This is a three-part article whose aim is to serve as an update to my work on the personal research portal, as long as to explain yet another practical example of a PLE, something that many found useful at the PLE Conference as a means to embody theoretical ramblings.
Later that year, in summer, I attended the Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral Programme at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. It was for me — and for most in there — the first truly web 2.0 enhanced event (as I put it in OII SDP 2007 (Epilogue): Last thoughts about Web Science and Academic Blogging or Why did not Academia came up with Wikipedia), as it was a fantastic exercise to stress the potential of blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, open bibliographic managers or photo and video sharing websites for knowledge sharing and building; and the (personal) discovery of then emerging tools like Twitter, Facebook and Dopplr.
Summer of 2007 was, I believe, the actual taking off of the PLE. Though many had contributed to its conception (Oleg Liber, Scott Wilson, Graham Attwell, Mark Van Harmelen or Stephen Downes, to name just a few), I personally consider the publication of Wilson’s article the coming of age of the concept, and most especially because many interesting things would happen since in an explosive way, from the “massive” adoption of the concept to the “massive” adoption of Web 2.0 tools in formal and informal learning (as “massive” as we consider ourselves and our reflections on ICT and education “mainstream”, of course).
Managing the complex
Since 2003 — when this blog was born — and especially since mid 2007, things have changed a lot. Mainly three things have radically changed the information-sharing landscape:
More people sharing information on the Net, boosted by the popularization of nanoblogging and social networking sites;
more ways to share information on the Net, boosted by the “cloud” alternatives to desktop applications;
a likely improvement in everyone’s (including me) digital skills, cause and consequence (make a virtue of necessity) of the former two.
According to that, my personal learning environment more or less looks now like this:
I used to rather call it personal research portal, as it had an explicit goal in (scientific) outreach and communication that most PLE do not. I’ll here stick to PLE for the sake of clarity and consensus.
Instead of wiring all the services I use between them, I chose to present it in a more sequential way (more on this in the second part on information management): information acquisition (input, what I get, in red), storage and processing (own self, in gray), diffusion and communication (output, what I create, in blue). Of course we cannot sequence information management this way: many tools are used for several purposes, processing is also a part of diffusion, etc. But I think it puts things in a clearer way.
What we do, what we are must be centralized. It is the image of what we do and become the one that has to be decentralized, not the essence.
I plead for the construction of the portfolio, for a return to the personal or institutional website, using social media as a game of mirrors that reflects us where we should also be present.
If anything, my vision of this statement has strengthened. I am, for instance, seriously considering shifting from Slideshare to iSpring. Or, at least, doing both: be present in Slideshare but upload and share in my site my own presentations in flash format.
This explains not only why the personal website (the areas shadowed in gray) is not only a huge hub where everything at least passes through, but why most information is embedded in there, especially all my own production. The blogs, the wiki, the bibliographic manager and the repository all are personal installations that surround my digital persona (here pictured as “about me”). Even the e-mail accounts, though managed with G-Mail, are my own domain’s. Moreover, the site also hosts a lifestream that works as Friendfeed collecting most my activity, but storing it on my own site.
Some reflections
First of all, it is important to note how relevant RSS has become as a vehicle to exchange information, but how embedding still is the option to present information, leaving APIs just a marginal role in the whole picture.
Linked to this, it is becoming increasingly industrious to keep record of your own production (whatever its quality). The result of this is that your digital persona and even your e-portfolio is scattered all over the Internet. This has consequences on the perception people have on you, thus consequences in how you are evaluated (knowledge, competences, behaviour). The forces that drive you to being present in the relevant places are opposite to the forces you have to apply to keep your things straightened up and under control. RSS feeds, open APIs and embedding help, and a personal website (including domain) is, in my opinion, becoming mandatory for every knowledge worker.
On the other hand, I would also like to stress the role of web analytics tools. If used for something more than quantitative measuring (pointless in my case, as visitors to my site come one by one and never in herds), these tools provide precious information if monitored carefully. Among others:
Discover kindred souls that visited you and you hadn’t heard of. Of course, this fact deeply depends of you keeping in topic.
Discover comments on your opinions and work.
