OUseful Info: Integrating Ad Hoc and Formal Communities

March 19, 2006

Integrating Ad Hoc and Formal Communities

By chance, I had a brief chat on Friday to Marc Eisenstadt and Simon Buckinghum Shum, both of KMi about the potential they see for using Web2.0 approaches in the infrastructure that is going to be built around the OU's
Open Content Initiative (if you're interested, here are the job ads - if you apply, please mention you found them via the OUseful Blog;-)

One of the things I've had in mind for a bit, but not articulated yet (though I have hinted about it previously in a note to self and which I fluffed describing a bit on Friday), is the idea of how we might build learning communities around the OCI content as well as recognising that they are already ad hoc communities that already exist that might also benefit from using OCI materials.

(Marc has commented in the past, for example, how OU students come together in ad hoc communities, e.g. on Yahoo Groups, in addition (I assume) to participating in the 'official' course conferences we run for the majority of our courses.)

One idea I've been mulling around that relates to student use of OCI material (rather than use by other academics or institutional developers (two significant communities that Simon brought to my attention)) is how we might set up user tool profiles that reflect the tools currently used by learner participants.

What do I mean by that?

Ad hoc Learning Environments

Well, as I understand OCI, an important part if it is that we'll be offering a learning environment to support OCI, not just making content available. We already support in a small way the forums on Open2.net, the site set up jointly with the BBC to provide web support to OU/BBC broadcasts, so I'm guessing that community forums will be an important part of the OCI learning environment offering, along with other social tools.

Just what other tools are going to be included is anyone's guess, but rumour has it that the artificial Chinese Wall that was put up between the OU's Moodle based VLE project and the OCI Environment project is now going to be semi-permeable at least, so I guess we're going to see conversations across it regarding what sort of social/community/participation building tools are going to feature in each project.

The VLE project has student blogs and wikis in mind (and social bookmarking too, I hope!), as well as an eportfolio and so on, and I'd be very surprised if these weren't going to be exploited in community building around OCI (indeed, OCI may well drive VLE tool development), which raises an important quesiton for me that provides some amount of context for user tool profiles, in particular:

To what extent will user communities require participants to go to the OCI (or OU VLE) site to join in and to what extent will participants be able to join in from a home context?

The home context is not a phrase I'm happy with so here's what I mean by it: those personal tools or clients - web based or on the desktop - that I use day to day. For example, my preferred email client, feed reader, word processor and so on. So perhaps 'personal context' and 'personal tools' would be a better way of saying it.

The home context is thus distinct from, for example, a forum hosted on the OCI site, or a feedreader or blogging tool embedded in the OCI learning enviroment.

Note also that this is not a PLE - Personal Learning Environment - at least as I currently understand them. That is to say, my understanding of PLEs are that they are centralised learning environments independent of any instituion. (Instituionally hosted learning environments are usually referred to as VLEs - that is, the assumption is that a VLE is 'owned' by an instituion and populated by its students.)

Instead, I guess what I'm proposing is an ad hoc learning environment (AHLE), recalling some of the ideas of a Portable PLE and indeed more directly a Virtual PLE

Now I don't know - and don't really have a feel for - the extent to which community feeling is strengthened by going "somewhere" to participate in a community, but I'm taking the view that we expose people to particulalry tools in a learning environment because they support learning in the (semi)formal course environment and they can also support an individual's informal, lifelong learning in their day-to-day lives.

That is, if we teach students to blog in an OU course because we think it can help their learning, then in part we've failed to prove that point if they don't continue to use the tool after they've completed the course, either in other courses or their daily professional development. (Unless the argument is that the blog is useful scaffolding only at a particular stage of learning development, and is no longer useful after the course it is used in, for example).

So - the position I'm starting from (and seems to have taken a long time to get here!) is that some participants in the OCI venture will already be using social/communication tools in a home context and will want to particpate using those home context tools and some will want a place to go to (e.g. the OCI learning environment) to participate. Some will want to mix and match both approaches.

Furthermore, the environment should be able to cope with these different modes in such a way that other particpants don't necessarily how any other people are participating.

This is all a bit confusing, I suspect, so here's an example to try and make it a little more concrete: a blogging community.

A Case in Point: Blogging Communities

As I see it, there are three components required in a blogging system:

a client in which to author the content;
a system on which to host the content;
a client with which to view or otherwise consume the content.

