lecture2 - writing and collaboration via web 2.0 and social networking

Web 2.0 and Social Networking:

What you need to know to get your students collaborating online, using tags, RSS, and aggregation

Lecture 2 in Writing in a Multiliterate Flat WorldMultiliterate approaches to writing and collaboration through social networking

Vance Stevens, Petroleum InstituteAbu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

XXVI Summer Courses of the University of the Basque CountrySan Sebastian, Spain, 11th-13th July 2007

July 12, 2007Vance Stevens in San Sebastian Spain2

Review from last lecture

Yesterday, we looked atMultiliteracies, Web 2.0The nature of ‘publishing’ in the read-

write century Up to the point my computer crashed,

we I got a recording. Find it at http://www.vancestevens.com/writing.htm


What we’ll do this lecture

I asked you to start a blog I’ll step through the tutorial with you

http://www.homestead.com/prosites-vstevens/files/efi/blogger_tutorial.htm I’ll show you my blog

http://adVANCEducation.blogspot.com And how you can Create and EDIT posts And how you TAG them

Then we’ll see how blogs are used to facilitate collaboration in writing courses


What is a blog?

Features given in Dieu and Stevens, 2007http://tesl-ej.org/ej41/int.html

Reverse chronological listing of postings Permalinks Ability for readers to comment Ability to tag entries RSS feeds used to efficiently monitor blog

posts; see Will Richardson’s RSS Quick Start Guide for Educatorshttp://weblogg-ed.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/05/RSSFAQ4.pdf


What is RSS?

Script that describes content. When you add a posting to a blog, the

script, or 'feed' from your blog is updated. If I SUBSCRIBE to your RSS feed then I

can know when you update your blog.


Subscribing to feeds

Locate feed URL, usually a small orange, graphic on a blog site.

Paste URL into an aggregator, such as Bloglines http://www.bloglines.com


Subscribing to feeds Bloglines displays links in bold when there are

postings not seen yet I only need to check blogs when I see entries in

bold in my aggregator.


Where can you subscribe to feeds?

Blogs Wikis Applications where content is

updated (like MyChingo, now Mobi) forums of content management

systems Moodle Drupal


Where can you subscribe to feeds?

discussion postings in YahooGroups (where discussion on those lists has been made public).

feeds of output from other aggregators Stephen Downes's Edu_Rss mashups of aggregated content possible with

PageFlakes newsfeeds produced by MySyndicaat PULL content via newsmastering.


Push vs. Pull PUSH:

information distributed top down

Each node in information network requires its own unique and redundant information management system

spam in our email inboxes

over-reliance for information distribution on email attachments

PULL: documents stored in

one place and master updated as required,

interested parties subscribe to the feed alerting them when update available.

The only management system is to be subscribed to the correct feeds


Information managementin the real world

Teacher models PULL information distribution in classroom Students extrapolate to real world ways to manage projects

office organization, management of information flow in a classroom

(tracking of ongoing work and submission of final assignments),

in a professional development group in any community of practice or collaboration project,

• including ones in which the teacher's purpose is to hook up writers in order to broaden the scope and enhance chances for meaningful feedback on students' writing.

There's a cute but instructive video "RSS in very simple terms" by Lee and Sachi LeFever at http://www.commoncraft.com/rss_plain_english


Information managementin the real world

Multiliteracies required in this system Awareness of the location of relevant content

• blogs • document repositories that they want or need to

follow be subscribed to those feeds Ability to aggregate and newsmaster content

How this impacts professional development -Play the audio segment here:http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2007/07/multiliterate-autonomous-learner.html


Aggregation through RSS Feeds: Pulling Distributed Knowledge I create a post someone who follows my blog reads it and links back

to me I might become aware of the link-back by monitoring

colleagues’ blogs in my aggregator. Trackback and Pingback

Meanwhile others make related postings on their blogs.

How can we find theirs? normal search engine http://blogsearch.google.com/ http://technorati.com/ to search topics on listed blogs.


Aggregation through RSS Feeds: Pulling Distributed Knowledge

Having an RSS feed of an aggregation of a specified topic keeps feeding updates on topic searches to your aggregator.

• http://www.blog-search.com/ lets you "Search for a blog, add your own blog or grab an RSS feed on the blog topic of your choice."

• Construct your own specialized search with PageFlakes or MySyndicaat and feed the results via its own RSS link into your aggregator


Tags

meta-layer of information that blog posts should always, contain.

also might be known as 'labels' 'categories' Etiquetas (in Spanish)

In aggregate they comprise an organization system known as folksonomy.


Folksonomy A system of classification created ad hoc by users

A folksonomy : blogs, wikis, tagged artifacts created as Web 2.0 learning objects

Dewey Decimal System : Library of Congress

Dewey DecimalSystem

Top-Down Client-Server

structured information

dissemination network

Precise Predictable Inflexible

Folksonomy

Bottom Up Peer to Peer

Ad hoc information

dissemination network

Sloppy UnpredictableCreative

comprehensive adaptable


New protocols for determining authority David Weinberger at Future of Education

In age of the Internet, old protocols are being overturned Internet is a threat to knowledge. Yet it also clearly is knowledge's future.

'messiness' is a 'virtue' when classification systems record metadata allow searches flexibly on parameters not anticipated by the developers of

the scheme “Owners of information do not own the organization of

that information." Elluminate session recording http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/foe-2007/David_Weinberger/


Technorati and Del.icio.us

Technorati http://technorati.com Del.icio.us http://del.icio.us. Both work on tagging, but

Technorati scans the blogosphere for tags that appear in blog posting, which were put there by the person who created the post.

