Spatial considerations

One of the issues that drove my choice of a PhD topic, and steered the way I thought about how social interactions work, was the way existing online learning systems tend to create social spaces. It's starting to change, but for a long time online learning systems kept the social aspects separate from the rest of students' learning. Even the innovative tools that linked social interaction with interactive learning tools and materials were still small systems, separate from the vast bulk of a student's online learning. Normally, students would be given a discussion forum attached to each unit of study, and it was hoped that they would use them constructively. There was minimal integration between these spaces and the other online spaces students engaged in. You end up with a space that looks like this:

And what's worse, each unit of study is a separate little mirror of this - so not only are the social spaces separate from the course material and other activities, they are also separate from each other - a conversation in one Unit of Study cannot be linked to a conversation in another unit; and when the semester ends, the units end, and the conversations are archived or deleted. It's little wonder motivation has to be drummed up by teachers, and the common solution is to make the forums compulsory.

My approach will be a bit different. Rather than creating stand-alone social tools, the goal is to embed them throughout the curriculum, so that wherever students are, there are social tools available for collaboration and interaction with peers. The above diagram becomes a little more like this:

-- each page has a little bit of interactivity attached; students socialize where the content is, not in specially constructed separate spaces. Furthermore, those slices of interaction can be linked up in other places as well - a student's profile page will contain an activity stream of their interactions across the curriculum; and student group pages can also contain activity streams of members.

The thought behind this is that by reducing the barriers to participation - if collaboration is only a matter of clicking or typing on a page the student is already visiting, there is hardly any effort at all to join in - students will be more likely to collaborate of their own accord.

Presenting my research

I presented my work to a range of folks at the weekly CoCo seminar last Wednesday, and was very happy with how it went. I received some great feedback from the folks present, and felt very encouraged. The recording should be online soon, here.

Some of the issues raised were:

• timing: it was mentioned that it was still early days, and I shouldn't be surprised at the lack of uptake. Also, that I should take into account how my releases interact with existing timetables (are students on break, or busy with exams? Will starting afresh with a new batch of first years next year mean I have a new cohort with a fresh perspective?)
• finding a champion: rather than promoting the system myself, would it be possible to find a student (or students) who might promote the project among their peers? Could the students' society perform this function?
• other studies: Karen mentioned a range of other studies she has read about that deal with similar situations - using social networking tools in medical education.

It was a very friendly, positive session, and I was very grateful for the constructive and helpful attitudes of all present.I've got a good amount of food for thought - I'll have to listen to the recording myself, and make notes on what followup actions I need to take.

Thoughts on Design Research

I had a very interesting discussion with my supervisor about Design Research today. He pointed out what should have been a bit more obvious to me than it was; that the problems I'm facing are kind of inherent in my methodology, Design Research.

Design Research is one of the various flavours of Design-Based-Research (a good taxonomy of the various kinds of DBR is given in Wang & Hannafin (2005)). What I'm doing seems to be a bit unusual, in that most DBR seems to be conducted in a setting where the participants have to participate - it's in their classroom, or they have been signed up to participate for some other reason. Not participating in the research has to be done actively - the participants don't just have the option of ignoring the research, they actually need to refuse. In my study, I'm providing tools in a system the students are using, but they don't have to use my tools.  I haven't found anything in the literature about Design Based Research under these conditions. I'll need to conduct a more exhaustive study, to see how other researchers have tackled this problem. Another difference from traditional DBR is that the teachers aren't pushing it; the teachers don't even see my system, and aren't out there in lectures encouraging students to use it, so I'm missing the Teaching Presence component of the Community of Inquiry framework (a model that attempts to explain the success of failure of online learning communities, introduced by  Garrison, Anderson, & Archer (1999)). Part of what I was hoping to do was show that these systems can work well without the Teaching Presence component, if designed well enough, and if the barriers to usage were low enough.

