Brad’s Ve-learning project

The boss was looking at social software as a forum appropriate to meetings & issues for senior staff (IMC).  She has her concerns re the lack of security on basic blogs & wikis.  She suggested I meet with Leona Norris, formerly involved with the veLearning project http://www.groups.edna.edu.au/course/enrol.php?id=771 incl the eMentoring exercise, particularly in the techie side of things, including the Edna groups area.

We discussed setting up an Edna site as a secure option of IMC, & it looks quite promising.  We also discussed a heap of other stuff, including useful blogs, VOX as a blogsite (looks interesting), Elgg as an educator’s MySpace & Protopage (mentioned by Leigh Blackall last week in the elluminate session). 

Update on the outing of the Delicious exercise…

One Librarian comment liked the limited number of old style subject links.  Others quite keen on the Delicious approach, including a couple of teachers.  Will need to be properly roadtested yet, but early responses generally positive.

The negative

• I am not sure about Delicious.  I use it for my own personal use but find the list of tags for Hort a bit long.  It is a good way to keep the links current providing people actually check them. It is probably organised differently to the way I have set up our links for Hort.  I quite like the way you have organised your links on the Bremer library site. I am going to reduce ours down to just the very basics.

The others 

• I’m interested in your progress with this project too. Would you mind adding me to your list, please?
• Hi Brad – this is great! I would prefer further bundling – eg Weeds; Landscaping; Poisons; Plant ID; Weather; …would like to reproduce it for the Furnishings SPIG.
• Just read this briefly and think that the concept is a very good idea that perhaps we can work on for our other subject areas also.
• Brad has done a good job to bring this together and has given us an avenue around our internet access problems. I agree … it could work for our other teams as well.
• Had a brief look at what you have done so far and it does look great. Will provide some proper feedback when I clear all of the end of year work

• Please accept feedback as ….great! I had a play and found everything good. Some people may have individual requirements, but for me it’s all good…Good on you Brad and thanks for the communication.

• Fantastic…I have a dream…… Library network – TAFE Queensland…That all our links are located on this page under the broad SPIG type breakdowns – or by Departments.  It is time to try for this…

As noted earlier, had a request to join in an Elluminate focus group session on social software for Val’s project.  This ran last Friday, 1st December.  Quite enjoyed it – around 15 of us from all over, including the Pilbara, Sydney & New Zealand, including Anne Bartlett-Bragg & Leigh Blackall.  Have included the relevant blogs in the blogroll. Another example of the collaborative side. 

Others were astounded at the extent of IT lockdowns on our system. 

Hopefully made some positive contribution…

Murray did the first presentation yesterday.  He was the teacher that I helped out that I referred to in the second post.  Impressive presentation…plus some very nice words for the library.  Encouraging.

I read an interesting contrarian style article on the collaboration side of social software, “DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism”  by Jaron Larnier at http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier06/lanier06_index.html .  Also have a look at the responses. 

Yes, I suspect the dabate has been pushing the benefits of the collaborative side of things somewhat, & Wikipedia has been a spectacularly visible example of what might be achieved. 

But I know people are not necessarily all that collaborative.  My experience with collaborative efforts is that contributions are often patchy & subject to personal politics.  Sometimes the collaboration works, sometimes it presents us with the camel that is the horse designed by a committee.

And I also know that a lot of my use of social software is not for sharing, but quite selfish.  Some of my Flickr shots are private, as are some of my Del.icio.us & FURL weblinks.  Other times they are available to all the world to see.  Irrespective, most software has capabilities to limit who gets involved & how.

Perhaps we need to focus less on what the higher end collaboration is capable of & look at the full spectrum, from selfish individual use to limited access, limited comments, memberships etc.  In an educational setting, as with the corporate sector, what is sought is collaboration within an organisation rather than putting stuff out there for the world to get involved.

The other day I filled in a survey – I think the link came via email, & it looked interesting & relevant, being a Flexiblelearning.net project on Social Software for Learning -

“The purpose of this survey is to identify how ‘social software’ or ‘Web 2.0’ technologies are currently being used in teaching and learning today and to gauge how social software can significantly contribute to certain forms of learning”

As usual I can’t help myself with forced choice survey questions & make a welter of the open ended questions.  Soon after I received an email from Val Evans, one of the research team, in response to some of my comments.  A few email exchanges later & the project includes one of my referred readings as a discussion starter, & the following

“your delicious tagging is brilliant! … I would love to include these links in our research wiki as an example of social bookmarking – nobody has offered such well-organised links to-date. Would that be okay? 

