iSpot a global #mobile enabled environmental #crowdsourcing initiative

For those interested in the development logic behind an ever growing, durable mobile project, the iSpot growth will be of interest. Especially as they share the choices they made and whether those were good or bad. There is also a link to the new Google mDesign recommendations.

Last October I met Will Woods who is part of the team behind iSpot a UK-based group linked to the Open University of UK. The iSpot team is now rolling out a worldwide mobile enabled project. iSpot a global mobile enabled environmental crowdsourcing initiative

iSpot focuses on sharing knowledge on what people can see in nature: birds, mushrooms, trees, flowers... and to determin what type of species or plant it is based on expert and peer knowledge. The project started out as something local, but is now set to go worldwide as an Open Educational Resource for nature in all it's wonders. In it's current version newly uploaded content to iSpot is determined (analyzed for what type of flora or fauna) within one hour!!

Different versions
The first version of iSpot was mostly web-based and was focusing on people willing to consume content related to nature. People could look up which type of flora or fauna they had met while being in the open. This was done based on a database with a list of visual and other information on local (UK) wildlife.
This first version was opened up for evaluation by all the stakeholders. As the project team got feedback from their first users, they quickly found that users wanted to be able to immediately access and share what they saw in the open field through their mobiles. the team got to work on a second version of iSpot, focusing on the possibility to share what had been seen in the open more quickly and immediately.

Version 2 got more interactive: people were now able to share their own content, load it up to the iSpot server, and ask for feedback on the determination of the species they had found, or simply add an extra visual to a specific species. By this crowdsourcing effect, the iSpot database is becoming a source of interest on where species were located, how their population is doing, how they migrate... Of course the database still needs to mature in terms of content, but ... it is a longterm project with a definite surplus to science.
For version 2 development choices had to be made which are of interest (see a bit further down this blogpost).

Version 3 wants to go international. This version will be rolled out by June 2013 but is already being developed and its vision was shared during the same session in mLearn2012. For this version to become of international interest, it meant that species not only had to be determined by the crowd, but that different language options for specific species needed to be embedded as well. This 3rd version is built based on the new Google recommendations for mDesign (G+), really new so check it out.
So what to expect in this version: html5, international options with regional mapping features, ecological relationships (relationship between different plants and animal life), improved social media tools, caching options for offline use and 'bioblitz' (which I forgot what it was... feel free to fill me in :-)

Interesting learning reward addition
An interesting and useful learning reward was offered. If people were able to determine which type of animal life they saw, they would grow through the 5 levels of expertise that the iSpot team had put up. This means that anyone with an interest and willingness to get into wildlife had the opportunity to work her/his way up to the 5th or expert level. Meaning they would reach a status where they would be the one's determining flora and fauna right up there with all the professors and experts connected to iSpot.

Choices made while developing

• When content is uploaded ideally it would be anchored to specific regional coordinates, as this would be of scientific interest.
• The mobile team also shared some pointers for ideal mobile project development:
• foresee short windows of development: if the iterations are short, it will enable you to cater much quicker to your target learner audience
• ensure adequate mDesign for an optimal user experience
• add features most suitable to app development
• design for a single platform initially as this will save you time and effort (= cost) and will enable you to focus on what matters => the actual content and user experience
• started as a mobile native app, but now turning into html5 project (the ECAR mobile preferences report of September 2012 indicated that students prefer mobile apps to web optimized content, so with the html5 option they hope to offer an optimal mobile web application).
• as different project iterations move on, it is of interest to analyse all the actions taking place in the project with event level Google analytics (this is also a new beta Google option and google looks for feedback so have a look).

Want to know more, contact Will Woods either through his twitter account @willwoods or his blog: http://technocrappy.wordpress.com

A nice extra, the iSpot project has resulted in an 8 year old girl finding and naming a newly found spider! How great is that?!

Help the world in #education and #ICT4D by winning prizes and let the community decide

A consortium involving Nokia, the Pearson Foundation and UNESCO have launched an “Education for All” crowdsouring challenge: “an eight-month initiative to elicit suggestions on how mobile communication can help achieve EFA goals.”.  The aim is to develop suggestions emerging from an interaction between education experts, teachers, parents, students and software developers. Each month will feature a separate EFA goal. The first month is devoted to finding solutions on how mobile communication can help achieve literacy. Prizes will be awarded monthly to the best ideas, chosen by a panel of judges.Monthly smart phone prizes will be awarded to the best ideas recognized by the panel of judges. The best ideas will be published and celebrated also in the UNESCO websites to explain their proposal in further detail and to encourage the development of the ideas into concrete projects.

How to participate?

