I am back in Vancouver after an eventful week at the Annual WebCT Users Conference, held in Chicago this year. It was a bittersweet event for me, since it was the last official WebCT-only conference -- all future ones will be joint Blackboard/WebCT events. I was able to reminisce with a few old-timers about the past 8 annual conferences, and the great energy and enthusiasm the attendees and the staff have brought to these events.

Ok - enough of that. Let's get to some the major take-aways for me:

Blackboard's Beyond Initiative

This initiative was announced in March at BbWorld, and originally focused on 4 areas: Global Learning Objects Respository, Social Networking, ePortfolios for Life, and Outcomes Management.

In the opening keynote by Matt Pittinsky and Michael Chasen, a fifth element was added, which was Student Centered Learning. This was of particular interest to me, since it happens to be the exact title of the handout that I created for the WebCT-Elgg integration, and which was an insert for the conference bags. It is good to see that everyone is thinking along the same lines.

Blackboard is just starting on these initiatives, and clearly stated that they would be multi-year projects. While real details were not yet available, I hope that these central sites will have a trickle-down effect to the product lines, so that web 2.0-type functionality can be taken advantage of directly within the course environment right across the institution.

Blogs, Wikis, RSS and Podcasts are everywhere

There was a huge buzz on these topics at the conference, with many sessions and pre-conference workshops touching on one or more of these. Most of the users take advantage of centrally-hosted commercial sites, such as blogger, blogspot, del.icio.us, so I took the opportunity to mention Elgg as a locally-hosted option in many of my conversations.

Dr. Helen Barrett's Closing Keynote on ePortfolios

Very good presentation touching on a number of key points (Download slides here).

The take-aways for me were:

• Concept of Working Portfolios vs. Presentation Portfolios
  
• Is Portfolio to be used as an Assessment of learning (summative), or as an Assessment for learning?

The Closing Video

It would not have been a WebCT conference without some comic relief from Utah State's Kevin Reeve and Marc Hugentobler. This time, they wandered around the conference with a camera crew and captured some great moments. The sailor suits for the conference party at the Navy Pier were a nice touch.

Over the past few weeks, I have been involved in a project using Elgg in a non-academic environment.

Vancouver is currently hosting the World Urban Forum, an international event on global urban sustainability. Working with teams from UBC and Opn Design, Aperto helped set up two sites to support activities related to the event:

Earthblog.ca is a site to promote dialogue around social, environmental, cultural and economic issues facing the Greater Vancouver region.

Elgg's main homepage was branded with logos, and the entry page of Elgg pulls in the most recent postings of four key bloggers, as well as a 'hot comment' (as designated by one of the site admins periodically), and the most recent comment to the site.

Most of the Elgg functionality was disabled for visitors, except for the profile tool. The official bloggers have access to all of the Elgg functionality.

Another key part to this site was the single-sign-on integration between Elgg and MediaWiki. All login is handled by Elgg, and the session is transferred to MediaWiki if a user wants to edit a particular Wiki page.

We will be releasing the Elgg-MediaWiki integration to the community shortly, as a number of other Elgg users are looking for this functionality. More on that in a future post.

The second site Aperto worked on is GUSSE, a social site to collectively discuss, review and apply the best ideas for sustainable cities.

The integration here involved a customization to the Elgg entry page again. Registration and log in is being handled by the social tagging system opntag. Elgg reads the opntag session information and creates users in the Elgg system. GUSSE maintains all Elgg core functionality.

It has been interesting applying Elgg to a non-academic environment, and I hope that these examples help showcase the flexibiliity of Elgg, and the ability to customize the look and feel of the application.

After getting a number of follow-up requests from the WebCT European Conference in Edinburgh, I decided to create a short Flash-movie which demonstrates the WebCT-Elgg integration.

The file can be found at:

http://www.aperto-elearning.com/files/elgg_demo.htm

The demo is best viewed on a 1024x768 or larger display, to minimize any scrolling.

For those interested, a PDF version of my presentation slides are also available for download from the conference site at:

http://gromit.webct.com/webct_europe_2006/Tu/Salari.pdf

Thanks to a note on Brian's blog, I attended a session by HP Researcher Scott Golder on his study of tags and social bookmarking on del.icio.us.

The talk was based on a paper which is due to appear in the Journal of Information Science.

Scott first gave background information on issues encountered when tags are defined by a community (ie. folksonomy vs. taxonomy):

• synonymy: using different tags for the same thing (tv vs. television)
  
• polysemy: a tag may have related senses (he gave the example of a window - either the hole in the wall, or the pane of glass)
  
• homonymy: a particular tag can mean different things, depending on context (eg. speaker, chair, apple)
  
• the 'basic level' problem: describing 'something' is related to the person's level of experience with that particular element. For example, a picture of a dog may be 'dog' to most people, but 'beagle' to a veterinarian.

