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Connections are more meaningful in the long tail
I can’t remember if Chris Anderson made this point, but it came home to me the other day. When you are operating with blockbusters then the connections you make are pretty meaningless since these artists or products have become a commodity, there is very little chance of overlap with other tastes. Let’s take an example of music – I don’t really listen to a lot of hip hop/rap (hey, I’m a Smiths fan, what do you expect?) but I like a bit of Kanye West. However, looking up Kanye on iTunes is not really going to find me artists who are similar to him – it wouldn’t be a good…
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Blogs easier to read than formal publications
Stunning new research (okay, ten minutes by me this morning) has shown that blogs are much easier to read than formal academic publications, even when they are covering the same topics. Yesterday Alan Cann put a few bloggers through FLESH, a piece of software that takes text and scores it according to the Flesch Reading Ease Score and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level. For the reading ease score, the higher the score then the easier the text is to read. For the grade level it indicates how many years in education a person needs to understand the text. There are some concerns about this method, and the grade level in particular seems…
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PLEs and the institution
Following on from all our VLE discussion, this post from Scott Wilson caught my eye. He has another good diagram (I’ve borrowed his Future VLE one before – with acknowledgement Scott!). I have had my reservations about PLEs, and particularly how they interface with the institution. I like the idea of assembling your tools over time, but there are some real issues about how these interact with institutional systems (authentication in particular – are you a student on this course, what support do you have, how do we verify course records, etc). Scott goes some way to addressing these. I think a telling quote is: Originally I thought that a…
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Loosely coupled vs integrated again
Continuing our debate around VLEs (which I’m enjoying anyway), Niall Sclater posts that one of the dangers of the small pieces approach is that we have no control over external sites, and he uses (my favourite web 2.0 site) Slideshare being down as an example. Tony responds rather cheekily (he tags the post ‘baiting’) showing the OU site was down, to demonstrate that internally hosted systems are not immune from such dangers. I would suggest that in a loosely coupled system your risk is spread from a user perspective – if Slideshare was down, that’s fine I’ll do the wiki activity, or look at the YouTube clips, or read the…
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In yer Facebook
A few people have blogged the Guardian report "Students tell universities: Get out of MySpace", based on the JISC project, in which the message from students seems to be that they want a separate space and don’t want universities and educators invading it. This will be all that many doubters need as justification to say that we shouldn’t be bothering with all this social networking stuff. Here’s why I think we should ignore that advice, or rather we should ignore it in a particular way. Firstly, the use of networks changes – after the initial flurry of hitting people with a wet fish or becoming a vampire, people’s use of…
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Some more VLE demise thoughts
A few people have responded either on blogs or in the comments on my (deliberately provocatively titled) post The VLE/LMS is dead, so rather than distribute my responses I thought I’d bundle them here. Niall Sclater refers to some earlier attempts at the loosely coupled approach: The model Martin describes of “loosely coupled teaching” was tried by Canadian schoolteacher Clarence Fisher who blogged about small pieces in November last year and had serious concerns about this approach Amongst these were different URLs and skills. I’d respond by saying a year is a long time in the online world, and a lot of these issues have become easier – you don’t…
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Edublog awards
If you happened to know of a nice, educational blog anywhere http://edublogawards.com/2007/2007-nominations/ I’m off to nominate Tony Hirst and Alan Cann, just to counter the North American dominance…
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The VLE/LMS is dead
(but we’ll probably take five years to realise it). Scott Leslie has coined the term Loosely coupled teaching, for the assembly of a number of different, third party apps to do your teaching with. This differs from a PLE in that it is still the educator who provides the tools, they just bypass the institutional systems. Scott’s post set me thinking and I had something of an epiphany (okay, I know I’m slow) – whereas I have been using the odd application you could completely set up your course outside of the institution. What might you want to use? For my course I could use the following: For content and…
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Some quick opensocial thoughts
What with travelling back from Oz and catching up on work I’ve not had time to really look at Google’s opensocial much. Not that there is much to look at currently, except some big announcements. If you don’t know what it is, it is an open API approach from Google with a host of partners to allow users to easily create social tools which can be used in more than one location. So, here a week later than everyone else, are my thoughts on it. Let’s get the Facebook thing out of the way first – opensocial is the social networking technology equivalent of a politician waiting to see what…
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A lexicon for the virtual/real world intersection
It strikes me that there are a number of new social behaviours that are arising when our online/web 2.0/social network selves intersect with our real, physical, everyday lives. So, while awake with jet lag I started compiling some new terms. I have put these up in a Wetpaint wiki, so you can add to them yourselves: Twintle – a knowing look someone gives you when you meet them face to face, who is also a Facebook friend or Twitter follower, where they debate whether they should mention your status updates, or whether that would be impolite. e.g. "I met Kathy the other day, and I’d been saying about how much…
