Matthew Allen

Speaking in a couple of weeks at the Internet Research 12.0 conference ‘Performance and Participation’

My paper, Web 2.0 from the ground up: defining the participatory web in its own terms, is based on an analysis using Leximancer of 750,000+ words used to describe 12,000+ Web 2.0 applications. Some of the fun I am having includes generating dubious yet intriguing infographics….

However, I am still struggling to find the right way to explain how I get from this to what I seek to conclude, concerning the way the discourse of Web 2.0, very much a language of computing, is now reshaping our sense of self.

See also other posts including the first one, on Web Communications 101, which explains more of the context.

Internet Communities and Social Networks 204

(basic unit description)

One of the most authentic learning experiences we try to offer students in the BA (Internet Communications) is the network conference, the focal point and driving force for the unit NET204. In this unit, the whole learning journey is designed around a 3-week online asynchronous conference in the latter stages of the study period: the first part of the unit involves writing the conference paper, improving it after feedback, and also designing and discussing how to run the conference and promote it.

Because every element of the unit is designed ‘around’ the conference, this unit is more than just an authentic assessment task: rather, it is an authentic learning experience, with the assessment almost ‘blending’ in with that experience. For example – the ‘conference paper’ is submitted, assistance given and then students can improve it, rather than in traditional approaches simply being done and marked. Very few activities in the real world involve submission of intellectual work that can’t be improved once completed.

While we set up the website and managed submissions, the academics were not the only ‘producers’ and users of the web for knowledge networking, producing a Youtube video, using a NIng group and promoting the conference through Facebook and Twitter.

Listening to Michael Dyson, from Monash talking about portfolios in teacher education: great presentation.

Dyson says:

• Education of educators is first of all premised on turning them into people who practice self-development. gives example of very first unit. [So, care of the self is central, and making students include themselves as subjects in the learning process - nice!]
• Learning is change dramatically – globalisation, computing, and so on. [But, perhaps, there is an important qualification on some of the more optimistic claims for 'new' learning: learning is embedded within society in ways that shape those possibilities in ways that are not entirely concerned with 'better' learning. At the very least, the definition of better is contested: is it cheaper? is it more orderly and commodifiable? is to linked to national norms and needs?]
• The creating mind is the goal. [Interesting - not creative, but more positive and active - creating. Good difference]
• Reflection is essential to achieving the kind of succcesses in self-developmental learning; using Dewey (2003), emphasises “active persistent and careful consideration”; reflection is not taking “things for granted…[leading to] ethical judgment and strategic actions” (Groundwater-Smith, 2003).  [ Further work needed, perhaps, to understand reflection for this new generation, if one takes as given the significant changes in knowledge: is reflection as developed in 20th c the right kind of reflection?]
• ALACT model – action, looking back, awareness of the essential aspects, create alternatives, trial.

[This is really helpful - I like the added 5th step, compared to the normal action research 4-step model]

• “the artefacts placed in their portfolio showcase who they are and their current onling learning”; these artefacts are attached to the standards which define what it is to be an educated teacher according to outcomes required. [So portfolios are a clear negotiation of the student's understanding of those requirements and standards?]
• Exploration of the actual portfolios that students have created, using a paid-for service iwebfolio (was subsidised). Variety of successes and failures, all the material goes into a digital, not paper portfolio. Notes the fact that the metadata on when and how material uploaded is available, unlike other means of generating a portfolio. [I emphasise: the portfolio is a genuine, real requirement for teaching employment. It is authentic learning]
• Use of standards / outcomes as information architecture to drive cognition in inputting information (adding artefacts, commenting etc [So, the portfolio is 'scaffolding' into which a building goes, with a clear design brief. It might be a hghly structured knowledge engine]

I am wondering if the students genuinely are doing this work for themselves or if they imagine an audience of ‘judges’ – their teachers who grade the portfolio or the employers who might use it? Managing multiple audiences is tricky, even with technology that allows it – because if you can shape the portfolio for several audiences…. then does the self audience survive?

Then again, maybe the whole point is that the students are not yet capable of being their own audience.

Some other portfolio software (and look how it is more than just a portfolio…)

http://www.pebblepad.com

See also other posts including the first one, on Web Communications 101, which explains more of the context.

