All 28 entries tagged E-Learning

Nostalgia for MoveableType excerpt feature

Follow-up to Shock of the Old Conference, 2005 from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

In this entry I recall the 'show only excerpt on home page' feature of the MoveableType blogging system. I consider how this could be a way of addressing the problem that 'compartmentalizing' people have with a wide range of subjects and activities being represented in full on their blog homepage.

*My confidence in this entry:* 80%
Importance of this entry to me: 70%

Main text

Actually, nostalgia for just one particular feature of MoveableType: the ability to set up the blog homepage so that only the first part of each entry is shown on it. MT entries can have a (slightly misnamed) excerpt field. This is effectively the first part paragraph of the entry, which tends to be used as a short introduction or overview explaining what the entry is about, with the effect of giving a sense of what kind of entry it is and what kind of people should read it.

Only the excert is listed on the homepage, with a link to read more. For example, see how it is used on the Auricle blog

I liked using this for four reasons:

1. it makes the blog homepage less cluttered;
2. it encouraged me to give an overview of the entry, making more sense of it;
3. readers could quickly see which entries were of interest to them;
4. it makes it easier to keep a blog with a diverse range of types of entry and topics – readers aren't turned away by seeing one of my mad philosophy entries filling the whole front page, instead they can just read an excerpt and decide to read one of my more sensible entries.

Now that I'm using my blog for so many different reasons, including containing long well developed texts alongside random brain-dump bucket lists, the excerpt feature would be really useful.

I suspect that others have the same problem. During my Shock of the Old presentation I put forward the argument that a blog is a good place to join-up, or at least contain, aspects from the different parts of my 'spaghetti-like' life – work, academic and social. The response to this was interestingly split. Many people could see themselves doing just that. But many others would not want to combine these different aspects in one place. They are what i would call 'compartmentalisers'. They like to seperate things out. They would use a blog for a specific purpose, for example, sharing family stories and photos. But they feel uncomfortable about putting that on the same page as work. I suspect that many students have this problem with the idea of putting academic things on their blog next to their social blogging.

Obviously they could use categorisation, however, they didn't seem to think that would be enough. The entries would still appear in full together on the homepage.

But using an excerpt approach would help to alleviate that problem, and may well encourage more of those compartmentalizers to blog.

For now, I'm going to start writing a brief intro to every entry that I write, clearly identified as the 'overview', and i'll see if it makes a difference.

: 08 Apr 2005 08:52 |  Tags: E-Learning Warwick University |  Comments (6) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Shock of the Old Conference, 2005

Writing about web page http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ltg/events/shock2005/index.xml

What a great conference! I presented a paper yesterday at the Oxford University Learning Technology Group's Shock of the Old 2005 conference. My presentation was ostensibly about 'The Warwick Blogs Experience', largely from the perspective of a student who uses Warwick Blogs in his work. But the subtext was that for universities like Warwick, we necesarily need to shift the emphasis of our development work away from top-down systems that seek to organize and extend formal/beaurocratic learning processes, to creating systems that support the kinds of self-organized and informal learning activities that are actually much more common and important in a top-end university. The kinds of independent and creative activities that embody what HE at this level should be about.

It wasn't at all a coincidence that Derek Morrison of Bath (author of the Auricle blog) gave a presentation before, also saying exactly that (report coming next). This is something that i really believe in, and i'm so happy to hear other people agreeing. It was interesting to note that the most enthusiasm came from delegates from places like Bath, UCL, Imperial, Edinburgh, OU.

Here's a few of the points that i covered:

• The 'network effect' (if you have friends who use a system, you are more likely to start using it) is important, use it;
• Informal learning (even ranting) leads to better formal learning – this argument seemed to go down well;
• High end learning is very personal, social, and involves a big investment by the student;
• Blogs give an attractive place in which to do this, students need to find the system attractive and exciting, need to have a sense of ownership over something so personal and so social as there own learning;
• Bucket model – just get them to record stuff, use blog as a bucket – blogs help with this, and its a valuable thing to do. Joe Talbot of LTG is also using his blog in this way, but has made some modifications to make it easier;
• Too much processing can be a bad thing- just write it without thinking, blogs are sufficiently informal for people to feel comfortable about this;
• Blogs can help deal with complex experiences and a complex multi-faceted life (such as that of a student);
• Learning at this level is mainly about 'conceptual modelling' – recieving, creating, understanding, recording, explicating, testing, modifying, joining-up and contextualizing conceptual models;
• PDP is meta-modelling of this modelling behaviour;
• This is difficult, but blogs can really help;
• Blogs is just the environment in which this can happen in many different ways, suited to different people;
• Blogs provide a sandbox in which students can try things out, a slightly less official and authoritative environment;
• As we are asking students to take risks with there thinking, such a sandbox is reallly important;
• The concept of the 'star blogger' is preventing lesser mortals from using blogs in a risky, experimental way or as a bucket;
• Making blogs to institutional and too close to formal learning will detract from this sandbox role;
• To make this work we have to hand over control, trust the students;
• Biggest blockers are student expectations and attitudes – students are end-product focussed – they need to become more concerned with the processes that get them to the end product;
• Can blogs help to overcome this?

