Use Case for the Distributed Model

This post arises as a response to a comment by Lisa Lane, who asked for some elaboration on the concepts I’m discussing in terms of a distributed model of sharing.  This post seeks to flesh the idea out further.  Admittedly there are elements of it that are still half-baked and I’m still working through, but it will hopefully at least give an initial idea of where my head is at on the matter.

Re-purposing and re-organising

To me the purpose of re-organising existing content is important because once it’s released by the original author/content creator, the motives for continuing to share it or adapt it immediately change – or at least the context does.

Take the example of a course. Say I’m an instructor of COMP1234 and have decided that a distributed model is the best way to go. I publish the curriculum, course readings, assignment descriptions, and instructor/course blog in an open platform and suggest that each student do much the same – e.g. creates their own blog wherever they like, upload their images to Flickr or Picasaweb, their videos to YouTube, Blip.TV or better still archive.org (which is intended for openly shared items), etcetera.

As the instructor I will obviously want a streamlined way to keep track of all the student contributions, so in addition to whatever other tags they use to describe each published object, I ask that each student include the tags COMP1234 and UNSW.

Aggregating the material

To aggregate the material I can do a couple of things. I could subscribe to a Technorati feed for tag = COMP1234, which should tell me anytime a new piece of material is assigned the course code; or I could get each student to provide the feeds for their publishing points (blog, video site, image site, etc).

At this point I could use a personal aggregator such as Google Reader to keep track of all the activity – however that approach will only benefit me. It would be better still to establish a portal or centralised space to display the ongoing stream of updates from the cohort of students. That way students and instructor will have a quick way to browse the updates of the entire course.  When they see something of interest they can click through to the source of the content and engage in discussion there.

Currently you can do this with Netvibes, Pageflakes, or a number of other sites that let you easily set-up a mash-up of different sources.

Syndicating the course

Now, at this stage we are still at a fairly fine-grained level of sharing – the activities of a cohort of students in a single course. Imagine now if we were to start aggregating the streams of many course portals. Much like a series of tributaries converging on a larger river. This would also mark the change in motives for sharing and re-using, since other instructors will have a different perspective and purpose for observing the activity, as will senior executives, librarians, parents, etcetera.

So whereas the course portal addressed the needs of the instructor and student’s perspective, a higher, meta-level of aggregation could address the needs of others, and start to adapt the content to align with these needs – e.g. terminology/tagging, potential uses/implications of the shared content, etcetera.

Re-organising the information

Because of the fact all of the course content was tagged with the course code, you could then start to re-organise entire sets of activity at a more meta level and make it searchable by others.

For example, if the tag is COMP1234 you could automatically expand the tags assigned to each object, since as an institution administrator I would know that the course was meant to cover (lets say) computing, social media, blogs and wikis. You’d also know what faculty the course was offered in and could add this as well – say engineering or computer science.

So you’re beginning to re-contextualise the information from another perspective. This is important because we will each look at an object in our own unique way, and the more descriptors we amass for the information, the easier it becomes to find.

This is where my ideas become more theoretical I should say, because I’m not a programmer and am not completely sure how you would address this. But ideally the university space would include the option to filter by format (image, video, text, audio, multimedia), as well as browse by broad subject/topic, or date.

Sharing through participation; embedded in practice

The point of this is that the model slots in with existing practice. Instructors and students aren’t being asked to change the way they work in their local context, and yet we are able to build and expand upon the work their doing, and re-organise it in a way that is usable by others. In doing this they themselves answer the age-old question “what’s in it for me?” when it comes to sharing. They share because it’s part of the requirements for engaging and participating in an activity they have already identified as important.

The institution-level portal then becomes a mechanism that supports practice, and enables the analysing and interpretation of what is actually happening in the classroom. It’s not a standalone site that can be easily delineated from what is going on in the learning spaces; in a sense it becomes part of the learning space.

More thoughts on this later as I continue to mull it over.  In the meantime comments are welcome – especially those that point out holes in my logic or model.