Ignore the underlying technology for a moment, and instead consider blogs and forums as different media. Each has a different pattern of interaction and ownership.

A blog usually belongs to a single person. Or in some cases, a small group of people. The main body of content on the blog is the responsibility of that person. That might mean that they write the content themselves, or that they act as a kind of editor/reviewer presenting someone else’s content. A blog also consists of relatively substantial individual entries, which may or may not prompt a discussion (the blog owner has editorial control of the discussion). The discussion might then involve a wider range of people. The quality of a blog largely depends upon the main blog entries, although that quality might then be enhanced by the subsequent discussion. Some successful blogs contain no discursive element. For most blogs, the role of discursive content varies over time.

A forum is very different. It is owned by all of its participants (although there may be editorial control imposed by a moderator). Forums are built out of shorter discursive exchanges. They are driven by a group of individuals, each sharing a strong need for such exchanges. Without that need, the forum will fail. A further drawback is that a dialog built out of lots of small exchanges is likely to fragment. Some forums avoid this because their participants have a good shared understanding, and are already driven to collaborate effectively. Other forums work because they are driven by an effective moderator-tutor.

Which would I recommend? Unless you already have the kind of community that I describe as necessary for a forum, you should probably go with a blog. To make the blog work, you will need to regularly add entries that are substantial and interesting enough to provoke a worthy discussion. One further possibility would be to invite selected members of your target audience to write entries for the blog, so that it works a little like an edited journal.

An additional thought: perhaps in an ideal world, a blog entry could more fluidly connect to an existing discussion forum, web page, video etc.

I didn’t wait for the latest Intel Atom model (which will have a much better battery life), instead deciding to spend a lot less on a machine that will get abused by the trainee terrorist. It’s small (maybe half the size of an average laptop), tough (with solid state storage rather than a fragile disk) and well designed. The keyboard is a bit tiny for some adults, but perfect for me and Lawrence. The screen on the PC900 is bigger than the original PC700, and fine for web browsing and movies.

Here’s a photo of the PC900 being modelled delightfully by some typical users…

Apparently, big hand bags are fashionable at the moment.

Already, I have put 6 of his DVD movies (in Quicktime format) onto the hard disk, as well as some wildlife programs. Each movie takes up between 300 and 600 MB. Once the 7MB spare solid state storage is full, i’ll start using an 8 GB SD card. Video and audio performance is excellent.

It also comes with Skype, a mic and a webcam (built into the top of the screen case), for voice and video conferencing over the web. This has been a major revalation! Last night we talked with a friend in Cambridge, with sound coming out of the speakers (no headphones needed). It was crystal clear, with no echo or noise. And loud too.

Combine all that with fast and reliable wifi (record video and audio messages straight into Warwick Blogs or Sitebuilder), and it really is revolutionary.

I will soon be buying the new Intel Atom powered Asus Eee PC901. That will please Lawrence, as he’s got very territorial about his own Eee.

We have a nice shiny new experimental teaching space called the Teaching Grid. It has lots of projectors, nicely spaced out, with moveable partitions that can be used to create separate zones. My idea is this:

1. Divide the room up into 6 zones, each with a screen, PC and projector.
2. In each zone, display one of 6 different VLEs (WebCT, Blackboard, Moodle, Sakai, Sitebuilder/Warwick Blogs, and WebLearn/Boddington).
3. Have a team of VLE users (teachers and students) & admins for each of the 6.
4. Create a matrix of requirements, features, design patterns, and analyse each one accordingly.
5. Present a list of 5 best aspects of each one.
6. Allow each of the 6 teams to visit all of the others.

There will also be a “beyond the VLE” section, for features and design patterns that don’t exist in any of the VLEs.

We have the technology. I can get money for a lavish(!) buffet. All I need are representatives from unis that use each of the systems.

I’m aiming for mid-September 2008 for this.

Anyone interested?

There is no simple quantification of the meaning of ‘insubstantial part’. We cannot simply claim that x% of the work is an insubstantial part. However there are a few useful guidelines:

If the reproduction of the copyrighted content makes it unecessary to view or purchase the original work, then that is clearly more than an ‘insubstantial part’.

If we are making a copy for the purposes of criticism or review, then we should only use content that is necessary to support the argument that we are making. Edit carefully. Be efficient. For more help, talk to Clayton Jones (University Legal Compliance Officer).