Web Publishing 206

(basic unit description)

Students doing the BA (Internet Communications) learn, in WEB101, to create a web presence that acts as the primary locus of their online identity, with links to other services and applications. In Web Publishing 206, the focus moves much more directly to writing effectively for the web (where writing can also including other media, but emphasises the written word).

The authenticity of the assessments in Web Publishing 206 are principally mobilised by requiring students to write regularly, on their blog, exploring different aspects and techniques of good online writing. The blog is assessed in its own terms, and also as the basis for students’ reflective essays which ensure that students are thinking about (as well as doing) this crucial online communication task.

Some examples of students’ blogs are:

• Eighteen Songs – WEB206 Weekly Blog
• Percussive Sweet Spot
• On the Internet, No-one Knows I’m A Blog
• Damien’s Web Publishing 206 Weblog | The Worlds of MMO’s

Notably, most students make virtually no reference to the ‘study’ component of these blogs: these are genuine blogs addressing audiences outside universities. Use of the tag Web206 however enables academic staff to look into them to find relevant content! And one student cleverly ‘colonised’ the name WEB206 : WEB206 | a Curtin University of Technology unit

While in WEB101 there was a strong sense that other students were the audience (along with the teacher), in WEB206 students are developing a much greater awareness of real audiences. In this respect, if no other, the assessment task is significantly advantaged by making it public knowledge networking.

As before, the blogging linked with other services and tools, pricipally delicious, as in these examples:

• Annoted Bibliography Feed (on the blog)

Once again, we see the value of the tag – the tag Web206 enables just the relevant links to be pulled from delicious into the blog, enabling a student to also use delicious for many other purposes. In this way, knowledge networking drives the nature of the assessment completion.

More findings from Web206 (which has only just run for the first time in late 2010)  will emerge over time. Thanks to Dr Helen Merrick, chief wrangler of publishing.

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The first of several posts, each relating to a different unit of study at Curtin

Introduction

Over the past two years, students in Internet Studies, Curtin University studying the BA (Internet Communications) and related courses have been doing a lot of authentic assessment involving online activities. These assignments are  authentic in that they are ‘true’ to the content of their studies (that is, aligned with the outcomes), ‘ real’ within the likely fields of employment for graduates, and ‘natural’  for the the emerging dominance of knowledge networking in society. More on these three variations on authenticity in a moment.

Not all assessments fit this pattern (nor should they), but we have seen significant improvements in the motivation of students to complete and exceed the requirements of assignments, as well as a greater degree of creativity and expression suggesting deeper engagement with learning. It has also, we think, improved students’ attention to more scholarly traditional assignments (such as essays) because of the variety we engendered across all assignment tasks. (And, it should be noted: essays are authentic – to the lifeworld of academic which also remains important as well as work and elsewhere).

Much of what makes these assessment approaches authentic is that they are public. Here, then, are some examples which suggest some of the value of embracing public knowledge networking as the basis for assessment, at least in courses that involve digital media and communications but, most likely, in any course where students need to work with, communicate and reflect on knowledge and, in doing so, become producers, not just receivers.

Web Communications 101 (WEB101)

A major component of the assessment in this unit is a ‘web presence’. More than a website and blog, a web presence interlinks a central node with linked  services and nodes to expand the digital footprint of a user and established their online identity. The negotiation and communication of identity is central to this unit: it’s not just ‘how to blog’.

A very small number of examples of these web presences are:

• Michelle’s Curtin Uni Learning Portfolio
• Caja Design – Web 101 – Blog
• Smartworks Education
• Outback Gold – A Website For Those With Gold Fever
• Reflection (and Stuff )

Over 400 students have taken the unit: sorry, can’t show them all. In particular, look at how some students have made their web presence almost entirely ‘real’, with bare hints of what it connects to (their study); others have not. Some students, as evidenced by these presences, are now using them as part of other units of study too.

Note that students happily created their own informal, computer-mediated network spaces such as Web101 – Curtin University | Facebook; and staff teaching also use the web as it was intended – free and rapid information exchange – to support this unit:  Web101 Assignments FAQ.

A big part of the unit also involves the use of twitter: see the most recent  Twitter search; delicious is also used.

Please look at “I Tweet Therefore I am?” by Dr Tama Leaver, chief architect of the WEB101 learning experience.

