edublogs

Elgg or People Aggregator? Which do you prefer?

Marc Canter lays into Elgg a little bit, pointing out that People Aggregator does what Elgg does - and more. But, for once, someone's snarkiness actually helps me understand something better, like what on earth it is People Aggregator actually does. Ben has since replied saying it's all wrong, yadda, yadda...

What I'm struck by is the lack of traction People Aggregator has in the education world - no-one talks about it but tonnes of educators rave about Elgg.

Is this because Elgg seems more wholesome coming from Edinburgh University and somehow more suitable for academia and schools, is it that Ben and Dave are really nice guys that the edublogging world feels they can approach, with the notion that Marc is a big private enterprise kinda guy not interested in educators (you'd be wrong)?

Time for a wee tasting session of it in East Lothian. Who's up for some localised global community-building?

Should schools dive in and own their own tools?

DOPA bans social networking in public institutions (including schools) in the US under the guise of safety and control of information. Since May the act has been discussed on the US edublogosphere, with several educators this side of the pond getting jumpy, itchy or mildly wary of relying on external suppliers and hosters of content.

John has started the debate once more on two angles - open source tools and self-hosting of tools by local authorities - after stimulation from the excellent Booruch podcast. It has all made me think afresh on whether schools or states should spend time, money and effort on creating 'safe', self-owned products which do the job of Flickr, blog engines, Bubbleshare, YouTube, del.icio.us and so on.

 

Owning information

Do we need to spend our effort on creating 'eduFlickrs' and self-hosted blogging platforms? My instant over-simplistic reaction is: no. The question of ownership of information might seem like a huge one when one stores one's writing on a blog hosted by Typepad or Blogger, for example, or one's photos on Flickr. It is a real question, too, not one of the made up examples or "imagine ifs..." that we are so fond of in education. For this very reason I think it's important to use the best of what is available in relation to the money we have to spend on it, and work at discussing the accompanying debate, whether that is ownership, copyright, intellectual copyright and plagiarism or "how do these sites make money?" (at Yester Primary School they are discussing just this question, and I hope to be able to head along there and help them come to the answer).

But is what we right online any more important than what we right write in school jotters, which end up binned, lost, water-logged or forgotten? Does writing some schoolwork or thought online make it worth so much more than the jotter that we must, at all costs, keep it? What is it about writing or publishing images and artwork online that seems to make the issue of who owns that virtual piece of paper more important than who owns/loses/keeps the school jotter?

Where owning information is good useful

This still did not stop me recommending to East Lothian that they use WordPress MultiUser, hosting the content of all their blogs, at least, on their own dedicated server, but the aims had nothing to do with security, safety or "owning the information". Hosting blogs on WPMU does nothing to help in any of these scenarios, but does help marketing (you can better analyse the impact of what you are doing, spot new trends, predict what plugins might be popular), troubleshooting (a double-edged sword since we are relying on fewer middlemen for help, but still work within the limits of our own expertise) and in trying to create a more coherent community (we're back to marketing, effectively, and how the information on user habits can help push community where it might not have existed beforehand). In East Lothian we are beginning to do this pretty well ;-)

Glow, for that matter, the national education intranet in Scotland, will offer some degree of extra security to the mix. The people in it are centrally registered users and therefore traceable, though I don't know how much tracing will go on; during the Glow trials there were incidents of 'minor' online bullying but no effort made by teachers or administrators to pursue it while the iron was hot. At the end of the day, owning the servers on which the content is stored will not stop predatory bullying, 99.9% of which comes not from the wild west of the www, but from within your schools, your classrooms. If we can get that little human glitch ironed out (I don't know if we ever will) then Glow-hosted blogs would be a real step in the right direction for increased new technology use by the next part in the equation, the third-generation of more risk-averse teacher ICT users.

   increased security
+ better marketing
+ better community finding and creating
= breaking down of our edublogosphere pareto principle.

Where not having to host the information is better

To go back to the East Lothian social media project, most of the other tools we are recommending our users to engage with involve hosting material on someone else's servers: del.icio.us, Bubbleshare, Flickr, Quintura and PageFlakes, for example. It's simply not worth our time, effort and money to attempt to recreate these pretty damned good tools just so that we can host them on our servers. At the moment I'd recommend the continued hosting of blogs in East Lothian since most people use a blog as their principle place of publishing news, artwork, video and so on (even if it's not hosted directly on it all of the time). But over the next year and beyond the blog in its current form will morph and many more people will live their online publishing life on non-textual tools such as YouTube (quelle surprise), Flickr and the forthcoming medium of IPTV.