My study is meant to be based around analyzing the usage of the system in order to improve it. My current situation, however, is that I'm getting very little data (and what there is seems to be indicative of students exploring a system to see what they can get out of it). This means I have nothing on which to base judgements about useful functionality. So, it seems I have two choices (I was loosely aware of this, but today's discussion clarified it):

1. Keep trying to improve the design, until it gets good enough that students want to use it.
2. Promote it to students (perhaps with bulletins, or a visit to the lecture, where I can give a ten minute intro to the system, and encourage them to use it). 

Option 1 is risky - I run the risk of the students just not choosing to use the system. Option 2 means injecting some Teaching Presence into the experiment, which I'm not sure I'm ready to do yet.

Social networks (rather obviously) are built around network effects. In other words, the usage of a social networking tool depends more on whether other people you know are using the system, than on the qualities of the system itself. I don't use Facebook because it's the social network with the best set of features (it probably isn't); I use it because my friends and family are using it. The reason I almost never use Google+ because pretty much no-one I know uses it (I visit it once a month or so for my good friend Evelyn's excellent rants). To kick-start the use of my network, I need to get some initial usage going, and then not only will I be able to improve it based on analysis of that usage, but that initial set of users will draw others in. Of course, I'll have problems separating out the two effects - the snowball vs. the improved interface - but that's the kind of problem it would be good to have.

One last possibility is that the current cohorts see this as something that isn't much use to them; they survived perfectly well before it was introduced, and therefore don't have any real drive to explore it. There's the potential that next year's incoming first years might take it up to a greater extent, since as far as they're concerned, it's just another part of the system, and it has always been there.

So, where to from here. Firstly, some more thinking about this situation - even without much usage, I might be able to pull together a perfectly decent thesis about the methodological issues of DBR in this unusual context. Certainly, I need to delve more deeply into the literature to see who has tried DBR in similar contexts, and how they handled it. Perhaps even into literature around software development, and how usage of software takes off - what is more effective: having the best software, or having the best publicity?

References:
Garrison, DR, Anderson, T & Archer, W 1999, ‘Critical Inquiry in a Text-Based Environment: Computer Conferencing in Higher Education’, The Internet and Higher Education, vol. 2, no. 2-3, pp. 87–105.
Wang, F & Hannafin, MJ 2005, ‘Design-based research and technology-enhanced learning environments’, Educational Technology Research and Development, vol. 53, no. 4, pp. 5–23.

Presenting my work

I'm learning that actual research is only half the job of being a researcher. The other half is explaining what you've found to others - in publications, conferences, seminars, and so on. Research doesn't magically disseminate; it's the researcher's job to push it out into the world, and make people take notice. The most successful researchers aren't necessarily those with the best ideas - you need to be able to convince others of the ideas as well.

As part of my PhD, I have to present my work. I have to present it at least twice at conference-type settings (including the research student conferences within the Faculty). I'm also expected to present once or twice in the CoCo seminar series, which is the seminars being given within the research group I'm studying in.

I presented this year in June at the research student conference. It was good - I wasn't yet in The Rut, and it was good to talk about my work to other students (and a couple of staff). I had my usual public speaking nerves, but nothing too much. My next presentation is at the CoCo seminar, and I'm wondering how I'll approach it. I don't want to give the same presentation, since the audience is different. These folks are all very smart, and are experts in the areas around my subject area. I'll need to present some of my data (what little there is), and what I'm doing, but apart from that I've got a lot of options:

• Focus on social networking
• Focus on Design Research
• Focus on design
• Focus on my data
• Give a broad overview, and skip details

It's a tricky set of choices. I should be approaching it as a way of getting good feedback, and therefore exposing all my weaknesses; but as a PhD student, I've got a reasonably strong dose of Imposter Syndrome (heh, I just had a quick read of that wikipedia entry, and it actually says "It is commonly associated with academics and is widely found among graduate students"), and in the annoying recesses at the back of my brain, I'm worried they'll tar and feather me and run me out on a rail. I know it won't be that bad, and folks there will be supportive, so in a way I'm also looking forward to it.

