EDUCAUSE | Social Computing

Privacy related links of interest ...

mpasiewicz — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 09:57:06 -0600

I just discovered a series of interesting blog entries from Danny Weitzner, W3C Technology and Society Policy Director and co-director of MIT CSAIL. These aren't especially new links, but I thought they might be worth relaying ...

Reciprocal Privacy for the Social Web - provides an introduction for a proposal "to establish a reasonable privacy balance in social networking environment" using FOAF. Also of interest is a link from Shahan Khatchadourian describing the use of FOAF and OpenID to establish trust/prevent spam. Apparently the solution could be available from Ryan Lee as a Drupal module? In some ways, this sounds similar to the Social Network Portability concept mentioned by Stephen Downes.

ELI In Conversation: George Siemens and Michael Wesch Talk About Future Learning.

gbayne — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 01:48:53 -0600

In this podcast we feature a conversation between George Siemens, Associate Director of the Learning Technologies Centre at the University of Manitoba. and Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University It was recorded at the ELI 2008 Annual Meeting.

Michael Wesch presented a session entitled, "Human Futures for Technology and Education" at the ELI 2008 Annual Meeting. He also produced a video, which is referenced in this conversation, entitled "The Machine is Us/ing Us".

George Siemens presented a session entitled, "Connectivism" at the ELI 2008 Annual Meeting.

OCLC Report on Social Networking

mpasiewicz — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 09:48:38 -0500

OCLC has issued a new report that sounds like a must read for those interested in navigating the waters of the social web and I look forward to delving into it. I, personally, have mixed feelings about what I've skimmed of the report. I'm particularly vexed about a call from OCLC to "relax the rules of privacy" ... I haven't read the report yet, but that's an interesting call to action. Personally, I'd love to see a call for a more research and experimentation into alternative approaches to the social web that might find a way to protect privacy and raise awareness of why it might be important.

I'm also interested in the so called attention economy and the work of groups like AttentionTrust.org, but they haven't gained much traction as far as I can tell. As I learn more about these new social spaces, I've begun to worry more and more about privacy. In an era of mash-ups, widgets and outsourcing services to third parties, it almost seems to easy to skim over issues like privacy. I also worry that for many, the topic of privacy is limited in scope to compliance with FERPA related issues. Am I alone in my perception there?

I often wonder whether or not we're sometimes are too quick to embrace some of these areas without pausing to consider the potential for unintended consequences and other side effects. Furthermore, I often wonder about who'll take up the banner of privacy and trust in an era where the library is being disintermediated and where the values that librarians often hold are brushed aside as organizations look to embrace some of these emerging technologies. The library was once a key locus for managing the relationships between content and consumers, but now access to information is much more diffuse and the breadcrumbs of consumption are scattered about and managed by many different players ... and many of them are private sector participants whose values may be very different from those often embedded in our library colleagues. Is this a good thing? I'm not so certain, but I'd love to hear your thoughts.

http://www.oclc.org/reports/sharing/default.htm

A few Selected Educause Web2.0 Articles and Resources

jrboyd — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 14:36:44 -0500

Community Resources

http://connect.educause.edu/term_view/Web%2B2.0

Articles:

Imagining Tomorrow's Future Today
Art St. George and the 2007 EDUCAUSE Evolving Technologies Committee
EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 42, no. 6 (November/December 2007): 107–127
http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm07/erm0765.asp

Wikis and Podcasts and Blogs! Oh, My! What Is a Faculty Member Supposed to Do?
Patricia McGee and Veronica Diaz
EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 42, no. 5 (September/October 2007): 28–41
http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm07/erm0751.asp

Dr. Mashup; or, Why Educators Should Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Remix
Brian Lamb
EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 42, no. 4 (July/August 2007): 12–25
http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm07/erm0740.asp

Confessions of a Podcast Junkie
Carie Windham
EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 42, no. 3 (May/June 2007): 50–65
http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm07/erm0732.asp