(The host provides a wealth of other services including an HTML view of the content, a feed, a persistent URL of a web page of each post, digests (e.g. over time or topic), comments etc.)

These components may be closely integrated, or they may not.

For example, Blogger.com will provide you with an authoring (content creation) and hosting (content hosting) environment, Bloglines primarily provides a feed reading (content consumption) environment (although it does also offer blog authoring/hosting), Performancing for Firefox (which I'm using now) just allows me to author a post, RSS Bandit is a desktop feedreading client and so on.

Now, a learning environment that encourages learners to blog will probably provide a unified environment for creating, (hosting), and consuming blogs posts. But it is quite possible for others to participate in this community from the home context.

In fact, there are eight (8) discrete configurations for mixing and matching the three blogging components (creation, hosting and consumption) across the 'place-to-go' environment and the home context, as well as a continuum of mixed strategies.

(By mixed strategy, I mean that students may receive, for example, RSS feeds through different clients depending on the sort of information the feed is providing. For example, I may choose to receive news blog announcements in my Google homepage, blog posts from particular blogs to my feedreader, and from other blogs via an RSS2email relay into my email box.)

So what are these configurations?

	Go-There Context			Home Context
Configuration	Content Creation	Content Hosting	Content Consumption	Content Creation	Content Hosting	Content Consumption
0	Y	Y	Y	N	N	N
1	Y	Y	N	N	N	Y
2	Y	N	Y	N	Y	N
3	Y	N	N	N	Y	Y
4	N	Y	Y	Y	N	N
5	N	Y	N	Y	N	Y
6	N	N	Y	Y	Y	N
7	N	N	N	Y	Y	Y

So for example, a configuration 0 style user would create, host and read other people's blog posts solely within the OCI learning environment, for example; a configuration 7 user would use there own client, host and feed reader (although their blog feed would perhaps be syndicated to the OCI environment; a configuration 4 user would user their own client to create content for hosting at OCI, and also use the OCI feed reader, and so on.

At this point it is perhaps recapping the model I am assuming - that there is an OCI content repository and associated with it an OCI learning environment. That learning communities will develop within the learning environment, and as ad hoc communities around the content. That hybrid communites composed of learners using OCI and home context/personal tools should be supported seamlessly (so that, for example, OCI based learners would not not that their some of their peers were using home context/personal tools. (That is, that communities based around OCI 'VLE' and AHLEs should be possible.)

What Services Do Institutionally Hosted Learning Environments Offer?

At this point, it is perhaps worth briefly stating what I think are some of the important features of a centralised learning environment:

Coherent navigation across services/components
Common styling across services
Content hosting
Social networking (groups, like minded people etc.)
Common authentication across services

(B***r - Performancing crashed in Firefox and lost 500 words...I'll try and recreate, but the rest is now mostly note form...)

To what extent can these components be satisified in an ad hoc tools way?

Consider navigation and style:

- Navigation can come from Sitemaps or SiteInfo feeds, or generated from consumed content feeds;

- common style can come from providing templates (e..g Blogger, Typepad or Moveable Type templates) or republishing feeds (e.g. like Feedburner or SuprGlu.

The tools we can add to our environment go way beyond just blogging, of course - IM/chat, wikis, collaborative authoring tools, podcasts, social bookmarking etc. etc.

Now at last I'm at the point where I can perhaps start to think about a learning environment profile building tool. Consider for example, a user wants to join a community and participate in it using a personal IM client and feed reader, and a personal blog. The envrionment builder tool would allow them to wire these components together to work within the community (wiring tools might also be provided in a more technical way to developers wanting to work a the level of wiring web services together).

How might this work?

The the tool generates a list of addresses to add to the IM client address book, corresponding to learning community chat rooms or participants, and perhaps add them to the user's messaging service personal profile via an API, as well as adding the user's contact info to the list of participants in the community.

The service subscribes to the user's blog, offers to republish it in the environment skin in a Feedburner like way, and adds it to the OPML reading list for that community.

Finally, the profiler subscribes the user's feedreader to the OPML reading list for feeds relating to the particular learning community the user has just joined.

At the technical/develop level, preconfigured profiles could perhaps defined and made available for personal cloning in a Ning like way - though this then goes back to a centralised PLE model perhaps?

The above is all v rushed and sparse, but I think I have it clearer in my own mind now how to go about building a demo, over and above the gut feeling that a mashed learning environment model is viable.