Arts Faculty E-learning Advisor – available to help any member of the Arts Faculty.
Email: r.b.o-toole@warwick.ac.uk
Office: Humanities H234

Robert O’Toole is a technologist, educator and philosopher with over ten years of practical experience in helping learners and teachers to find tools that extend and enhance their capabilities. He is a HEA National Teaching Fellow, and a winner of the Warwick Award for Teaching Excellence. He believes that:

“Learning is socially and technologically mediated from the outset, and is therefore necessarily shaped by the constraints and affordances of the epistemographical environment within which it occurs. Technology therefore matters. Technological choices have a critical influence upon learning outcomes. Students and teachers who are able to consistently make good choices are far more likely to succeed.”

Robert’s practice as a learning technologist helps individuals to make appropriate technology choices, based upon personal needs, abilities and intellectual approaches. The rapid expansion in the range of available tools, driven by the development of new web technologies, has multiplied available options. The role of the learning technologist as a guide is more important than ever. Robert helps people to exploit the potential for positive change by making the right technological choices, and by developing deep competencies as self-reflective learners/researchers.

As E-learning Advisor to the Arts Faculty at Warwick, Robert has provided a popular and wide-reaching service, enabling students and teachers to achieve excellence in their own work. He provides consultations, coaching and lectures tailored precisely and thoughtfully to the needs of individuals. Having established an e-learning office within the Faculty, he is a constant and always supportive presence, open to all members of the Faculty. This has been extended with the establishment of the Arts Faculty E-Squad, a team of students supporting staff. Skills and ideas for the use of technology are cascaded out across the Faculty, through the E-Squad, to thousands of staff and students, thus incrementally developing a network of digital natives.

Alongside the many immediate day-to-day engagements resulting from his role, Robert has developed a critical approach to understanding and designing new technologies. He is creating an ‘evaluation framework’, and beginning to share his methodology and findings through journal articles and conference presentations. He plans to develop this work more formally, as an advisory body reporting upon the impact of new technologies on knowledge creation and dissemination.

Read more on my blog.

A team of students, trained and supported by the Arts Faculty E-learning Advisor (Robert O’Toole).

They can provide help with a range of e-learning tasks, and are currently available free to Arts Faculty staff.

For more information and to request help, see the Arts E-Squad homepage.

1. The presentation

1.1 Context

Now in its seventh year, Shock of the Old has established itself as the most interesting and productive annual learning technologies conference in the UK. As usual, attendees came from many of the Russell Group universities. Oxford was of course well represented, along with delegates from Cambridge, LSE, the Institute of Education (London) and more. The theme this year was ‘Web 2.0 and the Connected Future’, with a second day follow up event on ‘Beyond Digital Natives’ (the second day has a more discursive format). I last gave a presentation at Shock in 2005, introducing the then new and quite revolutionary Warwick Blogs, with the concept of ‘guerrilla PDP’ (personal development process). In the three years since then, we have moved on considerably, with many such technologies having now become widely accepted and well used. Many other universities are only now introducing such things, perhaps with a plug-in module added to their VLE, or with semi-official support for the use of a free online service. Many more are only tentatively pondering the posibilities, still concerned about how these tools might be used by students and by staff. The conference programme brought together conservative elements with more radical propositions. Several papers and discussions expressed the common misgivings:

• Are we overloading people with unnecessary shiny new objects?
• How can institutional IT support such an outbreak of freedom?
• How can we stop students saying bad things about us, doing things that are bad (for us or them)?
• Surely all evidence demonstrates that Web 2.0 tools are leading students into making terrible mistakes?

My presentation, and several others, went some way to calming any reactionary voices. We’ve already been there, done it, and it really didn’t hurt. Furthermore, it’s worth the effort. During my talk I realised that I was saying something even more exciting: web development and Web 2.0 has matured, along with the competencies of our staff and students and our ability to support them, so now is the time to really get to work on developing web based services that work for your university. The second day of the conference ended with a debate and a vote on the proposition: ‘too many new features are being introduced too quickly’. During the debate I expressed my opinion that we are getting good at innovation. The nagative proposition was rejected by a significant majority.

1.2 An evaluation framework

My first move was to introduce the ‘evaluation framework’ that I have been developing over the last couple of years. I had expected this to polarise the audience to some degree, between two tendencies. On the one hand, asserting that a technology should simply be evaluated functionally: does it do what it’s supposed to do? Obviously that is important. The antithesis to that position maintains that things are always more complex than they seem: a technology has a non-linear relationship to the social, institutional, personal and cultural contexts within which it used, and therefore its positive or negative effects are dynamic and often intangible at the time of its use (this is a standard argument for historians and philosophers of technology, the big issue today is the speed and intensity of the dynamic). When considering a functionally broad technology with a lower degree of deterministic constraints, a technology that can be used and adapted for a wide range of purposes, clearly the latter position is more appropriate. As I argued latter in the presentation, a key aspect of Web 2.0 technologies is that people transfer them across domains (for example, a personal blog being used in formal teaching). The process of transference may have both negative and positive side-effects. For example, it may lead to a more effective and more critical understanding of a specific tool and a whole class of technologies. In most cases the side-effects are as important, if not more important, than the actual intended functionality. For example, we can ask of a tool: how does it raise the individuals competency in acquiring and applying new skills? My answer to the ‘too much new stuff’ charge is that change is good because of this side-effect (amongst others).