Oh well, I'd better start working on my slides...

The Rut

Things have been progressing a lot more slowly over the last month- two months ago I wrote with all the excitement of a giddy teenager's first crush about productivity. I'm now experiencing the flip side of that - full cognizance of my lack of productivity. Having a weekly schedule of what I need to do means I'm much more aware of what I'm not doing.

In a sense, I'm not too worried (though maybe that's a symptom of my malaise). I know what is causing this rut:

1. Work-related stress: my new role at work means I'm learning a lot of new things, and management makes me feel like I'm failing a lot. The annoying thing is that I don't think they'd satisfied regardless of my actual performance; it's just that their motivational method is to tell you you're not performing well. Sadly, that's almost the ideal way to make me feel awful all the time. It's exhausting, and I've felt ill for most of the last three months because of it.
2. The lack of uptake my students of my system:
   that's right, no posts for four weeks. The download graph is a little less depressing, but not much.
3. Oddly enough, my annual progress review (about a month ago). It felt good as I did it, as my productivity systems were working well, and I could report that I was making good progress. In actuality, I am making good progress; I'm the equivalent if 1.1 years into a 3-4 year PhD, and I'm gathering data, I've passed my Thesis Proposal, completed ethics etc. Technically, that's good progress. It just doesn't feel that way
   

So, it feels like I'm in what The Thesis Whisperer calls the Valley of Shit. I seem to be struggling my way out (I've had two productive evenings of the last four, and I'm PhD blogging for the first time in a month, even if it is just a giant whinge). I've got better data analysis happening (though I'm way behind where I'd hoped to be). Hopefully, I'll be posting here in another week. I've got to go and plan the next release of my software.

Data analysis: trickier than you'd expect

Well, at least it's trickier than you'd expect if you expected it to be easier than it ought to be.

Now that I'm gathering data, I'm starting to look at ways to analyze it. My first attempt has been to take some off-the-shelf tools to try to see how students are moving through the website. I've got a nice pile of data to look at (535 megabytes of BZip2 compressed log data), so I decided to analyze a day's work of logs using Statviz. I've come to a couple of conclusions:

1. I need to put a lot more work into data cleaning and massaging before I'll get useful results out of this data. There is just too much noise in these logs to give useful output
2. I need a faster machine! I set Statviz running on my PhD machine, and gave up three days later when it just kept processing. I started up a run on another, much faster machine in the house, and took over 24 hours, but it eventually came up with a result.

This was just one day's results - in other words, the website is generating log files faster than I waill be able to process them. On the bright side, the entirety of the log data isn't my primary concern - it's the usage patterns of the social tools that concern me, which will involve a smaller subset of the log files, and contents of databases.

As an example, here's one of the graphs generated from the log files:

It's substantially shrunk down from the original, which is 49680 by 6460 pixels in size.

First analysis

I'm still not sitting on a vast pile of data, but I've done my first bit on analysis on my log file data, and it mostly showed me what I was expecting. I had put the link to upload resources on a page that I thought was rarely visited. My analysis shows that this page is in fact visited 3% as often as the other page I could have put the upload link on.

Compass, the Curriculum Management System/Virtual Learning Environment that I'm adding these social tools into, is built around two main objects: the Teaching Activity and the Learning Objective. It is a searchable database of those two things, and the linkages between them - around 2,000 of each are in the database. It also holds learning resources, provided by the teachers, which are linked to the Teaching Activities. Part of the idea behind my project was to add prominence to the Learning Objectives, by linking the student resources to them.

The problem was that I did the logical thing, by adding the "upload resource" button onto the Learning Objective pages. The students currently have no need to visit these pages, since the key parts of the Learning Objectives are displayed on the page of the Teaching Activities they are linked to. The predictable result was that almost no students discovered the Add Resource button. In fact, it was predictable enough that I pointed it out as the second requirement for a successful social network for learning in my first post on this blog. Oops.