Social Networking Technologies: A "Poke" for Campus Services
Joanne Berg, Lori Berquam, and Kathy Christoph
EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 42, no. 2 (March/April 2007): 32–44
http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm07/erm0721.asp

A Wider World: Youth, Privacy, and Social Networking Technologies
Tracy Mitrano
EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 41, no. 6 (November/December 2006): 16–29
http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm06/erm0660.asp

Pioneering New Territory and Technologies
Pablo G. Molina and the 2006 EDUCAUSE
Evolving Technologies Committee
EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 41, no. 5 (September/October 2006): 112–35
http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm06/erm0659.asp

The Myth about Putting Information Online - No One Cares What You Say Online.
Diana G. Oblinger and Brian L. Hawkins
EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 41, no. 5 (September/October 2006): 14–15.
http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm06/erm06513.asp

Web 2.0: A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning?
Bryan Alexander
EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 41, no. 2 (March/April 2006): 32–44.
http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm06/erm0621.asp

Father Google and Mother IM: Confessions of a Net Gen Learner
Carie Windham
EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 40, no. 5 (September-October 2005): 42–59.
http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm05/erm0552.asp

Educational Blogging
Stephen Downes
EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 39, no. 5 (September/October 2004): 14–26.
http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm0450.asp?bhcp=1

A few new podcasts of interest ...

mpasiewicz — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 09:07:36 -0500

NPR's Andy Carvin recently joined Talk of the Nation to cover social networking and sites like Facebook and MySpace. During the recording, they covered a number of issues related to their use in education.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14993512

First Monday is starting up a new series of podcasts. The current recording features an interview with Ian Bogost about his new book, Persuasive Games. Next up is Siva Vaidhyanathan ... I was forwarded a preview of the very interesting recording, but they haven't linked it up yet.

http://www.firstmonday.org/podcasts/

Some Foundations for Second Life Pedagogy

HiredEd — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 14:47:30 -0500

Sex, commerce and stalking. In recent discussions on our campus on the use of Second Life as a learning environment, these were some of the first things people noted as concerns. Sex was a problem just because it was there to contend with - whereas it is not much of a factor in our current LMS! It was also thought that some of the economic arguments about Second Life being an "authentic" environment (because of the real economy) were questionable; i.e. what is so "authentic" about commerce, and is that the kind of "authenticity" we want to emphasize in our courses. And stalking is a bad thing, of course...

I did not share these concerns about Second Life. In ways I find both reassuring and depressing, sex, commerce and stalking are all part of life on campus anyway, and in these regards Second Life does not differ much from life on our offline, physical campus (except that real sex is better and real stalking is worse than Second Life sex/stalking).

Being a design-minded individual, my attention was more captivated by the unique pedagogical opportunities and challenges posed by the Second Life medium. We were lucky enough to have Sarah "Intellagirl" Robbins visit our campus to give a presentation on educational uses of Second Life. She described a lesson she designed on self-presentation and identity (or so I recall, I forget exactly how she herself positioned the lesson) where students had to choose bodies from a box or treasure-trunk, don them, and go out and interact in Second Life in those bodies. One group of students chose to go out as Kool-Aid men, and they went to a bar, where they bumped into people, angered them, got marginalized, tried to hide, sought solidarity with each other, and in general behaved like members of a visually conspicuous minority group. They returned to the home island a very short time after venturing out, having learned an enormous amount about size issues, discrimination and minority identities.

She also discussed programs like Global Kids in Teen Second Life, and related "Gaming for Good" projects, that put kids in the position of various kinds of decision makers - everything from authorities to commoners in famine zones or child soldiers (actually, she focused on the Darfur project, the other topics came up in my own web search - must apologize for some memory haze here...).

Reflecting on these instructional anecdotes, I find myself thinking that Second life is ideally suited for (at least) two kinds of learning activities - empathy-based learning and encounter learning.

