This is really neat to see for a couple of reasons.

First of all it’s an example of sharing and reuse in action.  I release all of my contributions to this blog as Creative Commons Attribution licenses, meaning anyone can copy the work, adapt it and republish it so long as they attribute the source, which Watching the Watchers has clearly done.

The fact someone thought enough of the post to reproduce it is quite a compliment, and it’s great to see the practical application of openness in publishing.

The second significant aspect of this is the replication of the Wave itself.  The whole idea was to explore the idea that Wave could be used to distribute centralised discussions in decentralised spaces – namely, many people engaging in a shared discussion in different locations.

The fact Watching the Watchers has included the original Wave in their version of my post lets us examine how this idea would work in actual practice.  All of the comments in the wave have been reproduced, as will any future contributions to the discussion.

Effectively it doesn’t matter if someone looks at the wave on this blog, on Watching the Watchers, or in Google Wave itself – the contents of the discussion are one and the same regardless.

So thank you to Watching the Watchers for not only helping demonstrate re-use, but also establish a proof of concept in use of Wave to distribute discussions.

Now that the hysteria has died down I’m finding it a bit easier to look at the tool in a more objective sort of way, and this morning I in fact had an idea about a real use for it in an educational context.

The significance of embedded content

One of the glaring voids in the tool historically has been there was no embed option. So you had to go into Wave in order to edit anything, or contribute to any discussions. For me the fact there are so many other communication tools out there meant that Wave was largely forgotten and overlooked.

However this morning I’ve just noticed they’ve added in an embed option, which means you can include a real-time view of the wave discussion in any website or blog that allows use of the embed code. The fact it contains JavaScript is a bit unfortunate though, since many websites are likely to lock down use of these sorts of code snippets (I suspect WordPress.com is one of them).

Decentralising Centralised Discussion

Nonetheless, it seems to me that Wave would facilitate centralised discussions in a decentralised fashion.

One of the corner stones of many online courses is use of a discussion forum. The centralised nature of this tool is such that people can engage with one another to discuss and debate concepts and topics in a shared space.

Historically this has required use of a centralised tool like a group or learning management system, which effectively makes the online element course-centric as opposed to learner-centric. My thought was that Wave could mitigate this reality by allowing centralised discussions to be situated in many different locations all at the same time – including student blogs, learning management systems, groups, etcetera.

Students would then have the power to engage in the discussions in their own chosen contexts, while not losing out on valuable interaction with their peers and instructors.

An Example

For instance, below is a publicly visible wave I’ve created. Why not try entering a comment, and see if you can embed the snippet in your own context – if only temporarily. Largely this idea is untested, so I’d appreciate any collaboration or feedback people have on how well this idea works in practice.

Note, in order to make this Wave publicly visible and editably I’ve had to add public@a.gwave.com to the list of Wave participants. More on this here.

Update: After experimenting with this a bit it appears that the embed code snippet is only available from within Wave, rather than via the embedded instance. So students would theoretically need to visit Wave in the first to grab the snippet, and thereafter could enter comments through instances. It also appears that many of the options in the tool bar within Wave are unavailable outside of it.

According to the header, Tomorrow’s Professor is:

“A partnership between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University to create a forum for comments and discussion about articles from the Tomorrow’s Professor Mailing List and about general issues concerning higher education”

This blog is significant for a few key reasons.

First, it is a collaborative effort between two recognised and highly respected institutions covering emerging issues that affect countless other institutions, teachers and students around the world.

Second, it is formatted like a scholarly journal – and indeed features long-form papers that are published in peer-reviewed publications elsewhere – and yet does so using an open format, which solicits open comments and discussion. Its intent is not simply to distribute and disseminate, but to discuss as well. Most scholarly journals don’t do that – in fact I’m hard pressed to think of a single one that does.

