CloudworksSocial networking for design

Gráinne Conole and Juliette Culver g.c.conole@open.ac.uk

Ascilite Conference paper1st December 2008, Melbourne

Empirical evidence

Tool development

Cloudworks CompendiumLD

Resources and events

Cloudfests

Workshops

Design challenges

Summits

Schema

Andrew Brasher, Paul Clark, Simon Cross, Juliette Culver, Martin Weller, Perry Williams

Helping teachers make effective use of technologies to create

better learning activities for students

Many repositories of good practice, but how do you develop the community???

RSS feeds

Follow and be followed

Friends

Embed

Aggregate

Share

Comment

Playlists

APIs

‘Social networking makes little sense if we leave out the objects

that mediate the ties between peopleEngeström

Design framework for socialityEnabling practiceMimicking realityBuilding identityActualising self

Bouman et al.

How can we encourage a culture of sharing ideas and designs?

Why has there been little uptake of educational repositories?

Can we apply web 2.0 principles to an educational context?

My social network

Course Design Challenge

Design summit

Cloudfests

Development

Vision statement

Prototyping

Paper clouds

Vision

• Enable people to find, share and discuss learning and teaching ideas

• Connect people with similar interests

• Showcase work

• Provide a place for different communities

• Encourage sharing

Principles

• Low barrier to entry

• People-orientated

• Open site, open content

• Target particular communities

• The site acting as a conduit

Cloudworks v 0.1Find and share designs

Web 2.0 principles: tagging, profiles, user generated

Clouds

Stormclouds

Resourcebank

Tools

People

Clouds

Tagging

It’s so easy to be very abstract ... and not catch people’s interest. Because you can’t quickly get a feel for what was actually done, that worked or didn’t work. ... [“Semi-collaborative learning”] was just terribly abstract, I couldn’t sort of work out what it was, what this range of activities were, it just didn’t get me there quick enough.

If you notice things that are abstract, you can say: Oh, and how did that work? or give me an example, I did one like this! ... It didn’t worry me that it was abstract. What worried me was: how the hell does he make that work in an OU teaching context!

The ones that started to catch my interest were where I could quite quickly get a sense of a device or an approach... [“Citing exercise”] got me straight there. Within two or three sentences, I kind of grasped what it was that they had done and it caught my imagination.

We’ve had notorious difficulties over the years in getting anybody to talk about teaching and share teaching practice. They’ll all talk about research; that’s fine. But there’s also no compulsion to talk about teaching.... I’m on our staff development committee, and we find out all kinds of quite interesting courses and things that would be really relevant to people. And they say, oh well, I’m too busy researching, and I don’t want to do that! (Laughs) ... So if there is a strong lead that this is an important thing to do and it’s just something that people do routinely, yeah, you get them to write. But otherwise I think you’ll just have a few very interested people.

‘Shortcuts to new thinking’

It’s not a repository it’s a conversation

Quality controlConcrete vs. abstract

Transferable designs

Success stories

Barriers to contribution

Ownership

Openness

Changing practice

Comments make it come alive

Visual designs

Design a short course in a day

Web Peer Assessment webparesearch.blogspot.com/

Information literacy webparesearch.blogspot.com/

Import existing Clouds

New clouds added

by delegates

New clouds

Ascilite conference Cloudscape

Overview of the cloudscape:a space to post and discuss

ideas seen at Ascilite

Workshop on Secondlife

Paper on mobilelearning

OULDI site

Peer assessment

criteria

CompendiumLD Academic Talk

Cloudworks v0.2Social networking site for finding, sharing & discussing

learning and teaching ideas and designs

Tagging by pedagogy, subject, tool and

other

Dynamic list of new clouds

All clouds

Titles Summary description

My cloudstreamdynamically

updates

Who and what I am following, who’s

following me

CloudscapesWorkshop

Conference

Research topicCourse

Design team

Topic

Project

Tool

18th September2008Design challenge:

design a short course in a day are you up to it???

Amazed at how much we achieved

Stalls really useful

Guidelines on selection

OER repository

Learning environment

Monitoringtools

OERDesign cycle

Design Use

Select

Evaluate

Design tools

Design repository

Data representation tools

Data analysis tools

OL-Net network

People/networks

Tools, methods, approaches

Meta-analysis/synthesis

Designs, evaluations, case studies

Hewlitt Foundation

References• OU Learning design initiative - http://ouldi.open.ac.uk

• Cloudworks - http://cloudworks.ac.uk

• Cloudworks: Conole, G., Culver, J., Well, M., Williams, P., Cross, S., Clark, P. and Brasher, A. (2008), Cloudworks: social networking for learning design, Ascilite Conference, 30th Nov – 3rd Dec 2008, Melbourne.

• CompendiumLD: Conole, G., Brasher, A., Cross, S., Weller, M., Clark, P. and White, J. (2008), Visualising learning design to foster and support good practice and creativity, Educational Media International, Volume 54, Issue 3, 177-194.

• Design schema: Conole, G. (2008), New schema for mapping pedagogies and technologies, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/conole/

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