So what's the difference between hosting blogs and hosting everything else? Money. Well, bandwidth to be more precise. Just as YouTube began to get exponential last May my LesBlogs buddy Peter was working out their bandwidth costs at around $1 million per day, with 15 million video downloads (each video about 3.5 minutes long). Considering that most educational content is longer than that and even with fewer users, I think most Local Authorities and even our dear Executive would baulk at a service which would drain 000,000s of pounds from the public purse - with no business model allowed to support it.

Self-hosted video and images? At the moment it doesn't make financial sense when aggregated costs and economies of scale from the big guys and venture capitalists help cushion the blow.

So if we're stuck with these guys for practical reasons, surely we'll get screwed on ethical ones? I'd say less of the conspiracy theory and more of the research. It's not in the interest of these companies to ignore the educational market. It's for that reason, perhaps, that the CEOs of PageFlakes, Quintura, Wikispaces, PBWiki and many other Live Web cos. are in fairly regular contact with me and other edubloggers to find out what would make their products better for education. I know that they keep an eye on Technorati watchlists of their product names to leap in and grab our feedback and improve their products.

Why? Because their teen and pre-teen customers of today are their ad revenues of tomorrow. Do I want a product without ads for my kids? Yes. Do I mind if they are facing advertising once they leave school and enter the world of work? No, because advertising is part of the makeup of their lives on MySpace, Bebo and the telly (do they still do that?) - avoiding a cool tool on the basis of advertising is cutting our collective nose off to spite our faces.

Rugs and feet

Will developers purposefully pull the rug from under their customers' feet? No, not if the business model is solid and they are making money. If a company changes the rules it set out with at the beginning (or tries a Google "we'll keep Google Earth free for the moment") then they are screwed for the long haul. And then take a look at the technologies mentioned in this blog post. Every one has an open API and a bit of magic which makes it what it is (that's why we might like PageFlakes better than Netvibes, Bubbleshare better than Flickr and so on). These companies are more or less open - open enough for most geeks - and provide a business model which reassures us they will be around for long enough.

Balancing risk, time, effort, development, skills and final product

Moreover, these 'open private' companies provide refined products which are generally quick to set up and use, and easy to get a backup from. Should they go bust or withdraw a service, there's nothing to stop regular users exporting the content and making a switch. Compared to some of the most popular open source apps, such as Moodle mentioned by Peter in the Booruch podcast, setup is a doddle and more accessible for the masses. So, my tuppence worth to John and others' points on open source and self-hosting might be summarised something like this:

• Does hosting offer a better chance to create a community?
• Does hosting offer better safety for kids? (Probably not)
• Does open source version of this provide the same experience AND more longevity (look at the business model, not the 'open sourceness' of the app - companies genuinely won't go out of their way to piss their customers off, especially the younger ones)
• Do the vast majority of users care if the final product is open source or not, hosted by the institution or not? (Audacity happens to be better than Windows Media for most people, but most people don't know it's open source and will not contribute to the creation of the product).
• Will most users be able to contribute to the open source product, or will the open source product be fed into by a minority of the group using it (thus making it quasi proprietary)?

The questions are, hopefully, provocative. I personally get fed up with the open source versus everything else debate and see a more complex mélange leading to success, but wonder whether some of the companies I've mentioned have superior venture capital, expertise and customer feedback to do the job better. Ouch. Release the spiders!

Photo of the jotter. Photo of pound note. Photo of slippery surfaces. (Creative Commons ;-)

Elgg Spaces goes for free!

Ben lets us know that Curverider's latest product, Elgg Spaces, is available for free - thanks, guys! Elgg Spaces allow you to set up a small community (up to 50 individuals with the free version) around one page. Paying for it allows you more participants, more design options and, importantly, Ben and Dave Tosh's support. It's tempting to use this in East Lothian but my only concern is how tricky it seems to add and format text. With wee people, one of the first things they want to do is write using different styles from everyone else and easily add graphics and so on. Maybe it's me being duff, but at the moment, for me, it wasn't clear how to do all that and I'm not getting a WYSIWYG platform on Firefox.

