An interesting post on Erik Duval’s blog on the quantitative analysis of user-generated content on the Web. The post refers to a presentation given by Erik and Zavier Ochia at the First International Workshop on Understanding Web Evolution (WebEvolve2008). The research builds on the notion that while consumption of user-generated content (UGC) might seem to be well understood, not enough research has been done on the production of UGC. Having read the paper I am now keen to understand the notion of ‘fat tails’ and ‘fat bellies’ and do some analysis of our own sites in order to gain an insight into the contributors of UGC in them. An important warning from the paper for me is to determine whether we have any sites that have a few ‘very important’ users that are really contributing to the overall success of the sites and how we are looking after them.

technorati tags: UGC, Web 2.0,User Generated Content

Original post by jleeson and software by Elliott Back

Here’s a great article aimed at people working in museums but I am sure it’s just as interesting for anyone working in any cultural institutions or really, anyone with an interest in social networking in general. Written by Nina Simon, ‘How much time does Web 2.0 take‘ looks at what you might be able to accomplish through social networking based on the amount of time you can devote to it per week. Have a read and work out if you are a participant, a content provider or a community director. There are some great suggestions in here on how you could promote your institution online and help those seeking information or trying to discover you.

Original post by jleeson and software by Elliott Back

In the spirit of a certain type of eportfolio, here are some reflections on day 2 of QUT’s ‘Australian ePortfolio Symposium‘. Day 2 was the only day I was able to attend which is a bit unfortunate as my perspective can only be based on my interpretations of that day in the program. What was really interesting was the panel session where a number of brave ‘eportfolio users’ were invited to give their thoughts on eportfolios and what is needed for them to be successful.

A bit of background first. There seems to be growing agreement from a number of eportfolio system owners and some users (not so sure about vendors as I haven’t personally heard any comment on this) that the idea of monolithic eportfolio applications (software offerings that do everything eportfolio that you need) is outdated and we need to consider a service oriented approach. This builds on the ideas being put forwards by projects/groups such as the JISC eportfolio reference model and the e-Framework service oriented approach. This is a notion that I support and its not hard to find a number of scenarios where this would work really well.
Back to the symposium, there was quite a bit of discussion over the merits of system provided or learner owned eportfolios. The user panel provided some interesting perspectives on this. Firstly, it was very clear that there are a number of perspectives to consider. A wide range of opinions was provided from what was a very small number of users (five). The users varied in their experiences of eportfolios ranging from very little experience through to very experienced.

My personal impressions were that the lesser experienced users saw some value in institutionally provided eportfolios while the most experienced user saw very little value in them and preferred to select her own tools from the Web. Having said that though, she recognised the need for some sort of framework for eportfolios as not all users would be in a position to establish their own Web presence in such an articulate, well formed manner. There was a view that only companies such as Google could afford the investment required to develop and provide rich ‘eportfolio’ services. To me this reasoning was quite flawed. True, it takes a lot of investment in either time or money to develop new types of services but when we looked at the services being asked for, it seemed to boil down to relatively mundane Web 2.0 style services such as file sharing, blogging, wiki etc. Not much investment at all is required to mash these sort of services together, whether deployed locally or using services that exist elsewhere on the Web. While some organisations do struggle with filespace issues there are alternatives available for those that are willing to think a bit more imaginatively.

Clearly though, there is a strong sense of drawing on this service oriented approach to bring in the ‘best’ services that are available from the Web and apply them in a manner that suits eportfolio functionality and their users.

The notion that all ‘younger’ students are tech savvy and can apply technologies in different ways that enhance learning is also flawed. A view that I have heard expressed before is ‘just because I am good at using my thumbs to text and know how to use a phone in many ways, thats only to communicate with my friends - don’t expect me to understand how to apply it or any other technology to get better at learning’. I have seen technologists and educators really struggle with how to improve learning through technology so having high expectations of learners to do the same seems a little unfair.

Getting back to the forum, it was clear that users wanted and needed more support if they were going to really embrace and exploit the potential in eportfolios.

Another really interesting perspective raised by one of the users, who is involved now in recruiting, is to consider the requirements of HR recruiters and employers. I think to some extent this can easily be overlooked. In a number of public forums that I have attended on eportfolios, many of the speakers/contributors, while not quite at the ‘lunatic fringe’, are very passionate about their views and so we find much of the debate occurring on what eportfolios should be. The use of them for reflective thinking, personal story, or journey telling often occupies more time than assisting in transitions etc. While reflection and goal setting can be very important elements of an eportfolio, there are many other, valid uses too.

