Facebook glue

Joss Winn / / Web

A press release from the University of Leicester last week, summarises the findings so far of a research project which “focuses on how pre-registration engagement with the University of Leicester Facebook network influences students’ post-registration social networks and their understanding of the University.” They’ve found that “a high proportion of freshers use the internet to smooth the settling-in process.” No real surprise there, but these kind of studies are important, not only to better understand the student experience, but also better understand how the Internet and social networking in particular, is affecting social relations in general.

A survey of 221 first year students conducted between April and June this year found that more than half (55 per cent) had joined Facebook to make new friends prior to entering university, while a further 43 per cent joined immediately after starting university. Nearly three quarters said Facebook had played an important part in helping them to settle in at university.

So within the first few weeks of joining university, 98% of students (who responded) were using Facebook to some extent. The way the quote above is worded doesn’t make it entirely clear whether 55% of students joined Facebook to make new university friends or socialise with existing friends and meet new friends in general. Later in the press release they say that “59% of respondents considered that the way that they used Facebook had changed since they came to University.” So we know that at least 59% of individuals were using Facebook prior to entering university. They quote some respondent’s motivations for joining Facebook:

  • To meet people before coming to university and because most of my friends at home used it.
  • Because my friends all had it and one of them told me that it was a good way to meet people going to the same uni as me.
  • To hopefully get into contact with people who were living in my building or were on my course through facebook groups. I hoped that knowing these people before I got there would give me a head start at uni.
  • To keep in touch with friends and for a bit of fun. Also to see if I could find anyone going to Leicester Uni living in my halls.

I suspect that the 55% is a mix of some people consciously joining with university in mind and others who were using Facebook regardless of entering university. Still, university life clearly accounts for a lot of Facebook registrations and an even greater amount of Facebook activity.

Over a third of respondents also said they used Facebook to discuss academic work with other students on a weekly basis, and more than half responded positively to the idea of using Facebook for more formal teaching and learning – although only 7 per cent had actually done so. Many suggested ways in which Facebook could be used, such as providing social support for students in departments and informing students about changing lecture times.

This is good to read and follows JISC’s In Their Own Words report about the move to increased learner autonomy.

But the survey also found that 41 per cent of students were against being contacted directly by tutors via Facebook. A report on the preliminary findings warns that the university will need to tread carefully if it wants to use Facebook to communicate with students for administrative or teaching and learning purposes.

So “more than half” of students welcome using Facebook for teaching and learning and 41% were against it? Or is that “more than half” of “over third of respondents” welcome the use of Facebook for teaching and learning? Again, not entirely clear to me, but I imagine it’s the former and that attitudes are going to shift even further in that direction over time.

My own experience is that the longer and more extensively I’ve used services like Facebook (in fact, the Internet in general), the fewer walls I construct to protect the normal divisions in my life. Not only is it too difficult to maintain separate identities on Facebook, but the boundaries between work, leisure, education and our private lives are far less distinct than they would otherwise be. You only have to look at the number of family photos on Flickr, the number of work related Facebook networks and the amount of discussion occuring online where people use their same identity for both work-related discussion and non-work-related discussion to see that walls are falling rather than being constructed through the use of the Internet.

Wikipedia : Google Docs : Yahoo Pipes Mashup

Joss Winn / / Fun, Tips, Web

First of all, this is not my work. All credit should go to Tony Hirst from the Open University for posting an explanation of this to his blog. Brilliant stuff.

Tony is doing what we’ve been meaning to look at for some time, which is create ‘Learning Objects’ out of mashups. In Tony’s example, data is 1) taken from Wikipedia, 2) imported to a Google Spreadsheet, 3) output as a CSV file and 4) mashed up in Yahoo! Pipes.

The process of creating an object like the map below is so transparent that both teachers and students, with a specific outcome in mind, could achieve something like this and the results are very satisfying, as you can see.

UK WordCamp (Ed)ucation?

Joss Winn / / Conferences, Fun, Learning Landscapes, Software, Web

Having heard about the WordCamp Ed event in Washington DC, I’m thinking of organising a WordCamp, focussing on the use of WordPress in HE and FE in the UK.  Would anyone be interested in helping with the organisation of this? 

There is some support for organising WordCamps from Automattic. A lot of the items listed there would be easy to facilitate with support from one of our institutions.  I’d be happy to ask the University of Lincoln. We’re just off the main North-South East Coast rail trunk, but the access isn’t bad from London up to Edinburgh, and it’s a good, modern university, with decent facilities in a historic city worth visiting. 

