Cloudworks
Strategies for developing sustainable virtual communities for design
Gráinne Conole, LAMS Conference
5th December 2008, Sydney

Resources and events
Tool development
Helping teachers make effective
Empirical
use of technologies to create
evidence
better learning activities for students
Cloudworks CompendiumLD
Workshops Schema
Cloudfests Summits
Design challenges
Andrew Brasher, Paul Clark, Simon Cross, Juliette Culver, Martin Weller, Perry Williams

RSS feeds Playlists
Follow and
be followed
Friends
APIs
Many repositories of good practice,
but how do you develop the community???
Share
Embed
Comment
Aggregate

‘Social networking makes little
sense if we leave out the objects
that mediate the ties between people
Engeström
Design framework for sociality
Enabling practice
Mimicking reality
Building identity
Actualising self
Bouman et al.

My social network
How can we encourage a culture
of sharing ideas and designs?
Why has there been little
uptake of educational repositories?
Can we apply web 2.0 principles
to an educational context?

Development
Vision statement
Cloudfests
Prototyping
Paper clouds
Design summit Course
Design Challenge

Vision
• Enable people to find, share and discuss
learning and teaching ideas
• Connect people with similar interests
• Showcase work
• Provide a place for different communities
• Encourage sharing

Principles
• Low barrier to entry
• People-orientated
• Open site, open content
• Target particular communities
• The site acting as a conduit

Cloudworks v 0.1
Find and share designs
Resource
Clouds bank
Storm
Tools
clouds
People
Web 2.0 principles:
tagging, profiles, user generated

It’s so easy to be very abstract ... and not catch people’s interest.
Because you can’t quickly get a feel for what was actually done, that
worked or didn’t work. ... [“Semi-collaborative learning”] was just
terribly abstract, I couldn’t sort of work out what it was, what this
range of activities were, it just didn’t get me there quick enough.
If you notice things that are abstract, you can say:
Oh, and how did that work? or give me an example,
I did one like this! ... It didn’t worry me that it was
abstract. What worried me was: how the hell does
he make that work in an OU teaching context!
The ones that started to catch my interest were where I
could quite quickly get a sense of a device or an approach...
[“Citing exercise”] got me straight there. Within two or
three sentences, I kind of grasped what it was that they had
done and it caught my imagination.

‘Shortcuts to new thinking’
We’ve had notorious difficulties over the years in getting anybody to talk
about teaching and share teaching practice. They’ll all talk about research;
that’s fine. But there’s also no compulsion to talk about teaching.... I’m on
our staff development committee, and we find out all kinds of quite
interesting courses and things that would be really relevant to people. And
they say, oh well, I’m too busy researching, and I don’t want to do that!
(Laughs) ... So if there is a strong lead that this is an important thing to do
and it’s just something that people do routinely, yeah, you get them to
write. But otherwise I think you’ll just have a few very interested people.

It’s not a repository
it’s a conversation
Success stories
Visual designs
Concrete vs. abstract Quality control
Transferable designs
Barriers to contribution
Changing practice
Ownership
Comments make it
come alive
Openness

Ascilite conference Cloudscape
Overview of the cloudscape:
a space to post and discuss
ideas seen at Ascilite
Design a short
course in a day
Import
existing
Clouds Workshop on New clouds
New clouds Secondlife
added
by delegates Paper on mobile
learning
Peer
OULDI
assessment
site
criteria
CompendiumLD Academic Talk
Web Peer Assessment webparesearch.blogspot.com/ Follow and
be followed
Information literacy webparesearch.blogspot.com/

Cloudworks v0.2
Social networking site for finding, sharing & discussing
learning and teaching ideas and designs

All clouds

Who and what I am
following, who’s
following me
My cloudstream
dynamically
updates

Cloudscapes
Workshop
Course
Research topic
Conference
Design team
Topic
Tool
Project

Stalls really useful
18th September2008
Amazed at how Design challenge:
much we achieved design a short course
in a day are you up to it???

OER Guidelines
repository on selection
Select
Design Learning
tools environment
OER
Design Use
Design cycle
Design
repository Evaluate Monitoring
tools
Data Data
representation tools analysis tools

OL-Net network
People/networks
Meta-analysis/
synthesis
Tools, methods,
approaches
Designs, evaluations,
case studies
Hewlitt Foundation

References
• OU Learning design initiative - http://ouldi.open.ac.uk
• Cloudworks - http://cloudworks.ac.uk
• Cloudworks: Conole, G., Culver, J., Well, M., Williams, P., Cross, S.,
Clark, P. and Brasher, A. (2008), Cloudworks: social networking for
learning design, Ascilite Conference, 30th Nov – 3rd Dec 2008,
Melbourne, www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/melbourne08/procs/conole.pdf
• CompendiumLD: Conole, G., Brasher, A., Cross, S., Weller, M.,
Clark, P. and White, J. (2008),Visualising learning design to foster
and support good practice and creativity, Educational Media
International,Volume 54, Issue 3, 177-194.
• Design schema: Conole, G. (2008), New schema for mapping
pedagogies and technologies, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/conole/

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