Meaningful, hand-picked content curation at its best

Maria Popova is an astonishing individual. I honestly do not know how she manages to build one of the most inspiring, cross-disciplined, politically aware, literary content outputs ... out there. Since I discovered BrainPickings, I must admit I was taking her fabulous content for granted, but today I realized what a treasure trove it is and that it is about time I promote it. Brainpickings is a weekly media rich newsletter that offers a good read for minds looking for some art/science/literature food-for-thought.

Just wondering how much time she puts in (in 2012 the hours spent indicated 5000!!!)... Such media rich poignant articles. I would love to see that as a virtual, interactive eBook on any device. Every Sunday a clean slate of nice readings... 

Just take a look at how she reviews and lets the reader 'feel' a book. In this case it is the Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America (public library) by journalist Jon Mooallem. The way the media is embedded, meaningful quotes are used and personal ideas are interwoven with the article... 

Still need to make a contribution to Angies work of art though (donations keep the newsletter going)... will do so right now (says she who once said "you have to pay for your own meal" to her 12 year old sister and her friend, luckily my partner intervened and put me on the right track - love is sometimes expressed by money). 

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?!

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.

Round up fact sheet for the seminar on Social Media – Benefits for researchers

During the seminar on Social Media – Benefits for researchers I facilitated on SCoPE all the participants discussed the following topics:

Are you a social media sceptic or evangelist? Which lead to a discussion on the definition of social media. Most of the participants were partly sceptic and evangelist. The evangelists all pointed to the extras of using social media (communication, exchange of knowledge, building a network). But the sceptic part covered the height to which social media is hyped at this moment and the fact that it increases the workload and the amount of knowledge you need to organize/respond to.

To keep from becoming a sceptic it was important to get metrics going on personal social media apps (like sitemeter or cluster maps) or any feedback that shows non-commenting visitors statistics.

There was also a remark that the impact/benefits of social media are still not very clear and metrics are important. It was said that too few innovators and early adopters are actually using Web 2.0 technology to enhance existing learning behaviours (as this article concludes).

Net etiquette: where a 10 step list for net etiquette was posted addressing people that you want to enrol in a discussion forum or learners that start with adding comments in social media.

Discussion on open or closed research, we called it: research should ALWAYS be OPEN to the public at every stage!
A couple of gurus (Jean-Claude Bradley and Cameron Neylon) on open science joined this discussion and pointed out some advantages of open science.

For anyone interested in an overview of social media benefits for researchers, there is a presentation on slideshare. This presentation was the core of the online discussion some of the SCoPE participants had with WiZiQ and which was facilitated by Ignatia de Waard.

Links on topic:
The computer-supported collaborative learning page.
A European research project on pedagogically sustained learning in CoP: the Palette program for anyone interested in learning research.

Categorizing Web2.0 apps
Webel: http://droopy.ecs.soton.ac.uk/webel/

Open science:
The open science blog openwetware .
Open knowledge share http://www.vision2lead.com/html/webinars.html
Open science chemistry http://usefulchem.wikispaces.com/
Lexdis: http://www.lexdis.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

Topics we did not cover to the full extend, but are related to the topic:
How would you subdivide social media apps with eLearning and/or research in mind?
Are teachers/coordinators using packages of social media with a distinction in the tools they offer depending on the work the learners are involved in?
How would you evaluate social media apps?

Thank you to all participants for making this a good discussion.

In relation to the SCoPE seminar on social media in research I am currently facilitating, I have planned a live session. So let’s get together and exchange ideas live on social media that is used in research, I have set up a session through WiZiQ.

After an intro of about 20 minutes in which I will give a short overview of the big outlines on social media and how it is linked to research, the floor will be completely opened to discuss possible thoughts and questions you might have. These questions can be the basis of discussion threads during the ongoing seminar in SCoPE.

Practical:
The session is planned for Thursday 8 May
12 PM Halifax, Nova Scotia time = ADT;
8 AM Vancouver, British Columbia time = PDT;
5 PM Brussels, Belgium time = CEST;
If you are not sure of your time zone, you can look it up at the World Clock.

You can access the online session here.

On WiZiQ
WiZiQ is a free tool. It is an online virtual classroom and allows interactivity (audio/video and chat and 'raising hands', the last feature enables you to ask for the virtual floor. The presenter can give you the floor (= give you the possibility to say something if you have a microphone connected to your computer).

To participate in this session, you need to register for WiZiQ.
Once you are registered you can access all the sessions for free, BUT you need to be signed in to be able to open the sessions!
This session is audio/video enabled, which means you can use a headset with microphone. This will enable you to give audio comments if you ask for the floor by raising your virtual hand.

Technical tips:

• it is a good idea to surf to the link a couple of minutes before the session starts. This allows you to test your audio/video devices.
• Please keep in mind that you need a headset with microphone if you are planning to talk. This enhances the audio quality, open speakers give the microphones a hard time.
• (a small side remark: if you have been using audio/video software during the day (f.e. for camtasia or captivate) and you want to link to WiZiQ, sometimes the settings are intertwined and do not function correctly. In that case you will have to log out and log in again.

Feel free to join!

join free online seminar on Social Media benefits for Researchers

SCoPE has invited me to facilitate a seminar on Social Media - Benefits for Researchers for which I am very grateful. The seminar begins this Wednesday May 7 and runs up until May 18, 2008. If you have ideas on the topic, mail them or join!

Short description: Social media provides opportunities to socialize, read, write, collaborate, aggregate, create, synthesize, track... How do we use social media for conducting research? What are our new research questions and strategies now that we have access to social media? All the interested participants will explore how social media can benefit our roles as researchers.

This forum will open on Wednesday May 7, 2008. On Wednesday I will post threads to start the discussion. I will also post questions or remarks I frequently get.

If you have ideas of your own or ideas that could stimulate the forum, please send them to me or join the seminar (it is free, you only need to register for SCoPE - also free - and then you can join all the ongoing seminars).

SCoPE brings together individuals who share an interest in educational research and practice through online forums. It is a Canadian initiative, open to the world.