Participating is extremely easy. Just visit the EFA Crowdsourcing Challenge website, select the appropriate EFA goal, and then click on the ‘Create an Idea’ link. (You will need to register first)

What are the upcoming challenges (European date format):

10/10/2011 - Start of EFA Crowdsourcing Challenge and launch of Literacy goal
10/11/2011 - Launch of Access to Universal Primary Education goal
09/12/2011 - Launch of Life Skills & Lifelong Learning goal
10/02/2011 - Launch of Quality of Education goal
09/03/2011 - Launch of Gender Equality in Education goal
10/04/2011 - Launch of Early Childhood Care and Development
31/05/2011 - End of EFA Crowdsourcing Challenge.

#LAK11 what about #privacy when using #data analytics to create #knowledge?

Learning Analytics: EDUCAUSE

View more presentations from gsiemens.

LAK11, the course on learning analytics and knowledge has started and immediately discussions touch a sensitive and complex issue: privacy. While talking about educational data mining, the issue of privacy was raised by many participants.

First a quick note on educational data mining: data mining, also called Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD), is the field of discovering novel and potentially useful information from large amounts of data. And with many social media apps gathering massive amounts of data, this field is of growing interests to companies as well as researchers. Educational data mining has a different aim, not to make money, but to map/increase/analyse educational knowledge creation and awareness. What makes educational data mining so interesting, is that it is increasingly using models drawn from the psychometrics literature in education.

The idea behind EDM is a great one: modeling student individual differences in these areas enables software to respond to those individual differences, significantly improving student learning for example. Another key area of application of EDM methods has been in studying pedagogical support (both in learning software, and in other domains, such as collaborative learning behaviors), towards discovering which types of pedagogical support are most effective, either overall or for different groups of students or in different situations. The only thing is, how do you cope with the privacy issues?

Privacy can be good or bad
Gathered data – just like anything else – can be used for the good or the bad. An early form of data gathering was getting all the Jews registered in Germany. Once that was done – for purely administrative purposes at first – it was a small step to gather the Jews themselves for … processing. There is also a recent initiative: in Nepal the third sex has been added to Nepal's next demographic surveys. This is a wonderful thing (I for one do not apply for many 'either/or' categories), but it makes abuse possible.

To me privacy is more relevant to minorities and vulnerable groups, then any other groups in society. If facebook sells gay related data to the Ugandan government, I would not like to be a gay person in Uganda, for you risk being seriously harassed if not killed (at this point in time). No matter when, privacy should be an option that is respected, disconnected from your own online identity, certainly you – as a user – should be able to use a ‘non-traceable’ account for certain reasons?

For instance by using disconnect(ere).

Out of the crowdsourcing cloud, out of the real world?
A way forward to keep your own data private is via: disconnect. But then if all of the people from a specific group use disconnect, their data will no longer be in the crowd, and as such 'non-existent', which makes vulnerable groups even more invisible and less catered to.

perspective of a LAK11 participant
Sarah Haavind, a participant of LAK11, mentions two interesting points on privacy as well:
First: the FB and twitter users no longer clutch to privacy (is this really true and has anyone researched this or the reasons behind it? I do mind and I adjust my privacy settings)
Secondly she adds to the privacy-commercial link: “What if the data-mining marketers know what I like? Isn't it a positive to be bombarded with ads for products I'm interested in rather than a random assortment, given their presence in our lives?”.
She has a point there, but… how can small, very targeted businesses come up through the data analytics that is available?
If I had to choose, I would also like smaller companies to be able to take part in this ad-data-world. I am not interested in starbucks, I am interested in the local coffeeshop burning its own coffee beans, just because I like a variety of tastes. If I go to Ethiopia, I want to listen to local contemporary music, I am not interested in the hashed music that can be found everywhere. So to that effect, I would like it better if I could choose localized data from my profile of ‘local business’ then the big mainstream stuff. But do I need to open up my private life to get access to such time-saving and potentially interesting stuff?

Having said this, gathering and mining educational data might help us a long way to get quick access to some sustainable outcomes (learner preferences, learner critical thinking skills…). But of course, like all data mining, the proof is in the algorithm. If the algorithm is based on a wrong hypothesis, will the results then still be useful? And if data is sold to the highest bidder, then the ethics of that highest bidder better be in sync with my interpretation of ethics.

Is your global eLearning2.0 content censored? You better take a look

With the recent Iran election, censorship is again high on the political agenda. But censorship does not only affect citizenship on a political level, it can also effect learning potential.

eLearning is relying increasingly on a mix of social media and delivered content. And in this ever growing world, the learners are dispersed and global. This combination of factors can result in courses that are not always accessible to all.

If you deliver online content and you enable your learners to stay in contact with one another through various social media, you can suddenly discover that the links or portals you provide become subject to censorship depending on the region in which your learner is situated or your content is delivered.