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As I have argued elsewhere: the authenticity of these assessments is not a simple ‘flip’ from artificial academic work into ‘real’ web work. They are a negotiation and a compromise in which equally valid requirements from both knowledge networking and education are brought into a creative and productive tension. In the next instalment, I will provide some examples of what happens for students in the followup unit to WEB101.

In semester 1 this year Internet Studies staff ran the very successful unit Internet Communities and Social Networks 204/504, through both Curtin and OUA. The centrepiece for this unit was the 3-week online conference which students participated in, by writing conference papers, posting them to our website and then discussing both their own and others’ papers. This very successful conference is now over but you can observe the results at the Debating Communities and Networks site. The unit was, clearly, not your normal ‘teaching and learning experience’ – all assessment, tasks and activities, resources and discussions, were aligned with making the conference work successfully – and ‘learning’ was a secondary (but very successful) outcome.

I am now, in concert with the unit controller Dr Michael Kent, doing some research into the experiences of this unit and what it might tell us about online learning, student motivation, and authentic assessment. I will be sharing some of these thoughts with you elsewhere, including giving a paper called “Going Public with Learning” at a conference in September organised at Murdoch University by Ingrid Richardson. (abstract)

However, something interesting is emerging from the research as it relates to the use and interpretation of the student surveys we use at Curtin (known as Evaluate. Because the unit ran in almost identical fashion for three different cohorts of students, at the same time and with the same teaching staff, curriculum and so on, we are now able to compare and contrast the results from Evaluate based on the differences that might be discerned from the students who respond. The only significant difference is that one cohort was most likely to have also attended a physical classroom for 2 hours a week as well as doing all of the online activity.

This situation is important. As we know, evaluation of teaching at university has become standard now in Australia. Some of the reasons for this situation are good: it is important for academics to treat their teaching as research and to inquire, empirically, into how it is working, both to improve individual units of study and also to become better all-round teachers. But some of the reasons are bad: surveys are often used in crude ways to manage teaching performance (rewards and criticisms both), or they are reported in generalised ways to show how great an area, course or university is for marketing. And, while there may be some contestation over my characterisation of the reasons as good or bad (after all, perhaps t is good to manage performance using surveys), there can be no doubt that the validity of the research or management based on student surveys rests on the quality and sophistication of the instrument: does the survey measure what it purports to measure?

Evaluate, Curtin’s instrument, has its strengths and weaknesses which you can judge for yourself: here are the items in the survey (to which students respond using a classic Strongly Agree/Agree/Disagree/Strongly Disagree/No opinion scale):

1. The learning outcomes in this unit are clearly identified
2. The learning experiences in this unit help me to achieve the learning outcomes
3. The learning resources in this unit help me to achieve the learning outcomes
4. The assessment tasks in this unit evaluate my achievement of the learning outcomes
5. Feedback on my work in this unit helps me to achieve the learning outcomes
6. The workload in this unit is appropriate to the achievement of the learning outcomes
7. The quality of teaching in this unit helps me to achieve the learning outcomes
8. I am motivated to achieve the learning outcomes in this unit
9. I make best use of the learning experiences in this unit
10. I think about how I can learn more effectively in this unit
11. Overall, I am satisfied with this unit

The aim, broadly speaking, is that the survey assess the curriculum and content of the unit and the design of the learning experience, rather than specific teachers. In other words, Evaluate attempts to assess curriculum, abstracted from the specifics of the teaching and learning activities. It also attempts to provide insight into the students’ mindset through items 8-10 though in practice these items are treated at Curtin as they were comments by students also on the quality of the unit or its teachers. Thus, in general terms, Evaluate attempts to use student perceptions as a direct measure of the realities of the quality of the teaching and learning experience, with students positioned as informed and reliable judges of that quality.

In most cases at Curtin there is just one cohort of students for each unit, completing the Evaluate survey. There is no demographic information to enable internal comparisons. But, for NET204, in semester 1 2010, we had a very unusual situation in which the same unit was taught using three different unit codes, for 3 different groups, thus enabling 3 different and differentiated data sets to be generated. One offering was for OUA students (all external); one was for Curtin-based undergraduates (mostly internal); one was for Curtin-based graduate students (e.g. new-to-area coursework students, not higher degree students) – (mostly external). (the samples and populations were: OUA n=21, from 68 possible respondents; Curtin undergrad n=16 from 35 possible respondents; Curtin graduate n=9 from 16 possible respondents)

So what happens when different results achieved in the Evaluate survey for these three different cohorts, remembering that with the exception of the classroom contact for internals, and some separation of students for the first 1/3 of the study period, all were treated to an effectively equivalent experience? What can we learn about Evaluate itself when we compare results from a similar activity but assessed by three different sorts of students – where the main difference in the ‘learning’ comes from the students themselves?

