Engaging Learning with Social Software

Just started with this course running at Oxford Brookes - just a few online weeks looking at the use of and using Social Software in an educational setting. Mixed emotions really ... on one hand I'm all in favour of using such ICT facilities in education (i.e. education as in learning) - I think that such tools can enable people to learn a lot about themselves, about other people & things. But on the other hand, I'm worried about using such tools in education (i.e. education as in teaching) - there's nothing more powerful as a disincentive to using tools as a teacher telling you that you should!

:-(

"I'm not saying that knowledge is socially constructed, but our understanding of that knowledge is socially constructed." - a line taken from this CNET news report (http://news.com.com/2102-1032_3-6140175.html?tag=st.util.print) on a talk by John Seely Brown (ex-Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation and the Director of its Palo Alto Research Center - http://www.johnseelybrown.com/) … makes me worry that MY understanding of that knowledge is better than your understanding of it because MY understanding/use/manipulation of 'socially constructed' is better than yours (to paraphrase the sentiment of Animal Farm quite awfully)?

But, like many position statements, I'm in agreement.

A useful tome to have around to be able to dip into has been the 600
page Companion to Digital Humanities, edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray
Siemens & John Unsworth and published by Blackwell in 2004.

'Humanities Computing' has trouble with maintaining a credible,
distinctive position in the field of academic disciplines ~ such trouble
is in common with that experienced by other 'new', developing
disciplines - Computer Science in the past, and Educational Technology.
This book offers justifications, examples and debate about what does
make it a creditable discipline.

A 600 page book is difficult to read in one sitting, or even in the few
days / weeks / months that one can borrow it from a library - and
difficult to carry around (books - 'portability' still accounts for much
of the popularity of this 'old' medium). But now, when you want to find
some learned words on what can be offered any particular corner of
Humanities endeavours, be it research or teaching&learning, the
Companion is available online at:
http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/.

The Best of Technology Writing 2006, a collaborative imprint of the
University of Michigan Press and the University of Michigan Library, is
now available for online reading at: http://www.hti.umich.edu/b/bot/.
Contents includes pieces on 'The Record Effect' which finishes strangely
by attributing death to the recording studio (presumably "locked from
the inside, my dear Watson!") and cyberextortionists, a new breed of
villain, who demand money to leave you alone.

I keep meaning to put in a link to this 'publication' - which arrives quite often by email, sometimes (like in this instance) a list of useful links and othertimes built around a theme ... wwwtools for teachers. The "Imperial History (Maps of War) is an impressive animated mapping sequence showing who has controlled the Middle East over the course of history - Egyptians, Turks, Jews, Romans, Arabs, Greeks, Persians, Europeans have all interacted here" caught my eye in this issue ...

Two examples of the sort of caring, sharing, collaborative ethic that the Internet has afforded us all, the Centre for Bioscience ImageBank consists of freely available images contributed by academics, researchers, Learned Societies, industry and individuals with rights cleared for educational purposes and the Woophy site - the WOrld Of PHotographY, a website founded by a Dutch collective of photo aficionados and internet designers who "believe navigation on internet can be more visual, logical and associative. The goal of Woophy's founders is to create an accessible, visual, current, democratic and collective work of art comprised of a database picturing our remarkable world." Raises all sorts of folksonomy-type issues ...

This latest issue of Innovate - June/July 2006 Volume 2, Issue 5 looks interesting, the lead paper is by Sir John Daniel and Paul West on the digital divide - a topic that I remember was always close to JD's heart when he was VC here at the OU (Vice Chancellor @ The UKOpen University). Then there's papers on the use of 'social software', wikis, chat rooms and plagiarism, Creative Commons and, lastly, retention. Something, as they say, for everyone!

I'm reading this book on Games Theory - some interesting points about the way that Games use feedback. One of the Games Theory gurus (Marc LeBlanc) defines two sorts of feedback: Negative feedback (-ve F) and Positive feedback (+ve F).

With -ve F, which intervenes to reduce the difference between the players or the player and the computer, the game tends to stabilize toward a steady state of activity - prolonging the game. With +ve F, where the intervention enhances the difference between the players, the game tends to destabilize - ending the game.

The book goes on to discuss a sophisticated feedback technique called Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment (DDA) that adjusts the difficulty of play ... i.e. the game 'evaluates' how well the player is doing and, if it senses that the a player is not doing very well (i.e. getting killed too often/quickly or falling too far behind), the game adjusts to make it easier for that player - similarly, it will make the game more difficult for a better player. The aim being to keep the players playing. (Salen and Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Playing Fundamentals, 2004, MIT Press, pp 218-224).

I guess in a Formative Assessment (academic) setting, this would be translated into something like a set of questions/tasks ... after the first ones the computer would assess how good the student was and either present more easier questions/task to poor students or more difficult questions/tasks to good students. After the next set of questions the student would be reassessed and the number and level of difficulty of the subsquent questions would be adjusted accordingly ... i.e. Adaptive Assessment (http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/mar14/vol71/num06/The-Potential-of-Adaptive-Assessment.aspx).

Another issue from those very helpful people that produce wwwtools for teachers, this one is all about Tags, Folksonomies and Social Bookmarking - theory piggy-backing on technological development. I know that we shouldn't let technology drive what we do, that pedagogy should ... but it seems to me that there are times (hopefully brief) when developments in technology throw up possibilities which drive a period of reflection while we put a lot of effort into thinking about whether or not some aspect of the new possibility could be at all useful. It might not be teaching & learning as we know it Jim ... but it might be next year.

... the 16th January, 2006 issue of wwwtools for teachers is all about the potential of Mobile / Cell Phones in Education with links to various presentations by Nesta Futurelabs and Marc Prensky etc. Topics touched upon include The Possibilities, Thoughts on Pedagogy, The Hardware, Examples of Features, Applications, and Services, Mobile Phones in Educational Practice, and Classroom Applications.