As you can see, I covered a huge range of points, some of which are quite radical in the learning technology world. But the response was very positive.

Some responses afterwards:

• "Come and do that presentation at our university, we'll pay you to do it".
• "I really like your educational theory and can see how blogs fits in".
• "We want to try that, is there any open source software available" – there was in fact an interesting open source developer present;
• "Its so good that you can get to do that kind of development";
• "I really enjoyed the presentation" – although credit for this should really go to Kieran, Hannah, John, Karen etc for building WB and doing the publicity material.

There were philosophical aspects to my presentation (and Derek's). This actually seemed to go down well, and several people asked me about it later. There was even a Hegelian/Heideggerian (former Warwick Philosophy student) in the audience!

And some interesting points that were raised:

• Compartmentalism – some people like to keep different aspects of their lives seperate – eg social and work, they don't like the idea of a single blog for everything – we should investigate this further, as it may be preventing many people from blogging;
• We need stronger links between the blog and the formal objects that we want students to blog about (finished documents, work in progress, concept maps, plans, online module content, ePortfolios) – several people mentioned wikis – possible links between blogs and wikis need to be explored;
• WiFi and ubiquitous computing will make blogs even more useful, as it will be possible to blog more imediately;
• Warwick Blogs is creating lots of research data and interesting behaviour, it would be good to more formally investigate it;

The one thing that i missed out from my planned presentation due to a lack of time was a discussion of Warwick's development methodlogy. I think this is actually more than just really really really important, and worthy of a presentation in itself. But more interestingly, its actually similar to the kind of approach to learning that i am advocating. More on that soon.

: 08 Apr 2005 06:13 |  Tags: E-Learning Warwick University |  Comments (6) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Analogy for Warwick Blogs e–learning development

Trying to communicate how the development of WB as an e-learning tool puts the emphasis somewhere completey different (ie on independent and informal student processes not formal lecturer processes). Here's an analiogy:

Most people have developed shopping malls, instead, we built a youth club.

: 07 Apr 2005 06:28 |  Tags: E-Learning Warwick University |  Comments (5) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Some basic requirements for a system to support the student academic process

Follow-up to Argument for shifting emphasis of e–learning development work from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

My next conjecture will be that we can define an efficient and succesful independent student academic process. This concerns how students recieve, use, test, extend and create models – domain specific subject content, domain specific meta-models of modelling procedures, generic meta-models of academic processes, and meta-models of how those processes relate to the individual's personal development and plans.

1. A student gathers experiences from a range of sources (learning inputs) into a single location, even though the experiences may not be simply structured or understood (the significance of the experiences may not even be obvious),
2. In some cases, the student leaves the experiences relatively un-processed until some later date (just get them into a 'bucket' from which they can easily be retrieved and processed);
3. Regular processing (or alternatively incubation) of the recorded experiences is encouraged and supported;
4. The student processes the experiences with reference to a model received from an authoritative source or developed personally – (they have to be able to choose the appropriate model);
5. The student’s understanding of the model is tested, assessed, and modified in relation to the experiences;
6. The model itself is tested, assessed, and modified in relation to the experiences;
7. The student can connect a set of models together based on experience;
8. The student can seek or develop new models to fill the gaps where necessary;
9. The student can consider the same and related experiences and models as recorded and processed by others.

These activities themselves are recorded in the process of carrying them out, such that the student can reflect upon the effectiveness and appropriateness of the recording and processing activities, and aim to improve them.

But most importantly, all of this must take place in a sandbox or dmz, away from assessment, away from judgement.

: 06 Apr 2005 06:30 |  Tags: E-Learning Warwick University |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Argument for shifting emphasis of e–learning development work

Writing about web page http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ltg/events/shock2005/

This is first potentially controversial argument that I will present as part of the Shock of the Old conference.

1. There is increased pressure on students to be successful (degree costs), so they are less prepared to take risks with uncertain study methods – currently this is much more obvious with international students;
2. Students often ask for definitive knowledge transfer (lecture notes) – a low risk solution; sometimes, they resort to plagiarism;
3. But top-level higher education is supposed to be about the student learning how to construct their own answers, with a creative research-based methodology;
4. And furthermore, it deals with complex and cutting-edge knowledge that can be difficult to summarize definitively, and which changes often;
5. Academics will not be able to, and may not want to, do much more work to extend their teaching if that involves the development of online learning activities that attempt to definitively capture their teaching.

Implications: a move away from lecturer/content focussed e-learning development. With more emphasis placed upon technologies that support the student’s own processes.

6. So we tell the students that they must be research-oriented, independent and creative learners;
7. But they are rarely equipped with such skills from school (A-level mentality), and are only taught them implicitly in the undergraduate (and graduate) curriculum;
8. Students are increasingly end-product oriented, do not understand the importance of the process that leads them to the end-product;
9. Hence this must be countered by teaching the best possible and demonstrably effective study, research, thinking and writing skills;
10. In a way that interests, engages and excites the students;
11. Matched with the best available technology to support those activities;
12. In fact the provision of new technology may help to make these skills more attractive to the students, if we can create good enough technologies that really engage them.

