elearning2.0

Preamble:

I have been trying to concentrate on two site-development tasks over the past few days, leveraging knotes to support some particular activities in the NGRF and SIGOSSEE sites.

The NGRF activity was intriguing. Alan Brown, from the Institute for Employment Research at Warwick, is a key person in the NGRF development and a longtime colleague and collaborator. He recently became part of a TLRP project to assemble resources towards a big report on Work-Related leearning.

One of their first goals was to design a categorical structure to describe these resources and/or to delineate the conceptual territory (sorry, I've never been entirely certain which). He was eager to use an old systems-integration trick of ours, the Team Task, to provide online support for that activity. We recently made a first pass at upgrading the Team Task concept to embed a group weblog and a resource aggregator which would give a clean interface into resources however mesily they might have been thrown into the weblog.

I spent the past two days struggling to understand the activity they were engaged in, and how to make a framework in which to carry on discussions supporting their activity. The rest of this post consists of an unedited email I sent to Alan this morning when I finally got the point.

And the point is: knotes can quickly be adapted to make all categories inherently (cross)-discussable, and to provide an interface for the social negotiation of a categorical structure.

Further background to understanding the stream of text which follows is that I was also planning the upgrade of the SIGOSSEE site so it too begins to make good use of knotes for collaborative work. As part of that, I was working out which kinds of existing SIGOSSEE content should be imported into which new knotes weblogs, and wondering about how to set up the initial categories for these blogs... and more interestingly how to support a process in which the members of the site develop their own categorising conventions.

I hope the text of that email to Alan might give a flavour of what we're about to try to do with knotes and categories:

Extended text for this entry:

Hi Alan

I have to admit I was struggling conceptually with designing that activity for the TLRP categories-development yesterday, but I think I'm finally starting to understand what it means and how it can be addressed usefull in software.

What's initially confusing about it, of course, is that the teask is *about* categories, and will also *use* categories

so there are categories as categories, and also as discussion points

I got tied in knots trying to hack a quick way to enable them to blog about the categories freely, as well as growing discussion threads within each category-as-discussion-topic

But now I'm starting to see how we might approch this more generally as an enhancement to knotes itself.

Background: remember in the old REM / Resource Locator / IMS metadata work days, that I always used to go on about the key issue in building useful repositories is the social negotiation of shared categorical / taxonomic terms and structures? There are several sources of tension which make this a very interesting problem

tension 1 : freedom-to-tag versus ease-of-search :

• it has to be easy and natural for editors, catalogers and plain old users to describe their content
• but it also can clutter the space of existing categories if that i totally unconstrained - lots of semi-synonymous or seldon-used categories emerge
• and at base, we tag so that others can find, so it is a social, communicative (or marketing :o) act to add categories to content
• and thus the requirements of those searching for content or resources has to constrain the categorical conventions

tension 2: expressive of special interest groups versus interoperability and global searchability

this is basically what killed the Learning Oblects Metadata

• each country, state, subject-area etc has its own peculiar way in which it thinks categorically about resources - eg different systems of educational level or specific content area
• but LOM tried to be global, and thus every local content-tagger was flummoxed by meaningless distinctions and terms

In the latter days of the resource-locator project, I put a lot of work into trying to embed discussion and negotiation and agreement within the taxonomic systems. But at that time we lacked a good enough discussion system to make this work... it went nowhere

AHA! But now we have an open-architecture discussion system to play with! It should be possible to make some advances, especially if we can identify and address some simple cases with simple steps forward.

What I'm thinking we should do soonish is add the ability to discuss and agree categories *as categories* within knotes

In other words, each category automatically gets to act as if it was a potential trackback recipient in itself, and we provide an interface to make new blog entries or discussion items which 'link' to the category itself.

(All this needs is a special URL which will open the interface for annotating and discussing that category... easy to do)

If that were the case, we would not need to make special discussion items to 'represent' the categories when we want to discuss them

And the process would be available in all blogs, for all categories.

This puts off the thorny question of how to agree the categories, though we could also put up a voting interface?

And more interstingly, what to do when an issue spans more than one category - as will often be the case - perhaps cross-trackbacking and spawning new 'category-agreement-issue' types of discussion topic/poll would do.... there is loads of room to experiment.

ill sign off now so I can take your call :o)

cheers

Mike