Top Hats & Trainers: formal repositories & informal Web2.0 sharing: a dance for educational communities: SHEEN Sharing Project

SHEEN Sharing EdShare Workshop on Traditional Repositories & Web2.0 Sharing, Southampton University, 4 November 2009 Sarah Currier, Project Consultant

I’m a formal repositories kinda gal, a librarian with a primary professional interest in learning materials repositories and educational metadata since 1999.
For 10 months I’ve had the guilty pleasure of organising a totally Web2.0-based resource sharing project.
I don’t believe this is a “vs.” discussion.

For me, the questions are:
How can educational communities make best use of both formal repositories and Web2.0 sharing?
How can repository developers and managers support educational communities by leveraging Web2.0-type technologies?

Formal repositories meet a certain set of use cases, requiring things like:
A long-term view of, and expertise in, resource curation and management;
Good quality metadata for high precision and recall in resource discovery;
In some use cases, resource preservation;
Solid support for rights protection;
... and so on ...
BUT! All this is expensive and requires a high degree of strategic buy-in from funders.
Not all educational communities (a) have the requisite resource or support, or (b) operate with those types of use cases.

IMS DRI map showing focus on the "core functionality" of a repository (IMS, 2003: Figure 2.2 Core Functionality)

http://groups.diigo.com/group/employability-coordinators-network
(... maybe, kind of ... but it didn’t quite meet all of this community’s requirements ...)

http://www.netvibes.com/Employability
According to that IMS diagram, definitely not! But to this community, it completes the meeting of their requirements.
They feel they now have their Web-based resource, their one-stop-shop for employability resources for Scottish HE, and they will call it a repository whether we like it or not!

Proposed by the SHEEN Employability Coordinators’ Network (ECN) in direct response to an urgent internal need.
Funded by the Scottish Funding Council.
Administered by the Higher Education Academy.
Overseen by the Scottish Higher Education Employability Network (SHEEN) Steering Group.
For the benefit of the ECN and their immediate stakeholders.

Proposed project outcomes:
Increased ease of sharing of resources and practice amongst the ECN, leading to more effective use of resources, better support for their professional development, and enhancement of their community of practice.
Support for discovery and dissemination of relevant employability resources to stakeholders outwith the ECN, e.g. academics, staff developers, student support departments, national services, funders, etc.
Dissemination of the project findings for the benefit of the wider education community, and the FE and HE funding bodies across the UK.

Project timescale: Jan – Sep 2009
Project lead: Cherie Woolmer, Employability Coordinator, University of Strathclyde (voluntary)
Project consultant, 2.5 days / week for 9 months: Sarah Currier (now extended for 4 months )
Project Development Group: enthusiasts in the Employability Coordinators’ Network (voluntary)
Admin and advisory support from HEA
Travel and events budget
No technology budget

The ECN’s original idea was that “someone” should provide them with a Website, perhaps powered by a “repository”, and populate it for them.
Given the project’s resourcing, timescale and intended outcomes, they were advised by JISC CETIS to look at Web2.0 / social media resource sharing instead.
The HEA was keen to use the forthcoming EvidenceNet repository as a more formal home for resources that required this further down the line.

Experimental -- Developmental -- Iterative
Must have ownership and involvement of ECN to succeed
Flexible: change track quickly if something isn’t working
Safe communication spaces + open dissemination spaces
Must not be driven by traditional project reporting outputs
CoP = sharing of knowledge, experience and peer teaching within community
CoP = room for mistakes, learning from trial and error, reporting what doesn’t work as well as what does, supporting each other
Piloting use of freely available Web tools
Validated 100% by Project Review!