Finally, in incorporating a simple, open format – using a bare-bones WordPress installation and default theme – Tomorrow’s Professor demonstrates the ease and speed with which collaborative efforts can be pulled together using social media tools, and yet offer significant benefits to the academic community – not just in terms to access to information and emerging research topics, but access to each other as well.

To me it’s an important symbol of the potential in educational use of social media, and what can happen when you start focusing on the possibilities rather than the politics.

Tomorrow’s Professor is located at: http://tomprofblog.mit.edu/

Digress.it is a plugin for WordPress that supports discussion at a far finer level than is traditionally available on most blogs.  Rather than limiting conversations to a single field at the bottom of a post, digress.it “lets you comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text.”

I don’t necessarily see this model being applicable to all blogs and blog comments, however there are definitely instances where the model would be very handy.

Collaborative peer review and solicitation of feed back are two uses that come to mind.  The Australian Federal Government, for example, recently launched a Consultation Blog, which uses a similar framework based upon the Comment Press theme.  Their aim seems to be to subject papers and policy documents to as rigorous a feedback process as possible at as granular a level as possible.

The opportunity to engage in highly specific, in-depth conversations is relevant for other use cases as well – such as fine grained analyses, discussion and debate.

For example, a document available to the public domain or shared under Creative Commons license could be posted to a course blog and used as the focal point for an exercise.  In the case of particularly long documents you could even allocate different sections to different groups.  Then at the end of the discussion you’d have a single post (or persaps a small selection of posts) that contained the thoughts and opinions of an entire cohort of students, with the granular level of the discussion meaning the comments were organised into topical chunks.

In the case of both Digress.it and Comment Press, a Comment Overview panel is displayed to the right of the content and is kept in view no matter where the reader is in the screen.  This serves to keep the discussion right up front the whole time.

It’s an open group and all are welcome. If you don’t have an account with the service you can quickly create one, or login using your Twitter, Google or Facebook accounts. The direct link to the group is: http://friendfeed.com/cck09

One aspect of the tool I’m likely to use quite a bit is the share discussion option. As far as I know this is unique to FriendFeed, and in my view it’s a really useful feature. It enables you to embed entire discussions in 3rd party sites like blogs and wikis. Because you are embedding the thread rather than copying specific sections of text the discussions are kept current. You can even add to the discussion from 3rd party sites. An example is included below.

I’m notoriously bad about checking for updates in discussions and discussion forums, so I’ve also enabled notifications for all posts and comments to the group. That way I’m reminded to return and participate.

Just in the last two days I’ve decided to make some fairly sweeping changes to the commenting system on this blog and have installed the Disqus Comment System. This video is a basic overview of what Disqus is, how you set it up (primarily from the standpoint of self-hosted WordPress blogs), as well as a discussion on the implications that the framework has for readers as well as site owners.

Disqus describes itself as:

“Disqus, pronounced “discuss”, is a service and tool for web comments and discussions. The Disqus comment system can be plugged into any website, blog, or application. Disqus makes commenting easier and more interactive, while connecting websites and commenters across a thriving discussion community.”

How it works

Disqus establishes tremendous opportunities for both site owners/bloggers and readers/commenters alike in that it expands the available functionality far above and beyond the traditional text-based commenting structures found natively in most blogs.

Information from Disqus profiles is accessible from blogs and websites

This includes the option to link to personal profiles elsewhere on the web, connect with friends and colleagues and thus facilitate discussion, and ultimately retain far greater ownership over your comments than exists in traditional commenting frameworks since everything you say is aggregated against a profile on the Disqus website.  For example, this is my Disqus profile.

Network and Community Formation

One of the key outcomes of this framework is the opportunity for network development at both the blog level and the user level.  This is due to the fact blogs and users are equally represented in the framework and can thus become nodes in their own right.

