A few weeks back I signed up for the new service founded by the ex-Pirate Bay folk (notably Peter Sunde). In a nutshell Flattr is a micro-payments that allows you click a designated button on websites signed up with the service, the result being you give the site a share of a monthly total your willing to give away to those you think deserve it. Say your browsing the web and stumble across a new musician's work or a useful tutorial that you think is so good you'd be willing to pay for it, despite it being freely available, then providing you can see the Flattr button on the page and you have an account, you can send money to people you think deserve it.
In many ways it's akin to the "Paypal Donate" button, but with the emphasis being on paying people for services that are technically free but you think are worth a fiscal reward. Users pay a small monthly amount (minimum of €2.00) and then click buttons on sites to share out the money they paid in among those sites. The company takes a small cut on all funds added. It's been referred to as sort of like an Internet tip jar. The more buttons you click in a month the more your monthly total is divided amongst the recipients. You can read the Flattr story here and you can watch a short video of the service below
Flattr are not the only business aiming to extract some value from the social web. Rewrd are also doing similar things, as are Kachingle. What all these services need is to gain some form of critical mass if they want to succeed, which is why I've embedded a Flattr button on this blog. I'm not expecting any money to come in but I am happy to help spread the word. If you want to embed a Flattr button in you Blogger site then I'm happy to recommend this post by Nico Gramlich (it was so good I Flattr'd him for it).
I'm really hoping services like this take off as it seems to be a simple way to reward people for their efforts. I do wonder how long it will be before we start seeing Flattr buttons appear on music blogs and for the copyright police to start rubbing their hands in glee - I guess you'd have to be pretty stupid to give away someone else's intellectual property and then be expected to benefit from it. Wait a minute, that sounds like Rupert Murdoch's Google argument...
On Monday I've been volunteered to present at our media team away day on how best to implement and use various web tools to aid student engagement with module content. I don't have too much time to spare as there are a few other people presenting in the same session, covering things like:
the integration of our community radio station, 107 Spark FM, into our production modules
the development of iPhone/Android applications for learning
the use of social media, like Facebook study groups, Delicious social bookmarking, Twitter hashtags, etc
One of the things the University has been building and implementing over the past 6 months is its own attempt at a social networking site for staff and students, as a riposte to some of the security and privacy concerns that have been associated with delivering educational content across different third-party commercial sites. This is where "My Sunderland"comes in...
We've already had a central launch point for staff and students to locate the types of content they may find useful (ie the original My Sunderland), such as access to the VLE, module catalogues, telephone directories, docushare, etc, but, as has been evidenced from the many staff blogs and study groups across various social media sites the existing provision for actually engaging in a dialogue with students has been pretty clunky or restrictive. In particular, I'm thinking of the "Discussion" tools in WebCT here - the user interface leave a lot to be desired and is hardly intuitive (for staff or students). Student feedback on this issue regularly points out that learners prefer to discuss their module content in more familiar surrounds that are easily navigated, hence the plethora of Facebook groups for many of our modules.
Enter "My Sunderland 2.0"
In January this year, a new beta version of My Sunderland was launched which seeks to offer staff and students a bespoke communication space with all the features and facilities of the earlier space, but now dressed in the guise of a funky Web 2.0 social networking site - think of this as "My Sunderland 2.0". This site offers a lot of interesting feature that were missing from our earlier offerings - we can create blogs/pages/communities around all manner of content, from community events or things happening on campus, to self online modules capable of hosting audio and video content. Best of all, everything that can be created can be given its own privacy setting from the following options, meaning that only the people you want to see the material can see it:
Private (only the creator)
My Friends (only people who have accepted friend requests on the service)
Logged in users (all users of the My Sunderland service)
Public (the entire web)
Community xyz (only group members of specific user created communities)
These are quite powerful privacy options. Many staff find it uncomfortable befriending students on social networking sites like Facebook as there have been many instances of students who have exploited that relationship, either by verbally abusing staff members or abusing the fine line that demarcates the public and private spheres. I'm sure I'm not alone in having been contacted inappropriately by students around assessment time. Of course, it goes both ways. There are many a time I've witnessed students talking about their nocturnal activities or their great feats of alcohol endurance over an assessment period, only to be contacted by them begging for an extension of some kind. Facebook filters are nebulous and often difficult to keep track of, but with these My Sunderland controls only the people you want to see the content are going to get the message(s) you post.
There are several other features that are available, and I'll list a few with a brief description below:
The Wire - this is a status update service akin to Facebook or more appropriately Twitter (140 character limit)
Pages - a homepage which can be used host information and subpages
Communities - create and manage your own communities based around modules, classes, interests, etc.
Blogs - maintain your own personal or committee-specific blog
I'm going to create a few simple screencasts walking people through the basic features and I'll embed the video in an update to this page in a few hours...
Any staff member or student can login into the new My Sunderland space, so go ahead, try it out now.
[UPDATE]
Video walkthroughs of the basic tools and features can be found below. Click through for HD versions with better resolution.