Jan – Mar 2009: Exploratory phase
Initial planning meeting of Development Group
4 introductory meetings held across Scotland
Requirements / benchmarking survey
Literature review
Apr – Jul 2009: Tools trials phase
Planning meeting with Development Group
Decide to trial Diigo & Netvibes: introduced at ECN Meeting
3 Diigo Training Days held across Scotland
Aug – Sep 2009: Evaluation phase
Planning webinar with Development Group
Follow-up / evaluation survey
In-depth interview with 2 co-ordinators
Evaluation Event

Oct 2009 – Feb 2010: Project extension
Consolidation of project work as ECN enters new academic year;
Follow-up Diigo trainings to further embed sharing practice;
Development Group workshop to finalise Netvibes page;
Development of Diigo Group tag dictionary based on Netvibes page requirements;
Development of some learning resources for future use of ECN after funded period ends;
Dissemination event Jan/Feb 2010.

Characteristics, Priorities, Experience, Confidence Levels

CoPs and resource sharing in UK HE:
PROWE, CD-LOR, SPIRE (JISC DRP 2005-2007)
JISC Emerge, Pathfinder DMU Learning Exchanges
Interviewed key people.
“ [...] the pedagogical, social, and organisational aspects of these communities have not been at the forefront in the design and development [...]. Research has consistently demonstrated that the most substantial barriers in uptake of technology are rooted in these factors”
Margaryan, Milligan and Douglas, 2007. CD-LOR Project

Ca. 20-22 members at any given time.
National, across all Scotland’s HE institutions
Geographically distributed, with some members, particularly in the north of Scotland, less able to attend centrally based meetings;
Mostly female (76% female / 24% male);
A mix of part-time and full-time (59% full-time / 41% part-time) ...

A mix of professional backgrounds:
Lecturers;
Researchers;
Careers advisers;
Policy developers and implementers;
Staff developers;
Educational developers;
Librarians
... ?

A mix of institutional situations, in terms of:
1. the type of department they are based in:
59% educational development;
41% careers service;
some co-located in different departments;
2. the emphasis required by their institution:
working at a policy level;
working on curriculum and course development;
working directly with academics and students.
3. university type, from red brick to the ancients, including the Open University and the federated UHI Millennium Institute.

Temporary: funding for their work will not continue beyond the next couple of years (a few have permanent posts).
A small number of institutions did not employ designated “employability coordinators”, but most did.

There is significant time pressure on many ECN members;
There are a range of professional and institutional cultures, priorities and communication styles coming to bear on their ability to participate;
There are institutional cultures with different levels of support for use of technology;
There is a sense that the work accomplished must not be lost after the end of the ECN’s funded tenure in their roles.

Communication:
Mutual support;
Sharing experience, practice and learning.
Resource sharing, comprising:
Discovery, sharing, recommending and rating;
Sharing experiences of use of resources;
Targeted resource dissemination to all stakeholders.
One-stop shop for employability for:
New employees coming in;
Employer stakeholders;
Academics;
Students ... And more?

Communicating less frequently than they’d like:
time constraints;
issues of information overload;
all forms of communication tend to occur monthly or less.
Using browser-based bookmarking, Google, email (including a dedicated JISCmail list).
Minor experience with social media and educational tech: not all positive.
Medium/low confidence in efficiency/effectiveness at resource discovery, sharing, dissemination.
Strong support for:
sharing opinions, practice tips and ideas around resources with ECN colleagues and other stakeholders,
improving their own efficiency and effectiveness in sharing resources.

The Story of SHEEN Sharing

We had 4 introductory meetings ...
With a handout ;
We started a project blog , to:
Be a central dissemination and discussion point;
Introduce people to the idea of using RSS feeds;
Provide a place to demonstrate different tools.
Homework was for everyone to:
Set up their own newsfeed reader;
Subscribe to the project blog newsfeed.
We set up weekly drop-in support webinars using the OU’s FlashMeeting tool

The first 4 months were uncomfortable for people:
“ Where’s our nice repository?”;
Ambiguity about purpose of blog was difficult;
Many didn’t even bother with setting up a feed reader;
We had regular Flashmeetings but: technical problems at their institutions - Flashmeeting has virtually no tech support;
We made a few early, passionate, converts who have become the CoP’s expert users;
I probably wouldn’t do it much differently knowing what I know now!
Threshold concepts are key to personal development and learning – and they are troublesome and scary!
I might use the CoP more right from the start to tell their own success stories.