I’m sure there would be a lot of interest in attending. It could appeal to teachers, students, researchers, ICT and web dev staff.  We could appeal for the involvement of edubloggers who have a lot of experience in advocating the use of blogs in HE and FE. 

There was a WordCamp in Birmingham in July 2008. We could contact the organisers of that event for advice as well as the organisers of the DC event.

The day might be organised like this: 

  • Registration and welcome
  • Keynote 
  • Live WordPressMU install and set up. A useful overview for both administrators and users. Also introduces the language of blogging which people will hear constantly throughout the day. i.e. ‘posts’, ‘pages’, ‘tags’, categories’, ‘blogroll’, ‘plugins’, ‘themes’, etc. 
  • Two or three presentations with Q&A on how people are using WordPress in education (maybe one from a marketing perspective, the others from a teaching and learning perspective) 
  • Lunch 
  • Keynote 
  • Special interest group sessions: research groups, teachers, students, marketing, administration, development, etc. 
  • Group feedback 
  • Presentation on forthcoming WordPress features. Integration of WP with other (social) services. Intro to BuddyPress and BBPress as extensions to WordPressMU.
  • Close 

Is anyone interested in helping organise a WordCamp(Ed) in the UK? Please leave comments below and join our new Google Group.

Academic Commons: Learning from FLOSS

Joss Winn / / Commons, PhD, Presentations

While preparing my ‘Thinking Aloud’ seminar on Academic Commons, I was pleased to see that the Wikipedia entry for Open Educational Resources notes:

What has still not become clear by now to most actors in the OER domain is that there are further links between the OER and the Free / Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) movements, beyond the principles of “FREE” and “OPEN”. The FLOSS model stands for more than this and, like e.g. Wikipedia, shows how users can become active “resource” creators and how those resources can be re-used and freely maintained. In OER on the other hand a focus is still on the traditional way of resource creation and role distributions. [my emphasis]

As it happens, this is a significant interest of mine and one I touch upon in a forthcoming book chapter I contributed to.  We conclude:

The idea of student as producer encourages the development of collaborative relations between student and academic for the production of knowledge. However, if this idea is to connect to the project of refashioning in fundamental ways the nature of the university, then further attention needs to be paid to the framework by which the student as producer contributes towards mass intellectuality. This requires academics and students to do more than simply redesign their curricula, but go further and redesign the organizing principle, (i.e. private property and wage labour), through which academic knowledge is currently being produced. An exemplar alternative organizing principle is already proliferating in universities in the form of open, networked collaborative initiatives which are not intrinsically anti-capital but, fundamentally, ensure the free and creative use of research materials. Initiatives such as Science Commons, Open Knowledge and Open Access, are attempts by academics and others to lever the Internet to ensure that research output is free to use, re-use and distribute without legal, social or technological restriction (www.opendefinition.org). Through these efforts, the organizing principle is being redressed creating a teaching, learning and research environment which promotes the values of openness and creativity, engenders equity among academics and students and thereby offers an opportunity to reconstruct the student as producer and academic as collaborator. In an environment where knowledge is free, the roles of the educator and the institution necessarily change. The educator is no longer a delivery vehicle and the institution becomes a landscape for the production and construction of a mass intellect in commons. ((Neary, M. with Winn, J. (2009) ‘Student as Producer: Reinventing the Undergraduate Curriculum‘ in M. Neary, H. Stevenson, and L. Bell, (eds) (2009) The Future of Higher Education: Policy, Pedagogy and the Student Experience, Continuum, London))

I’d be interested in discussing these ideas with anyone who has similar interests. I don’t doubt I have a lot to learn from others.

Having been part of the open source community for the last eight years, I am utterly convinced there’s a lot to learn from the collaborative and highly productive social and creative processes that allow software developers, documentation writers and application end-users to work together so effectively. Over decades, they have developed tools to aid this process (mailing lists, IRC, revision control, the GPL and other licenses, etc.). Isn’t it time that more of us worked and learned in this way? Creative Commons is our license to do so; the Internet is our means of connecting with others. The tools are mostly available to us and where they are inappropriate for our discpilines, we should modify them. In the FLOSS community, knowledge is free and the community is thriving.

As the Wikipedia OER article states, the transmission of knowledge from teacher to learner is slowly being freed, but the social processes of knowledge production remain largely the same. Students are still largely positioned as consumers of knowledge and the hierarchical relationship between teacher and learner is increasingly contractual rather than personal. There are exceptions, I know, but there are few genuine opportunities for teacher and learner to work together productively, especially on a group scale. Institutions, like my own, are making some efforts to change the ‘Learning Landscape’ but I don’t think it is necessarily an institutional responsiblility. It’s the responsiblity of individuals (especially in an environment so relatively loosely controlled as a university) to work out the social relations and processes of peer production for themselves, looking for support from others when they need it.