As part of the set-up process each blog is given its own community area on the Disqus website (here is the one for this blog).  Not only does this enable users to quickly view and respond to comments (which are tied back into the blog), the community area also displays statistical information regarding Top Commenters and Popular Threads.  The increased focus on the individual in this framework means that readers are able to connect with one another – thus facilitating the development of networks and communities within and across blogs and sites.  Effectively the users start to become hubs for the discussion as much as sites are.

Synchronised Comments

Of critical significance for WordPress users (which forgot to mention in the video) is the fact that Disqus now synchronises comments between your WordPress blog and the Disqus site.  In the past when you replaced the native WordPress commenting framework with Disqus, all comments were stored on the Disqus website.  Personally this is the reason I never adopted it earlier; it seemed too great a risk to store the comments elsewhere.  With comments stored on both Disqus and WordPress, if you decide to revert to the native comments  at some stage – or otherwise need to deactivate the plugin – you are not going to lose all the discussion that took place while Disqus was implemented.

Many Platforms Supported

This is not to say that Disqus is restricted to WordPress.  The framework supports a variety of other platforms, including Blogger, Movable Type, Tumblr, and hosted WordPress.com blogs.  “Hacks” for other platforms have been developed as well.

There is a plethora of information available on the Disqus website so I encourage you to take a look if you’re interested, or take a look at the comment area of one of my posts here to see the framework in action.

Update: Apologies for closing comments on this post; it’s just been getting too much spam.

By and large the bulk of the online conversations I engage in these days take place on Twitter.  Sure I blog, and I post comments elsewhere, but these tend to be fairly one-off threads.  I’ll write a post here and perhaps receive a comment or two in response every once in a while, but there is rarely many-to-many discussion on anything.

Twitter

Twitter does tend to facilitate this with far more regularity to a degree.  The problem is the 140 character limit.  You can say a fair amount in 140 characters if you’re efficient in your wording, but my experience has been there are definite limitations to the depth that can be explored and maintained.  This is especially true given there are no clear ways to tie conversations together.  When you comment, it appears as a largely independent contribution, making the prospect of easily skimming through a thread exceptionally difficult. Hashtags are useful for consolidating topics and tracking trends, but in my experience they don’t do a great deal to further the conversation.

Twitter is great for link sharing, and fairly superficial conversations, but not for deeper more lengthy discussions.

Facebook

In the absence of something better, Facebook has started to become the place where this has been happening for me, however I’m not particularly happy about that.  For one thing I really don’t like Facebook.  Above and beyond the sheer volumes of rubbish and distracting applications and advertisements that are so prevalent across the site, I have always had huge issues with their user management policies, the stance they’ve taken on photos of breastfeeding, and also the fact that it is a private environment where conversations are not easily viewed publicly.

It’s a place I visit occasionally when I want to kill time on something fairly shallow and mindless, not where I’d like to go to engage in meaningful discussion.

FriendFeed

The topic Gina and I were talking about was FriendFeed.  FriendFeed has been around for a couple of years now and has a fairly passionate user-base, but not one that has seen anywhere near the levels of notoriety that Facebook and Twitter have.  In the same way that the stream of updates on Facebook’s default page displays recent contributions of your contacts,  FriendFeed is designed as a way to aggregate and share your activities, track those of others, and engage in discussions.

You’re now able to organise your contacts into different lists for easier browsing, as well as create groups for more contained discussion and sharing of information.  Importantly it’s not plastered with ads and unwanted applications in the way Facebook is; content is kept to what is shared by your contacts – and you have a great deal of control over what you choose to view in terms of other people’s content, or alternatively what you decide to conceal from your view.

Like Twitter, you can also engage in discussions from 3rd party clients like Twhirl.  This means you don’t have to be constantly on the site to remain plugged into the discussions.

On the surface you’d have thought that I would have quickly adopted FriendFeed a long time ago – but in truth that’s never happened.  I see a lot of discussion taking place amidst the Silicon Valley crowd, and technology focused people in general – but seemingly very little communication in the educational, edtec or elearning sectors. Sharing, sure; just not discussion.  Without a network to engage with, a useful application like FriendFeed fails to yield much value for me.