The profile tool
The wire tool
The dashboard tool
The blog tool
The activity tool
The communities tool
Overall, there is a lot of potential here. WebCT is fine for uploading .doc or .ppt files, but for anything else third party solutions have tended to be the order of the day (embedding Slideshare presentations or YouTube videos live in the page). If you wanted to get creative, you really had to know a little bit of HTML or create distinctive spaces within a module space. For instance, the headers and the footers of a folder were editable with HTML with the centre of the page being given over to hosting files, but the pages seemed clunky to use and ugly to look at. Also, a module space could be hard to navigate. By adapting the look and feel of common social media tools My Sunderland 2.0 seems to offer a more customisable and friendly interface to staff with more rudimentary tech skills.
Remember, it's still in the beta phase o there may be bugs that need ironing out still. Let me know what you think
I noticed a tweet by Howard Rheingold today which alerted me to a new study published by the MacArthur Foundation entitled 'Living and Learning with New Media'. The study was headed up by the cultural anthropologist Mizuku Ito, with a number of contributions from Heather Horst Matteo Bittanti, danah boyd, and more (28 in total!). boyd has a variant of her contribution hosted here entitled 'Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life'
The larger project was started back in 2005 with the goal being to gain an understanding of
youth new media practices in the U.S. by engaging in ethnographic research across a diverse range of youth populations, sites, and activities
The study looks at the different media ecologies young people negotiate with on an everyday basis, taking in themes such as intimacy, friendship online, families, gaming and more. It promises to be quite interesting and initial press response has been quite positive in claiming the report should placate worried parents obsessing over the amount of time kids seem to spend using technologies and going online.
The project will culminate in a book to be published by MIT Press (entitled Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out: Living and Learning with New Media) later in the year, but for now there is plenty material to get to grips with.
A short two page summary of the findings can be located here
A 58 page summary white paper can be accessed here
The final report can be found here (handily divided into quick access subsections)
The MacArthur Foundation's press release material can be found here with some video interviews with Ito. I've embedded one below:
This clip below is from June 2007 when the project was in its second year:
The study aims to look at how teenagers are using technology from the perspective of the participants rather than some distanced, academic viewpoint. Any of my students on MAC201 wondering what kind of case studies they should be thinking about for assessment 2, then look no further.
It's been a while since my last post, mainly because I've been back at work preparing for a new semester of teaching (it was Freshers Week last week too) and my upcoming wedding. One of the things that has preoccupied my mind recently has been the issue of innovation in education and how to translate that to student engagement.
I run a large core module for my second students (MAC201 Media Studies 1) which I have modified this year to include an hourly workshop which focuses on helping the students apply what they have learned to an example. I did this mainly because I had a lot of students come see me through the course of last year needing personal tutorials outside of my established office hours and seminar times, effectively doubling my work load, but also because I recognize that not all students are suited to the lecture/seminar/independent study format. A quick show of hands in the workshop on Wednesday revealed most of my students hadn't been to the scheduled screening or read the required reading material.
This isn't in itself unusual. However, there are 180 students on this module and only about 35 turned up for the voluntary session. Now, either this is because 140+ are so confident that they know what they are doing or that the 35 that turned up were those with doubts and were seeking clarification, or that it can be difficult to engage students in the first week back. Who knows? Despite this, I felt the session went well and next week's session will build on the groundwork covered yesterday.
NB: any students reading this can go to WebCT VIsta/SunSpace and access the additional resources I placed there for you yesterday afternoon
I'm also developing a new module at level 3 (MAC309 Media Studies Special Topic) and I've been thinking about a completely different way to engage students and assess them. I've been taking my inspiration from two people in particular, namely Howard Rheingold at Berkely and Stanford University and Tarleton Gillespie at Cornell University. Rheingold delivers two courses, one in Digital Journalism and the other Virtual Communities/Social Media, and its the way he gets the students to interact with the course and its materials which I think is innovative and advantageous. Both of those courses are powered by Socialtext wiki software, and require students to actively participate in their own learning by keeping a blog and a personal wiki which is assessed at the end of the term (along with other modes of assessment too).
What is impressive about this model of engagement is that it encourages the students to take owenership of their own learning and evidence it on a week by week basis, with plenty self-reflection regarding the learners individual responsibilities to themselves and their academic development. I'd like to roll out a similar format myself. Week 9 of the Social Media course even has students meeting in Second Life! There may be problems in implementing this as I am not sure if we have a wiki or if the University's PCs are up to scratch to run Second Life. My 6 month old iMac on my desktop at work can hardly do that.
I think that this kind of course delivery would help to avoid the the situation I had in MAC201 earlier on in this post when the vast majority of students failed to turn up. I'm going to keep an eye on the attendance for this module and see how the students engage with the material. I also have an online discussion space setup in WebCT but, historically, this has been poorly utilized by students. Time will tell if these measures will help the students.
In many ways it's akin to the "Paypal Donate" button, but with the emphasis being on paying people for services that are technically free but you think are worth a fiscal reward. Users pay a small monthly amount (minimum of €2.00) and then click buttons on sites to share out the money they paid in among those sites. The company takes a small cut on all funds added. It's been referred to as sort of like an Internet tip jar. The more buttons you click in a month the more your monthly total is divided amongst the recipients. You can read the Flattr story here and you can watch a short video of the service below