Empathy-based learning design requires the instructional designer to create a habitus, consisting of physical markers and parameters, position markings, behavioural options and the like that enable someone undertaking the lesson to experience social or instrumental interactions in a way that allows them to experience reality from a perspective different from their own. Some offline examples of empathy-based learning include the blue-eyed/brown-eyed experiment, having people who don't usually use wheelchairs use them for some significant stretch of time, having kids take care of a fresh, uncooked egg for several days to simulate the demands of parenting, having people dress as if they are destitute and homeless and have them try to carry out everyday social and commercial transactions, etc.

Second Life is a rich environment for empathy-provoking learning experiences of this sort. One might imagine "empathy islands" devoted to offering an empathic understanding of some issue or situation. A course on the history of the Klondike Gold Rush might be greatly enriched by challenging students to undertake the journey to Dawson in Second life on an island that replicated the physics and energetics of the journey.

On an activist front, rich and engaging empathy-islands for current social issues could be studded with "PSAs" or "ads" for social service/change organizations, which could be virtual "change boxes" to gather donations for those charities - thus generating a micro-billing stream of real support for the empathic focus of the island. Other calls to action could also be woven into the experiential rhetoric of the island.

Discussions about the educational use of Second Life should thus include some sustained reflection on the role and value of empathy-building activities in education more generally. It is likely that in many cases, a rationale for the use of empathy-based learning will further support a rationale for the use of Second Life as the environment for that learning activity. Others may already be talking about this, but as I enter this conversation about Second Life, I do so with this issue on my mind.

Another kind of educational activity that Second Life enables is encounter-based learning. Second Life allows one to transcend physical geography and bring diverse people together. A blindingly obvious way to leverage this for education is to bringtogether learners from different language groups together for foreign language practice. I haven't though as much about the possibilities here, but again, a sustained examination of the uses and roles of encounter-based learning in general will end up offering an important framework for constructing Second Life learning activities.

Sex, commerce and stalking do not strike me as the main challenges to building learning activities for college-aged adults in Second Life. As I said before, these things already characterize college campuses, and must be similarly managed in either domain.

For me the most interesting thing about Second Life is that it is a primarily spatial learning environment, which means that instructional designers lose the inherent contro lover instructional *sequence* that a primarily textual or audio-visual medium offers.

Second Life is inherently a random-access, exploratory environment. It even adds the degrees of freedom of flying and teleporting to an already free navigational paradigm of just walking around. Of course, instructional sequence could always be controlled by constructing a castle full of hallways to walk down, or a roller-coaster-ride through the lesson materials, etc. But in the absence of any such special construction, Second Life is non-sequential, random access and exploratory.

That offers a third "E" to this list of educational modes that are natural to Second Life:

- Empathic/Empathy-Based
- Encounter-Based
- Exploratory

The design of exploratory learning is an interesting challenge. How do you design non-sequential instruction? In a blog entry I wrote earlier, I discussed a game-design book that offers some guidance on this design task. The book is called _Rules of Play_ . In that book, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman describe three layers of design:

- Rules: The logic and organization of possibilities within the system of the game
- Play: The human experience of the system - the constaints that enable people to move through the logic of the game rules in a structured and workable manner
- Culture: The larger activities, social and instructional contexts engaged with and inhabited by the system.

Without going into too much detail about this (which I couldn't do even if I wanted to), it seems to me that instructional design in Second Life must attend to these three layers of design. There is the logic or structure of the experience one wants to create, then one must attend to how learners will explore or move through this experience, and the fit between this experience and other social and instructional aspects of the course needs to be clear (enough) as well.

While it's not as dramatic as sex, commerce and stalking, the combination of:

- Empathy
- Encounter
- Exploration
   * Rules (Logic, conceptual/factual structure)
   * Play (Learning activity, processing)
   * Culture

...does offer a foundation for some pretty rigorous work on the educational uses of the Second Life platform. It's not the whole story, but it's a great place to start.