Fostering Long-form Discussions

Nonetheless the peppering of discussions I’ve enjoyed on Facebook lately have made it clear how much value there is in long-form discussion.  Having a thread emerge that you can easily track, link to and share with others, while not being confined to character limits has proven to be an extremely liberating experience.  So I’ve been inspired once again to try and find a way to cultivate this outside of Facebook.

There are people on Twitter I greatly respect who flatly refuse to use Facebook, and I’d really like to bring them into the fold if possible.  Friendfeed seems like at least one reasonable option there.  The fact you can now embed discussions seems to open the door to distributing conversations more widely.

For example, I posted the following status update to FriendFeed (embedded at the end of this post), where people who follow me can read and respond to the comment. By enabling me to embed the entire discussion here – including all future updates – I’m able to circulate the discussion more widely amidst a community of people who may not be FriendFeed users. This is a far cry from the site-specific discussions you see on Facebook, as well as more traditional discussion forums.

There are a number of additional thoughts, issues and considerations floating around in my head about this at the moment, so I may post more about this later. The significant thing to me is the idea that I’d like to engage in more in depth discussion than I have been on Twitter and need a framework that will enable me to do this – preferably in a distributed fashion.

I welcome any thoughts on this in the meantime.

Embedded FriendFeed Discussion Thread

At the best of times PHD is geared largely towards the academic community, with much of its humor likely to appeal only to those people who work in the sector and are accustomed to it’s social and political idiosyncrasies.  This particular comic was particularly niche, as it also made references to the culture of debate, self-publicity and commenting found on blogs.  Being highly idiosyncratic in my own right, I found it hilarious.

Well, why don’t they?

Shortly thereafter though I began to wonder: “Why don’t research papers have a comment section?” Followed shortly thereafter by, “What is the real objective and value in research papers?  What purpose do they serve?”

This is not to say I think they serve no value – quite the contrary, research papers provide an important road map upon which innovation can occur, and the advancement of human understanding can take place. At the same time though, they do harken back to an older time, before personal online publishing virtually eliminated the boundaries to engage in the discussion.

So in my typical tendency to question all traditional institutions, structures and assumptions, I began to wonder whether the whole notion of the role and place of research papers needs to be reevaluated and reconsidered and thus make it more open to discussion and wider participation.

Advancing human understanding

Historically research papers have been written and presented to document and share the outcomes of ongoing research with the academic community, develop a dialogue surrounding their implications, and start to vet the accuracy and strength of the underlying arguments.  Far from being one directional flows of information, debate and dialogue regarding research papers occurs via subsequent papers that either build on the findings of previous ones, refute their outcomes, or perhaps provide a slightly different analysis of the results.

At the same time though, the nature of the process, particularly with respect to peer review, editing and re-editing makes the dialogue exceptionally slow, drawn out, and importantly accessible to relatively few people. Don’t get me wrong, taking the time to formulate a well-considered and thoroughly analysed paper is critically important – but so too is establishing opportunities for open dialogue and discussion, whereby people can construct their own understandings of the research.

Not everyone is able to, or capable of, writing a paper that is published in a reputable journal – but this doesn’t mean they won’t have thoughts on the matter that are worth sharing.  Likewise it doesn’t make their thoughts or perspectives on the matter any less significant.

Open publishing

In saying this, some research publications may be open for commenting (if you know of any please provide some links).  My contemplation of all this is more in the vein of “just because something has always been done this way doesn’t mean it still needs to be.”

I note too that there is an increasing tendency in certain spheres to use blogging platforms as vehicles for publishing journal-quality material.  Konrad Glogowski’s “Blog of proximal development” and David Jone’s “Weblog of (a) David Jones” immediately come to mind here, as do George Siemen’s Connectivism blog, Stephen Downes’ “Half an Hour” blog and Mark Pesce’s “The Human Network“.  The point is these are more the acceptions to the rule, with the majority of research largely directed towards discussion by those “in the know.”

