the frequency with which a given tag was used by the group. Then we could have the exciting experience of watching folksonomies emerge through collaborative texting in real-time, as a piece of performance in itself.