CANS: Promoting Social and Collaborative Learning in Online Environments

catherine — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 09:06:32 -0500

CANS, or Context-aware Activity Notification System, is an innovative software development project that highlights the role of social contexts and personalization in online learning environments. Currently in use at the University of Missouri, in 10 online courses, CANS offers a way to increase the levels of “sociability” afforded by educational technology infrastructure, and to generate opportunities for collaborative learning.

Recently, I interviewed two of the main architects of CANS, Chris Amelung and James Laffey, via email and took advantage of the medium to ask them some detailed questions about the present and future directions of the project. (Chris's responses are listed in black, and Jim's in blue).

Background

CH: Tell us a bit about the background to CANS. What was the original inspiration for the project?

CA: I initially developed CANS for my dissertation so, in the broadest sense, CANS was inspired by my need to graduate. But, of course, the story isn’t that simple. A lot of prior effort and thought inspired the design and development of CANS.

Several years ago, Jim and I worked on an open-source project called Shadow netWorkspace (TM), or "Shadow". Shadow was a collaborative network-learning environment designed and developed for online learning and collaboration. Our team, lead by Drs. Dale Musser and Jim Laffey, put a lot of thought into the collaborative features of the system. We had multiple group types with different levels of access permissions, an advanced structured discussion board, an online file system, email, chat, and so on. The system was great and quite advanced for its time; however, like Sakai of today, we quickly ran into usability problems.

It was difficult for users to navigate and find needed information. Our users were spending too much time trying to find the information they needed for learning and collaboration. Trying to navigate through all of the different files, discussion board posts, and chat messages (from instructors and students) was too difficult and time-consuming. We needed a better way. We needed a notification system to bring the information to the users.

I believe it was Jim who initially pushed for the idea of adding an activity notification widget to the main page of each group and course in Shadow. The idea being of course that as soon as a user enters a course, s/he would immediately receive a summary of recent activity for that class and have the ability to navigate straight to the desired artifact, thereby bypassing the complicated hierarchical nature of our LMS.

We built and integrated our notification system based on the desire to improve usability and access to information. On the surface it appeared that we had a system that worked really well. Unfortunately, we made a mistake that I think a lot of groups make when they think about activity awareness and notification. We coupled our system too closely with the core LMS. The notification system we built was integrated and embedded throughout Shadow and after a few months of activity and a few thousand artifacts, the notification system that was supposed to improve the user experience brought Shadow to its knees. Performance dropped to an almost unusable level.

I believe the notification system we developed had two fundamental problems. First, the system was too closely integrated with the core LMS. It simply requires a lot of processing power to generate appropriate activity notifications and, because of the tight coupling between the notification system and the LMS, the performance of the LMS suffered from the increased demands on the notification system. With CANS today, the notification system is decoupled from the LMS. All of the processing required to generate and deliver notifications, and the back-end database, is designed to run outside of the LMS on an entirely different server. Worst-case scenario: a user won’t receive a notification; but because of this decoupling, the user will always be able to use their LMS.

The second problem, and less obvious one at the time, was that we didn’t offer our users any way to customize their notification preferences. We assumed we knew what they needed and that was what they received. We knew this wasn’t the best solution, but it was the only one we were able to come up with at the time.

Users did want to change their notification preferences but because they weren’t able to configure their preferences in the first place, they didn’t have an opportunity to setup and learn how the notification system worked or what the information they were receiving actually meant.

After a few semesters of using Shadow, I was at the point where I was looking for a dissertation topic. We were intimately familiar with the benefits and challenges of activity awareness so it was a natural topic for my dissertation.

CH: Are there any specific fore-runner projects or tools that you are drawing on in the design of CANS?

CA: During my dissertation work, I evaluated and tested several different LMS and activity notification systems. Beyond our own prior work in Shadow, three projects influenced the design and implementation of CANS.

The first, and most influential, was Geraldine Fitzpatrick’s work on the Locales Framework. Dr. Fitzpatrick designed this theoretical framework “to enhance and support social world interactions” and developed a system called Orbit to evaluate the framework (Fitzpatrick, 1998). I drew many insights and inspiration from the Framework, the Orbit system, and another tool they developed called Tickertape.