The evaluation framework consists of a series of four non-definitive lists, aiming to give a simple but powerful way of assessing the impact of a technology on people and the university:

1. Web 2.0 design patterns – concrete patterns of person-system-person interaction;
2. Competencies of a digital native – abilities that we can expect people to have so as to operate successfully in an environment that spans between offline and online;
3. Learning design patterns – typical patterns of activity that are employed by teachers and learners;
4. Enabling activities – a set of things that we can do with technology to positively extend the capabilities of people in a university (and beyond).

My suggestion is that we can use lists 2, 3 and 4 to evaluate the effects of real instances of 1 (and other technologies). Although I didn’t have time to carry out a comprehensive evaluation in the alloted 35 minutes, my handout containing the lists did indicate which of them were clearly supported by Warwick Blogs or Sitebuilder, and where there might be some scope for debate.

1.3 Some evidence

The introduction of the evaluation framework was followed by a screening of the 4 minute long interview that I recently carried out with Peter Kirwan, a student from the English Department who has used Warwick Blogs successfully ( he video can be viewed online ). Peter’s example demonstrated how many of the ‘enabling activities’ are possible with blogs. For example, the technology had helped to form a mutually beneficial collaboration (4.10), with Peter being invited to take part in a high-profile conference debate. The example of Peter’s blog can easily be used to show how Warwick Blogs implements most of the ‘enabling activities’ as well as sthome of the ‘learning design patterns’ whilst having the side effect of encouraging people to develop the ‘competencies of a digital native’.

1.4 Web 2.0 design patterns in Sitebuilder and Warwick Blogs

The main body of the presentation consisted of a series of ScreenFlow video screen captures, each illustrating how a different feature of Sitebuilder or Warwick Blogs implements one of the web 2.0 design patterns that I listed. For example, ‘read/write’ web was simply illustrated by the Sitebuilder WYSIWYG editor (although even that basic feature impressed the audience). Each ScreenFlow was introduced, accompanied by a commentary, and concluded with some points relating it to the evaluation framework (although in no real depth due to the time constraint). Two of the design patterns were used to raise interesting questions about the fit (or lack of) between the new technologies and the practices of academia.

Sitebuilder can be used as a Wiki, but rarely is. In fact there’s still not much application of the wiki pattern in teaching and learning at Warwick. Wikis, I suggested, employ a membership model in which the content of a page belongs to all of the participants, who are themselves ‘members’ of the page or more widely the site. The traditional (and very successful) read/write web pattern tends to see a page as belonging to an individual. Indeed its hard to think of any pages in Sitebuilder (beyond department home pages) that are not the work of a single author (perhaps with a few minor corrections and updates from others). Furthermore, few knowledge objects in a traditional university are authored through a membership model rather than an ownership model (or an author/editor model). Our assessment and authorisation processes tend to focus on the individual owner-author.

Another challenging pattern is the ‘folksonomy’ or ‘tagsonomy’: collaborative tagging. I demonstrated an instance of collaborative tagging using Sitebuilder. The History department created a schema of tags that they then applied to all of their many web paged. I then created a keyword search interface. Here is the video that I used to show this:

I suggested that the rather high number of distinct tags used in Warwick Blogs (almost 19,000) might actually be a bad sign. There are few instances of collaborative tagging, and certainly no instances that I know of where a whole schema has been used. This prompted an interesting discussion (see questions below).

My intention had been to spend some time examining another impressive example of how these design patterns are enhancing the epistemography (knowledge-landscape-process) of students at Warwick: ePortfolios. Unfortunately, I had to skip this part of the presentation, as it looked as if a longer than expected discussion was being prompted.

1.5 Impressive results

I ended with the conclusion: Warwick has become a Web 2.0 university. What do I mean by that? Not simply that we have a love of shiny objects, or even that we have implemented Web 2.0 design patterns as central to key activities, or that we have made them available to the entire university membership. Rather, it is the way in which we have grown a digitally native membership, capable of taking these tools and using them in their own ways for their own purposes; but more, they then pass on those results through their own networks, and back to the developers/designers/advisors with ideas for new directions; and the developers/designers/advisors themselves go further, learn more, find new and better ways of doing the ‘enabling activities’. That level of engagement seems to be unique in a UK university. I ended with statistics: the thousands of Sitebuilder editors, the 105,000 blog entries, the 80 members of staff who came to a podcasting workshop last year, and most importantly, the extraordinarily low incidence of problems generated by that mass of activity.

1.6 Questions

Having blasted through quite a lot of material in half an hour, the discussion that followed is now a bit of a blur in my mind. I recall a lively discussion, and some really good questions. I do remember that the questions led me in to making more explicit the benefits of doing it the Warwick way. I repeated my belief that the investment has been worth it, given that we have generated a huge amount of knowledge, established a world-class development team, and created a population of digital natives. Three questions were particularly memorable:

Why did you build it yourself? Why not use the many free services now online? Or why not open source? – I will answer this fully in the second part of my report (coming soon).

How do you provide training for these thousands of people? Answer: we provide a range of training and consultation services, including formal training sessions, departmental sessions and individual task-oriented consultations. However, many thousands of people have acquired their skills independently, or within their own informal networks. Three factors contribute to this being a viable approach. Firstly, the software is really well designed. It uses familiar and usually intuitive design patterns. It separates out the basic functionality required to get important tasks done from more complex advanced functionality. Secondly, the abilities of our members has grown progressively with the web applications – they are attaining the digital native competencies and hence becoming more independent and capable. Finally, we have encouraged our members to help each other, to share their learning, to develop support networks within their own groupings (for example, at the departmental level).

Does 19,000 Warwick Blogs distinct tags really indicate a problem? I was challenged on my claim that a large number of tags means little collaboration. I responded by saying that I know of very few instances in which a tag has been consciously created by a group (there are a few cases where we have invented a tag to be used in a teaching context). I’m sure there are no cases in which a schema of related tags, forming a taxonomy, has been invented or even used. Taxonomical classification is important in many academic subjects. My presentation was followed by Dr Annamaria Carusi of the Oxford e-Research Centre. Annamaria concentrated upon the sciences, and demonstrated some subject specific systems that use keyword tagging. However, she seemed to confirm that it is a complicated and diverse business, requiring more research to understand current practices and possible developments.

In part 2 of this report I will look in more detail at the question: why do it yourself?

How the podcasts were made

With the exception of those created by the Communications Office, the podcasts were created independently by staff and students. Some initial training was provided, with 80 members of staff attending a workshop in 2007. Some of these podcasts were created by the Arts faculty E-Squad students (a team of 8 supported by Robert O’Toole, Arts Faculty E-learning Advisor).

Edirol R09 recorders are common throughout the university, with some departments also using more sophisticated Marantz recorders. The R09 is quite capable of broadcast quality recordings if used carefully. Editing is most usefully done with the free Audacity tool. Our Sitebuilder web content management system includes a podcast page type, with automatic generation of RSS feeds, as well automatically displaying a Flash MP3 player for each uploaded podcast. Once that a page is set up, new podcasts can be uploaded with just a simple form.

Professional quality podcasts by the Communications Office

Produced to showcase research and teaching at Warwick.

Warwick Podcasts Interviews with leading academics.

Writers at Warwick Recordings of visiting writers,

Writing Challenges A series of exercises to act as a taster for the Creative Writing programme.

Medieval Islamic Medicine

Student Podcasting

Created by students competing in the Warwick Podcasts Competition. Each team interviewed a member of staff or an alumnus.

Warwick Podcasts Competition 2007

Warwick Podcasts Competition 2008

Departmental podcasting

Goethe Podcasts, German Studies Using an approach that links the text of poems to an audio reading.

Warwick HRI

English Department European Novel lectures Simple recordings of lectures, helping to widen access and make them available to part-time evening class students.

Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies visiting speakers

Warwick Innovative Manufacturing Research Centre

Law IDHR

Clinical Pharmocology

Warwick Business School

I am investigating the possibility of moving the query layer of a web application off the SQL Server that hosts the data (so as to allow me to more easily move the database to another platform). Last week I mastered BlazeDS for Java remoting. That was easy. So I decided to add Spring to the mix, following this excellent article from Adobe Labs. I’ve never used Spring before, but understand how it simplifies such applications.

It didn’t take long to understand the example from Adobe, and adapt it to query the SQLServer database that I have used.

And when I pressed the ‘query’ button on my Flex app, I was astonished. 10,000 rows appeared immediately as an ArrayCollection. Whereas my Flex/JSON/Java app would request 100 rows at a time, with a new query each time the datagrid page was changed, I can now load every single record and immediately work with it in the browser.

Next trick? Hibernate.