First of all, the immediate obvious finding is that Curtin undergrads were less likely to be satisfied with the unit overall – (item 11). 95% of OUA students, and 100% Curtin graduates ‘agreed’ (either SA or A) that theu were satisfied; only 75% of Curtin undergrads agreed. And, on average, these undergrads scored the unit 10% lower on all 12 items. In other words, even with caveats about sample size, response rate and so on (caveats that rarely matter for internal management in any case), we get a face-value difference that is somewhat troubling.

The only reasonable conclusion I can draw from this is that the STUDENTS, not the curriculum or teaching, explain the difference. Curtin undergrads had a class *as well as* all the online work and thus can be assumed to have had a richer / better teaching experience of the same content. Yet they were less satisfied. I conclude that the most likely reason for this is that, on the whole, Curtin undergrads have a more teacher-centric approach to their studies and thus an authentic, challenging learning experience is not as satisfying for them because it does not fit their expectations.

How do I arrive at this conclusion? Well, digging deeper into the data, Curtin undergraduates were notably more like to agree that they had made best use of the learning experiences (+7% from average) and were more likely to agree they thought about how best to study (slightly more than OUA; a lot more than graduate students). Graduate students and OUA students had lower scores on these self-rating items. I draw the inference that Curtin undergraduates *believe* they are studying well and perceive the difficulties to be the teacher’s fault (they are not taking responsibility for their learning as much as the others); OUA and, especially, graduate students are actually studying well, but take more responsibility for problems, thinking it is their fault. They are therefore more likely to be satisfied with a unit (even if they don’t make as much of it as they could) which challenges them to be responsible for what they are learning.

Let’s also look at the item on feedback: we know feedback is the most troublesome area in all student evaluations and usally the source of the worst scores on Evaluate. Remember that, in this case, all students – across the 3 groups – received exactly the same extensive feedback (including that they had their main assignment marked, commented, suggestions for improvement and then were able to resubmit it with improvements for a better grade). Even the classroom contact would not have materially changed this situation (and might even have allowed for more feedback). Despite this equivalence, Curtin undergraduates rated feedback 19% lower than the other two groups! My interpretation is that students’ responses to the feedback item are not a reflection of the feedback given, but – rather – students’ interpretation of what feedback should be. In other words, because Curtin undergraduates got extensive and helpful feedback which required them to do more (so as to learn and improve), they actually believed that was ‘poor’ feedback – because it didn’t fit with their inflated expectation first time around or that the teacher ought to have told them how to do a good job before the assessment and therefore poor performance, leading to critical feedback, is not their fault in the first place.

Finally, let’s look at the key question of motivation (the unit was specifically designed to maximise motivation by giving students responsibility for their learning). Curtin undergraduates varied in their agreement with motivation by 12% – in other words, despite identical approaches to motivating students, the Curtin undergraduates felt themselves to be less motivated. What this suggests (again not surprisingly) is that motivation is correlated with the internal dynamics of the student, and not necessarily amenable to control by what teachers do. Of course, teachers must be focused on motivating students (indeed that is the point of authentic assessment in many cases): but surveys must be used cautiously when assessing the degree to which teachers have achieved that goal since it is, in truth, only possible for students to be motivated when a partnership (rather than a relation of domination and control) is at least approximated.

In conclusion, this unusual situation – 3 different cohorts, all responding in significant numbers to the same survey, on the same unit, with all variables pretty much the same except for cohort membership – shows the challenge of Evaluate and similar surveys. They do a good job of assessing student perceptions of teaching and learning. With some fine analysis they can also suggest ways of managing those perceptions for the better. But what they cannot do is substitute student perceptions for measures or evaluations of actual quality.