The second project that strongly influenced the system architecture of CANS was called iScent - the InterSubjective Collaborative Event Environment (Anderson & Bouvin, 2000). The distributed nature of this system inspired the architecture of CANS. In addition to system architecture, iScent was an inspiration because it drew upon an interesting concept called “intersubjectivity” or “I know that you know that I know”. Not only would iScent notify users of relevant activity, but it would also notify the person who generated the activity. In other words, for each notification sent to a user, a notification about that notification would get sent to the originator of the activity – certainly an interesting idea that could strongly influence identity and collaboration in an LMS. While intersubjectivity isn’t being used in CANS today, it is something I hope to implement in the future.

The third project that influenced the development of CANS was called Groove. It was a desktop notification system built by Microsoft. Unlike the other systems, Groove ran independently from a browser and was designed to put the data analysis and work required to generate activity notifications on the user’s computer instead of on a shared server. The influence of Groove on CANS can be seen in our Desktop Awareness Widget work (EyeOnSakai).

CH: The design of CANS draws on Dourish’s concept of “embodied interaction”. Can you give our readers a brief explanation of this?

JL: First, let me recommend Paul Dourish’s book, “Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction” as an excellent foundational book for those involved in design and development. The term “interaction” refers to how work (teaching, learning, producing, playing, etc.) gets done and the term “embodied” points us to an appreciation for the role of context in how work gets done. The lessons we drew from Dourish’s exploration of these topics was to stop thinking so much about how to optimize users' experience with the physical computer or software and to start thinking more deeply about how computation can optimize users’ interaction with their work. By thinking about computation rather than the computer we can envision new processes to support work which are embedded in the workflow of teaching and learning…. and new representations to help users make sense of the interaction.

So by mapping how activity information fits with teaching and learning processes we can try to deliver or insert that information at the time that it is relevant and helpful to the teacher or student and in the way that it is most helpful.

Similarly by understanding how activity information is used in teaching and learning processes we can think about how to represent it in the most meaningful ways. For example, sometimes information is most salient to a decision when you have tables of numbers or graphic representations for seeing a birds eye view of activity; at other times we need more detail about who did what when, or maybe we want to see how one set of activity information compares with another, for example how does my level of activity in a course compare with the average user, or with the instructor.

So the major take away from Dourish’s book for us was to focus on how computation supports the work of teaching and learning and how to include contextual information as we try to help the user derive meaning from the interaction. Of course we still have much to learn about how to do that well….or the best ways to accomplish the display, timing and delivery of appropriate information.

Architecture and Functionality

CH: CANS has been designed to work with any network-based app capable of generating / receiving XML. Is your vision for CANS that it will find its most “natural” home in LMS / VLE / VREs, or did you design it for use in other types of online community as well?

CA: I believe educational environments are a natural fit for CANS and because our group is primarily interested in educational technologies, it just fits. However, I believe it can and should be used with other online communities. For example, I have been working with a social networking site, for entrepreneurs, that is already using CANS and we’ve started working with a software development company that specializes in business technologies.

The interesting thing about CANS and activity awareness in general is that it isn’t just about education. It really affects all aspects of online life. Whether its education, business, entertainment, whatever; awareness about what others are doing is very important and relevant to our daily lives, even the virtual ones.

CH: Are there specific institutional systems / infrastructure that CANS needs to interface with? (authentication, student information, etc.)

CA: Integration with institutional systems is important when it comes to administering a CANS-enabled system beyond more than a few hundred users. CANS currently doesn’t interface with any authentication or user information system, but that is something we plan to implement within the next 12 – 18 months.

CH: What do you see as being some of the most important educational implications for bringing more “presence awareness” into an asynchronous or semi-synchronous learning environment?