Let me take a Belgian example. At the Institute of Tropical Medicine we research HIV/AIDS amongst other 'tropical' diseases. This results in the need to survey different target groups that are relevant to the HIV/AIDS disease. One of the key issues in HIV/AIDS is sexuality and as such the content of the delivered courses might be perceived as sexually explicit. One of the many target groups is also the gay male community, which will have homosexuality as one of the key words in its description, another target group are drug users, making it difficult to build a survey that does not explicitly put names of (illegal) drugs into the survey.
Depending on the country some content related to drugs, homosexuality and sexually explicit content can be censored and as such result in limited content access for learners from a specific region. That is: if a search on keywords is conducted by gatekeepers in those regions.
If you deliver content with these keywords but in a medical platform, it is much easier to keep in touch with the relevance of those keywords to the content. But if you add social media to your courses as an added bonus or place for discussion, it might be much more difficult to keep the link between relevant content and those keywords clear for all.
As a result some of your content might be censored, although the content and its related discussions are relevant to the medical objective. And because you, as an eLearning provider are living in a different part of the world, it can sometimes be difficult to account for possible drawbacks in that type of content delivery.

There is a website that tries to track different types of censorship in the world: the Open Net Intitiative. The initiative is taken by American Universities and is as such biased (every region has its own 'normal' censorship options). For example the website mentions 'illegal' drugs, but depending on the region some drugs are illegal and others are not, so that is not an objective term to use. Nevertheless the site is interesting because it gives an idea of where in the world certain types of censorship occur.

The site also offers you a way to add to the censorship data statistic by participating through the crowdsourcing principle and using HerdictWeb.

The global world does bring along different aspects and mindframes for eLearning content delivery. It keeps on surprising me.

mobile projects and crowdsourcing in developing countries

Thanks to Ellen Trude (blogging in German), I got hold of this 38 minute video on mobile phone use in developing countries (focusing in this video on the sub-Saharan part of Africa). If you are into mobile applications, this is worth watching.

Nathan Eagle (MIT) teaches computer scientists in Africa how to program mobile phones at first, but is now involved in mobile crowd sourcing projects. What is nice about him is that he is always looking at the interaction between human and machine.

Some interesting facts from the movie:
Developing world uses 59% of the cell phones in comparison to 41% in the developed world. But the mobile applications in Africa are most of the time disconnected from the mobile users in Africa. So African companies are refurbishing mobiles and material adding to the real need of Africans.
There is a ubiquity to using mobile phones and if the users are more aware of this the applications that are developed will be more tailored to the user’s needs also.

Examples mentioned:

• How prepaid cards can be used to get water in Kenya, electricity in Rwanda…
• Real time monitoring of blood supplies;
• Day laborers organizing themselves through sms.

And 21 minutes into the speech he gets into mobile crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is interesting and feasible in a region were a lot of people are unemployed.
Some examples are mentioned: citizen journalism, translating (a lot of languages across Africa, so if by crowdsourcing you can build a dictionary, the phone companies can use this data to develop localized mobile interfaces – this is something that might be useable in education).
All these mobile crowdsourcing projects got some money in the pockets of the users.

Nice movie to keep in touch what is going on in Africa on the mobile side.

ICT4D the Peoples Uni, an OER initiative - they are looking for students and teachers - Join!

A new initiative in Open EDucational Resources that I came across today, thanks to my ever informed colleague Verena Renggli.

The Peoples Uni is looking for both students and teachers at this stage and more importantly collaborators to help develop and deliver the courses. The courses are delivered through the Moodle LMS. Professor Dick Heller (who is leading) is more than happy to get your views, ideas and suggestions. You are welcome to contact him through the website above http://peoples-uni.org or through his email Dick.Heller(at)manchester.ac.uk

Interested? Let me paste a little bit of what they post:
Most low to middle income countries (LMIC) currently have to cope with a wide range of health problems that interfere with their future economic development. Public health is a major priority, especially the spread of AIDS, tuberculosis and common infectious diseases, as well as the emergence of chronic disease epidemics. A trained workforce of health professionals is essential, but local universities being vastly oversubscribed for face to face courses and fees for overseas universities, including e-learning distance programmes, are higher than can be afforded by most potential students in these countries. Internet-based eLearning has the exciting potential to deliver high quality learning resources anytime and anywhere, and although access is by no means universal it is improving quickly.

The open source software movement provides an inspiration for an affordable and credible solution - Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS), (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOSS . Many hundreds of individuals have contributed to the development of high quality software which is freely available on the Internet.

In the education field, there are now parallel developments of Open Educational Resources (OER), with an ever expanding range of high quality on line resources that are freely available through the Internet.

The Peoples Uni are calling on individuals and organisations to undertake various of the required tasks. They are calling this ‘Volunteersourcing’ – a variant of ‘Crowdsourcing’. While many of these tasks might be performed by volunteers, others will require funding (such as accreditation).