: 06 Apr 2005 06:21 |  Tags: E-Learning Warwick University |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Using a blog as a particular type of mental bucket

You can use a blog as a bucket for thoughts and experiences that are not yet fully dealt with or considered. This is an important technique. You can empty them from your mind, whilst being assured that they won't disappear entirely. Later, you can return to them and try to process them. Processing means:

• discarding them as useless;
• connecting them up with other thoughts;
• planning further actions to be taken on the thoughts;
• building them into a wider argument or project;
• expanding them further to be revisited at a later date;
• just putting them into incubation.

You can do this with an old-fashioned paper notebook, but a blog has some key advantages:

1. it can be shared, groups of people can do the work of sorting through and processing the thoughts, leaving helpful comments or writing linked entries – blogs are shareable thinking, but best suited to that early indiscriminate stage of thinking about something;
2. it has a nice format that forces you to write neatly;
3. you can link your thoughts to web pages outside of the blog (link them to news items, other people's blogs, module web pages, learning objects – hopefully one day calendar items, words in glossaries, concept maps);
4. you can link your entries through time;
5. you can categorise your entries (keywords and links to glossaries would extend this further);
6. you can easily include images and diagrams – take photos of whiteboard drawings and upload them;
7. you can edit your entries and comments, deleting the junk;
8. you can easily reuse text from a blog in another document without having to type it back in – I just wrote the first paragraph of my thesis in my blog!).

The downside of using a blog for this is that it doesn't quite feel as safe and personal as a paper notebook. But Warwick Blogs has features that help you to feel that sense of ownership.

So how do you use a blog in this way? The key is to just get stuff down into it, without having to think too much right away. The virtue of blogging, and of Warwick Blogs in particular, is its speed. Worry about processing the stuff later, when you need to (to help with a decision, writing a more formal text, or a presentation). For now, just get it off your mind. Some advice:

• don't treat it as a container for finished products (there are other places for them);
• don't record trivial stuff that should only be a single phrase in a simple list of stuff (a simple list bucket);
• don't use it for recording well-formed project tasks or actions that need doing, use a proper project log, plan or some other project task bucket for that;
• don't assume that you have to identify exactly what each entry is for or what it is about (don't worry to much about categorisation);
• don't think that you have to be right all the time, or sound like you know what you are talking about (if you are worried about looking stupid through your blog, limit access to your entries);
• record real-world events, even when they refer to many distinct concepts, people, or projects;
• use well identified keywords (put them in bold) to identify the references to distinct concepts, people and projects when mixed together in a single entry (better keyword idenitfication system please!);
• if you can't record your notes directly into your blog (more wifi please) then have a system for getting them down or on a pda, then adding them to your blog;
• if you really do have to write a rant, try to be honest about the events that caused it, otherwise that particular piece of history will be irretrievably lost;
• be a little disciplined about processing (or at least re-reading) the stuff you put in your blog.

And finally:

• just blog it.

: 22 Mar 2005 17:16 |  Tags: E-Learning Warwick University |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Concept Mapping – an agile presentation and thinking tool

Writing about an entry you don't have permission to view

Concept-mapping is really good. I've used it in a way similar to that described by John, basing a presentation around a map. There is a very good reason for doing so. It is a technique of thinking, writing and presenting that provides a significant cognitive advantage. As John notes, it doesn't force you into an overly linear discourse in the explication of an argument.

Why is such linearity bad? The form of the argument often becomes more important than the argument itself. The need to keep the text on track, moving along, linear, over-rides the content that it is trying to develop. This leads to:

1. A suppression of subtle details, which when considered properly, turn out to be much more important;
2. A suppression of connections and their implications. For example, if strand A of the argument relies upon strand B (which has already been introduced, or which is to be explicated later), the implications of accepting strand B in the service of strand A are not necessarily clear. It should be easy for the presenter or the audience to understand what is at risk by implication when accepting or rejecting part of an argument;
3. A suppression of feedback. The audience or the presenter may identify a weakness or previously unknown aspect of one strand of an argument. It may be the case that the new point is trivial, or belongs somewhere else in the argument. It can therefore be passed over. However, without being able to see the connections, implications and weightings, the judgement concerning the triviality of the new issue is made without proper consideration. The tendency is to ignore the new point, to avoid the possibility that its consideration might de-rail the linear progression of the argument, consequently leaving a big scarey hole.

I have seen this happen in many philosophy presentations. You can even see it in the texts of many good philosophers, although one suspects that they are well-aware of the power of the linear form, and use it cunningly. Ironically, many texts that are written about the philosophers of non-linearity, principally Deleuze and Guattari, are horribly linear and just
downright oppressive. Their own works are famously not linear. In fact I suspect that they used some kind of methodology akin to concept-mapping (the consistency of their very complex conceptual assemblages over 40 years of work suggests that they had some kind of system other than text).