In the analysis of the tags used to describe the bookmarks on del.icio.us, Scott found that they fell into 7 categories:

1. Identifying what or who it is about: topics of the bookmarked items. Tags consisted of common or proper nouns.
   
2. Identifying what it is: the kind of thing being bookmarked (eg. article, blog, book)
   
3. Identifying who owns it
   
4. Refining categories: these refine or qualify existing categories
   
5. Identifying qualities or characteristics: adjectives used according to the opinion of the bookmarker (eg. funny, scary)
   
6. Self Reference: identifying content in relation to the tagger (eg. mystuff, mycomments)
   
7. Task Organizing: information related to a task, used to group related information together (eg. jobsearch)

From this list, it can be seen that some tags are general, whereas others are very personal to the tagger and their experience. From an analysis of tag order, it appears to people use generally meaningful tags first (and these have the highest freqency across bookmarks), and more personal tags later. Therefore, analysis of the first few tags of a bookmark should give a good idea of the general topic of that link.

Scott also found that users' tag-lists varied greatly, and were not related to the number of bookmarks a particular user had. In one case, a user's number of tags increased steadily as their number of bookmarks increased, while another user's number of tags stayed level. This points to definite personal styles for tagging.

Another of his points related to usage of new tags. For example, I may have been doing some research on Africa, so I have tagged all of my bookmarks with that tag. However, a few months later, I decide that I need to be more specific, and add a country tag as well. This additional level of classification poses the following problems:

• I cannot search my old bookmarks for instances of the country tag
  
• Adding a country tag to my existing bookmarks (which could be in the hundreds) could be extremely onerous.

Finally, he found that tag proportions over time tend to be stable for a particular bookmark. This means that, after approx. 100 bookmarks for a particular URL, each tag's frequency is nearly a fixed proportion of the total frequency of all tags used. So for example, a particular URL may have the tag 'dog', which will have a frequency of 30% of all tags used for that bookmark, regardless of how many bookmarks are added and tagged for the URL.

The implication from this result is that "after a relatively small number of bookmarks, a nascent consensus seems to form, one that is not affected by the addition of further tags."

Some of the questions I am asking myself after the session are:

• Do I tag for myself or for others? In the case of bookmarking, it is mostly for myself, but what about tagging my blog entries - is it so I can find them more easily later and selectively filter, or do I tag to make it easier for others to find my information? And if I do tag for others, do I tag with a specific audience in mind, and does that intended audience then define to some degree the tags that I use?
  
• My own set of tags is evolving over time, based on my experiences. What is my responsibility for updating the tags of any previous content that I have tagged, should I decide to split a particular tag up into 2 or 3 different tags? On the one hand, the thought of inconsistency makes me uneasy. On the other hand, maybe I just have to accept the evolution of one's tag set, and consider the older tags as a snapshot of my state at that time.

How does an institution successfully increase and scale usage of social software across campus?

Any institution that has deployed a VLE for a number of years likely has a significant amount of usage by faculty and students (I can't recall the exact Gartner figures, but for North America, I believe around 50-60% of courses have some type of online presence.)

The good news about that number is that online learning is now mainstream. The bad news is that much of the online presence is very limited - maybe a syllabus, a couple of web pages, possibly some e-mail support. In other words, not very engaging.

Having all of these courses online now provides an opportunity to build on that user base, and to introduce them to new technologies, such as social and student-centered tools. As I wrote in a previous post, the first step is to make it as easy as possible to get started. If users are already in the VLE environment, that means automated sign-on and navigation between systems.

Once users are in the new system, what are they to do next?

Most social software is very flexible and unstructured, exactly the characteristics that make it so attractive in the first place. What then is the best way to expose students and faculty to these services?

I am reminded of two bits of information here - one from a few weeks ago, the other a few years old:

In Edinburgh, at the ePortfolio roundtable, one attendee described their University's experience with two systems. The first system was an 'empty shell model' which allowed students much flexibility in how they decided to use the features. The second was less flexible and provided more structure through the use of web forms. Students preferred the second system, which received significantly higher usage, because they simply did not know how to use the more flexible toolset.

My second example is from the early days of WebCT. Back then, when a new course was set up, the instructor simply saw a blank page when they logged on, along with some action buttons at the bottom of the screen. Again - the instructors had a lot of flexibility on how they decided to structure their courses, but most where overwhelmed with the choices and had no idea on how to begin.

As these tools are rolled out across a campus, some initial structure is inevitable, and there are a number of possibilities:

• 'soft structure', in the form of documentation, training and best practices. The issue here will be the ability to reach a significant number of users with existing resources.
  
• simplification or elimination of features - it may be possible to hide or disable some of the software features, to make users comfortable with a subset of functionality, and gradually re-introduce functionality in stages.
  
• templates and context - providing users with pre-populated content based on existing data, auto-populating communities that mirror academic structures, guiding users through the initial set-up steps online.

In all cases, the institution has a role in defining how these tools are to be used, and has the choice of suggesting vs enforcing. However, care must be taken that any enforcement of structure does not diminish the utility of the tools over current technologies.

Probably the most important point: users must be able to use these tools successfully in their initial attempts. It is much easier to introduce more complexity over time than to reverse a negative first impression created by an overly difficult system.

