Francisco Reis

Thanks a lot for your comments and interest.

Umniverse development will continue and it gained a lot from our LAK11 experience.

Let's see how learning can be improved with Virtual Worlds and analytics.

All the best for you,

Francisco

Thanks a lot, Nicola, your wow means the world to me for motivation is the basis of long term work!

I'll take a look at other tag systems, namely those that you mentioned, and improve Umniverse Forum object accordingly.

Here I join another view of current graphics/analytical possibilities hoping it meets some of your ideas.

Best Regards

   Francisco

I find that table interesting and I would take them to what is my field of present work.
(Sorry for always insisting on developing better tools).

Let's take these three items of the social behaviour (see attached image):

• tags (I call topics)
  
• likes, dislikes, rates, votes (I call UDRIVE)
  
• who else is online at same time (I propose virtual presence)
  

As Fora seams to be the most used paradigm in our LAK11 MOOC, why
can't we have the three items above in each Forum (perhaps only one Forum is then needed).

TAGS
When adding and entry to a Forum it would be very easy to tag it as belonging to one or more topics, for instance EDM, Privacy, K12 or even Spanish.
Any user should add a topic if he feels the need (or the Forum manager can set a predefined set of topics if he wishes to).

NOTE 1: The operation to choose to which topics an Entry belong must be easy like using checkboxes!
NOTE 2: The filtering of entries by topics should be available!
NOTE 3: If you are only seeing entries of certain topics it should be seamless to make our reply also belong to those topics (enabling, of course, to add or remove any of those topics)!

LIKES, DISLIKES
Any Forum Entry can be marked by readers for Instance as UDRIVE (Uread, Deleted, Read, Interesting, Very Interesting, Exceptional).
NOTE 4: FIltering by the marks we gave should also be possible.
NOTE 5: If all this information, likes and topics, can be repesented in various forms in table and charts then we could have insight on what is going on.

WHO ELSE IS ONLINE AT THE SAME TIME

Virtual Worlds are very good at it. If the Forum has a 3D representation then we should see other avatars that are close to it.

All the above is already integrated in my www.umniverse.com system and soon you will be able to test it if you want (I join an image to open up your appetite).

My main message is: tools should get better! Integrated, easier to use and with instant analytics (which for common users I call them Statistics ;-) ).

I think CIOs of education institutions should be involved. But my experience is that they aren't.

The CIO of, for instance, an university should go much beyond than keeping the systems running. He should present the old and new options to the scientific and pedagogical counsels, and should put forward academic analytics INCLUDING learning analytics.

I'm even thinking of answering for a job as the CIO of Universidade do Algarve in the hope of being able to do in the information systems what as a PhD lecturer in software engineering I'm not even allowed to influence!

I leave the question if there is the need for a new profile for universities CIO. Having a CTO in a university would make sense or would it may go against some of the existing research groups? Who should contribute to the strategy and who should lead? How to motivate/fight CIOs to extend their reach to new areas like LA?

Not being intrusive is, also in my opinion, very important. But it may allow us to include in the tools actions that are immediatly useful and natural for students having later analytics usefulness.

That's my reasoning for the Forum object I'm developing in my Umniverse virtual world. In 2 weeks time I can show how it works.

Who can send me a link of discussions about integrating Elluminate functionality with SecondLife? Thanks in advance!