JL: Let’s think about “presence awareness” in two ways here. First that I am present and represented, and second that I am co-present with others. I’ll try to keep this short, but we need to appreciate that education is a social activity….as humans we want to be social, as learners we are guided and shaped by social interaction and the behavior of others, as learners we are also not just learning to do or know something we are learning to be someone, as members of a social unit (class, school, etc,) we are interdependent and benefit when trust and social capital are present. Of course being social is not the end in itself, because while being social can be motivating, guiding and build social capital it can also be distracting or detrimental to the educational objectives. The goal in our work with Sakai is to build an information and toolset so that educational leaders and teachers can manage presence (activity awareness) so as to bring the benefits of the social nature of learning to bear in their enterprise and courses. So in a way we want CANS to enable Sakai educators to implement their theory of social learning in their local context.

However, if you read our FIPSE proposal we make the case that (1) too often online learning fails to engage and sustain students because it lacks a sense of social enterprise, (2) too often online learning fails to implement social affordances that are present in F2F learning, such as social navigation and modeling in learning, and (3) too often the tools available for collaboration among students are so cumbersome that collaborative learning becomes turn taking or division of labor rather than real collaboration so that students do not get the value and instructors see this way of teaching as too hard. In this sense we see the current social aspects of Sakai and CMS in general as being so limited that we just want to enable more and more natural social experiences.

User Experience and Development

CH: Let’s talk a bit about the benefits of being keyed into the Sakai community. Sakai’s strengths are often noted as its flexibility, its robust technical framework and its open source, community development model. What, for you, are the benefits of participating in the collaboration? What are the challenges?

JL: Well like most folks we are users of Sakai and want it to be better. We also like being in a community of folks who want “better.” As mentioned in the answer to question 1 we built a cool system called Shadow netWorkspaceÔ a few years back. It was open source but we never got traction with sufficient user communities to sustain it. Perhaps it was a little ahead of its time. We took over a year “teaching” our university admin and lawyers about open source before they would allow us to use the GPL. We really liked the project and learned a lot from it….but we did not have the return of knowing that an accomplishment with the system would lead to thousands of instructors and 100’s of thousands of students having better teaching and learning experiences. Those outcomes are salient and tangible within Sakai. Also, while we were learning a lot we were pretty much learning in a closed context. With Sakai we see the opportunity for learning across the community in ways that are really exciting.

As a challenge….just the complexity of keeping up with all that is going on…well of course we don’t do that, but the thought is daunting J How do all the pieces fit together not as a product for course management….that while not trivial is pretty straightforward. Rather how do all the pieces fit together as an innovation in teaching and learning that really impacts education and our vision for education.

CH: In terms of the user experience, I note that many teams in the Sakai collaboration are currently making great efforts to improve look-and-feel, navigability, and general user-friendliness of Sakai. How could CANS contribute to the user experience within Sakai?

CA: I applaud the efforts of these teams and look forward to their contributions. I know Sakai will improve because of their work. However, I believe that “look-and-feel” and navigability can only take us so far. I think its time for a fundamental shift in thinking when it comes to the advancement of Sakai and other LMS.

Sakai is a great information repository for online coursework. It stores information and offers a nice set of tools for navigating to, sharing and accessing information. I realize it does do more, but looking back at the history of LMS, it’s pretty obvious that things really haven’t changed that much. We still have the same basic set of tools and features as we did 5+ years ago. And in the Internet life-span, five years is a long time.

To initiate the next revolution in LMS, I believe that we, as a community, must turn our attention to activity awareness, notification systems, and the idea of working both in and out of the LMS. We need to be working on tools to deliver the information users want, when they want it, how they want, and where they want it. Why force a user to login to Sakai and navigate X-levels deep to read a discussion board post when you can deliver that message to the user on his or her cell phone only when its about a topic of interest?