The result of linearity dominating is often merely a sense of disatisfaction amongst the audience. But occassionally someone decides that contriving with the presenter to keep things on track would result in having to accept just too many significantly wrong assumptions. Things then turn nasty.

More seriously, in arguments that are used to support projects, policies and expenditures, the linear form may result in expensive and disruptive mistakes.

So what is the alternative? A technique that MindManager supports is as follows:

1. Create a map that records everything you know about the topic, starting with a top level set of nodes, and drilling down into the detail through several levels. Nodes can easily be moved around, edited, deleted and added, so develpoment is rapid and responsive;
2. In the presentation, start with only the top level nodes open, the lower level nodes are all closed (easy with MindManager). Either this top-level is uncontroversial, or provides some work for the more detailed levels to do in justifying the top-level carve-up of the topic (remember, its easy to move or edit nodes, so you don't have to be too concerned about getting things wrong and having to respond to feedback as the presentation progresses).
3. Do a high-level pass through the top nodes, giving an understanding of the basic distinctions uppon which the presentation is based – look for problems at the top level! Don't gloss over them – if you do, the audience won't be with you;
4. If there is an issue with the top level nodes, open up the next level and see if the detail contained in them can be used to resolve the top level problem. Keep drilling down into detail if necessary. Jump across nodes to show how different components at the different levels are connected transversally;
5. If no problem is found at the top level, do a pass through the second level of nodes, again looking for problems.
6. Keep going lower until you run out of time or everyone is satisfied.

This should result in thoroughness, bringing the audience along more succesfully. It also allows for the presentation to flexibly and genuinely respond to problems and new ideas, without the possibility of it being entirely waisted by an unforeseen issue (remember, you can re-draw the map as you go along). The presentation can, in this way, be much more productive. In fact we could say that with this approach there aren't problems or difficulties, only opportunities (as Ted Simon would say, "interuptions are the journey").

: 22 Mar 2005 11:31 |  Tags: E-Learning Warwick University |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Against the division of academic and social blogging

Follow-up to Selling Warwick Blogs to Warwick from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

Quick answer to Dan: opinion is divided as to whether there should be a formal division between academic and social blogging. But there are some strong arguments against it.

Firstly, here's a sweeping generalisation: people from the sciences and engineering have a more clear division between work and socialising. Is that because they work in spaces that are more formally designated as working spaces: the lab? Whereas people from the Arts do much of their work in spaces that accomodate both social and working activity. For some people, blogging is about recording and reflecting upon real-time events, which for people from Arts, may combine work and social. In fact they may not even concieve of a strong difference between the two. In the distant past, when Kieran and I first thought about the combination of social and academic in a single blog, I think we decided that forcing an artificial division on people would be wrong. Instead, they are left to make the distinctions themselves, if they want a distinction. The method through which they can make that distinction is categorisation, and if they so wish, also permissions control. Categorisation is not perfect, but it does allow for social and academic blogging to happen together in combination. A single entry may record the social and the academic aspects of an event, even when that event is more academic oriented. But as I said, this approach leaves it up to the individual.

A second, and perhaps more pressing requirement is this: we want undergraduates to develop confidence in their abilities to write about what they are doing, and implicitly, to become more confident about what they are doing. Confidence is a big issue for first years. We do not expect them to start writing academically sophisticated blog entries right away. If they can write cogent accounts of their university experience in general, then that would be good. If they then include some details of their academic activities within those more general entries, that would be better. If they go on to writing accounts of their academic activities, that would be superb. The PDP people at Warwick, whose job is to work out ways to improve personal student development, have seen blogging as a means of encouraging students to develop a joined-up whole person view of life at Warwick, and to make the transition to thinking and speaking confidently about their academic and social activities together. Forcing them to see the world as divided between academic and social activities may work against this.

Robert O'Toole : 20 Dec 2004 09:53 |  Tags: E-Learning Warwick University |  Comments (4) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Selling Warwick Blogs to Warwick

Selling blogs to Warwick, that's a part of my job. Or at least I should say that part of the still significant task of selling blogs to the University, the whole University, is up to me and the small team of people that I work with. I am the Arts Faculty E-learning Advisor, one of four such advisors, each assigned to a different faculty. I am also one of the people who convinced IT Services and Elab to build Warwick Blogs. Why did I do that? Partly because I want to use it for my PhD, and partly because I wish I could have had it when I was an undergraduate here ten years ago.

If you are reading this entry then almost certainly you have already bought into Warwick Blogs, you have been converted. Maybe you are even addicted to it. But you have probably bought into just one specific idea of what Warwick Blogs is about, one that is quite different to the many ideas that I am trying to sell people. That in itself is OK, but you have to realise this:

Warwick Blogs is a powerful and sophisticated tool. We tell people that it is just a clever kind of notebook or journal, but in fact it is far much more than that. It's potential is huge. It's applications numerous. That's why the team who visited us from Oxford University this week were in awe at what we have done.