Disclaimer: This analysis is not a rigorous statistical reading of the data. That task is, in fact, impossible because of the way it is collected and presented and, moreover, would require different items to be asked in the first place. It may not be statistically significant that these variations emerge but, that said, it does on the face of it, make me suspect that there is a major difference between the purported measurement and the actual measurement goals. Furthermore, since the survey results are used for management purposes with little regard to good statistical practice, I am playing by the same rules as those who require the surveys of is

I recently answered an email from a colleague asking for advice about wikis, especially in the face of his university’s (inevitable) suspicion about anything that is not authorised, locked-down, served from the campus and generally (IMO) unusable for agile teaching and learning. I thought I would share an edited version of my views, since it neatly captures some of what I’ve been thinking about as part of my ALTC project on Web 2.0 and online learning.

Agile teaching: responding to needs and concerns in the learning design of students’ experiences, activities and tasks which takes account of current events, new technologies in ways that institutionalised curriculum design and enterprise technology practices can’t cope with because they are too structured, clumsy and slow-moving. Agile teaching implies agility of mind as well as design and technology – it’s being playful, picking up and putting down, making limited and short-term commitments to particular ways of teaching and content, on the basis that it’s more fun, more engaging and ultimately more realistic as an educator and thinker to be moving forward, not circling the bureaucratic wagons

 

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Yes, we use wikis in our teaching, in two ways. First, some of the students naturally set up wikis to work on collaborative projects or similar without us telling them to – we leave that up to them! They also use other technologies, such as Ning and similar networking sites/services and, of course, simpler forms of communication and collaboration. Wikis perhaps are suited only to some kinds of people for this task?

Second, we run a unit of study in which students are required to author their first assignment in a wiki – but not collaboratively (they look at others, but don’t edit). Then, their second main assignment – a group report – must be online and while we provided an alternative publishing space (openzine.com) they didn’t like it and so all, I think, ended up using a wiki. This year (semester 2) we will require them to use a wiki. Elaine Tay and I have written a paper about this unit and how we use wikis – currently about ready for submission for publication. Briefly, we concluded, it’s not the wiki itself, but the social affordances of groupwork that are the most important learning design consideration: wikis are too open a technology to really constrain or require a form of collaboration unless you create the social context for it. Note that an unexpected outcome was that students benefited from seeing each other’s individual work and, as far as we can tell, there was no great worry about it. Some ideas about this were presented to the Teaching Learning Forum in Perth this year.

I should add – we also used to use a wiki as the place where students doing a whole-of-group collaborative project on virtual communities would create and publish their material. We used a wiki like this in the mid-2000s and it has been a great success though, recently, as numbers have grown (that unit now has 100+ students online), it has not worked as well and we’ve changed our thinking (see below re the online conference). What we loved about this wiki environment is the way it challenged the students to imagine the form and structure of the collaborative presentation, not just the content. It enabled task division – some people did more design work, others more content work. It also promoted a sense of student ownership – what made this task authentic was the students’ own taking of responsibility in the snowfield of the blank wiki!

So, in short, you can and in some cases should use wikis in teaching. I think the most important affordances of wikis are as follows.

• The fact that the process of creating and editing wiki pages is relatively simple, and yet produces a shared resource, makes this software a very powerful tool for managing knowledge work within a group whose abilities and knowledge of the content of the site varies as much as their technical skill.
• Wikis permit (and even promote) collaborative individualism. Traditional cooperative publishing activities tend to require a lot of discussion of what to change and how to do it, before you actually make changes, create content etc. Wikis allow individuals to jump in and work relatively safely and the collaboration – the forming of the group happens in the process of editing and developing the content.
• Plus, at a very simple level, a wiki rapidly allows us to get material online, shared, reading and writing and thinking about audiences – whether all the other students or (preferably) a real audience of web users

If you look at http://www.wikimatrix.org/ you will see a listing of 100s of wiki engines and sites. Some would need to be installed and run from a server (think mediawiki for example), others are hosted (like pbwiki). I’ve not looked at a lot of them in detail recently but have been using http://wikidot.com – this is free, but with ads and some restrictions. It’s cheap to buy a license however. Personally I like it, but my colleagues think I am nuts! They tend to go with pbwiki, now available via http://pbworks.com/ but the cost is an issue. Just had a quick play with wikimatrix and I suspect you will find better free solutions. The key reason to pay money is to get finegrain control over access / publicness etc and/or lose the adverts. I doubt size is an issue that would make you pay money.