How can the model by which the FLOSS community works so productively and openly be translated to every academic discipline and change the way that knowledge is both produced and transmitted? Technology is at this core of this enterprise and I suspect many teachers and learners feel alientated and divided by it.

By the way, here’s my Thinking Aloud presentation.

The Lincoln Academic Commons

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Bruce Sterling’s Preface to ‘The Hacker Crackdown’

Joss Winn / / Commons

Last night, I downloaded the ebook of Bruce Sterling’s The Hacker Crackdown to my iPod Touch. With the exception of poor battery life, the iPod Touch running the Stanza ebook reader software is a decent arrangment, even more so because you can easily download books from FeedBooks.

Anyway, opening Bruce Sterling’s book on my iPod this morning while walking to work, I had great pleasure reading his preface to the ebook version and his ‘license’ to the reader to distribute it non-commercially. In case you’re late to this book, as I am, here it is for your enjoyment, too:

Preface to the Electronic Release of THE HACKER CRACKDOWN

October 31, 1993-Austin, Texas
Hi, I’m Bruce Sterling, the author of this electronic book. Out in the traditional world of print, this book is still a part of the traditional commercial economy, because it happens to be widely available in paperback (for a while, at least).

Out in the world of print, THE HACKER CRACKDOWN is ISBN 0-553-08058-X, and is formally catalogued by the Library of Congress as “1. Computer crimes-United States. 2. Telephone-United States-Corrupt practices. 3. Programming (Electronic computers)-United States-Corrupt practices.” ‘Corrupt practices,’ I always get a kick out of that description. Librarians are very ingenious people.

If you go and buy the print version of THE HACKER CRACKDOWN, an action I encourage heartily, you may notice that in the front of the book, right under the copyright sign-“Copyright (C) 1992 by Bruce Sterling”-it has this little block of printed legal boilerplate from the publisher. It says, and I quote:

“No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information address: Bantam Books.”

This is a pretty good disclaimer, as such disclaimers go. I collect intellectual-property disclaimers, and I’ve seen dozens of them, and this one is at least pretty straightforward. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have much to do with reality. Bantam Books puts that disclaimer on every book they publish, but Bantam Books does not, in fact, own the electronic rights to this book. I do. And I’ve chosen to give them away. Bantam Books is not going to fuss about this. They are not going to bother you for what you do with the electronic copy of this book. If you want to check this out personally, you can ask them; they’re at 1540 Broadway NY NY 10036. However, if you were so foolish as to print this book and start retailing it for money in violation of my copyright and the commercial interests of Bantam Books, then Bantam, a part of the gigantic Bertelsmann multinational publishing combine, would roust some of their heavy-duty attorneys out of hibernation and crush you like a bug. This is only to be expected. I didn’t write this book so that you could make money out of it. If anybody is gonna make money out of this book, it’s gonna be me and my publisher.

My publisher deserves to make money out of this book. Not only did the folks at Bantam Books commission me to write the book, and pay me a hefty sum to do so, but they bravely printed, in text, an electronic document the reproduction of which was once alleged to be a federal felony. Bantam Books and their numerous attorneys were very brave and forthright about this book. Furthermore, my former editor at Bantam Books, Betsy Mitchell, genuinely cared about this project, and worked hard on it, and had a lot of wise things to say about the manuscript. Betsy deserves genuine credit for this book, credit that editors too rarely get.

The critics were very kind to THE HACKER CRACKDOWN, and commercially the book has done well. On the other hand, I didn’t write this book in order to squeeze every last nickel and dime out of the mitts of impoverished sixteen-year-old cyberpunk high- school students. Teenagers don’t have any money-no, not even enough for HACKER CRACKDOWN. That’s a major reason why they sometimes succumb to th temptation to do things they shouldn’t, such as swiping my books out of libraries. Kids: this one is all yours, all right? Go give the paper copy back. *8-)

Well-meaning, public-spirited civil libertarians don’t have much money, either. And it seems almost criminal to snatch cash out of the hands of America’s grotesquely underpaid electronic law enforcement community.

If you’re a computer cop, a hacker, or an electronic civil liberties activist, you are the target audience for this book. I wrote this book because I wanted to help you, and help other people understand you and your unique, uhm, problems. I wrote this book to aid your activities, and to contribute to the public discussion of important political issues. In giving the text away in this fashion, I am directly contributing to the book’s ultimate aim: to help civilize cyberspace.