We need to start approaching LMS development like the PC market is starting to treat the Internet and mobile devices. Like the PC, the LMS is your core system that stores all your information and has a core set of tools where you do focused work when you want. But all of your mobile devices and other components of the Internet (ex. mashups) are connected to the LMS. Not only do you receive awareness information on these devices but you also have simple, light-weight ways to interact with the LMS. For example, you receive a notification about a new urgent discussion board post on your cell phone and you use that phone to post a reply back into the LMS. Don’t make the user load and navigate through the entire LMS.

I believe CANS can contribute to the user experience by helping with the delivery and presentation of this information.

CH: In July 2005, Chris Amelung posted on Sakai Confluence: “As a user navigates through Sakai, he or she is navigating through various social contexts.” If, as Chris maintains, “A social context is a place where user actions and interactions can occur”, then I would agree with him that “pretty much anything in Sakai can be considered a social context (the entire community, a work site, a discussion board, a discussion board post, a resource, a folder in the resources, even a user or group of users)”.

(Ref: http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/ARCHIVE/Use+Cases+-+DG+Collaboration )

What then is the meaning of “presence”, for a user who finds him or herself located in multiple nested or interdependent social / systems contexts? Or, to put the question another way, at what level (or levels) does “presence” gain significance for the user?

CA: This question can’t be answered easily because ultimately I believe it’s up to the user to define when/where presence gains significance. Generally, however, I think its safe to say that the users most nested social context has greatest significance at any given time.

For example, if a user is posting a reply to a discussion board post (context 1), within a discussion thread (context 2), within the discussion tool (context 3), within a course site (context 4), within Sakai (context 5) that discussion board post is the most significant context for that user at that given time. If another person posts a reply to that message while the user is writing his or her own reply to that post, it’s probably an important enough event that the user should receive a notification that actually interrupts their workflow. In contrast, a notification within the site (context 4) may just show up in the user’s periphery and a notification in Sakai (context 5) doesn’t show up at all.

So, I think a user is “most present” in his most nested social context because that context defines the current context of interest.

This whole model of nested contexts and associated levels of presence can be broken when users choose to define other contexts (sites, artifacts, users, etc.) and associate personal priorities to their contexts. In other words, users may want to define all messages posted by Instructor X as a context that is always important. So the instructor’s presence in Sakai is always significant to the user no matter where the user is or what s/he is doing.

JL: Additionally we may find that workflows can also define context. So for example knowing what comes next in a workflow or knowing who is to act next upon an object may allow us (or more likely instructors or group leaders) to specify associations and sequences as defining new contexts beyond the way contexts are presently defined.

CA: One of the advantages of CANS is that we’re putting the power of customization in the hands of the users. The challenge that we’re working on right now is to develop intuitive interfaces that allow users to manage their notification preferences without overloading them with too much information or too many options.

CH: How do you deal with the question of “representativeness” when designing for users of CANS? How do you put together CANS use cases? Do you use personas?

JL: I am always confounded by the issue of designing for innovation in that current practitioners can’t imagine what it would be like to work differently and I can’t imagine what it is like to do their work. Our approach is to rapidly prototype so that we can engage users in thinking what it will be like to work with the new tools. So we first prototype with stories about working differently using personas and scenarios, and then try to rapidly move to mockups of how it might be. When I worked at apple we often stated the need too “fail fast.” You want to learn what will not work fast rather than holding on to a design concept for a long time only to realize late in the product development stage that something is not going to work. So we rapidly prototype through narratives and mockups and try to get a small number of folks to critique each stage so as to find the losing ideas and get rid of them. Our next phase is to take our “better” ideas to a broader community for critique and commentary. We’ll be doing that on our cansaware site and hopefully all the readers will check out and comment in our user experience section of the site.

Future

CH: VR tools and services are often touted as the next logical step in terms of presence / synchronous communications for education. Tools such as Sloodle (a mashup that allows students to blog to Moodle from within Second Life) are blurring the boundaries between individuals, systems, and synchronous / asynchronous communications. Do you have an opinion on this? How do you see CANS fitting into this new emerging landscape?