Have you been considering how blogging, podcasting, RSS syndication, social networking and other innovative new pedagogical tools fit into your learning environments?

What are the advantages to each technology, and how are they best used in parallel with existing eLearning frameworks?

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Our services include:

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As I am sitting at YVR waiting for my flight to the UK for the WebCT European Conference, I am thinking about what differences there are globally in adopting the social technologies that I will be speaking about.

In my roles at WebCT, I was always fortunate to get feedback from a wide range of constituents, and there were certainly differences when comparing Australia, Far East, North America and Europe (unfortunately I did not have much interaction with Africa, Middle East and Latin- and South-American clients).

In particular, the Commonwealth countries (Canada, UK, Australia) were aligned with respect to their online programs, and the way they adapted to and used new technologies. Continental Europe tended to be more inwardly focused as countries, with local (and EU) products and technologies favoured over ones developed overseas.

Europe is certainly a hotbed of open source activity, with numerous products available in the LMS space (add to this the recent Open Source announcement from JISC). Someone mentioned to me that in some countries, budgets for capital purchases are handled separately from staffing, and it is often easier for universities to obtain funding for people than it is to buy products. I do not know whether this is an accurate representation (and I know that there are many, many factors to be considered), but it could influence the build vs. buy decision.

It will be interesting to follow the broader uptake in education of social networking, blogging, podcasting, etc, and whether the Open Source nature of many of the tools means a more rapid deployment in certain areas or types of environments.

The early adopters of these technologies certainly are present in all geographic areas, so in part their successes will play a key role in broadening usage.

It is good to see that open source solutions are generating some interest at the Blackboard user conference which kicks off next week in San Diego.

Matt Pittinsky's overview of the conference highlights a panel session on Open Source. A follow-up post mentions birds-of-a-feather sessions on Blogs, Podcasting, RSS and Wikis.

From my read of the information, Bb seems to recognize that open source e-learning can (and will) co-exist with commercial solutions on campus. The timing of the conference is unfortunate, as it overlaps completely with the WebCT European User conference which I will be attending. After all those years of wondering what goes on at a Bb event, this would have been my opportunity, but it's just not meant to be.

If anyone attends any of the open source sessions at Bb World 06, or sees any summaries posted, please do point them out to me.

I am very happy to announce that Curverider and Aperto are collaborating on an integration between the Open Source system Elgg and WebCT's product lines.

As is mentioned in the announcement, the collaboration brings together the robust eLearning framework of WebCT with the social networking and blogging tools provided by Elgg.

I am especially pleased that the integration demonstrates how innovation created in the Open Source world can be used in conjunction with products in the commercial space, to create a total solution which benefits the end user.

The integration provides a seamless transition for faculty and students as they navigate between Elgg and WebCT.

To me, the integration opens up a whole world of pedagogical possibilities - instructors can now easily take advantage of some really exciting emerging technologies:

• blogging
  
• podcasting
  
• social networking

Most importantly, Elgg allows instructors and institutions to operate outside the bounds of the individual course or section - learning groups can be created across multiple sections, multiple courses, and even across departments.

Over the coming weeks, I will be discussing how Elgg can be used effectively in conjunction with WebCT, and I would really like to hear from existing WebCT customers on what they are looking for.

I will also be demonstrating this integration at the WebCT European Users Conference in Edinburgh from Feb 27th to March 1st, so please track me down at the conference if you will be attending.

For the Elgg perspective, also have a look at annoucements on their site, and comments from Elgg's Dave Tosh.

Alan Levine makes a number of great points in one of his Latest
Blog posts, as he distills the discussions from the Northern Voice conference.

I think nearly everyone agrees that 'closed' blogs - ie. those which are limited to a single semester class - are bad, and the EduGlu
concept by D'Arcy Norman has a lot of merit if all the pieces can fit together.

The 'closed' blog option certainly would feel safe for the novice faculty and student, who have no experience with blogging. The EduGlu option gets all of the early adopters and tech-savvy folks excited about the possibilities.

So what about everyone else? To me, social software in education is still in the early-adopter phase. Faculty and students need to be shown a way to incorporate these technologies into their daily routines if we want the technology to be taken up more significantly.

How do you do this? Make it as easy as possible (from a workflow perspective as well as technologically) and clearly demonstrate the benefits. I also don't think we will get there in one go, and there won't be a one-solution-fits-all model. Some institutions will want to have a locally-hosted instance of their social software, while others will be happy with a hybrid or perhaps a completely outsourced solution.

One way to get more of the mainstream faculty exposed to social networking software is to harness those who already have a toe in the water of the elearning pond - in other words, the ones who are using some form of Learning Management System, be that open source (Sakai or Moodle) or commercial (Blackboard or WebCT).

By this, I don't mean to move the faculty off any of the above systems and completely into a social space, but instead show them how to use these tools in conjuction with what they are already used to. As they gain more experience and comfort with the new technologies, they could very well change how they teach and for example use a blog approach instead of their closed LMS discussion board.