Discover works that have been listed besides your own, and that you hadn’t heard of.
By construction, discover others’ ongoing work and projects and, sometimes, even be able to take part in them.
Wikimedia is about the community, about volunteering. Since the project kicked off in 2001, there have been created 13 million articles in 271 languagesw, 17 million pages, 325 million edits, 330 million visits monthly, 100,000 active contributors (edit 5 times a month at least), over 50 books published on the Wikimedia phenomena, etc. All coordinated by the 27 world chapters of the Wikimedia Foundation, though with only 35 employees.
If we look not at what’s in there, but what people is looking for (visits to the website), some Wikipedias may already be shifting from encyclopedic core to more topical and current events content. On the contrary, though, 1/3 of the hits of the Spanish Wikipedia deals with science and technology content.
Besides current events or news, local content is increasingly searched for. There is also an increase of geotagged content on Wikipedia, thus the interest in local content. As anecdote, it can be said that the second Wikipedia ever created was the Catalan Viquipèdia.
Management model
Provide physical home (servers)
Basic rules
Leave the community work and grow on its own
Power shift to the citizen
Technology: insfrastructure, tools, open source
Cultural Movement: free culture (Linux, Apache), free knowledge
License structure: GNU FDL, Creative Commons (CC-BY-SA)
All in all, the question was that anyone could contribute and the result would be open to everyone.
How do we take care of the community: transparency, trust, thankfulness, respect, responsiveness.
Business Model
Servant-leaders achieve results for their organizations by giving priority attention to the needs of their colleagues and those they serve. Collaboration, communication, culture.
Create a platform, let other people build (i.e. Mediawiki). It happens everywhere: Google, Apple, Amazon, FaceBook, etc. This also applies to Education, as everyone has something to bring on the table. You have to figure out how to make people that know be involved in the process.
Small “workforce” that can adapt to market changes very quickly, plus a virtual larger “workforce”, using the community as research and development.
You have to figure out what you’re good at, and forget about controlling the whole value change. Do not try and do everything. Networks form to address needs: you have to figure out where you fill into that.
Discussion
Ismael Peña-López: would your model be different were the Wikimedia Foundation be Wikimedia “for profit” Corporation? It depends on your project, as everyone is different and there is not a unique model, but leveraging the community might still apply. You definitely have to focus in your goal and where you can contribute best to achieve it. If you’re running a talent based project, you definitely have to share some of the wealth in it. Talent goes where it is appreciated most.
Q: Is it a must to have a professional core? A: It really depends on what you want to achieve. There is definitely not “a” model.
Silvia Bravo: where do we start from? A: Figure out what your goals are and find who’s your champion. Once the project is started, things become easier, but the difficult thing is to start up the project, and the role of the champion is crucial here. Then, you need to create something that people can build things on top of. Make sure you have a clear goal, find out what tools will you be needing and get a champion to promote the project.
Q: how do you deal with security hazards/attacks? A: It is very important to have a clear and shared framework (linked to your goals) that everybody can relate to. And the system works the same way.
Q: what’s the physical structure like? A: only 20 servers [guess I got that right], as most information is only text. But the challenge is how to keep up with changes and still being able to bring the relevant information, which increasingly comes in rich media (photo, sound, video, etc.). That’s why Wikimedia Foundation engages in partnerships with the corporate sector to be ahead of the future.
Llorenç Valverde: how do we engage the community, and invite everyone to add value? A: Culture is the biggest problem. The way collaboration and sharing ideas happens varies a lot depending on the culture, understanding culture not only at the country level, but also at the company level. E.g. if you’re a newcomer to a firm, you might have brilliant ideas but you might not be (self)legitimate to share them openly. Culture is doubtless the toughest part of all.
Llorenç Valverde: so the starting point is to share information within the organization? A: Certainly. Add everybody in the process.
Social Media consultant Marc Cortés has kindly invited me to join a 27 people document where to draft our Predictions for Social Media in 2010. Though most of the professionals featured in the document come from the communications and marketing field — and, hence, the final outcome is populated with advice and forecasts on related topics — there is also a little room for politics and governments.