The notion of learner owned is very important, and strongly supported, identifying the user as learner, not student, or even better, author, really demonstrates where the thinking is around eportfolios. We do need to consider other users as well though. When I think of books, authors are important but they have very little value without readers and readers tend to ultimately determine the value of the books. So, while there are some very important introspective elements of eportfolios such as reflecting and planning, we do need to consider potentially much larger audiences if we start to think about those eportfolios that will be used to support transitions (getting a job, moving from one educational environment to another etc). These audiences will have have quite specific requirements and in the case of HR recruiters, may not even be human (that’s not meant to be a slur on recruiters, just that computers can be used to sift through vast amounts of electronic information to do some sort of shortlisting/culling of applications).

So, overlaying these basic services of collecting and organising content, which many gerneric Web 2.0 style services do very well, there needs to be some emphasis applied to presentation of content within specific audience contexts, and this is an area where simply mashing together public generic services falls short at the moment. We have some interesting ways of formatting parts of this content in HR-XML which may satisfy some recruiters or their computers but there is still a way to go. In the symposium we recognised challenges faced around context, language, vocabularies, ontologies etc and efforts made around standardisation and how incredibly difficult that is. Early attempts were too specifc and granular, which made them incredibly hard to implement. Organisations such as IMS are looking at having another go at their eportfolio specification so I look forward to see what happens there.

In the meantime, social networking services are combining with recruiters so maybe we can just sit back and continue to debate what an eportfolio is while the rest of the world gets on with it;)

technorati tags: eportfolio

Original post by jleeson and software by Elliott Back

Interesting post from Tim Hand got me to thinking about this one. From Tim’s perspective, the standards arena seems to have stalled a bit (if I’m reading correctly). When compared to what’s happening in Web 2.0 with new services and technologies just powering ahead. Try to keep up with what’s happening in the world of mashups alone and it’s staggering. There is interoperability (of a kind) everywhere. Developers are connecting up all sorts of apps, data sources etc to deliver new, innovative services. In doing this they are not dependent on cumbersome, complex standards. We recently did some research on standards in the area of ePortfolios and one of the major findings from that was the impact that Web 2.0 was having in that area. It was hard to find ePortfolio implementations (other than vendor software) that were using standards such as IMS ePortfolio but many of the implementers were interested in using RSS and other lightweight specifications in their implementations. They could easily consume content from other sources and also publish/syndicate their content very easily. Simple specs and simple services enable them to include functions from other sites into their ePortfolios (eg using Flickr to hold images of your work). Students also saw services such as myspace and Facebook as better places for them to have their ePortfolio (there were some interesting variations on this though).
So what does this mean for the formal world of standards and specifications. The very nature of the standards process is a slow one. A great deal of work goes into the development of a standard/specification which involves development work, collaboration, reviews, (public) comment, ratification and so on, all of which takes time. Time unfortunately is not ‘Standards’ best friend in the frenetic, fast pace of the Web 2.0 world. As the rate of change increases in both speed and sheer number of new services, it seems to me that the slow paced standards process faces a real challenge to keep up.

technorati tags: standards, Web 2.0,ePortfolio

Original post by jleeson and software by Elliott Back

Visiting one of our service providers this morning gave me a chance to play with a photo geo-tagging service. locr provides a service that uses an internal or external GPS receiver to tag your photos with GPS coordinates which you can then upload to their website to share with the rest of the world. It certainly makes geo-tagging your photos very easy - it is all done automatically rather than running a script later which tags your photos by comparing timestamps on them with timestamps in a GPS receiver.
I am still coming to grips with a new phone (its turning into a love/hate affair) so the quality of the photos taken here isn’t good. locr runs a program on the phone that you use to take photos with. As I didn’t really delve too deep into instructions the photos aren’t that well focussed - however, in my hurry, I wasn’t sure whether there was a way to focus the camera using locr or not.
The phone takes a few minutes to pick up the GPS positioning so you really need to anticipate when you are going to take that first photo (something not easily achieved in many situations).
Anyway, once the photos were taken, they could be immediately uploaded to the web which was great.
You can see these photos here. locr has a javascript ‘badge’ that you can embed in your site/blog etc but it is misbehaving with our blog software at the moment and I haven’t had time for a closer look.

Cheers,
Jerry.

technorati tags: locr, Geo-tagging photos

Original post by jleeson and software by Elliott Back

ePortfolios have been around for a long time now and the range and diversity of ePortfolio implementations is, well, staggering. There are a lot of commercial software offerings and most eLearning platforms seem to have a portfolio component. Large numbers of schools, training organisations and higher education organisations have developed their own and some of the larger ones have multiple eportfolio implementations. Some of these are great, particularly while you are engaged with that institution. Some allow you access to your/their portfolio (of you) for a long time after you leave, although who actually owns ‘your’ portfolio could be problematic.