Also your horticulture wiki is a great example how a statewide system can collaborate. In fact, you could spread it even wider and make it national. Again, with permission, can I include it as an example on our wiki under Teaching and Learning sites?”

With all due humility (the tagging is a very basic first effort), who am I to refuse?  So this project is now recorded on her Project wiki at http://socialsoftware-research.wikispaces.com/TandLSites  and lo and behold I also have a comment on the post beneath.  Good grief – from initial spam to the CEO of pbWIKI one day, and Val the next – I have a readership !

Goodness.  I try to be careful with my comments & the next time I log on I have a comment & email notification from the CEO of pbWiki asking about the issues I noted, the content of which suggests that a real person read my comment & made the enquiry.  I am impressed!  At this stage I would note simply that pbWiki was impressive but in my time-limited run through the alternative had the edge.  Will look in more detail & get back when have a chance… in virtual space almost anyone can hear you whisper…

I have been working on populating the Delicious account.  For those in the know there is no great need to have explanatory notes etc, so this might be preferable to a WIKI for in-house use.  It seems useful to keep it running as an open window, & then bounce off each link with a right click ‘open in new window’.

The following email was sent to our staff…

“Further to my earlier email…

There are now 11 of us (as far as I know) with Delicious accounts.

Some of you have imported your favourites. All of these are imported as ‘private’, which means no-one else can view them.

Some of you have even been through & unlocked some of these to make them public, which is the idea behind the sharing thing.

As mentioned, there is now an account for bremertafe. I have pillaged a number of your shared favourites as a basis for building a core Bremer TAFE Delicious collection, & then bounced off these ideas & added quite a few others. Ultimately it would be nice to cover the needs of most of our jobs here (& possibly also be a precedent?). I have left out most ‘article’ type links & tried to keep it to useful practical work based stuff. It has been a work in progress & I’ve changed a few things as I’ve gone along, so as you play with it you may well think of a few obvious issues worth discussing.

It is located at http://del.icio.us/bremertafe

All 181 (so far) links appear in chronological order. The tags on the right of the screen are your search tool - you just click on whatever tag you might be interested in. If you scroll to the bottom of this to ‘tag options’ you will find they can be displayed either as a ‘list’ or a ‘cloud’. In the cloud, the more frequently used tags result in a heavier &/or larger font. You can also fine tune these by using the 1, 2 or 5 to indicate the cut off point for display (how much detail we use is obviously one of the issues). I have also created ‘bundles’ for government & suppliers, & you can display with or without the bundles.

Have a play.  Look at, for example, catalogues, or SearchEngines (the system only allows one word tags, hence the running of terms together), or through the Government sections. All the links we need for work, reference, purchasing, info lit sessions etc could be stored here, & (unlike favourites) stored under any tag/s & accessible from any net connection. Headings can be changed, explanatory notes can be added (e.g. see Zoho), tags changed / amended or whatever – immediately. From one screen we can access all intranet links, off-air recording links, subject links, reference links etc (though we would still need to keep them differently on the website)…You can access it by

• remembering the url,
• Googling ‘delicious’ (no you don’t have to worry about the punctuation) & simply adding bremertafe to the url, or
• even adding it to your favourites (just for use here of course).

Let me know if you want anything added, any explanations of how it works, or want the password to get yourself going.

Suggestions or feedback appreciated…”

As one of the ‘words of the week’, del.icio.us has caused a little confusion.  While I’ve had an account for some time I didn’t know anyone else who had one, so the social side has been non-existent (& for my purposes I’ve preferred to use FURL, & even more Netsnippets, but the latter requires a download & is thus anathema to the bureaucracy’s IT police).  Several of us have been talking about sharing favourites.  As a number of library staff now battle with del.icio.us, here is a chance.  Firstly comes the research – I’ve spent some time in my account to sort out  the finer points of settings, particularly ‘private save’ & ’import existing favourites’.  So I imported those & all seemed well.  And then someone wants to know about sharing, so I research & test ‘networks’.  Problem, however, is that just using one or two people’s individual accounts is not going to do what is needed & even if we were all in there a shared network will have a heap of personal & duplicate dross.  Solution? Start a new account specifically targeted at the library’s needs (thus using a suitable name & the library email) & use the social side to cherry pick everyone’s favourites for the gutsy content (& to identify gaps).  This will hopefully provide a quality linkset to serve as everybody’s first port of call, & continue indefinitely irrespective of staff turnover. So I sent the following email to library staff…