There’s more that I’d add to this discussion, but as usual I’m short on time.  I’m interested in what others think of this whole train of thought. Do you think research papers should allow commenting? Why or why not?

First and foremost I’ve realised that my initial attempts at objective attendance were doomed to failure.  As I’ve discussed previously, the fundamental philosophical objections I have for this mode of education have proven too severe to overcome.  Frighteningly, I’m now more appalled by use of an LMS than I was before.

To be honest I’m quite concerned about this ephiphany.  I’ve always sought to find the middle ground in conversations where disagreements exist; and traditionally I’ve always found at least a small foothold.  In this case my only conclusion is I want no part of LMS’s; I feel they are not beneficial to learning, and I will instead actively seek to increase awareness of the alternatives.

Modeling alternatives has always been a focal point for me, but in the wake of this week’s ephiphanies it’s taking on an even greater sense of urgency.

The Backchannel’s on Fire

One unexpected, yet very positive outcome of all this has been the opportunity to engage in vibrant backchannel conversation spanning a number of different mediums.  I already have a vibrant network of insightful international colleagues, and this enabled me to explore concepts that were not being covered by the formal portion of the session.  Importantly, this included aspects of the tool and subject matter that I found profoundly concerning or frustrating.

The ability to discuss these concerns with trusted colleagues – regardless of their relative location – was incredibly value, especially considering I could externalise my thoughts as they emerged and were in the front of my mind.

The fact many of these conversations occurred during periods where the facilitator was covering Blackboard’s ability to restrict access to student conversations is perhaps the ultimate irony.

Gotta go, class is starting.

The framework would incorporate participatory elements including exposure to network dynamics, backchannel communication and the notion of the presenter as just one node in the discussion.  Use of new media technologies would be encouraged to facilitate and document the discussion, with aggregation, tagging, and syndication linking the disparate conversations together, and therefore making them easily referenced and synthesised later.

In addition to the primary objective of cultivating discussion on the subject matter  of the presentation is hoped this framework would also serve to model and demonstrate the opportunities and affordances of new media by establishing a real world use case.

Prior to the presentation a blog post, email, or document would be circulated to potential attendees outlining the participatory nature of the event and discussing the following ideas:

• Networked Learning, Connectivism
• Backchannels, including Twitter and use of temporary chatrooms
• Folksonomy – nominate blog tag and Twitter hashtag for the event
• Live blogging, wikis
• Links/embedded versions of Common Craft videos on Twitter, blogs, wiki
• Suggest creation of a Twitter account

During the presentation, the presenter would seek to actively incorporate feedback coming through the backchannel and address any questions, comments or confusion that may emerge therein.  Among other things, incorporating and referencing the backchannel would seek to legitimise the activities in the minds of people who are unfamiliar or uncomfortable with engaging in two-levels of conversation.

It is expected that resistance and discomfort will exist – traditionally presenters are expected to be the focal of a passive audience, with any and all discussions and questions revolving around what presenters are talking about, and unrelated or tangential discussions discouraged and considered rude.  In this case it would be encouraged, with the idea being you gain a better appreciation for the thoughts and views of others by encouraging discussion while the ideas are being formulated. It would be emphasised that the presentation would be merely the inception for the conversation, and that discussion, debate and clarification would extend far beyond the end of the initial presentation.

Use of tags and hashtags will enable the aggregation, syndication, synthesis and further discussion of these ideas long after the presentation is finished.

After the presentation had finished a wiki page would be created that linked to all blog posts, wiki pages and the link to search results of the nominated Twitter hashtag.  It would also provided an initial synthesis of the thoughts expressed through the backchannel discussion.

As I said, this idea is very raw at this stage – so any feedback, ideas, and particularly experiences would be much appreciated.