The diagram below (inspired by Richard Millwood) is intended as a rhetorical device to help in the planning phase of creating some form of multimedia presentation based on three dimensions, audience, narrative, and control.

In terms of audience and narrative, the key question is that of author intent.

Is the work for the creators own personal gratification of is there a wider audience in mind?

Is the narrative intended to be a factual account or is the work intended to in some way affect a change? Arguably, good example of the latter would be the documentary The Inconvenient Truth. This is a work of fiction to some, and reportage of the current state of affairs to others.

The last dimension pushes at the boundary of what technology is increasingly offering. Many people are familiar with the term interactive television through activities such as choosing which camera shot of a football match to view or voting for participants in virtual reality shows. More extreme experiments have included offering different forks in a script for viewers to vote on or even asking the audience to suggest the plot direction themselves.

Possibly these are interesting dimensions for bloggers out there to reflect upon!:^)

A sign in Vanuatu that conveys visually what this business is about. The explanatory words are there, but not essential to gaining an understanding:^)

A simple blogging tool with posts via the website, text messages, and desktop apps that aggregates posts of groups of friends and broadcasts onto web pages, via RSS feed, and phone texts.

Not sure if the flash badge will show in a post, but hopefully this is my twitter… You will need to open the ‘twitter’ blog post to see it…

The following is my interpretation gleaned from an audio recording of a conference at MIT attended by Stephen Downes to explain some of his thinking (apologies for any misrepresentation) about how the www could develop.

The challenge
The ability to access a resource (person, document, learning object, software etc…) can be used as a measure of how efficiently the www is functioning. If this is to be optimised, a “powerful” network is required that can perform the function of connecting people to resources based on their personal needs – a ‘best fit.

If this were to work really well, rather than searching for resources the system ought to have a predictive capability in which “the resources present themselves to you”.

The design paradigm
Fundamentally, this is an egalitarian position that values autonomy and diversity rather than the ‘authoritative’ voice of the relative few. To achieve this, the vision is for a domain-centric rather than a person-centric culture on www. A relativist approach that values knowledge as a localised constructed/co-constructed reality created through transactions.

How it works
Fundamental to this egalitarian approach is the ability to capture the ‘contextual experience’ of a resource from its inception through its complex life cycle; its use, modification, connecting those with common interests or purposes, etc.

To achieve this three types metadata would be collected:
- biographical metadata (who created it, title, location, journal source, etc.)
- resource experience (automatically accrued data, what it was used for, who used it, etc.)
- third party metadata (categories, descriptions, evaluations, etc.)

The third party metadata is added in the form of a ‘regular expression’, that is a description but not according to a semantic web schema. This enables automatic categorisation into topics and as a consequence feeds back out into the www. See Edu-RSS for more detail.

The above systems approach relies upon individual nodes accessing resources (via something like RSS), and then re-broadcasting out onto the www resulting in the accumulation a richer set of non-hierarchical metadata. Of particular importance being the contextual information about how something was used and by who. For this to work will, it will require individuals who are prepared to become a node and re-broadcast onto the www.

The new ‘richly connected’ www will promote the essential characteristic of connectivity that developing knowledge is an emergent process better propagated by a well organised network, but ultimately requiring perceiving by humans to create the knowledge.

Randy Garrison, University of Calgary, offers this draft Online Community of Inquiry Review: Social, Cognitive, and Teaching Presence Issues (2006).

The research tool (below) developed by Garrison, Anderson and Archer (2000) is put forward as a framework that has “provided significant insights and methodological solutions for studying online learning”.

Those with experience of participating in online communities will likely feel some ‘resonance’ with some or all of the elements identified:
social presence – the ability to project one’s self and establish personal and purposeful relationships
cognitive presence – exploration, construction, resolution and confirmation of understanding through collaboration and reflection in a community of inquiry
teaching presence – different aspects of programme design, facilitation and direct instruction

Garrison, Anderson and Archer (2000)

As Randy implies, part of the driver for the development of the research tool was to be able to quantify the value of online communities of inquiry (CoI). I wonder if trying to ‘weigh the online pig’ in this way they risk undermining the potential of very thing they are seeking to promote.

In trying to understand complex situations such as how learning takes place in online communities, I would argue that a strong case could be made for the truism that ‘you get what you measure’. Is the framework developed pushing us to measure the right things, or is it simply identifying that which can be more easily observed and quantified?

Arguably, Wenger’s Community of Practice (CoP) learning theory provides an approach that is congruent with the use of emerging online technologies (web 2.0) that are founded on user-generated content and social networks – “connectivism”).

For Wenger, “The basic idea is that human knowing is fundamentally a social act”. More specifically, “Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something (domain) they do and learn how to do (practice) it better as they interact regularly (community).”

A process of negotiation and resultant ‘meaning making’ defines the community. This ongoing interaction changes the identity of the individual and their relationship to the group as a whole and its other members.

Different communities come into contact with each other at the boundary (practice or domain of knowledge, or community) and it is here that the most potential for innovation exists as new and competing ideas interact.

The implications of integrating a CoP approach with a CoI would place less emphasis on the instructional aspects of the teaching role and instead see them focusing on the importance of modeling desired behaviour such as critically reflecting on their own experiences. Labels for individuals such as teacher and student would diminish in significance as all community members adopted different roles according to their knowledge, experience and changing identity. Individuals membership of different online and f2f communities would allow for the opportunity of cross pollination of ideas and experiences.

The description could be developed further, but in such a model, the single most important identifier of success, would be who are the community members becoming rather than what do they know about X or Y.

It would be easy to get carried away describing some idealised model for Higher Education when the reality dictates something that is very much different.

In his paper Randy summarises the characteristics of a community of inquiry (below) and, in so far as they go, they make good sense to me. However, I would suggest that the boundaries could be pushed further and that by re-visiting the categories and indicators of the research tool offered, then a more powerful model for an online community of inquiry could be developed and if this what we measure, then this is what we will increasingly get!

A community of inquiry needs to have clear expectations as to the nature of critical discourse and their postings. Participants need to be aware of the academic objectives, the phases of inquiry, and the level of discourse. These educational challenges raise the importance and role of teaching presence. The distinction between facilitation and direction must also be clear from a design perspective. Teaching presence must consider the dual role of both moderating and shaping the direction of the discourse. Both are essential for a successful community of inquiry.

Not quite the budget airline travel frenzy over Europe, but anyone in NZ who wants to join the ‘got some time, but don’t know where to go jet-set’ may find some cheap seats here. For example, Christchurch to Wanaka (Wed 25th April) return (Sun 29th April) $98 return. Not bad for an Autumn break around beautiful Lake Wanaka.

It seems a distant prospect humankind being able to reconcile our apparent insatiable desire for travel with the needs of the planet…