September 16, 2006
Time for an OpenLearnigg (sic) Environment?
I've just been trying to finish of the final report for our NAGTY online academic study group project - which could have gone better, if truth be told - and as I was doing so I started wondering what a Digg-like, resource based learning environment (that is, a learnigg environment) would be like?
One of the strategies we tried in the NAGTY palaver was to create resources that could be used either to prompt a discussion topic, or could be dropped in to a discussion in response to a question that was raised about some aspect of a particular topic. The resources we pulled on for the NAGTY groups (as well as web based resources discovered by a bit of judicious googling) were largely reversioned from the OU short courses T183 Design for the Web and T184 Robotics and the Meaning of Life. (The reversioning involved producing standalone versions of pages and integrating links to discussion threads within them.)
An idea we had in mind when we originally bid to run the groups was to try and explore ways of organising the environment so that students could register any time and just hop on the moving learning escalator, that is, whatever discussion happened to be in progress when the student joined the group.
I'm still working on the escalator metaphor - the fact that it's moving (upwards in my mind's eye), that people can walk up it past other people, or struggle back down past them against the way the escalator is moving, all feature in some way - I'm just not totally clear how, as yet!)
Associated with each discussion topic would be a learning resource - a page or two of web content, perhaps, a journal paper, or even book chapter, for example. Ideally, a link to a digital version of the resource would be available.
And associated with the resource would be some sort of (learning) context, and a question or two for the learner to bear in mind (i,.e focus on - read with a purpose, and all that!) when reading the resource.
So this is maybe where a learnigg environment might come in to play...
Just consider the Digg interface for a moment. All stories have a short amount of descriptive text and link to a resource.
Stories can be tagged:
Stories can be commented on, and henced used to support a discussion:
Admittedly threading is a bit crazy, as users vote to change where the comment appears, but I guess a traditional threading approach could be used instead? Or maybe the system could support view options over the comment threads - most/least popular, (reverse) chronologial, etc. Alternatively, users could be encouraged to use commenting appropriately so their comment essentially stands alone and contains elements from other comments it relies on? Or what the heck, why not just have a wiki for the comments?
For users coming to the learnigg enviroment, they can navigate resources according to topic, popularity, or 'liveness'.
Search should also be in there to support discovery - maybe using a full text search of the linked to resources...
The question is, to what extent would popularity provide a useful signal for users visiting such a site? If the resources were in some way related to, or relevant to, news or broadcast content, then it's possible that user behaviour would bubble up program related content. The OU and BBC co-produce the open2.net site, of course, so we do already have a stake in the market for this sort of user attention.
Going back to OCI, I'm not sure what the OpenLearn Moodle environment is going to have at its top navigational layer, nor the intent with which users will approach it and the material it contains.
I wonder whether it would be OUseful setting up a Pligg server somewhere (called openLearnigg, of course;-) which only accepts links from servers that make open educational content available?
One question that occurs to me as a consequence of taken this approach is, what the effect of having multiple different interfaces to the same content is likely to be? Would they compete, stealing traffic from each other? Or might they be complementary?
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Posted by ajh59 at September 16, 2006 05:57 PM