June 11, 2007
ICT Resource Digger - fOUndit
Not of my doing, but totally in keeping with the OUseful philosophy, John Woodthorpe has just opened up fOUndit, a Digg like environment being tested as a resource discovery, social recommendation and current awareness tool to support OU ICT courses.
Social news sites like this allow readers to submit and vote on news stories of interest to community members - in the case of fOUndit, the initial audience is the "T175 community" (T175 being an OU course on Networked living: exploring information and communication technologies; you can get a taste of the course here: T175 on OpenLearn).
The service - which runs on the Pligg Digg clone (Pligg blog) - has actually been in testing for a few weeks now (John's posts on OU Pligg.
With services like coRank offering hosted social news sites (so you can get something like your own Digg/Pligg without having to install anything on a server) it's now easy enough to set up and run your own site. The question then, of course, is building a community around it.
Anyway - it'll be interesting to see how fOUndit takes off... there are several ways it could go I think:
- current awareness for course team and ALs (providing links of interest that may be worth mentioning to students);
- as a student info sharing site - something like Social ROUTES;
- as a 'keeping current' site for course alumni - keeping them in touch/up-to-date with the area after the end of the course (after all, all it takes is a subscription to the fOUndit RSS feed);
- as a "course issues" site for potential students.
Now I wonder, how could a course or programme social news site be designed to satisfy all those target groups, along with providing course tasters on OpenLearn for potential students and (authentication protected) access to live course info for current students and staff.
One of the things I've thought for a long time is that we should be upping the prominence of "current awareness", ,em>optional wider reading on course related issues and so on... (I know, I know, if it's optional why would students read it... BECAUSE it provides current context for the stuff being studied, that's why...! ;-) Placing a feed from fOUndit on the course front page, cf. the feed I have taken from delicious on the T184 website, would be one way of making foundit content available to current students and ALs.
PS I keep on wondering too whether the social recommendation approach can be used for live informal learning production, OpenLearnigg style... ;-)
Posted by ajh59 at June 11, 2007 01:10 PMSo what is the user base for this project, i.e. how many people will be contributing to the database (and what's the user base for digg ;-)
"So what is the user base for this project"
I guess you're implying here that without a large user base the app won't fly?
But I'm not sure goos an assumption that is...
"Trad" HE courses are delivered by lecturers to classes in a "live" way. Lecturers get to pass comment about newsworthy items during lectures etc.
The OU course delivery model potentially suffers here - course materials are written for delivery over several years.
Currency is maintained by techniques that include assessement, online course forums and to lesser extent face to face tutorials (e.g. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=4084625 for a discussion of some of the issues).
What the T184 delicious news model demonstrates is a way of piping news into a course page.
fOUndit offers another potential source of news for ICT courses. Even if only one member of the course team is posting news, and then only posting once a week, there is still value to the course.
What fOUndit offers in addition to just the "course team chair bookmarks a link and posts it to the course pages" model is a wider potential for community action in several ways:
- community contributed links;
- community rating/voting.
We also need to bear in mind that our students maybe access the course pages once or twice a week, and don't sit watching their feeds for up-to-the-second updates...
fOUndit is not there for news junkies, necessarily. It's there to provide small amounts of interesting news traffic, build up an archive of news stories related to particular course themes, and provide an opportunity for community engagement.
(As I hinted at in ./010363.html - "Personal Learning Environments are also Social..." I believe that a lot of social tools also get of by being useful personally/without the invocation (necessarily) of network effects.)
The above are all my own opinions of course - John W may take a different line?
Posted by: Tony Hirst at June 11, 2007 02:08 PM"The above are all my own opinions of course - John W may take a different line?"
John takes a very similar line, Tony. :o)
Inevitably we're thinking and working within an OU context, which is not directly applicable to many other universities because of our scale and delivery methods. My main "thinking aloud" pieces about fOUndIt and the ideas that have lead me to it (via talking to you and reading some of your postings) are http://testmatch.mine.nu/wordpress/?p=15 and http://testmatch.mine.nu/wordpress/?p=18
The conversations I've had with several OU people outside of the ICT courses area show that there's something about the fOUndIt/Digg style that could sit very well with a wide range of subjects, and is flexible enough to let us do different things for different users within different courses. Obviously it needs more work, but I think it's got a lot of potential in our delivery systems. T175 (the course I chair and will be trying this on) has 1500 students on each presentation. We only need a small proportion of them and of OU staff to contribute to it to make it valuable to everyone else.
John
Posted by: John Woodthorpe at June 11, 2007 07:12 PM1500 students is an entirely viable user base, 25 students isn't (the situation campus-based courses are often faced with).
What do you think the proportion of lurkers will be?