CA: I think I already touched on this point in a previous question, but I find “blurring the boundaries” as critically important to the way users work and learn today. I believe we can use CANS and other awareness systems to link these systems with the LMS so activity that occurs in Sakai can be sent as activity notifications to the 3D environment and visa-versa.

CH: What are your plans for CANS in the future?

CA: Well, there are many and most of them are related to our current FIPSE grant. In the near future, we’ll be developing better tools for administering CANS, we’ll be developing tools to integrate activity notifications within the Sakai interface, and we’ll be improving our email digests and Desktop Notification Widgets. As already mentioned, we want to start integrating CANS with institutions’ user account and authentication systems, and I personally have a strong interest in working with cell phones and PDAs.

JL: In addition the FIPSE award enhances our ability to work with the Sakai community in learning about how activity awareness and notification mechanisms influence teaching and learning practices and outcomes, as well as hopefully engage others in making Sakai and LMS in general more powerful in supporting the social nature of learning.

CA: I’d also like to explore geographical awareness through services like Google Maps. Of course, I have other plans too, but I’ll save that for the next interview.

Before I sign off, I’d like to stress the fact that CANS is more than just an activity notification system. It’s also a tool for researchers to use to study the impact activity notifications have on user actions and behavior. It can do this because not only does it record the activity that occurs within a LMS, but it also records the notifications that get generated and delivered. From these data, one can study the actions occurring in Sakai and also study the impact those notifications have on future actions. In the future, I hope we can build tools and interfaces to not only make users more “aware” and “present", but also to assist the researcher in this important area of study.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to send them to me at chris@cansaware.com or visit http://www.cansaware.com for additional information.

CH: Thank you both very much. For me, this has been an engaging and stimulating discussion. I hope it may encourage readers to begin to explore some of the opportunities and benefits of adding more “social” elements to online learning environments.

ELI2007 Podcast: First Generation Ubiquitous Computing

Carie417 — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 20:19:51 -0600

In this 50-minute recording from the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative Annual Meeting, we'll hear from Bryan Alexander in a session entitled First Generation Ubiquitous Computing: Social, Mobile, and Gamelike. Alexander explores how gaming, social software, and mobility have synthesized the first generation of global, ubiquitous computing.

Future of Books - Google 'Unbound' Conference

jeffvand — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 09:52:04 -0600

Many of my recent posts (Human Education Network, ECAR, Webpage Documents, Trailfire) focus on the future of education and the internet's role in that. Yesterday Inside Google Book Search posted an short article about a conference they recently had in New York about the future of the book. As part of their post they posted a video montage of the event.

The conference, appropriately titled 'Unbound,' focused on the future of books. Here are a couple of quotes.

Presumably talking about a website centered around a book one presenter said:

"The website should be interactive. It should be forum, there should be author talks, there should be talks the author can participate in."

Another presenter said the following about the power of social networking.

"Social activity around my work is absolutely the most important thing that can happen for it. To have someone turn to someone else and say: 'I read this book, I love it, you must read it.' Boy, nothing sells books like that."

Probably the most important quote comes from David Worlock, Chairman of EPS.

"The future of the book is secure. It's what we do it, how we promote it, how we develop it, and how we put new layers of meaning around it in a digital context which becomes extremely important.

I post this all just to re-emphasize the importance of the internet. The internet will provide a sphere where we can add these new layers of social networking, collaboration, and a myriad of other new layers that haven't even been thought of yet.

I applaud Google once again because they are ahead of the learning curve. Last week I saw some features on their Google book search that is already potentially changing the way we learn from books. I look forward to more developments in the future!

(Original Article: http://www.edutechie.com/2007/02/future-of-books-google-unbound-conference/)

An Interview with Lisa Hinchliffe

mpasiewicz — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 10:35:15 -0600

In this 15 minute recording, Lisa Hinchliffe shares some thoughts on, among other things, the role of librarians in the social computing sphere and shares some thoughts on her experiences there.

This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2006 Fall Task Force Meeting. The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity. You can learn more about CNI at their web site, http://www.cni.org