A recent interesting development which might work for a small group (since I am unsure how stable it is) would be http://www.springnote.com. The beauty of springnote is that it wraps up a wiki approach in a metaphor (the notebook) and some visual clues. It’s primarily aimed at private (eg not publicly accessible) work by individuals OR groups Or both in the same space. But it can be exported to a public site. I’d caution against using it with more than 10-20 students at first, and you should download / backup regularly. I discussed Springnote recently at the University of NSW:

Part of the problem with wikis is that they are highly unstructured and can be challenging to manage in terms of access / revision etc. It was a 3-week online conference, students submitting 2000 word papers in 1 of 4 streams (after major assistance with improving the papers). Students then read papers, commented and replied to comments on their own papers. We used WordPress (a blogging engine but which actually is more like a content management system these days) installed on a server I pay for in the US. It worked absolutely fine – 85-90% of students have said they learned more this way than from normal study mode. Most students were external, but not all. The challenge, though, is to design the learning experience – this approach worked because it was a social event, culturally encoded and built into the assessment, teaching and feedback structure of the unit.

So, in short: wikis work. Choosing a wiki is a personal matter and thank goodness for wikimatrix! Making it work, however, remains an exercise in teaching – that often-forgotten aspect of ‘learning technologies’, ‘the student experience’ and so on. Teaching with a wiki involves careful assessment design, strong encouragement and endorsement of its use and, in the end, a realistic and believable purpose for it. Otherwise students will simply dismiss it as ‘technocrap’.

Update: as evidenced by this report, on unique visitors to FB and Google, industry commentators still don’t get the difference between these two giant net companies. Equally, FB putting realtime search into its environment (acquiring FriendFeed) also doesn’t in any way demonstrate equivalence between the two. Both reflect a relatively simplistic understanding of the net as a place for searching and for getting lots of visitors. (Think, for example, of google search is embedded inside many applications and services – Google doesn’t need people to go to its hompage!)

Ultimately, reflecting on some twitter comments (thanks @baym and @amuir_netecol) from my last post , I am drawn to the comparison between Facebook as the massive department store within which all wants and desires are collected, strucutured and offered: some of the ‘departments’ are franchises, essentially leased from the main store, others are owned by the store. Just like department stores are designed to lure customers in, and make it hard to leave, with astute physical environments that prevent ‘walk through’, so too Facebook acquires as much of a user’s attention as possible and then distributes it across several applications, engagements and the like. While much of what is there is equivalent to each other, there is also a lot of care taken to avoid direct competition inside the store – there is one shoe department, not 10. Google is like a bazaar or marketplace in which there are numerous identical stalls and services all being offered at once, in a rowdy, complex way, built into the fabric of the town or city.

These are neither better or worse models for online living (though I know which I prefer personally): but they are very different, non-competing modes of online exploitation. Perhaps then it isn’t ever a question of Google vs Facebook: it’s another sign of the divergence in media models (channels, brands, etc) when they fall into the formless, malleable world of the Internet.

I commented recently on Twitter that Facebook = the new AOL and, not surprisingly, then discovered that many others (e.g. Kottke.org had already had my apparently novel insight! (This effect can either deflate one’s confidence or increase it – I am not the first, but I am as wise as the crowd – some examples from the crowd thanks to googlesearch). And, clearly, Facebook is trying to create an experience of online life / augmented reality / social and cognitive networking that stands apart from, or is potentially isolated from the ‘web’ within which Facebook exists – though it claims to be embedding itself into the web, of becoming a sort of underlying social networking of people, data and places throughout the web, I actually see the plan as one to enable its users to never leave the facebook environment except when prompted to do so by something in facebook, and then be returned to facebook. So, in this model of online behaviour, Facebook users would look out over the low walls of the garden and observe interesting things elsewhere in the jungle of the net; would at times scurry out into that jungle, but otherwise would remain safely inside the habitat of Facebook. As Siliconbeat reports, Google should be worried about this new wave of Facebook’s expansion of the way it will encompass online behaviours into a single space: communities that serve Facebook.