There is a need to be open minded about blogs. For all of those people who have done so much to make it their own, to define what it seemed to be to anyone looking at its old homepage, think of the potential uses and the users who might interpret things quite differently. Think of the researcher for whom it might be a useful writing tool, or the international student showing his funders back home what he is part of.

At the moment the system has been occupied by a small percentage of those potential users, using it for a small fraction of its potential capabilities. That's good for them, but we are here to support the whole University in using IT to improve what they do. And this is a big and diverse place. Cultural change in such an environment will always be difficult, and must be handled with great sensitivity. As one of the people who has to sell Warwick Blogs to Warwick, I have a simple message to our current bloggers:

Selling new working/studying practices is really hard. Convincing people to adopt new IT practices is also really hard. Getting people from a diversity of social/academic/national cultures to adopt change at the same time is more than just difficult. The combination of these things makes for a very difficult job, and ensures that selling Warwick Blogs beyond its early adopters is quite a challenge.

I'm the guy who has to do this, and I am telling you that we are facing a big challenge! If the system needs altering to help us to meet that challenge, then it has to be altered. Trust me, I work on this every day. I'm out there talking to people every day.

As a user of Warwick Blogs, you can either help us with this, help us to reach a wider range of people with a wider range of users, or you can decide that you would rather keep the system to yourself, to people just like you. What would be the right thing to do? Here's a little exercise to help you understand (perhaps you could answer it on your blog):

1. think about why you use Warwick Blogs, list the things that you get out of it;
2. consider how those values are dependent upon the ways in which you like to do things, and upon your working, studying and social practices;
3. consider how lucky you are that the University has developed a system to help you do those things;
4. now try to consider people with different values and different practices – if you can't come up with lots of examples, then you really are narrow minded!
5. consider if your view of what Warwick Blogs should be like will also provide a system that is attractive to them;
6. consider if this will lead to an un-feasibly complex system;
7. now think about the difficult task that eLab has in pleasing as wide a population as possible.

Hard isn't it!

A summary

I think that the changes to the Warwick Blogs home page are about making it more neutral. I am saying that this is essential if we are to sell it to a wider range of people, which we must do.

The old home page presented a view of what Warwick Blogs is being used for now, rather than what it could be used for. Unfortunately, potential users look at the content on the home page and think "that's not for me, that's not what i want my activities associated with". And they turn away. Yes, the changes are a marketing move. The home page was intended as a marketing tool. And as such, it has to represent a wide range of possible uses.

Robert O'Toole : 16 Dec 2004 16:46 |  Tags: E-Learning Warwick University |  Comments (41) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Plan for introduction to PDP using blogs for history students

Later today Kay and I will be doing a presentation to all of the History Department 1st year undergrads. We will explain to them PDP, convince them that it is essential, and show them how blogs can help them with it. The plan for my half of the session, specifically about blogs, is below…

What is a blog (show blog and demo features)?

• a sophisticated online notebook or journal;
• belongs to a single person, the blog owner;
• the owner chooses the title and design of the blog;
• the owner creates categories into which they can organise their entries.
• the owner writes entries in the blog;
• the owner decides on who can read and comment on each entry;
• every blog has a url that starts with http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/ and includes the name of the owner.
• a blog directory for finding people's blogs (see blog homepage).

Get them to write down my url, then comment on this entry.

How does using a blog help with skills, PDP and academic work?

Your PDP category:

You can use your PDP categeory to:

• write about how you have used, developed, and are improving your communication, IT, problem solving, study and research skills;
• record and share your plans;
• write about how you are organising your time;
• reflect upon your learning and your successes.

You can easily share these entries with your fellow students, your tutor, or the whole world. You can also restrcict access to yourself. Demonstrate writing an entry.

Academic and other categories:

You may be asked to create a category that is linked to a module. You may want to create other course related categories. You can use these to record and reflect on:

• meetings, lectures, seminars, tutorials;
• your responses to questions and ideas asked by your lecturers;
• your ideas, work and writing;
• books and other resources that you are using (book reviews);
• definitions of key terms.

Your blog is an ideal place to try out ideas and to see what other people think.

A good thing to do is to record your academic work in these categories, and then reflect upon the PDP aspects of them in your PDP category. You can use the write follow up option to write a related entry (demo this by writing a follow up entry).

Soon you will also recieve emails that suggest things for you to write about. These are optional, but hopefully will be useful. We call them prompts.

More things that you can do with blogs:

• you can very easily write book, CD and DVD (movie) reviews;
• you can find people's blogs in the blog directory;
• it includes an "About Me" page that you can use as your homepage;
• you can upload images into galleries and use them in your entries;
• select key entries from your blog to add to your CV;
• more coming soon!

Get a blog at http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk

Sign in, then register.

Robert O'Toole : 09 Nov 2004 11:51 |  Tags: E-Learning Warwick University |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Blogs, the scope of offensiveness, and the democratic process.

