Knowledge Building for Web 2.5: Making the transition to a networked

worldSandy McAuley (UPEI)Stian Håklev (OISE/UT)

IKIT Summer InstituteToronto

August 3, 2010

KF & the Web

Web 1.0The

“read” web

Web 2.0The

“read-write”web

Web 3.0The

“semantic”web

1996 2005 2???

The Question?

• Why are knowledge building and Knowledge Forum not getting the traction they need in increasingly networked education?

The Problem?

• The closed nature of Knowledge Forum compromises the knowledge building principles that underlie its design

The Compromised

• Epistemic agency

• Democratizing knowledge

• Idea diversity

• Pervasive knowledge building

Open Education

• Started with Open Educational Resources

• David Wiley’s Intro to OER

• “Wiley wikis”

intro open ed I

7

Peer2Peer University

• A platform for running open courses, and conduct research on open education

• Since September 2009, ran 21 courses with more than 1000 participants (another 30 in September, 2010)

• Limited enrollment, but content and discussions open to anyone

Almost all participants also reported using at least one (and usually several) tools that were not required to access the content specified on the syllabus or follow the instructors.  These tools included social networking sites like Ning, LinkedIn, and Facebook, blogging tools like WordPress, virtual environments like Second Life, and Twitter for “backchannel” communications, brief comments, and resource sharing.  Additionally, content aggregation tools (e.g. PageFlakes and RSS) and social bookmarking and link sharing tools like Twine and Diigo were key elements for several participants.

Eric Calvert (2009) citing a study by Fini (2009)

The Challenge?

• How can Knowledge Forum remain relevant, how can these open learning processes be enhanced through Knowledge Building principles and technology?

A more web-savvy KF• Exposing the full graphical features of KF

directly in the browser

• Making KF a “full member” of the Web 2.0: web APIs, ability to input data from a number of sources, ability to output data in open formats

• Platform is open source, course contents available to anyone (if teacher chooses so), nodes and views have individual URLs, googleable

Alternative 1: A more web-savvy KF

APIs

Harvesting GradebookWashington State University

A KB open web overlay

• All content authoring is done in distributed Web 2.0 tools (blogs, wikis, twitter, Youtube)

• A KB plugin for web browser, follows you around, adds scaffolding

• Use open APIs and semantic data to enable pulling together and organizing contributions on many different platforms

Alternative 2: A KB open web overlay

initial post

Rise above

build-upons

Why is this important?• Open Education is growing very rapidly, has the potential

for powerful research

• Very open-minded and experimental community

• Mix of course/conference/research collaboration - metaphor fits KB

• Unique constraints: what is the role of the teacher (level of training?), length of courses, level of teacher involvement

• Get out there and engage with the community

• Future of continuing education

• China: 350 million

A place to start

• A simple way to publish views to the web

• A simple way to integrate two published views

Contacts

• Sandy McAuley amcauley@upei.ca

• Stian Håklev shaklev@gmail.com