There’s a real sense of imperialism about Facebook. Sure we worry about the approach to privacy (see Raynes-Goldie, First Monday and the casual manner in which Facebook treats its users, by changing rules on them, making them feel (and indeed be) disconnected from their data bodies. But what worries me more, at this stage, is how Facebook is attempting to exploit more and more of the Internet for its marketing purposes (through the ‘like’ function, and by embedding internet affordances into its environment) and to claim that what matters in information acquisition and production is what is liked, or networked, between its users. (note too – Facebook acts as if everyone online is a Facebook user – a lot of them just don’t know it yet). So the challenge we face in responding to Facebook and its extraordinary (and network-effect growing) power is not how Facebook works in its own terms (after all, one can opt out, to some extent, if you don’t like it), but how it acquisitively eyes the Internet as the source of the raw informational material which it needs to sustain itself.

Google has an equally imperial view of information – witness the book digitisation issue, the constant acquisition of individual online behavioural data. What I find interesting to consider, though, is the difference between how these two behemoths of the online world approach their activities. Google achieves its empire (an empire of mind and data) by networking diverse nodes together – there is, really, no one place where Google ‘is’ and can be found / managed or located. Googlemaps tells us that Google is everyone and nowhere all at once. Note how Facebook is absolutely locatable – it’s all about what happens inside that Facebook environment (content brought into that space); Google is all about what happens everywhere else (but monitored by Google). And, while Google ‘profiles’ us when we sign up for its services (and even when we don’t), there is one key component of most online activities which we don’t find through Google – the public profile. Google is, truly, ‘faceless’ book – except that your face is very clear to google, if you choose to embrace its multitude of data services.

Facebook, then, strikes me as the inheritor of Yahoo!’s location in the web-world of the 2000s – a place for ‘us’ to form networks; the networks are a consequence of accepting what we give up when we use Facebook. Google is the service where the network is t he starting point: the network of data, the networking of us within the infoverse of the Internet. While Facebook might be viewed as a force for the enclosure of the net, as a company that seeks control (and market profitability) through a very explicit presence, an overlording curator of those within its domain, Google – equally potent – disperses itself throughout the Internet; invisibility, implicitness and distributed power work for this company.

Since both of them are searching, in the end, for revenue streams from advertising , Facebook and Google compete (though Facebook is far less pervasive, less successful in those terms). But the competition is not just for ‘who wins the most revenue’: like most deep struggles within capitalism, Facebook and Google are engaged in a kind of ideological struggle to define the Internet in ways which (in the minds of users) will constrain and shape the Internet’s future. So, in years to come, will the Internet be – largely – seen and used inside the low walls of Facebook’s crowded gardens? Or will it be itself the garden, and Google a kind of viral thread interwoven with its every use?

Following my presentations on the ‘top 10′ web 2.0 applications for learning which exist in the real world of the Internet, I have started to develop a model of knowledge networking which allows us to understand how the contemporary web (a better description now that Web 2.0?) serves to enable knowledge networks, and how those networks might exist within the complex digital ecology of the Internet. These ideas are still under development.

In 2009, I argued that learning was a special case of knowledge work and, that as all knowledge work becomes, or tends towards, being knowledge networking, so too learning changes in its character (regardless of whether students and teachers actively engage with such a change). In doing so, I claimed that knowledge work is best understood in quite simple terms (at least initially), as involving the classic input – process – output model which has dominated information sciences and systems research for many years. I don’t doubt that knowledge is far more complex than this model at first suggests (see Allen and Long, 2009). But, the complexity cannot be ‘explained’ by making the model appear more sophisticated, for the complexity comes from the social conditions within which knowledge work occurs. Therefore, superficially, we might as well continue to think in terms of knowledge work being done within the input-process-output circuit, and just remember that every output is an input (and vice versa) and processing is also continuous, influencing how information even comes to be considered as inputs and outputs.

To gain more understanding, however, and to emphasise the way that the Internet promotes distributed and collaborative knowledge work (why it is networking, not just working), I want to now model knowledge networking in the contemporary Internet in slightly different terms, though the relationship to input-process-output should be obvious. I identify four crucial elements which, collectively and interactively, generate the system of knowledge work conducted through and for the web; in doing so, I hope to provide a better way of thinking about the purpose and possible application to elearning of the entire system.