My reflections, though not explicitly stated, are more targeted towards researchers and knowledgeable people — to whom the Web 2.0 has at last provided a voice on their own despite their affiliation — and to knowledge workers and knowledge intensive institutions in general.
I here below translate my part into English and reproduce the full document and the “headlines” of all other contributors.
Social media will channel activity towards what is relevant: the portfolio
In the coming years we will be closing the circle and be back to personal and institutional websites, though these will in any way look like the ones we visited in the dawn of the World Wide Web.
We have performed a necessary initiation journey taken by the hand of social media, so that we could be introduced to the new and growing possibilities of the Web. Blogs and wikis showed us what was possible in a bi-directional Web, where content and even services creation could be decentralized and exit institutions. Social networking sites added the human factor to the network we had recently created: bi-directionality became multi-directionality, multi-diffusion. Blogs created the bourgeoisie of the Internet, and social networking sites opened it up and democratized it for the rest of the society.
But it is as easy to use social media as it is difficult to manage them and make them work for out benefit. It is likely that whoever wants or has to have a reputation on the Internet just cannot keep having tentacles without a visible head. Social media must be funnels that lead to us: we neither can manage chaor eternally, nor can we expect that whoever looks for us finds us or reconstruct us amongst this total maze of confusion.
This does not mean that we are not present in the relevant channels: it is there where we will mainly interact. But the critical mass of our digital persona must be as near as possible to our self.
What we do, what we are must be centralized. It is the image of what we do and become the one that has to be decentralized, not the essence.
I plead for the construction of the portfolio, for a return to the personal or institutional website, using social media as a game of mirrors that reflects us where we should also be present.
Predictions for Social Media in 2010
Alfonso Alcantara: Consultor y coach en desarrollo profesional y empleo 2.0 “En 2010 las redes sociales definitivamente serán las autopistas de las ideas.”
Jacobo Álvarez: Director Negocio Grupo Intercom y Socio en Multiplica “El 2010 el año en el que, al menos en el móvil, la suma de geolocalización y redes personales y profesionales nos liberen del exceso de información y nos ayude a acceder a información más relevante de nuestro entorno”
Jose Luis Antúnez: Fundador de YouAre y Coorganizador de Evento Blog España “El real-time es la extrapolación de la vida real a la web. Y en la vida real se hace dinero vendiendo y pagando cosas”.
Enrique Burgos: Responsable de Marketing Relacional de Unidad Editorial “Solo demostrando el valor que aporta a las marcas (económico & imagen) se lograra una mayor comprensión por las altas direcciones de las empresas”
Cesar Calderón: Socio Director en Autoritas Consulting “2010 será el año en el que las administraciones públicas descubran los Social Media y comiencen a conversar con los ciudadanos”
Marc Cortés: Socio-Director RocaSalvatella y Profesor Marketing Electrónico (ESADE) “Dejaremos de hablar de Social Media y empezaremos a hablar de Social Business”.
Adolfo Corujo y todo el equipo de Llorente & Cuenca: Director Senior Llorente&Cuenca “Para el usuario, 2010 será el año de… La explosión de la búsqueda en Tiempo Real”
Roberto Carreras: Consultor de Comunicación y RRPP “La web en tiempo real, que durante 2009 dio sus primeros pasos como fenómeno, vivirá en 2010 su consolidación.”
Fernando de la Rosa: Socio y fundador de Seis Grados “2010 es un año de re-invenciones: el principio de nuevos mercados y la agonía de otros”.
Roger Domingo: Director Editorial Deusto / Gestión 2000/ Alienta / CEAC “La incorporación del mundo de la empresa a las redes sociales conllevará también un incremento de la publicidad en las mismas, lo cual pondrá en peligro la tan deseada “conversación cluetrainiania””
Fernado Fegido: Director de Negocio Digital de Caja Navarra “El año 2010 será otro año en el que deberemos de seguir evangelizando y capacitando a muchos responsables de Márketing y Comunicación”
Tristán Elósegui: Responsable de Marketing Digital de Canal+ y Organizador del The Monday Reading Club “La crisis va a favorecer el crecimiento de los medios sociales”
Ricard Espelt: Regidor de Nuevas Tecnologías de Copons “La ciudadanía, cada vez más consciente del poder de las redes sociales, va a provocar pequeñas “revoluciones” en el devenir de la política española”
Marek Fodor: Emprendedor y Business Angel del sector tecnológico “Bajará notablemente el crecimiento de twitter, comparado con el año 2009”.