“As part of my Ve-learn involves the word of the week, I guess it also involves some troubleshooting. Everyone seems to have managed pretty well to date, but Delicious seems to be the first one to throw up a few spanners. (If what follows seems too much just grab me in my ’spare’ time)… In order to be able to share links we all need accounts. Go to the delicious site at http://del.icio.us/ & register. At step 2 you will also need to install post / tag buttons, which seems the messiest bit. (N.B. These buttons (it seems) appear as a dropdown under your ‘Links’ on the toolbar (or if you are keen you can unlock toolbars via View>Toolbars> & untick ‘lock the toolbars’, then drag down the links to a new toolbar).Multiple PCs: These buttons will only be available, it appears, on the PC you have put them on though you can install them on others by going back to Step 2, or otherwise do without the buttons by using the posting page http://del.icio.us/post/ . See the FAQ… Multiple accounts on one PC: It appears that the buttons also work on the one PC irrespective of whether you are logged into your personal account or another, though it will only save to the account you are logged into – I haven’t pushed it by logging into two accounts at once…). You can then save any weblink by clicking on ‘post’. You can adjust your settings >bookmarks>’private saving’ to give you the option of whether you want the world in general to be able to view your saved link, or keep it all to yourself.  When you are saving you are given the option of adding tags. A little like your bookmarks folders, this is what is known as ‘Folksonomy’, which is basically user generated make-it-up-as-you-go-along cataloguing. You can also import all of your existing favourites into your account (settings>bookmarks>import/upload), & they will come in by default as private. Utimately, we end up with a mess of links in no particular order, & then use the tags to pull the relevant items. There are a few other tricks with the tags, but I will spare you these at this stage.As we are all likely to have duplicates & personal interest (?) links in our favourites, the tightest way of making a universally useful link collection is to set up a single Bremer library account. Robyn, Max & I were tossing this idea around a while back.We will need to monitor: a) what links go into it &b) what tags we use.Ultimately this will be accessible to all by (oddly enough) adding the single link back into your favourites, storing the link somewhere (e.g. a permanent email to yourself), just remembering the link, or coming in via Delicious & adding bremertafe to the homepage link. Accordingly I have started an account at http://del.icio.us/bremertafe (I have used the bremer.library email address) & have begun populating it with links & tags, though there is plenty more to do. For those of you I have spoken with who have already registered I have also added you as part of the ‘bremertafe’ network, so anything publicly viewable in your personal account is also available to all other members of the network. This is the sharing bit.The ’sharing links’ aspect will probably only be useful here until we get the Bremertafe account populated, but the social logic of it should be obvious if the network was a bunch of people with a particular interest in movies, music etc. Theoretically we could all simply just share the bremertafe account without having your own account. At this stage I think it best if we all have individual accounts just to see how the process / sharing etc works, & I feel it would be best to have limited access to the bremertafe account to avoid messy additions, deletions or even deletion of the entire account. If you feel confident enough to start playing in the bremertafe account, see me for the password. So set up an account, save a few links (anything will do for starters), let me know your account name & I’ll add you to the network.See me when you’ve got that far or if you have any dramas …”… Today we have several new accounts & a total of 8 tinkering in the network (as far as I know).  See how we go from here! Again, in the spirit of the Ve-learning project, this post was composed in & to be sent from Zoho writer, a free online wordprocessor, but neither Zoho supported Wordpress, nor did Wordpress allow for email options.

First efforts were in a support role, devoted to assisting one of the teachers in getting his material up onto a blog.  Accordingly, we used several resources to do so.  We set up a Blog in Blogger.  We set up an account in Flickr.  We uploaded a number of images to Flickr.  One of these was also used to become the image of the Blog author, the others were used in the Blog itself.  As the pix were fairly high resolution, we also used Fireworks to reduce the file sizes to a more managable level given the Flickr upoad limits.  We cut & pasted a logo graphic.  Bingo, it looked pretty good !