First, we can identify online behaviours and web services that work as information pumps: these pumps draw on the apparently infiinte (though actually limited) reservoirs of information within and around the web and then circulate the information with various degrees of filtering, flavouring, and transformation through many different channels and pipes. Note that information pumping involves both humans and computers. Some examples of the web services that might naturally appear as information pumps can be found at Newsmap, or at Evri; but do not think that it is the ‘sites’ alone that are the pumps. Delicious also serves as an information pump, distributing the work between its users and the systems maintaining the lists of tagged links. Pumps can either be sites that are visited (such as the innovative new instance of Cuil, Cpedia ; or they can be feeds (primarily RSS) from sites, gathered and analysed in various ways and presented to users (see RSS Voyage for an elegant version; and many different variations thereof.

Second, we can observe that many web services entice and require uses to engage in the manipulation, creation, re-expression or other forms of cognition using the service as a partner in these activities. Thus, the second element of knowledge networking online is the existence and use of cognition engines: these engines – fuelled in part by the information pumps – work with users to ‘do’ the knowledge work. There is an incredible variety of cognition engines, from complex and highly structured (Cohere for example), to deceptively open and simple (wikis would serve as these kinds of engines – a current personal favourite is Springnote, with its elegant notebook metaphor). Engines can involve innovative creative activity (making simple movies from text at xtranormal; the delights and frustrations of Prezi) or some traditional cognitive forms – the visualisations that can be made at Manyeyes for example, or mindmapping as at Bubbl.us. Cognition engines can promote reflection, too – like a personal current favourite Betterme

Cognition engines often contain significant affordances for collaboration: yet we can also see that many web services are specifically designed for the kinds of collaborative endeavour, which generates the third key element in the knowledge networking system: social environments. Ranging from loose social networking utilities (Ning), to detailed groupwork systems (Wiggio), but also including real-time interaction channels, such as the simple Tinychat conference room system or more sophisticated systems like Elluminate, these environments establish an array of spaces, mediated by technologies, within which people can act socially in knowledge work.

The fourth and final element discernable within the contemporary web as a knowledge work system is the publication outlet.

In conclusion, then, we can say that the knowledge networking dynamics of the web involve distributed, conjoint action by humans and computers through web services which serve as information pumps, cognition engines, social environments and publication outlets. But, to be clear, it is not the case that each web site we encounter online serves for just one of these dynamic elements. Indeed, most web services include a combination of features which means they serve as all four elements at once, whether closely coupled (as for example in facebook), or more loosely. That said, individual users, as they form and participate in networks of knowledge, traverse several sites, use many services, to carve out from the available opportunities their own particular kinds of knowledge networks. Let me finish by providing two examples: one that is contained largely within a single service; and one that spans several.

Diigo, a bookmarking, collaborative research and web annotation service, is a clear example of how one single website can host services and permit user behaviours that constitute an entire knowledge network. Diigo pumps information (both from the web and within its own system), with a significant degree of filtering and enrichment by users; in the work of organising, analysing and reframing information, it serves as a cognitive engine; yet, since many people are engaged in that task – often in well-defined and purposive groups – it is a social environment as well; finally, the results of this knowledge work can become public, so Diigo serves also as an outlet, with an audience, for publication.

Yet, knowledge work systems can span several services and sites as well. RSS feeds found and managed through Feedmil can push information into a cognition engine involving Listphile: the cognitive work here is to array and manage individual items within a pretermined list form; and, while listphile is itself a social environment, the collaborators using it choose Wiggio as the locus of many of their active collaborative endeavours. Finally, the list – while available in Listphile for public consumption – is pushed to the world as embedded code within a blogging-based website linked to Twitter, using Tumblr. Note that, in this example, the Tumblr site is itself also serving as a cognition engine at times; the listphile service involves collaboration, social action and a degree of publication, but that the specific knowledge network formed emphasises specific uses for these services within the model I am outlining.

Ultimately, the contemporary web demonstrates the fluidity and agility of the so-called Web 2.0 approach – data and human endeavour is no longer necessarily concentrated at specific places and times, in forms that are unique or limited in their re-usability. Within such a web, many forms and examples of knowledge networking, using countless varieties of applications, will occur. But, in general terms, I would argue that all knowledge networking involves the collective activation of the four distinct elements I outline – information pumps, cognition engines, social environments, and publication outlets. Higher education must learn to imagine and build its own knowledge networks that draw on this model, and on the many excellent services for knowledge work available on the web.