Information WANTS to be free. And the information inside this book longs for freedom with a peculiar intensity. I genuinely believe that the natural habitat of this book is inside an electronic network. That may not be the easiest direct method to generate revenue for the book’s author, but that doesn’t matter; this is where this book belongs by its nature. I’ve written other books-plenty of other books-and I’ll write more and I am writing more, but this one is special. I am making THE HACKER CRACKDOWN available electronically as widely as I can conveniently manage, and if you like the book, and think it is useful, then I urge you to do the same with it.

You can copy this electronic book. Copy the heck out of it, be my guest, and give those copies to anybody who wants them. The nascent world of cyberspace is full of sysadmins, teachers, trainers, cybrarians, netgurus, and various species of cybernetic activist. If you’re one of those people, I know about you, and I know the hassle you go through to try to help people learn about the electronic frontier. I hope that possessing this book in electronic form will lessen your troubles. Granted, this treatment of our electronic social spectrum not the ultimate in academic rigor. And politically, it has something to offend and trouble almost everyone. But hey, I’m told it’s readable, and at least the price is right.

You can upload the book onto bulletin board systems, or Internet nodes, or electronic discussion groups. Go right ahead and do that, I am giving you express permission right now.
Enjoy yourself.

You can put the book on disks and give the disks away, as long as you don’t take any money for it.

But this book is not public domain. You can’t copyright it in your own name. I own the copyright. Attempts to pirate this book and make money from selling it may involve you in a serious litigative snarl. Believe me, for the pittance you might wring out of such an action, it’s really not worth it. This book don’t “belong” to you. In an odd but very genuine way, I feel it doesn’t “belong” to me, either. It’s a book about the people of cyberspace, and distributing it in this way is the best way I know to actually make this information available, freely and easily, to all the people of cyberspace-including people far outside the borders of the United States, who otherwise may never have a chance to see any edition of the book, and who may perhaps learn something useful from this strange story of distant, obscure, but portentous events in so-called “American cyberspace.”

This electronic book is now literary freeware. It now belongs to the emergent realm of alternative information economics. You have no right to make this electronic book part of the conventional flow of commerce. Let it be part of the flow of knowledge: there’s a difference. I’ve divided the book into four sections, so that it is less ungainly for upload and download; if there’s a section of particular relevance to you and your colleagues, feel free to reproduce that one and skip the rest.

Just make more when you need them, and give them to whoever might want them.

Now have fun.

Bruce Sterling—

The Virtual Studio

Joss Winn / / Conferences, Open Access, Projects, Repositories, Software

I am in Venice to present a paper with two colleagues from the School of Architecture, at a two-day conference organised by the Metadata for Architectural Materials in Europe (MACE) Project. Yesterday was a significant day, for reasons I want to detail below. Skip to the end of this long post, if you just want to know the outcome and why this conference has been an important and positive turning point in the Virtual Studio project.

I joined the university just over a year ago to work on the JISC-funded LIROLEM Project:

The Project aimed to lay the groundwork for the establishment of an Institutional Repository that supports a wide variety of non-textual materials, e.g. digital animations of 3-D models, architectural documentation such as technical briefings and photographs, as well as supporting text based materials. The project arose out of the coincidental demands for the University to develop a repository of its research outputs, and a specific project in the school of Architecture to develop a “Virtual Studio”, a web based teaching resource for the school of Architecture.

At the end of the JISC-funded period, I wrote a lengthy summary on the project blog, offering a personal overview of our achievements and challenges during the course of the project. Notably, I wrote:

The LIROLEM Project was tied to a Teaching Fellowship application by two members of staff in the School of Architecture. Their intentions were, and still are, to develop a Virtual Studio which compliments the physical design Studio. Although the repository/archive functionality is central to the requirements of the Virtual Studio, rather than being the primary focus of the Studio, a ‘designerly’, dynamic user interface that encourages participation and collaboration is really key to the success of the Studio as a place for critical thinking and working. In effect, the actual repository should be invisible to the Architect who has little interest, patience or time for the publishing workflow that EPrints requires. More often that not, the Architects were talking about wiki-like functionality, that allowed people to rapidly generate new Studio spaces, invite collaboration, bring in multimedia objects such as plans, images and models, offer comment, discussion and critique. As student projects developed in the Virtual Studio, finished products could be archived and showcased inviting another round of comment, critique and possibly derivative works from a wider community outside the classroom Studio.

Our conference paper discussed the difficulties of ensuring that the (minority) interests of the Architecture staff were met while trying to gain widespread institutional support and sustainability for the Institutional Repository which the LIROLEM project aimed, and had an obligation, to achieve. During the presentation (below), we asked:

Can academics and students working in different disciplines be easily accommodated within the same archival space?

