Discussions started by Inge Ignatia de Waard

The resources put forward in this part of the course all point to the same strategy: interdisciplinary data workers getting together, which will lead to new interpretations and applications. As such educational institutions will benefit from cross-polination on this topic.

Classification (especially for living objects), clustering all the information and removing ambiguity of terms is indeed an enormous task (language, semantics, hypes, cornering concepts...), yet at the same time we are already getting used to these methods (e.g. using Goggles). So the use of data results is immediate (which affects what needs to be learned, as old/new knowledge can change rapidly). Professional learners will be able to get to relevant up-to-date information much quicker.

The benefits for learning are enormous: it would not only provide me with personalized, tailored content that fits my current hunger for knowledge, it would also allow me to stay in close contact with those who provide that information and share it amongst those who have a similar interest. The professional groups will shift from a more localized network to real global networks that learn through connectivity (like we do here).

There is not only the personal learning which will benefit from the semantic web (getting relevant information ASAP), but also for professional groups, etcetera.
We - as educators or trainers - might even be in the possibility of creating a course which redesigns itself depending on the prerequisites and skills of a particular learner, thus giving her/him a much smoother learning path, without leaving the learning objective itself.

This approach of semantic learning might even take us out of the artificially divided classrooms. If we could cater lessons to a variety of learners, they would not be put into classes depending their age, but depending their ability to grasp what is necessary.

It will also facilitate research: just imagine, that you want to launch a new project in your scientific field? You need to write a proposal, and with an algorithm (AI friend) which searches in your scientific field (e.g.) scholar.google and cross-references this to the data bank of EU/WHO or B.& B. Gates foundation for funding that was granted... you could be on your way to get a funded post-doctorate or project going with much more ease.

However, I can see a potential downside: how much will it cost to access it? Will learning then turn towards: personalized and tailored to the ones that can afford it, and slow with more time demands for those with less money?

Overall, for me the semantic web will impact learning and ... innovation in a profound way.
By analyzing and mapping interactions, you have a better overview of what people are doing and how they learn/perform. As such I see two fields of interest: education/training and knowledge management in corporations.

Education and training benefits
you can localize students or learners that are at risk (of not understanding, of having decreasingly less time...). The SNAPP-people have listed some great benefits of network diagrams:
* identify disconnected (at risk) students;
* identify key information brokers within your class;
* identify potentially high and low performing students so you can plan interventions before you even mark their work;
* indicate the extent to which a learning community is developing in your class;
* provide you with a “before and after” snapshot of what kinds of interactions happened before and after you intervened/changed your learning activity design (useful to see what effect your changes have had on student interactions and for demonstrating reflective teaching practice e.g. through a teaching portfolio)
* allow your students to benchmark their performance without the need for marking.

Adding to these, I think SNAPP also allows us to pinpoint lurkers (who might be a good target audience for research, e.g. did they get something out of the course, and why did they only lurk?)
Additionally, you can filter out those students that might be good future facilitators, giving them an extra incentive to be active in a course. For students that are in the middle of the interactions, are clearly motivated and strong in reaching out and communicating. We use this 'stepping up' strategy with one of our online courses which uses facilitators from across the world.
Another educational benefit is for looking at peer-2-peer interactions. It might be that you do not get much feedback from a student, but after analysing the interactions, you might see that that same student is a real peer-2-peer knowledge node, and as such has great course value.

Performance and knowledge management benefits
This SNAPP approach can also be used for knowledge management. Let's say you have a internal, central 'help' forum inside your company. And there is a person responsible for giving help on that forum. It might well be that after you screen the forum with SNAPP, you can see that someone else in your organization offers just as much help or support, just because they know the subject. As such you can give a bonus, or a different function to that active employee and stimulate knowledge transfer in your organization.

I am surely planning to use this to a greater extend in order to get a better idea of what is happening on the learner side.
Inge

[SCoPE] LAK11 -> Introductions -> Greetings from Belgium!

by Inge Ignatia de Waard -
hi all,
Great to connect and looking forward to the course. Joining the course as an enthusiast learner who uses technology for a multitude of learning reasons, but is not that good in statistics (yet :-)
I work as an eLearning coordinator at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Belgium and as such I travel a lot and I am always looking for solutions that can cater to a wide variety of settings.

During the seminar on Social Media – Benefits for researchers we discussed on 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.
Hope to meet you again in SCoPE or IRL.