I've now finished most of the coding to add the tools onto a range of more high-profile web pages within Compass. The coming weeks will show whether that makes any difference. In the longer term, I'll be adding even higher profile links, such as an Activity Stream of the latest uploaded resources on the portal page for the web site. I'm expecting each new tool will add to the amount of utilization my network receives.

Data!

Things are starting to get a little bit interesting - I've finally got some data! Not a lot - in fact very little - but it's better than where I was a few weeks back, when I launched my software to deafening silence.

My social network now contains three posts, and two students have sent through feedback. Still disappointing, but to be expected. I'm now working towards the release of phase two of the software, which I plan to roll out this coming Friday. It contains a few bugfixes and cleanups, but mainly it's making the social tools visible in more places across the site, to encourage participation. I would have liked to have put more changes into this upcoming release, or to have released it sooner, but I've had about six weeks of illness - depression, stomach bugs, and now a cold - which have deep sixed by productivity. But overall, things are looking up.

Productivity

I've been working on productivity a lot this year - step by step, incremental improvements to the way I run my life, with the aim of becoming more productive. I've been actually considering setting up a separate blog about it - it's been a big thing for me this year. Over the last few years - since starting my PhD, and even before that, I've been trying to work out ways around my laziness and torpor. I'm not one of those people who feel a natural urge to be doing productive things all the time - I'm happiest in front of a TV and computer, playing games, reading, and/or watching comedies and shonky horror films. Planning has never been my forte, nor has systematically working towards a goal.

This all needs to change. After various experiments over the years, I've found some things that work:

1. Remember The Milk. It's just a to-do list, really, but it's got a number of features that make it more effective than any other to-do list I've used. It was good web and mobile clients, so it's everywhere I am. It lets me set dates and categorize things. So, everything in my to-do list is set to happen at a certain time, so each day, I know I can't really rest until I've done everything I need to. I'm using it for work, study, and in my personal life, and in all three, I feel my productivity has significantly increased.
2. Weekly PhD planning - each week, I schedule what work I need to do each day - whether it's software development, reading, data analysis, etc. I set a minimum standard for what comprises a successfully completed task. This means I no longer have the luxury of thinking "hmmm, PhD night or TV night?" when I've put the kids to bed and dealt with everything - if there's something on my list, it needs to be done. Remember the Milk is where this to-do list lives.
3. "Leads to follow up" - a PhD involves gathering vast amounts of information about a subject area, and trying to ingest it. You're learning a huge pile of new skills and concepts. Every day, you hear about new things that you ought to look into to see if they're relevant. Early on, I would try to remember them, and hope they didn't slip away. I didn't remember, and they did slip away. My solution is Evernote - a folder called "Leads to follow up" contains anything that might be important. Also, a repeating task in RTM to follow up a lead every few days. Currently there are 70 items sitting in my leads to follow up notebook, and 41 in my "Leads - followed" list. It's really handy, and also helps prevent distraction - if I find something useful thread of info while working on something else, I can just pop it into the Leads notebook, and get back to what I'm doing.
4. Evernote in general - I set up my Evernote account a couple of years ago, but I'm finding it more and more useful as I go along. Recently I started using the "todo" system in there - If I make a note that requires a followup action, I put that little checkbox in there. I can then run a search, for "todo:false", and find all the things in evernote that need doing, and follow up on them. Fantastic for ensuring I do things I've promised in meetings.
5. Triaging. I schedule in several sessions each week, to make sure things are in the right lists. The "leads to follow up" notebook is one example, but there are more - I schedule in a weekly session of searching through evernote for todos, and put them into RTM, so they get done. I also go through my email, to move things into RTM and other places.

That's where I'm at now, but after years of failed efforts to improve productivity,  I now have some velocity, and want to keep improving. The aim is to get to a point where

• The things I say I'll do, I actually get done
• I don't have a backlog of things that are overdue, but instead am tackling things in advance
• When I'm not working on things on my list, I don't feel guilty about that nebulous pile of stuff to do

That last one was a doozy in my undergrad degree - during those years, I always felt bad when I wasn't studying. It wasn't until three or four years after I graduated that I read a fiction book, so ingrained was that feeling that I ought to be working on something serious. I wasn't productive at all; I just spent all my time feeling bad about it, and not properly enjoying my leisure time. This time around, I'm changing things.