Del.icio.us allows users of blog posts and all other web artifacts assigned their own URL to be classified according to ad hoc folksonomy


Technorati world's foremost authority on blogs. constantly trolls the blogosphere and gathers

statistics from the blogs it knows about. It knows about blogs that it can ping, or that ping

Technorati. In order for your blog (or your students' blogs) to be

found by Technorati, either • you have your blog ping Technorati manually, • you must use a blogging server that Technorati checks

If you use such a system then your blog must be made 'public' on that system in order that it will accept and respond to pings from Technorati.


Using Technorati in classroom settings Have your students TAG their postings with an agreed-upon

consistent marker Technorati finds students blogs based on

Default: text strings that appear in the blog postings themselves Advanced: the tags your students have used !!!!

http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/thewebisflat • Reports some recent postings tagged with search term • Extra click shows ALL postings on that term,

• at that point find a Subscribe button to RSS feed for the content you have just aggregated

• copy its link location to your Bloglines or feed aggregator of choice • monitor postings with that tag as they are harvested by Technorati.


Using Technorati in professional development Participants at international conferences are asked in

advance to tag consistently with one another. participants in Webheads in Action Online

Convergence http://wiaoc.org tagged using wiaoc2007,

• blog postings with that tag can now be aggregated (and wiaoc is also a productive tag; try it: http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/wiaoc).

Future of Education conference requested participants to use a pre-assigned tag FOE2007, with content aggregated at: http://www.pageflakes.com/ltc/10987119,

• subscribe to the Technorati feed on that tag by copying the link shortcut to your Bloglines from the top of this page: http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/foe2007.


Del.icio.us

http://del.icio.us - a highly popular social bookmarking site,

Explanations of Del.icio.us for educators John Pederson's tutorial on Using Del.icio.us in

Education http://docs.google.com/View?docid=ad62vwjv8zm_6fh3r2s

Aixa Almonte's Learning 2.0 Tip-of-the-week for 24 May 2006, a 9 min screencast on using del.icio.us to build a 'reading list' and a 'syllabus' - http://learning2.0.ottergroup.com/blog/_archives/2006/5/24/1981354.html


Social Bookmarking A bookmark is stored with your personal profile information on the local

computer Del.icio.us bookmarks on the Internet Del.icio.us also lets you tag your bookmarks At sites tagged by others on the network, we can see

their user names, the tag we used for this site in common, other tags these users have used.

By browsing the folksonomies of others I can expand my own conception of the topics I am interested in

I can find others interested in the same topics, I can see what sites these others are visiting on the Internet. You can see who who has visited your site and apparently interacted with it with

enough interest to have made the effort to tag it. Tagging allows us to sift through and find each others postings in an otherwise

seemingly chaotic docuverse. But this is not the only way we know that our writing is being read, and interest is

being shown in it.


Writing Matrix and Dekita

Writingmatrix a group of 4 teachers engaged their students in

writing using blogs, all had the students use the term writingmatrix. We

then tutored each other and the students in turn how to use tagging and RSS to aggregate each other's blog posts

Barbara Dieu used similar techniques in her http://www.dekita.org project. For example, aggregation of content at

http://www.dekita.org/orchard using Gregarius, http://gregarius.net/.

Barbara and I have gone into more detail on aggregation techniques we use in these projects at Dieu and Stevens (2007).


Youth Voices

Podcasts on the Worldbridges Network of Teachers Teaching Teachers http://teachersteachingteachers.org Youth Voices http://youthvoices.net./elgg,

remarkable outcomes from student bloggers whose writing has taken on a sort of cult quality, who have found audiences they, nor their teachers, could have imagined.

Paul Allison's videos on blogging at http://www.veoh.com/series/paulallison ... engaging presentations of the process of writing that goes into Paul's students' blog postings –

• Freewriting• sentence starters• bubble cartoon devices • how the students respond to one another.


Me.dium and Mashups

http://me.dium.com lets you see when your buddies are browsing the same site (e.g. my blog where my writing is) at the same time I happen to be there.

Interesting 'mashups' mentioned in DIY Educators Gone Wild: Where are the Instructional Mash-Ups? by Brian Lamb: http://openconnectedsocial.learningparty.net/wiki/page/Mashups. PageFlakes which we talked about earlier a user-created mashup of Craig's List and Google Maps that

shows you exactly where the apartments listed are. Brian points out that RSS is one of the more infinitely mashable

types of code. Educators might be thinking how existing Web 2.0 scripts and

programs might be made to work together, something along the lines of http://www.dekita.org/orchard being just one example.


Pedagogy

Skills as complex as writing and language acquisition are ineffable When we say teaching we really mean facilitation. Facilitation means to create the most conducive environment

possible for learners, full of tools and learning objects. Learning objects are created by the tools available in the

environment. Therefore a good facilitator must be aware of the latest and most useful tools how to use them.

This talk has been an examination of some of the tools I think are useful to the writing process. these particular tools are ones that educators tend to be not yet

aware of The tagging and collaboration techniques discussed here also

utilize tools which educators can use, once they are aware of how they work, in the teaching of writing.

I don’t know how far we’ll get with this today, butsee you all tomorrowVance Stevenshttp://www.vancestevens.com/writing.htm

(the URL for these presentations

Lecture texts, slides, recordings –

check it out later!)

lecture2 - writing and collaboration via web 2.0 and social networking

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