Curverider conference videos online

After the wee-est of waits the videos of the fascinating talks from September's Curverider conference are online. Particular faves of mine:

• Miles Berry - for school managers this is a must. Shows how managers can start thinking about ICT and connective learning
• Kevin Jardine - if you're a geek into online security and single sign-on, then this is a must. He talks about open source style security and online identity.

Curverider Conference: StudentZone at Brighton

Stan Steiner helps run the biggest installation of Elgg at Brighton University – and they still use Blackboard, too. Their choice of MLE instead of VLE seems to resemble what SSDN/Glow aspires to: a system which integrates every aspect of learning, teaching and Management Info Systems. 95% of courses use their Blackboard MLE, which they’ve branded as Student Central. They even have t-shirts, which Stan has been handing out and now reveals he must wear at all times even in a brisk Scottish breeze wind, mugs, branded iPods and a strapline: Cool, Funky & Gorgeous. Their branding has been important to get this kind of use out of the system, and they have actively encouraged social as well as academic.

The look of the site is young, young, young. Lime green and pink do go together when you’re an undergraduate.

So what drove this considerable change at the university? Technology changes on a daily basis; to keep up with this a university must change as much as it can. Students use this technology for different things, and these uses also change. Students’ expectations have changed since I was at uni ten years ago. They want blogs, the ability to download music on a public computer, the ability to share photos of their weekends, as well as the ability to do their uni work and submit it online.

This also suggests what we know already: that learning styles have changed, too. Continual Partial Attention, as Saatchi calls it, means that we must develop means for learning to take place 24/7, when students feel they are working at their best, not at pre-determined times when students’ minds are on something else.

Are VLEs the answer? According to Stan, in the last six months VLEs have gone through a David Beckham: from golden boy to not even in the squad. Why? There is almost no student participation in these institutionally ring-fenced zones which are controlled by tutors or teachers. You suck  up course-structured content (not learner-constructed  content) then go off and work on your own. Learning community? Nah, it’s a lonely learning experience.

Choosing a breakaway from the VLE
The uni wanted to offer every student a blog if they wanted it. After examining 20 blogging platforms none of them came up to technical scratch, but Elgg did and it offered a community ready-made to court those blogs.

What really impresses me is the integration between Elgg, Blackboard and the uni’s MIS systems. They have single sign-on (like Glow) for Blackboard, Elgg, the blogging system, the online chat… The students’ blog posts have automatic ‘post only to community’ status, which they can override to publicly post if they wish.

They have got people using it by giving them time to get it. They’ve even seen the creation of a Grumpy Old Gits community, created by the users who took a little more time to get it than others. People have had trouble getting tags, though, and the project team have had to be careful in how they guide people to use them – they want folksonomy, not a totalitarian taxonomy where people seek the ‘correct’ tag to use.

One issue that rings true with me, is how to convince students to use a ‘school’ blogging system, when they already use Bebo or MySpace. What they are thinking of doing is providing a dashboard which would take users through to their Bebo or MySpace pages. This is great in a university setting, but what about a school setting?

Another issue is that of good use – not just the Acceptable Use Policy one – but how one uses this responsibly. They are explicitly not going to police blogs, much as they haven’t policed discussion boards thus far. Self-policing has worked here. They are having to think about issues such as trolling and how to give students a place to go if they feel uncomfortable with something they have found. There are also more sinister issues, such as how to cope with foreign language blogs which the team don’t understand. Someone rose the concern that a terrorist cell could blog in a language no-one understood. Legitimate or paranoid? The question seems apt as I sit in my old translation classroom…

StudentZone is launched in a month's time.

Curverider Conference: Managing change in a Dutch university

Misja Hoebe from Netherlands’ CHN University is an Elgg developer who implemented Elgg at CHN University alongside the traditional Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) of Blackboard. The University has several campuses in Holland as well as in Qatar, South Africa and soon in China, so online learning is important. Now at a crossroads, he shares his conundrums.

Blackboard has been used in a low-level way, reinforcing old teaching practices with new tools – posting assignments, sharing stories in discussion boards – but has at least been good for faculty staff to get a foot in the web’s door. Now that has been achieved it is time for something that will inspire staff and students to work at a higher (teaching and learning) level. Students are already creating their own VLEs, using MSN chat, P2P sharing of resources (and not just  music) and using their personal social networking spaces such as MySpace to organise their online lives. Getting in touch with these students is near impossible since, surprise, surprise, they are not using their university email addresses, but their googlemails and yahoo.coms. Even in East Lothian and the MFLE we share this same issue: the global address book is not half as useful as having an address book filled with staff’s personal emails, the ones they actually use.