There are a bunch of next steps in this. Firstly, some longer term planning, especially around the PhD. Currently I'm only planning out each week. I've got a few tasks set to recur after four weeks or six weeks, but the bulk of my planning is short term. I'll be putting together a multi-month plan, probably through to the end of the year, so I can see where I'm going, and give some larger structure to my work. I want to play around with the pomodoro technique - especially once I start writing. I've heard good reports from many smart, productive people. I need to find a way to get a big picture of my literature review - mind mapping, maybe? Mind maps irritate the hell out of me, but I need to find some way of getting that high-level view and drilling down. There's a lot more room for improvement, but the great thing is that I'm making progress.

Types of social network

One thing I'm thinking about at the moment is how I'll structure the first version of the social network I'm building. Social networks come in a lot of flavours, from the messy, real-world face to face social networks that we all live in, to online discussion forums, where people meet to chat about things, to the more formally structured Social Networking Sites, where people make explicit links between each other. I'm most interested, from a research perspective, in the explicit social networking site in the context of a virtual learning environment; but even then, there are a lot of choices in how to develop the site:

1. Is it a "pure" social network, where the interaction and linking between people is the primary purpose - Facebook feels a bit this way (though it has a lot of other features, mostly people just post statuses and photos, and their friends like and comment on them), and this seemed to be what Orkut was mainly about, at least in the early days (I'm not Brazilian, so I haven't been to Orkut in years). Or is it some other site with a social network built around it - like Flickr, or Tumblr, which are mostly about photo and video sharing, but have the ability to connect to other users in order to keep up with what they are posting?
   My initial plan is that I'll be developing a resource-centric social network. Probably the major reason for this is that I want my participants to have a reason to use the system. They are students at a major University, all in the same course, and so they already have a strong social network among themselves; giving them a pure social network just replicates what they already have in Facebook. The other main reason is that I'm aiming for this to be a social network for learning - making it resource-centric means that they will be sharing learning resources that they have created or discovered.
2. What is the structure of the network? Here I'm talking graph theory - not this kind of graph:
   
   but this kind:
   
   Imagine each of those dots is a person, and the lines are connections between them. Does a link need to be agreed upon by both parties (as in Facebook), or can it be initiated by only one party (as on Twitter) - ie. will the graph be directed or undirected? Do the links have additional properties (as in Google+'s Circle feature; or Facebook's ability to make certain links as being family or spouse)? How many links do we expect a typical user to have, and is there a limit (Facebook allows a maximum of 5000 friends; Twitter and Google+ are unlimited) - ie. what are the typical and maximum outdegrees of the network?
3. What does a connection mean? Does making a connection to another person in the network imply they are a "friend" or a "study partner", or is it more an "I'm interested in what you're posting"? How I name and manage the linking function will suggest to users what is meant by it, and hence affect the way the network is used - people will react differently if they're "following" someone's posts, as opposed to if they're declaring them a "bff", even if the functionality exposed it identical.
4. What kinds things can be posted into the network? Is it plain text, (à la Twitter), or is it a multimedia extravaganza (à la Tumblr)? Does each post lead to a discussion (Facebook), or can it only be liked or re-shared (Twitter, Tumblr) and replies need to be posted in the replier's own posting stream?
5. How are posts rated by other members - are only positives allowed (Facebook "like"s, Twitter "favourites"), or are negative ratings also allowed (Youtube's like/dislike, Slashdot's moderation tools)? What do the ratings mean? Do they have additional properties (Slashdot's "Funny", "Informative", etc. ratings)?
6. What are the posts attached to - are they attached to a person (Facebook's statuses and walls), or are they attached to some other things (eg. Facebook's groups, Flickr's Sets, Tumblr's blogs)?