It could be, and is often, argued that many of these ‘formal’ eportfolios do not meet all the requirements of their user base. Take a look at the rich information hundreds of thousands of Internet users are pouring into social networking services daily. Many Internet users would be quite comfortable with the notion that their myspace presence or similar service serves them well as their ePortfolio. Blogs make excellent (components of) eportfolios. Linked to your FLickr account, Facebook and dozens of other Web 2.0 services, you can create a very compelling Eportfolio of yourself. Which of these services should you or could you use? You might be able to find out information about me through Facebook, pageflakes, Windows Live spaces, several personal blogs, flickr, our company blog, Zoominfo, maybe even a myspace account, my EuroPass resume, and any one of dozens of Web 2.0 services I have reviewed over the last 12 months or so. None of these presences have been populated by me to serve as an ePortfolio but it is entirely reasonable that they could have.
Some services, such as ZoomInfo aren’t even maintained by me and are at best, very incomplete, at worst, wildly inaccurate. If I do a ‘vanity’ search on Google, I can find references to me on other services too, along with papers, presentations that I have delivered at conferences and all sorts of other ‘portfolio’ related information. Fortunately (?) for me, I have a relatively uncommon name. However, what if my name were ‘John Smith’, a reasonably common Western name. Trying to sift through Internet content that is ‘me’ would be a nightmare - even coupled with location and time based information it could still be very difficult.
Another problem for me is that I only seem to have existed for a few years - at least on the Internet. For those of us young enough to have grown up in the Internet era this may not be so much of a problem but many of us have done some pretty interesting stuff, that would be valuable for potential employers to know about, a long time before we started publishing it on the Web. I guess that is just another illustration of the radical change we are undergoing as a result of the Web - some of us existed prior to this change as well as existing during it.
For a portfolio service to be valuable to me, I need to be able to store, or refer/link to all sorts of content that may reside locally or on a wide variety of services. I need to be confident that the content will be available and accessible for a long period of time. I would like to present this content, or parts of it, in any number of formats/layouts to different audiences at different periods of time. It is about me so I would like to have some naive notion that I have a semblance of control over what it contains, how it looks, who can see different parts of it and when. Importantly, I would also like to refer to authenticated information about my achievements from time to time. An example would be proof that I completed a degree at a specific University. Of course, this is just one component of an eportfolio. In addition to providing evidence, artefacts, etc, I may also like to use it as a learning tool which means I would like a range of other services to be aggregated, or available at a single place of my convenience using whatever device I feel like at whatever time. I may like to reflect on what I am learning and other experiences or use my portfolio for planning too. This brings to mind a number of tools that I am using at the moment with Google’s increasingly large range of services.
So where does this leave me. To date I have a number of great services that I would like to incorporate into my ePortfolio space but I would also love to be able to link in authenticated, validated content from education/training organisations as proof of some of my achievements.

Cheers.

technorati tags: ePortfolio

Original post by jleeson and software by Elliott Back

Technology plays a large part in the work I do and while I have made a commitment to try and blog about technology and its application relation to our work it is interesting to see just how difficult this can be at times. There are some quite natural constraints for work blogging which in essence, reduces the number of things that I might like to blog about considerably. Then there are time constraints - I am putting this post together while eating lunch. Sometimes it seems that I have been so occupied in day to day operational tasks that there is just nothing new to comment on. During the first part of my lunch, I came across this interesting article on twopointouch. It provides some really interesting perspectives on blogging. There are some great reasons why people do blog, a pile of barriers/reasons why they don’t, some discussion on microblogging (I’ve joined the Twitter crowd and can see the attraction but haven’t ‘drank the cool-aid’ yet). More interesting to me is the notion of passive blogging - I think I have a lot to say but just don’t have the time etc to devote to blogging it. I am definitely going to follow this up.

Cheers.

Original post by jleeson and software by Elliott Back

Well, SEOmoz’s 2007 Web 2.0 Awards have been out for a couple of weeks now. All the usual suspects are there such as technorati, bloglines, magnolia, furl, yahoo! local, craigslist, google docs, feedburner, 43 things, google maps, frappr, ning, flickr, picasa, linked in, digg, del.icio.us, pageflakes, and of course, YouTube. As you can see, there are quite a few google and yahoo! services in the mix. If you have a look at all the awards, you will find even more google and yahoo! services. What surprised me was the number of ’same old same old’ in the list. Some of these have been around for quite a long time now and perhaps are just part of the fabric - we really depend on them and use them all the time. If you have a look at the criteria by which they are measured (usability, usefulness, social aspects, interface and design, content quality) it is easy to see why they are there (again). Since there are ‘over 200 sites in 41 categories’ there is a lot to look at so quite a bit of time and effort must go into producing these awards. It’s really worth checking them out and seeing if you can find something that works for you. Here’s a few interesting ones:

1. donors choose - teachers submitting ideas for funding
2. be Green - highly topical at the moment - look at the carbon calculator
3. a couple of interesting hosted wikis (wetpaint, pbwiki) - check out the student/teacher example in pbwiki
4. twitter - my views here

Of course there are many more to look at and it would take hours to go through the lot of them.

technorati tags: Web 2.0 Awards

Original post by jleeson and software by Elliott Back