To legislate against 'offensiveness without intent', whilst at the same time failing to specify the legally admissable scope of offensiveness, would itself be dangerous. There are many countries where this happens. The uncertainty acts to discourage people from speaking publicly, from taking any risks at all.

One solution would be to try to comprehensively define the scope of offensivness. That can of course only go so far, and may only be based on a concensus.

We should step back from this debate and consider what has gone wrong with society to lead to it. To begin with we do want people to be uncertain about the scope of offensiveness, we do want them to be self-critical. But we also want people, especially university students, to be adept at testing out the boundaries and feeling there way through the moral issues in a safe and controlled environment. Indeed we want them to learn how to set up and maintain such environments.

Traditionally, one would have friends with which one would talk, testing ideas (sounds rather Ancient Greek!). Of course that group of friends should not be entirely like-minded people. Friends with whom one can experiment, offend, be corrected, and be forgiven.

And then there must be extensions out from these groups of friends, networks into which ideas and opinions can be tested in a wider and less unpredictable environment.

And finally, once one is certain of one's ground, it is safe to go public.

I had thought that was what universities are about.

The blog system that we have designed aims to work in this way. Blog collections based on existing academic groupings already exist. We will, very soon, have the ability to create our own collections of arbitrary blogs and publish them. This will encourage the operation of the process described above. Temporarily, as a means to publicise the system, we have an entirely open blogs homepage onto which anyone may get their ideas published to the public without developing that safety. This is in some instances has a detrimental effect, but as the system gets more sophisticated in how it encourages groups of friends, this effect will subside.

Personally I see blogs, when properly implemented (and we are near to that point), as a powerful means for developing democratic society.

Robert O'Toole : 08 Nov 2004 09:12 |  Tags: E-Learning Warwick University |  Comments (32) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Simple way of doing semantic mapping in blogs

Follow-up to Semantic cartography to support conceptual development through blogs from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

And some simple ideas on how it could be done…

1) user creates list of personal favourite blog entries and urls
a) by browing someone else's entry and selecting 'add to blogroll';
b) by selecting an 'add to blogroll' option when they write an entry;
c) by selecting an 'add to blogroll' link when viewing a SiteBuilder page;
d) by typing the url into their blogroll.

2) they give the link in their blogroll a keyword.

3) when writing the body of a subsequent entry, they get a link picker that allows them to easily create a link to one of the items in their blogroll.

4) when the entry is created, the link is formatted in a special way that indicates that it is a link to a blogroll concept, with the keyword appearing on mouseover.

5) a special collection page is created for each blogroll entry showing where it has been refered from.

Robert O'Toole : 07 Nov 2004 18:10 |  Tags: E-Learning Warwick University |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Semantic cartography to support conceptual development through blogs

Blogs recording the academic process

For a while now I have been using Warwick Blogs both for developing academic research and for recording my activities as an E-learning Advisor. It works well for both of these purposes. It is most effective in how it allows me to very quickly record an event. Such events may be meetings, lectures, seminars, readings (of a book chapter), or even just sessions of thinking. Theses are recorded sequentially as they occurr, within the datetime ordered structure of the blog. And I can easily jump back to a point in time to see the recording of events from that time.

Real-time engagements

We could say that these recordings are recordings of real-time engagements. Such real-time engagements are always engagements with more than one distinct but related concept. For example, in philosophy I may have a seminar that deals with modularity of mind and with artistic confinement, as two explicitly stated and applied concepts. The resulting blog entry should record how these two distinct concepts have operated together, or at least how I moved from one concept to another. These concepts are then the explicit subjects of the meeting and the resulting blog entry. Our expectation has been that the recording of real-time engagements would also result in the recording, as implicit concepts, of other aspects present in the engagement. For example, I may wish to identify that I used a specific skill. That skill and my use of it becomes a concept when I start to define it's nature, scope, and my capabilities. Other such implicit concepts may concern the intentions, agendas, perspectives, and subsequent and consequent trajectories of the engagement.

In this way, real-time engagements always consist of complex assemblages, formed from both explicit and implicit concepts, and reflectively recorded as involving both explicit and implicit concepts. These may be represented in a more or less effective way in a blog entry about the engagement.

One of the reasons for developing the Warwick Blogs system was to support the development of these concepts, both explicit and implicit, over an extended period of time. We know that concepts only get defined, skills only get developed, when they are applied to each other, in relation to each other, in real-time engagements. This is how the research process actually works. To support this development we have two mechanisms that seek to link together real-time engagements and the concepts that appear within them: categorisation and follow-up entries.

Categories as developing concepts

The most obvious mechanism is the category. By placing a series of entries in a single category the blogger indicates that they develop the concept represented by, or held within, that category. For example, there may be a category called PDP, and the concept that it represents is the quite nebulous concept of Personal Development Process.