There are many other more subtle choices that affect how the system is used. So, where to from here?

My objective with the system I'm building and the research I'm doing is to build a social network that students willingly use for learning. I'm lucky in that I have a large cohort of very keen students who, if presented with a sufficiently useful tool, will use it. I'm building this into an existing course in an existing LMS, so it needs to follow the conventions and requirements of those. At this stage, my thoughts are that the most useful thing for students is a resource sharing network - they're all out there finding useful web sites, creating summaries of learning material, and so on, and being able to share these could be very useful. The most obvious way to handle the connections is to allow students to follow other students, so that they can build up a feed of interesting new resources. This means building a directed graph, and that the meaning of a link is of the "interested in your output" kind. It means allowing student to post anything into the network (Tumblr style), since it's impossible to predict what the most useful kinds of resource will be. It means building a rating system to allow constructive criticism and collaborative moderation. And it means using the curriculum as the crux of interaction, in the form of Learning Objectives.

Of course, all of this could change, depending on how the students take to it, and what their actual needs turn out to be. It's very unlikely I'll stumble across the Right Solution first time around - it's much more likely that I'll have to try a number of things, until I find something that the students take to. This kind of research is very context sensitive, and (as shown above) there is a large space of possible social networks, some of which would work very well in other contexts, and a few of which will work in my context; so I'll need to wander around, looking for that local maximum of affordance and functionality.

ICLS 2012

The week before last I went to my first ever international conference: the International Conference of the Learning Sciences.

It was a little less international than could have been wished - it was right here in Sydney, which meant I didn't get to travel anywhere exciting. But it was international in the sense that most people attending were from overseas.

I found it really worthwhile - the theme for the conference was "The Future of Learning", and it really did give an exciting picture of things to come. I've seen demos in the past of the "interactive classroom", but this was the first time I've ever seen things that actually looked like they could be  used in a real classroom - a symposium ("Interactive Surfaces and Spaces: A Learning Sciences Agenda" by Michael A. Evans, Jochen Rick, Michael Horn, Chia Shen, Emma Mercier, James McNaughton, Steve Higgins, Mike Tissenbaum, Michelle Lui, James D. Slotta), showing projects with big touchscreens, projectors, kinect sensing, and others based on iPads, was an amazing glimpse into the near future of learning. Matthew Berland was also a very impressive presenter, and I really enjoyed his talk about using strategic board games to support computational thinking (and was surprised how many people in the room were familiar with Pandemic, the game he was using).

A quiet start

So, I launched my software, Friday a week ago. It hasn't been met with the fanfare I expected, to say the least. I have a grand total of zero posts into the system so far. And 57% of students have consented to be a part of the study (ie. 43% declined to participate). I was disappointed at first, until I thought about why it might be the case.

In my last post I talked about what would make the network a success, and one of the criteria I mentioned was that it needed to be embedded throughout the system. When I look at what I've rolled out, the interfaces I've created are quite visible. But they're on pages that are rarely visited. In fact, the add button, to share a resource into the network, is on one of the least visited pages on the system. Other pages will display the resources once they're there, but the use of the system isn't getting started, because the students haven't found that crucial "add" button. On the bright side, if I do add the buttons in more places, and students actually start using them, then I have some solid evidence to back up my claim that embedding is crucial.

Also, I haven't done a proper job of explaining the new features. I'll put this one down to a rather unpleasant bout of depression and stress I've been in over the last month (work-related, not PhD related), which has meant that I haven't had the emotional energy to communicate. In a lot of ways, talking to the participants (even via a bulletin system) is a lot more emotionally draining than any of the other tasks. Coding can be done in most moods - productivity can be affected, but the quality of the work ends up not too variable. Quality of communications, however, is greatly affected by mood. I assume this is the case for most people, except maybe professional comms people.

So, I guess the plan over the next few weeks is to remedy these teething problems. Luckily, I've got a couple of years for data gathering, so there isn't a huge rush, and a couple of weeks isn't a major setback.