Jose Antonio Gallego Vázquez: Responsable de Comunidad del BBVA “Se dará el caso de comunidades enteras que renuncian a las redes sociales, que se bautizarán como “Amish digitales””
Albert García Pujadas: CEO Nikodemo “El video se impondrá como formato de comunicación habitual y como soporte publicitario de primer orden”
Xavier Guell: Weyoose y Coorganizador de Cava&Twitts “Adiós humo, hola servicio”
Javier Martín: Blogger y emprendedor Es la hora de vender!
Jose Antonio del Moral: CEO de Alianzo “Volveremos a hablar de Web 2.0 y no tanto de social media. En el fondo todo es social y no sólo los media”
Ícaro Moyano: Director Comunicación tuenti “¿GRPs? Mejor recomendaciones”
Sebastian Muriel: Director de red.es “Será el año en el que no se dejará de hablar del Social Media en los medios tradicionales”
José Luis Orihuela: Profesor de la Universidad de Navarra “La red y sus aplicaciones se vivirán cada vez más como una experiencia móvil”
Alberto Ortiz de Zárate: Director de Atención Ciudadana en Gobierno Vasco “Empezaremos a hacer un uso inteligente de las redes sociales. En ese camino, la relevancia se desplazará de las herramientas hacia las estrategias de comunicación”
Ismael Peña-López: Profesor Universitat Oberta de Catalunya “Abogo por una construcción del portafolio, por una vuelta a la web personal o institucional, utilizando los social media como un juego de espejos que nos refleje allí donde debamos estar también presentes”
Genis Roca: Socio Director RocaSalvatella “En resumen, las palabras clave para este 2010 serán: Indicadores, Gestión y Resultados”.
Esteban Trigos: Marketing Innovator Director – Double You “las marcas empezarán a incorporar en sus mensajes un nuevo giro a la hora de comportarse: serán más sociales
Marc vidal: CEO de Cink “Será el momento de los Net estrategy por encima de los Managers de comunidad”.
Parallel session: Trends and advances before the digital divide: assessment systems and good practices Moderator: Concepción Colomer Revuelta, Subdirector at the Oficina de Planificación Sanitaria and Director del Observatorio de Salud de la Mujer del Ministerio de Sanidad y Política Social
Digital and informational divides in a context of digital, cultural, cognitive and generational convergence Marcelo D’Agostino, Consultant in Knowledge Management, Organización Panamericana de la Salud
Marcelo D’Agostino believes that the digital digital will shrink, necessarily, as the Internet won’t make steps backwards [he seems to forget that the digital divide is actually widening, especially if we take into account the quality of access, namely, broadband access, and what you can or cannot do with that different quality of access].
Advise to bridge the digital divide:
Don’t be intimidated by technical jargon
Don’t be afraid of technology
Nobody is an expert in everything
Trust first your capacity and then apply technologies
Be careful where you look for information
Benefits of ICTs for Public Health: a better link between patients and professionals; better and life-long training.
Open access to health and medical information: a challenge before the digital divide Helena Martín Rodero, Head of the Sección Bibliotecas Biosanitarias de la Universidad de Salamanca
Raghavendra Gadagkar: open-access more harm than good in developing world (published in Nature, comment by Peter Suber) stating the rich world patronising the poor world, in the sense that rich ones might be more interested in poor ones reading rather than publishing.
We are witnessing a crisis in the system of scientific diffusion, that has lead to the creation of the Open Access movement and several international declarations to foster scientific publishing in open access journals (gold access) or scientific self-archiving in open access repositories (green access).
Open access is compatible with peer-review, professional quality, prestige, preservation, intellectual property, profit, priced add-ons and print (originally in Open access to the scientific journal literature, by Peter Suber.
Access to knowledge will necessarily help to bridge the digital divide, and open access publications and repositories is a way to enable a better access to knowledge.