It is true that, as entries are created in a category, over time they tend to define and develop the concept behind that category. But these categories and the concepts that they represent are broad. PDP is a big and potentially all-encompassing idea. To achieve a greater degree of granularity, one could define many different categories to represent all of the concepts that will be developed in a blog. This could ,ake for a very complex top-level view of the blog. We would also lose an important aspect of categories, a role that they perform at the top level view of the blog, in that they provide a means for dividing up the various uses of a single blog (social, academic, etc). We could use sub-categories to deal with this, but again categorisation gets quite complex.

There is, however, a more serious limitation with the method of categorisation. We know that blog entries usually report on real-time engagements. These engagements always include more than one concept, implicitly or explicitly. In the case of PDP, the engagements are likeley to be explicitly related to a subject-specific concept, and only implicitly related to PDP issues. If categorisation were to be our mechanism for identifyng the concepts dealt with by an entry, the entry would have to exist in more than one category. We could allow a single entry to appear in more than one category, but that would be both complex and unintuitive. Consider this scenario. I go to a seminar on "the transcendental deduction". The seminar deals quite intensively with Kant, but even so I notice during the seminar that I am using my notes in a different and more effective manner in response to some PDP work that I have been doing. I get home and just about have time to write a single entry to record the engagement. This entry mostly deals with Kant, but with a brief mention of the use of my new skill. Do I then classify the entry under both PDP and Research? Would my PDP category get cluttered up with academic entries that have some hard to find mention of PDP? But if I didn't in some way identify that the entry contains something of relevance to PDP, the important event of an advancement in my PDP agenda would just be lost within the complex body of entries within my Research category.

Thus categorisation is not sufficient.

Follow-up entries extracting and refining concepts

The second mechanism that we have for developing concepts in blogs is the 'follow-up' entry. This is designed to deal with the limitations of categorisation. It works as follows: I write an entry recording an engagement, I publish the entry, at a later date I re-read the entry and have some further thoughts (or possibly I have a related engagement), I use the 'write follow-up' link on the entry to write a new entry linked back to the first entry.

We had hoped that bloggers would use this to explicitly develop a concept that had been only implicitly recorded in an entry about a more complex engagement. For example, I may have a seminar that involves, amongst others, an implicit PDP related concept. I would intuitively, and due to time-constraints, record that in an entry that deals with all of the concepts involved in the engagement. In order to isolate an develop the implicit PDP concept, I would write a follow-up entry that extracts that concept out of the complexity of the engagement, defining it and reflecting upon it with greater concentration.

Note that this only works one way, I cannot currently take a set of concepts dealt with in their own blog entries and then write an entry that deals with all of them together. So a key process, synthesis or summarization is missing. However, the 'follow-up' mechanism still does present a powerful tool for working with concepts.

In reality, it is probably the case that very few people use the follow-up system because they are just too busy recording those complex real-time engagements. They hardly ever get a chance to abstract out the single concept and work on it in isolation. We may be able to encourage the use of a pedagogy that gets students to work with concepts in this way, but I suspect that even then it will not become the intuitive mode of operation.

We can therefore conclude that the 'follow-up' facility is very useful, but for the concept development that we are after, it probably requires just too much extra work to be done on a consistent and widespread basis.

Semantic mapping of real-time engagements

To find a more intuitive solution, I have concentrated on what has to be the only realistic strategy: model intuitive and commonly used workflows for concept development, and use the technology to replicate them, but with some key enhancements that give the new tools an advantage over traditional methods. I'm sure there are several ways in which researchers and students develop concepts, reflecting the diversity of methodologies between and within disciplines. Although I think we should not overemphasise this. But to start somewhere, I will start with that with which I am familiar: philosophy. So how does it work in philosophy?

Firstly, what is a concept? Without delving too deeply into the relationship between mind, language, technique and material, we could simply say that it is some repetitively appearing notion that makes a definite and reproducible difference to the way in which an aspect of the world is conceieved. For example, the concept of 'human-rights'. When this is refered to, whether I agree or disagree with the proposition within which it is deployed, I will always concieve of a human as something that may or may not lay claim to a universal right. A concept doesn't prove anything, but it does raise a set of questions, it does posit the existnce of some thing or some attribute. And most importantly, it alters the outcome of an argument or a decision.

Surprisingly, when an individual concept is introduced to a student or first encountered by a researcher, it is rarely done so with much of a definition. A concept new to the student or reader tends to be applied immediately. We may provide some indication of the key concepts that need to be observed, possibly with a rudimentary definition, but that is all. The concept is quickly deployed to make a key difference to an argument or a decision. In the context of that argument or decision, in relation to the other more familiar concepts used, and in relation to the outcome of the argument or decision, the student gets a feel for the concept. Not necessarily a complete understanding, but at least a sense of it. This sense is fundamentally a cartographic sense, a feeling for the layout of arguments and discourses with the relative and repetitive positioning of concepts forming the peaks and contours. Intuitively the student develops a semantic map of the meaning of the concepts.