Also, I went to a conference. It was great. I'll write about it another time.

Starting off...

So, for the last few months I've been a week or two away from launching my software, and starting to gather data. It's been rough - my ethics ride was a bumpy one (though from what I hear they mostly are, on your first drive through Ethicsland), and that left me feeling a bit disheartened. The changes that were required weren't that serious, but the emotional effort of going back in to change software that was in my mind "completed" was a bit draining. I took a look at my remaining task list last night, and decided that if I keep focussed, I can launch this coming Friday. So, here's hoping.

I guess since this is my first post to this blog, I should start with a bit of an introduction about what I'm trying to research, and why I'm blogging here. The first part, in case anyone comes along and reads this, and the second part, to try and give myself a picture of why I'm here on Blogger.

My research is on Social Networks in eLearning Systems. There is a lot of research out there on collaborative learning online (see the ijCSCL for a good starting point), and a lot of research out there about social networks and about social networking sites. there is some stuff about bringing the two together, but it seems to be in its infancy. I have a few issues with the way a lot of collaborative learning is done online. It's well known that online collaborative learning can be an excellent way to foster deep learning in a group of students, but it seems that it's really hard to get them to do it. In fact, the standard way to get students to engage in a discussion forum is to give them marks for participating. If you don't mark them on it, they don't do it. So clearly the students don't attach much value to the exercise. They don't (usually) get marked on lecture attendance, or tutorial attendance, but they turn up to those in droves.

Students also use social networking sites to a quite staggering extent (some of them spend several hours each day on them). In a lot of ways, it's just because this is what humans are about - we have a fundamental drive to socialise, to socially groom the members of our tribe. An awful lot of what we do as people comes down to the basic drives: eat, sleep, breed, socialize, work on our status. What they aren't doing (well, not to a large extent) is using these social networks for learning. That seems to be due to a number of reasons, but primarily:

1. Social networks are about socializing, which involves presenting a persona to others. The "studious type" isn't particularly fashionable, so students are presenting a different face to the social networks
2. Students understand that the social networks are very leaky, privacy-wise. Asking a dumb question, or stating something incorrect is risky when it's in writing for all to see. This part of what makes discussion forums daunting, but social networks are even riskier when it's potentially open to the entire world's Google searches (including those of future employers).
3. Facebook isn't "where you go" to study. It would be like studying in a pub or a nightclub - like in meatspace, there are places on the web you go to study, and places you go to hang out with friends.

The aim of my research is to see if the tools of social networking can be successfully embedded in a Virtual Learning Environment (aka. Learning Management System (there are semantic differences, but the one I'm using could be described as either (warning to potential readers: in times past I coded in LISP; my parentheticals nest deeply))). The development group I manage has developed a Curriculum Mapping VLE called Compass, to which I will be adding social networking style tools. Currently my plans are looking more like Tumblr or Flickr, with a twist of Twitter, then they look like Facebook, but it's a work in progress. The network will be embedded throughout, enmeshed with the curriculum. My claim is that the network stands a chance of being useful because it is:

1. Protected -  nothing they do in here will be visible to the wider web. It won't (at this stage) even be visible to staff. This means the risk of being embarrassed by displaying a lack of knowledge is reduced.
2. Embedded - if the social tools are available in the same place as the rest of their learning materials, the effort to engage is dramatically reduced - it's always there in their face. They don't have to make the effort to go to another part of the site to check if anyone has posted anything
3. A space for learning - this is the place they go to learn, so they don't have to switch gears to get into learning mode. The space encourages learning, so their interactions will be in that direction.

My research over the next few years will tell me whether I'm barking up the wrong tree or not.

The second part of what I planned to talk about in this post is why I'm here. Well, I guess I don't really know. I know I want to keep track of my research, and this is intended to be a part of that - so that when I come back in four years' time while writing up my thesis, I have something that tells me why I implemented certain things in certain ways. It's also to give me someone to talk to - my personal place to do some rubber duck problem solving. Let's see how it works.