Web 2.0 and Medicine Dídac Margaix Arnal, Librarian at the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia
New generations (digital natives) have been born with new technologies and these are no strange to them. Have different skills towards technology and information, which they manage in different ways.
We might be in an age similar to the Renaissance, where technology feeds cultural and social change, and culture and society feed technological change.
Three kinds of Web 2.0 sites
The web as the platform: use the web instead of the desktop (e.g. Zoho)
Remix the web: use the web to mix different content (e.g. Google Maps)
The social web: it is users what counts, not visits. Users add value to the site (e.g. YouTube)
Medicine 2.0: use of a set of web tools by health professionals applying the principles of open source, open access, etc. It is different from e-Medicine, that is applying ICTs in health issues. There has been an inflexion point that has put humans into technology, from just ICTs to the dimension of community. It is a matter not of technology but of participation.
Some factors:
“Suppormediation”: support and mediation by non-professionals (in Spanish: Apomediación)
Collaboration
Transparency
There increasingly are websites that provide health information on the Internet. We should prescribe more information than pills (or, at least, as much information as pills).
Summing up: new agents, new tools, collaboration, personalization, training.
Internet and Health David Novillo Ortiz, Agencia de Calidad del Sistema Nacional de Salud. Ministerio de Sanidad y Política social
Related to health, increasingly people get their information from the Internet and less from TV, and more from blogs. In general, e-mail, search engines and social networking sites have entered with strength into the information landscape.
Search for health information in the Internet has gone from 19% in 2003 to 54% in 2008 (Spain, % of total Internet users). There is a gender gap where women score 10 points higher than men, probably due to their role as the person at home that cares for the family members.
In April 2007, the same search terms in 4 different search engines produced only 0.6% of overlap (only 0.6% of all results were the same in the 4 search engines). We should be careful about that, as the information that search engines produce is, by any means, the same one ever.
Indeed, we trust more the people we know that the ones we don’t, that’s why Google Social Search might be adding a lot of value as it will bring personal context to people’s searches.
On the other hand, we can access certified/verified health websites whose information is backed by the reputation of the institutions that publish those websites. E.g. excelenciaclinica.net, a metasearch engine that crawls the best health websites in Spanish.
The possibility to tape a lecture — e.g. an academic lecture from a professor and belonging to an undergrad course — and upload it to a web server is not new. But as a lecture is not only a speech, but a lot more — questions and answers, teamwork, a blackboard or a beamer with complementary materials and/or further explanations, etc. — we have usually been seeing lecture recording like a by-product of master-classes in the best of scenarios.
But the fact that the web is increasingly (a) providing best connectivity, access, searchability/findability, ease of use and capabilities of storage, and (b) more social tools so that people can collaborate, has made the debate around video-lectures worth revisiting.
A simple search provides a good bunch of articles worth giving them a look:
The results from the previous papers can be summarized as follows:
If the recorded lecture is just a substitute for the live thing, it might not make a difference or, in other words, the impact might be null.
But the recorded lecture can be more engaging than the live lecture, as it allows for stops and fast-forwards, pauses to check other information, etc.
The video-lecture can also enable people to attend lectures they would or could not attend, and even make them more efficient in their attendance (see previous point)
The taped lecture can also be a trigger for teamwork, collaboration and other social learning methodologies, methodologies that, indeed, are normally not used in live lectures because of their (a) unidirectionality (b) time constraints and (c) crowded classrooms — let alone shyness from some attendees that just cannot speak/interact in public
If students are more engaged, comfortable and willing to collaborate, the impact of having recorded lectures either as supporting materials or as a substitute for the “real thing” can end up having a positive impact and increasing academic performance in relationship with students not using taped lectures but attending classes
Educator.com
With this in mind, I happened to meet online the founders of Educator.com and had the chance to have a guest access to the site — while they invited me too to write this little piece about Educator.com.
Educator.com is a collection of academic lectures [...] helping students that do not have ready access to great education because of geographic location or socioeconomic status. Educator’s instructors are all experienced college professors and guide students through an innovative two video interface that simulates a one-to-one learning environment. In other words, people at Educator.com have put together good professors in front of the camera and taped their lectures, including their slides, whiteboard notes, syllabuses, readings, etc.