The pedagogical background to the uni is a practical one. They are currently going back to their roots of problem based learning, focus on teamwork and collaborative problem solving, they even have their own learning companies: there is a learning hotel on campus. Their web presence is also being managed in cooperation with the uni’s marketing and communications departments, in order to bring back alumni to the university community.

The Uni has started trialling Elgg, which is being used as the basis for a travel company, learning company websites, taking a ‘Grand Tour’ of  the other worldwide campuses of the university, student bodies, providing a student portfolio, to aggregate other information from student blogs and podcasts.

Faculty members have found it troublesome to render control to the individual students and have questioned how its use fits with accreditation/assessment. Students, on the other hand, love the comments and help brought in from the outside world – important in the domain of business – including the enlargening of the number of resources that are suggested.

Students have been instrumental in creating communities for courses, where the administrators had not provided one already.

In cooperation with Apple they have been using Apple’s Speedy Lectures, whereby one films a lecture, clicks a button and has it instantly published to the world. Vodcasting on the fly, if you will.

There are still challenges ahead even with this apparently student-pushed IT-staff-led innovation. Mindsets are still too comfortable with Blackboard-style VLEs and courses need re-evaluated to take into account not just the new methods of learning but also lecturers’ control over their intellectual copyright in the case of instant vodcasting.

Curverider Conference: Adoption Issues for social software

I’ve come along to the Curverider conference, being held in room 401 of DHT of Edinburgh Uni – the place where for four years I was terrorised by the impossible French and German translations placed in front of me. Since then, they’ve added an overhead projector and computer, so things are obviously looking up.

Terry Anderson, Canada Research Chair for Distance Education, was the first to take to the podium tackling a few adoption strategies for social software. In the past I have only had Suw Charman’s business adoption strategy under my arm, but the educational ones suggested by Terry dovetail this nicely.

When institutions want to implement social software the first thing they often do is set up some kind of system, some kind of portal even. But often this tends to limit, to some extent, individuals’ control over their space, time, content…

A Learning Management System makes sure that everything is in its place, in the right box. Trying to embrace social software, though, can blur this so that it’s difficult to pigeon-hole chat, formal writing, assignments, social areas and so on.

Elgg has tried to bring these social tools into a common space to make sense of the chaotic nature of social software, offering some form of control for the organiser. Yet, the LMS at the moment will always be easier for educators to ‘get’, and so social software, even with an element of control, is difficult for institutions to adopt.

At Athabascau University Terry and his team have developed a Masters in Distance Education, using Elluminate for realtime collaboration, Furl for dissemination and knowledge polling, Moodle for the calendar and resource drop-off, Me2U.Athabasca.ca for blogging and making connections.

For educators, it seems a lot of work getting rid of a previous LMS to make only incremental improvements while also losing control.

8 conditions that facilitate the implentation of educational technology (Ely 1999):
•    Dissatisfaction wit the status quo
•    Expertise
•    Resources
•    Time
•    Rewards or incentives
•    Participation
•    Commitment
•    Leadership

Rogers (2003). Five characteristics that will lead to swifter innovation:
•    Relative advantage
•    Complexity (this is down to individuals’ perceptions)
•    Trialibility (is it easy to trial and test, without commitment)
•    Visibility (how easy is it to demonstrate – online and ubiquitous)
•    Compatibility

Dan Surry: Strategy of a change agent
•    Developer philosophy: they build tools, evangelise them, if only the tool is perfect then they will come
•    Adopter philosophy: focus on the context: the needs and opinions of potential adopters.

Moore (1995): Inside the Tornado: Bowling Alley Adoption
•    A period of niche-based adoption in advance of the general marketplace, driven by compelling customer needs and the willingness (and capacity) of vendors to craft niche-specific whole products
Adapting these ideas to education we could, approach end-user decision-makers and show them how our innovation resolves problem or saves them time or money.

Design-based research
•    Investigate
•    Create intervention
•    Evaluate in a local context
•    Intervene and evaluate in multiple contexts

While similar to action research it involves both the practitioner and a researcher, with a focus on end-users, not IT infrastructure. The use of small-scale projects allows us to bypass conventional IT managers.

One issue Terry had while implementing Elgg was that he threw too many tools at the students at once. As such they didn’t concentrate as much as they perhaps could have done on the blogging aspect of the tool.