As the concept is then re-encountered in different contexts, for different arguments and decisions, that sense becomes more definite, or at least greater. The students gains a stronger orientation and sense of the landscape in which they are operating. In fact the concept itself, as it is put into action repeatedly, changes and gains definition. It rises from the background cartography, with features extending outwards to meet with other concept. The activity of definition itself, textual definition, usually only occurrs at this later stage. They know where the mountains are and now set out to conquer them. It is primarily concerned with setting out the scope of the concept, stating what work it can do, what difference it can make to arguments. We could say that this activity of definition, scoping and tracking the use of concepts, is one of the most important, if not the most important, academic activity.

If we now return to a consideration of how the blog system could be used in academic activity, we can see that it fits with this analysis of the workflow and entities involved in philosophy. For example, we want first year undergraduates to encounter the key concepts of PDP as applicable to their own activities and decision making processes. We may give them a primer that identifies the useful concepts, a rough map, with some sense of their scope, importance and suggested directions. But to actualy make sense of those concepts, the student needs to start applying them. And as has been made clear, the use of those concepts, the development of that understanding, happens within real-time engagements. The same is true of philosophical concepts. So we need to give them the ability to identify when they have used the concepts, directly within the context of their use: the blog recordings of the real-time engagements. We need to make it obvious when more than one of the concepts is used in relation to another. We need to allow them to track and visualise their use of the concepts over time, as they develop. And finally, we need them to focus the application of the concepts into the development of definition. The actual functionality that is required to help with this is as follows:

1. Priming of the development with a set of key concepts to be recorded in the blog. This could be more or less self-directed. The process of identifying key concepts and adding them to the list could be the responsibility of the student/researcher. A tutor could provide the list in the module blog, module web pages, with the students creating their own instances using 'blog this'. Or they could just be suggested in lectures and seminars. Or the student could be prompted to record these key concepts and register them in their blog. We could even pre-load a blog with an entry for each key concept. Would there be a separate category for 'Key Concepts and Definitions'?
2. Use of the concepts during the recording of real-time engagements in the blog. A simple means for identifying words or blocks of text that refer to a concept. This should trackback the use of the concept to the entry in which it was defined/introduced. More than one concept can therefore be used and linked to in a single entry.
3. When reading the entry it should be clear which concepts have been used and where they have been used within the text.
4. A search facilities that returns a list of instances in which the key concept has been used, or where a set of key concepts have been used together.
5. The student extends the entry with which they define the key concept as they use the concept within their blog.
6. Relationship specifiers that identify the relationships between key concepts as they appear in entries.
7. Visualisation tools that demonstrate the relationships between key concepts and the blog entries that they appear in – concept maps of the semantic cartography.

Robert O'Toole : 07 Nov 2004 17:17 |  Tags: E-Learning Warwick University |  Comments (4) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Warwick Blogs for PhD students – intro session

I'm running a session tomorrow morning for the Graduate School to introduce some PhD students to using blogs for research work. I will start of by covering these 10 key points about Warwick Blogs:

1. a blog always has an owner, usually an individual, sometimes a team;
2. the owner chooses a title, a description, and a style;
3. it consists of a series of entries written by the owner;
4. the latest ten entries are displayed on the homepage, you can use the calendar to see older entries;
5. every entry has a category, there is a page that shows all of the entries in a category;
6. there are (currently) five types of entry, including standard, follow-up, and review entries;
7. you can allow people to comment on your entries;
8. images can be uploaded into galleries and used in entries;
9. the blog owner can control who can view and comment on each entry;
10. public entries are indexed by Google.

And then I will get them to think about ways of using blogs in the research process, for example:

• Publishing agendas
• Reporting on meetings
• Recording and commenting on reading
• Recording new ideas
• Developing ideas
• Reflecting on skills, performance etc
• Recording experimental results
• Reporting on lectures, seminars and conferences
• Book reviews
• Writing about blog entries by other researchers
• Writing about other online resources
• Publishing photos of experiments and field-trips
• Evaluating technologies and techniques
• Recording and reflecting on the development of documents.

It will be interesting to see what other ideas they have.

Robert O'Toole : 22 Oct 2004 22:45 |  Tags: E-Learning Warwick University |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Be aware, Google will find your blog!

Follow-up to Chasing Che book review from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

Since the launch of Warwick Blogs i've been constantly telling people that if they write entries that are accessible to 'anyone', then Google will index your blog. Our system attracts such good Google rankings that your entry will come to the top or near to the top of peoples searches.

For example, I recently wrote a review of the book Chasing Che. If you do a Google search for that book, my review will be listed near or at the top of the results. This is a really good thing if your want your work to get noticed, and has the potential to promote Warwick's researchers. You will also probably find that, after a short time writing a blog, doing a search for your name will list you very high in the results returned. You blog is associated with your name. Which is also good.

But if you don't want your entries to be quite that public, you need to make sure that Google can't index them. To do so, you must restrict access to the entry to Staff/Students, Staff, or Students or some other defined group.

Update – if you do a search for Motorcycle Diaries review, my entry on the movie comes 11th, with only reviews from magazines etc before it in the list!

Robert O'Toole : 19 Oct 2004 16:52 |  Tags: E-Learning Warwick University |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem