ADLRR2010: Panel: Social Media, Alternative Technologies

Susan van Gundy, NSDL

Cooperation with NSF & OSTP: Stem Exchange
NSDL has existed for a decade; digital library functionality, central metadata repository, community of grantees and resource providers, R&D for new tech and strategies
Aim now is to understand education impact of these materials; hence Stem Exchange: what are educators doing with NSDL resources? What knowledge do educators add to the resources, which can be fed back to resource developers?
This is about contextualisation & dissemination. Teachers know what NSDL is by now; now they want to know what other teachers are doing with it
Metadata is limited: labour intensive, expensive; limited use to end users beyond search & browse, though it is still important for content management: metadata is essential but not sufficient
"The evolving power of context": capture context of use of resources
Web service, open API: datastreams from NSDL straight into local repositories; teachers assemble resources online on the local repositories, generating resource profiles; this is paradata being fed back into NSDL (including favouriting of resources)
METANOTE: kudos for correct use of para- in paradata meaning "supporting context, circumstances"; cf. paratext
Generates data feeds of paradata: what others think and do with the resource. Akin to the use of hashtag in capturing usage.
Applies to open reuse subset of NSDL; will integrate into current social networking tools (e.g. RSS)
Now establishing working groups on how this will work
Are looking at folksonomies and pushing that back into NSDL formal metadata
People don't volunteer this data, need incentives: there will be automatic capture of the paradata in aggregate





Jon Phipps, Jes & Co

Interop isn't about using each other's interfaces any more —profusion of standards! Now we need to *understand* each others' interfaces
Linked Data: opportunity to share understanding, semantics of metadata
The 4 principles of Linked Data from Tim Berners-Lee
Jes & Co are making tools to support Master Data: central authoritative open data used throughout a system—in this case, the entire learning community
(Tends to be RDF, but doesn't have to be)
Given that, can start developing relationships between URIs; map understanding across boundaries
This enhances discoverability: ppl agree in advance on the vocabulary, more usefully and more ubiquitously—can aggregate data from disparate sources more effectively (semantic web)
e.g. map US learning objectives to AUS learning objectives for engineering learning resources. not a common et of standards, but a commonly understood set of standards
RDF: there's More Than One Way To Do It: that's chaos, but not necessarily a bad thing


Me

Can't really liveblog myself talking; I'm going through my position paper, and I've recorded myself (19.7 MB MP3, 21 mins).

Sarah Currier, consultant

"Nick said everything I wanted to say" :-)
Others have been high level, big strategic initiatives. This is microcosm education community, addressing compelling need of their own.
14 months of purely Web 2.0 based repository with community, "faux-pository", ad hoc repository
How do edu communities best use both formal repositories and Web 2.0 to share resources? How can repository developers support them using Web 2.0
Is a diigo group a repository? Netvibes is: http://www.netvibes.com/Employability
Community wanted a website powered a repository (whatever that is, they weren't techo); £40k budget. They went Web 2.0: though repositories were being built that were similar to that need, nothing the community could just jump in and use. (And the repositories that were built don't provide RSS!)
"Must not be driven by traditional project reporting outputs": more important to develop a good site than a project report!
Ppl needed both private and public comms spaces, and freely available software.
Paedagogy, social, organisational aspects of communities have not been involved in repository development, and are the major barriers now.
Everyone thinks their repository is somewhere everyone goes to. You're competing with Email, Google, Facebook: no, the repository is not the one-stop shop, push content to where people actually do go
There is a SWORD widget for Netvibes, but it's still rudimentary
Put edu communities at the heart of your requirements gathering and ongoing planning!
You *must* support newsfeeds, including recommendations and commentary, and make sure they work in all platforms
Need easy deposit tools, which can work from desktop and web 2.0 tools
Allow ppl to save this resource to Web 2.0 tools like Facebook; don't make your own Facebook