MACE Presentation

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Our presentation slides. My bicycle is a reference to Bijker (1997)

The paper argues that advances in technology result from complex and often conflicting social interests. Within the context of the LIROLEM Project, it was the wider interests of the Institution which took precedence, rather than the minority interests of the Architectural staff.  I’m not directing criticism towards decisions made during the project; after all, I made many of them so as to ensure the long-term sustainability of the repository, but yesterday we argued that

architecture is an atypical discipline; its emphasis is more visual than literary, more practice than research-based and its approach to teaching and learning is more fluid and varied than either the sciences or the humanities (Stevens, 1998). If we accept that it is social interests that underlie the development of technology rather than any inevitable or rational progress (Bijker, 1997), the question arises as to what extent an institutional repository can reconcile architectural interests with the interests of other disciplines. Architecture and the design disciplines are marginal actors in the debate surrounding digital archive development, this paper argues, and they bring problems to the table that are not easily resolved given available software and that lie outside the interests of most other actors in academia.

Prior to the conference, I was unsure of what to do next about the Virtual Studio. I felt that the repository was the wrong application for supporting a collaborative studio environment for architects. Central to this was the unappealing deposit and cataloguing workflow in the IR and the general aesthetic of the user interface which, despite some customisation, does not appeal to designers’ expectations of a visual tool for the deposit and discovery of architectural materials.

However, the MACE Project appears to have just come to our rescue with the development of tools that query OAI-PMH data mapped to their LOM profile, enriches the harvested metadata (by using external services such as Google Maps and collecting user generated tags, for example) and provides a social platform for searching participating repositories. I managed to ask several questions throughout the day to clarify how the anticipated architectural content in our repository could be exposed to MACE.  My main concern was our issue of having a general purpose Institutional Repository, but wanting to handle subject-specific (architecture) content in a unique way. I was told that the OAI-PMH has a ‘set‘ attribute which could be used to isolate the architectural content in the IR for harvesting by MACE. Another question related to the building of defined communities or groups within the larger MACE community (i.e. students on a specific course) and was told that this is a feature they intend to implement.

Because of the work of MACE, the development of a search interface and ‘studio’ community platform has largely been done for us (at least to the level of expectation we ever had for the project). Ironically, we came to the conference questioning the use of the IR as the repository for the Virtual Studio, but now believe that we may benefit from the interoperability of the IR, despite suffering some of its other less appealing attributes. One of the things that remains for us to do, is improve the deposit experience to ensure we collect content that can be exposed to the MACE platform.

For this, I hope we can develop a SWORD tool that simplifies the deposit process for staff and students, reducing the work flow process down to the two or three brief steps you find on Flickr or YouTube, repositories they are likely to be familar with and judge others against. User profile data could be collected from their LDAP login information and they would be asked to title, describe and tag their work. A default BY-NC-ND Creative Commons license would be chosen for them, which they could opt out of (but consequently also opt out of MACE harvesting, too).

Boris Müller, who works on the MACE project, spoke yesterday of the “joy of interacting with [software] interfaces.” This has clearly been a central concern of the MACE project as it has been for the Virtual Studio project, too. I’m looking forward to developing a simple but appealing interface that can bring at least a little joy to my architect colleagues and their students.

MACE Conference

Joss Winn / / Conferences, Projects, Repositories

On Friday, Andy, Carl and I are going to the Metadata for Architectural Contents in Europe (MACE) Conference in Venice, to present a paper which reflects on the issues raised during our JISC-funded LIROLEM Project. Here’s a Word Cloud of the paper, for those of you who don’t have the time or inclination to read it. For those of you who do, it’s in our repository, of course.

 

Image created at wordle.net

ALT-C 2008 Keynote: OLPC and the X0-1 laptop

Joss Winn / / Conferences, Open Source, Projects

Just a quick post.  The final keynote of the ALT-C 2008 conference was by David Cavallo, Chief Learning Architect for One Laptop Per Child. I’ll link to his presentation when it’s on the ALT website.

If you’re interested in looking at the Sugar desktop and some of the Activities which are on the OLPC X0-1, then James Munro, a student here, has been working over the summer on a related project and produced a LiveCD of Xubuntu which boots directly into Sugar with a selection of Activities to try.  You can read more about the project and download the LiveCD on our wiki.  Without an X0-1 of your own, this is probably the easiest way to try out the Sugar desktop right now.  Any comments, questions or problems, do get in touch with me or James via our blogs. Thanks!

Note: The LiveCD is still being tested. It’ll be available via the wiki soon.