At first glance — which sticks at second and further “glances” — the quality of the materials is impressive (see, for instance, what’s being prepared to learn chemistry or Calculus BC), treated with most taste and sensitivity: content is good and is meticulously presented. Most materials include a video of the professor plus his slides and/or whiteboard, while keeping navigation very easy along the syllabus which features subtitles and time codes. Videos add up some quick notes and the possibility to comment them.
That said, and going back to what we stated before about video lectures, Educator.com makes a very good companion to either reinforce or to (maybe) substitute traditional lectures, and I see a lot of potentials in models like Educator.com’s.
Cons of video-lectures?
In my opinion, the cons — necessarily — go in the same line as the “accompanying measures” that the afore mentioned researchers already stated in their papers: while content can constitute a core and a good one, it is context and enablers what will make of a video-lecture a (potential) success — besides the incontestable fact of being able to reach a content you wouldn’t otherwise if not being able to attend live lectures, of course.
A first aspect is exercises, so that oneself can test a specific level of knowledge acquisition. This is something that’s already planned (though not still implemented) in Educator.com and that just seldom is seen in other academic lectures’ repositories.
Related to this, possibility of feedback or guidance should naturally follow. Being myself a professor teaching online, once content is made available, our added value is, simply stated, (a) guidance through path setting and (b) provision of specific feedback.
Which leads me to the third aspect: in distance learning, syllabuses, learning paths, etc. are a must. Much is done in this sense at Educator.com and much more is likely to be found there would their project work, reach a critical mass and enable them to put as many courses as possible.
Of course, it is not only a matter of setting up a learning path, but also help in blueprinting one’s own curriculum. Being able to create one’s own “playlists” (something that other content — not lectures — repositories allow) or be able to go offline by feeding your mp4 player would be interesting add ons to the project and to the freedom of the student.
In the end, sites like Educator.com should enable the student to create their own e-portfolios or, to follow the actual trend, their own personal learning environments.
These personal learning environments would, of course, interact with other students so that a learning community can emerge, be it to share hints, materials, doubts or, in the best scenario, to build together their own learning.
Summing up: initiatives like Educator.com take the best of technology to capture live lectures and make them available to a very broad public. I don’t think just taped lectures are “education”, but:
They can be complemented with more content, context, guidance, classmates, etc. so that the resulting mix is a real and richest learning experience
They definitely stress the weaknesses of the traditional lecturing style, challenging the suitability of such methods, and asking them for an urgent update… maybe a blended model were lectures can be supplied by someone like Educator.com and leave live meetings for debates, seminars or something were face-to-face makes more sense and ads real value.
Blog analysis based on journalists that have a blog, as a middle ground between pro and personal. Of special interest how is the identity built: Identity building: domain name, about section, personal photography, affiliation, etc.
The network of blogs gets complicated with other Web 2.0 services. There’s a need to manage the increasing data with a model: Barriblog.
The model is based on two axes — content affinity and intensiveness of relationship — and measures links, conversations/comments and citations, adding them up in a relationship index.
Improvements on the model: time series, how have other web 2.0 applications (e.g. Twitter) impacted on blog usage and blog networking, etc.
How can we map transnationality? Focusing on flows; focusing on active contacts with people with the same origin; focusing in the geographical distribution of all active contacts.
For instance, a visualization of Chinese immigration in the Barcelona metropolitan area shows that there’s more relationship with the country of origin (China) or the US, than within immigrants; that immigrants mainly settle in Barcelona and have poor relationship with Catalan rural areas; and that within Barcelona, they move around relatively few places. Visualization allows immediate glance to these facts while raw data does not.
Many ethical issues arise in an ether that covers all, where everything we do is registered/tracked.
Use visualization to make better research questions, to get qualitative observations after quantitative data.
NOTE: difficult session where to take notes, as everything was so… visual.
e-Research: opportunities and challenges for social sciences (2009)
I am professor at the School of Law and Political Science of the Open University of Catalonia, and researcher at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute and the eLearn Center of that university.
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