A couple of weeks ago, Chris Pegler mailed me asking if I had any ideas for a talk she was giving about technology enabled 'new learning activities' for adult learners over the next 2-3 years. The theme of the event was something to do with ePortfolios, which provides the context for the rest of this post. I'm not sure if the talk has been posted anywhere yet - or how it turned out - but the germ of the following came out of my ramblings at the time.
So here it is - a ramble around possible futures relating to online storage and e-portfolios...
One of my favourite quotes is William Gibson's 'the future is already here; it's just not evenly distributed yet'. Predicting short term technology futures - like predicting the weather - is often safest if you take the line that 'the weather tomorrow will be like the weather today'. The problem is, that while day to day changes are barely noticeable, continual incremental changes can result in major changes. Rome may not have been built in a day, but it was built one brick (column(?!)) at a time.
Some of the greatest changes in technology enabled learning activities will, I think, arise from the mainstreaming of stuff that is already out there and helping people 'grok' how to use some of the 'new' technologies.
To drive uptake, I think the users firstly need to see how they might gain personal benefit from new technologies today, in the context of how they already use related technologies.
An example here might be dragging a link from a web page or browser address line onto the browser bookmark toolbar, to encourage the use of bookmarking; and then showing how users who use different browsers might benefit from social bookmarks or bookmark synching.
Another example might be the use of online word processors such as Writely/Google docs or Zoho Writer: alternatives to applications that users already use that offer some benefits over those currently used tools.
As well as offering personally beneficial (more convenient?) alternatives to current tools, many web applications also support sharing and/or collaborative features. These features provide 'personal benefit plus' - enhanced personal benefits arising from either the network effects afforded by social technologies, or the collaborative models afforded by being able to share your content in ways you determine.
Giving users easy control over the access permissions assigned to their web-reachable content is becoming a widespread model in web applications and one that may lead to expectations from users with respect to: a) the features they expect from a portfolio; b) the ways in which they can collaborate with others - either in a commenting way, co-production of documents way etc.
How users organise their content is also potentially "subject to change". If you know how to create folders/directories on a Windows machine (and I'm prepared to believe there are many users who don't know how to do this) then the odds are that you have a complex hierarchy of folders on your computer, with each file stored in a single location.
Increasingly, however, as users collect files and folders on their personal machine, I suspect that more and more of them (in unacknowledged deference to the Google way of working) search for content on their computer, rather than navigating/browsing to it via a folder hierarchy.
Search based navigation - or content rediscovery - will become increasingly common as desktop search becomes as fast as Google search (which is the case in Vista). How this will affect the way in which users mentally organise their content is unclear to me... ;-)
Search will also increasingly provide a loop back to flat directory based organisation by means of "active folders", directories that contain the contents of a live, saved search on particular search terms. (So for example, I could associate a saved search for 'desktop search' with a directory, and the contents of that directory will be the results of that search.) It will be interesting to see how widely adopted this becomes - it is already possible on some platforms (such as Mac OS/X) and I believe it is also supported in Vista.
Organisation using tagging schemes is also likely to benefit from increased support and user uptake, perhaps in tacit response to more and more widespread use of clustered search results (such as in search engines (like Clusty) or online stores (think Amazon)).
As far as (online) storage goes in a personal as well as an educational setting - for this latter concern, think personal repositories or e-portfolios - I get the feeling that storage per se will not be the determining factor in the solutions that the users prefer. Just having online storage is all very well, but users will increasingly expect to have editors - as well as effective search tools - associated with each content type that can be stored in the repository - e.g. Zoho's recent announcements of integration first with Omnidrive and then box.net.
It's also worth considering how users will react to the continuing rise of cheap, affordable, or free seemless application related online storage. I'm thinking here of the free storage you get implicitly when you register for online applications. For example, Google Mail famously gives you over 2 gigabytes of storage, Zoho gives you free storage with its apps, and so on.
This is leading to a world where we each maintain distributed personal digital object repositories locally organised around particular applications:
The desktop correlate here is akin to only ever accessing files from the 'recently opened' menu in an application, rather than launching hte application by first discovering the file...
The term found art - more commonly found object (French: objet trouve) or readymade - describes art created from the undisguised, but often modified, use of objects that are not normally considered art, often because they already have a mundane, utilitarian function.Ref: Wikipedia: Found art
In some respects, the 'local application based storage' may be thought of as 'found storage' in the sense that it "describes storage provided implicitly by application providers that are not normally considered storage providers".
When content organisation tools (such as tagging) and additional application helpers are provided alongside the storage, we might even go so far as to argue that system offers enough functionality to be regarded as a 'found repository'.
Local storage contrasts with services like Omnidrive, which offer storage first and then editing tools as an additional service and services offered as a consequence of the wider commoditisation of online storage (I'm thinking of things like BT's Digital Vault here).
And with an always on broadband connection, why not use online storage as your main drive - especially if it looks just like another drive on your PC (XDrive).
Another feature of online storage solutions is their "collaborative" nature, insofar as they typically let users define access privileges over stored items - which means you can share different documents stored in the same repository with different closed groups...
Whether users will prefer to go to a single storage place from where they access and edit files, or go to an app from where they open locally stored copies of the files they are working on, I don't know. Maybe there are reports out there that will shed light on how this might play out that compare the behaviour of users who go to My Docs and open a .doc file into Word, with users who open Word and navigate for 'recently used' files?
[Just by the by, it's worth bearing in mind that online services like Zoho Writer offer toolbar integration with Microsoft Word, as well as letting users open web links to .doc documents directly into the online applications.]
I'd also argue that the scope of the distributed/discovered repository goes even further than application related storage. In a very real sense, we are starting to see the emergence of Personal Repository Caches almost everywhere we look:
Finally, by opening up their APIs, storage companies and application providers can both play off each other's strengths. The recent publication of the Google Notebook API, and the forthcoming Zoho Notebook (which will presumably also have an API if other Zoho apps are anything to go by) are likely to provide many opportunities for integrating online content capture and organisation tools with both online storage tools and online applications.
When compared to the rapid pace of development by small start-ups focusing on online storage, online apps, or the integration of the two, it's worth reflecting on the extent to which e-portfolio developers in the educational sector can keep up.
In a follow on to this post, I'll look at how search and discovery can be supported in this emerging world, such as using tags to help users organise and index content *across* distributed, found/discovered repositories.
Things I'll consider include the extent to which we'll need to help people organise their distributed repositories and whether we can help students articulate the skills they use to manage their stuff across multiple digital object stores to help them manage their own learning resources.
We also need to ask whether we can learn from some of our younger students (i.e. those who are well versed in the ways of the web) better ways of managing knowledge. In particular, how and why do users a) partition their stuff to support rediscovery, (e.g. separating holiday photos from birthday photos, or simply keeping different parts of their life separate (work/home)); b) reconcile stuff across different digital object stores (e.g. bank statements from different online banks, e.g. movies on motionbox and photos on flickr recording the same Christmas dinner).
I'll leave a consideration of the possible future of search as it relates both to search over personal resources and personalised search over arbitrary web resources - as well as a consideration of the extent to which a user's (search) history becomes part of their implicit/discovered/found repository - to another post...
Posted by ajh59 at February 20, 2007 09:54 PM