Where we are now

We organised some training sessions;
We got everyone to join Diigo and transfer their existing browser Favourites / Bookmarks to Diigo;
Those with Delicious accounts were helped to transfer those bookmarks to Diigo:
NB: They remain on Delicious too;
Diigo can be set up so that when something is bookmarked using Diigo, it is automatically bookmarked on Delicious as well.
Everyone joined a public Employability Group and a private ECN Group on Diigo.

Cherie and I agreed an initial structure for the public Netvibes site .
I added in examples of resources that could be fed into the Netvibes site:
SHEEN Sharing blog feed;
HEA pages and feeds;
GoogleScholar Pipes were very popular- until Google killed them!;
Targeted Diigo, Delicious, YouTube, Twitter searches (using specific topic tags);
LibraryThing feeds.

Formal repositories with working newsfeeds:
EdShare!
Anything based on intraLibrary (but only if you can get behind the wall; their current open interface is based on SRU and doesn’t offer feeds out-of-the-box);
Formal repositories not currently offering feeds:
HEA EvidenceNet (but they are working on it, and we’ve used their search URL in meantime)
IRISS Learning Exchange is an example of a good intraLibrary repository using their open interface: again, the search URL can be used.
Netvibes SWORD widget: rudimentary right now: not usable for a community like this.

Most of the evidence I have seen suggests that end users do not create good quality metadata for the purposes of robust resource sharing and discovery , even in Web2.0 tagging systems, however:
Diigo has an excellent user-friendly tagging system
Will recommend group tags
These can be a pre-set tag dictionary or just tags your group has used.
I kept trying to introduce this while training on Diigo
Nah, not interested!
Finally realised that the tags were going to create the structure within Netvibes
Once we have our workshop on Netvibes we’ll know what topic tabs and feeds/widgets the ECN want
We will then create a Group tag dictionary and say “If you want your resources to be disseminated via Netvibes, make sure you tag them”.

JISC Emerge (2009) found that “[t]he effective use of Web2.0 applications depends essentially on human networks. This raises questions of inclusion, exclusion and identity”.
We’ve had to stay very aware of the different levels of engagement/confidence and utilise the CoP and peer stories to help people along.

People feel they don’t have time to engage because they perceive a difficult learning curve ahead;
They understand intellectually when experienced CoP members say: “it saves time and enhances work”;
But until they put an initial bit of time in to learn, they don’t get the personal experience that validates that.

Results of the Evaluation Survey

Where we’re at

About 85% of the ECN attended introductory / requirements gathering meetings.
About 60% of the ECN attended the Diigo training workshops and are signed up to Diigo, have their existing bookmarks in their Diigo accounts, and are members of the public & private groups.
About 33% of the current ECN has shared employability resources within the groups (thus making them available to colleagues and Netvibes feeds).
At least 50% of the ECN has signed up for follow-up Diigo trainings this month.

Overall: put educational communities at the heart of requirements gathering and ongoing planning
First priority: make sure at the very minimum you support newsfeeds robustly and flexibly:
Make sure users can easily create standard feeds based on any search/browse/tag/collection;
Provide feeds that include user ratings / recommendations / commentary;
Make sure they really work!
Second priority: remote, easy deposit tools (use SWORD) that can capture metadata;
Third priority: “save/share this resource”.. Especially to email, Twitter, Facebook, social bookmarking / recommendation sites.
Again, include ratings/recommendations/commentary.

Currier, S. (2009) SHEEN Sharing Benchmarking and Final Requirements Report. Final Public Draft. Higher Education Academy. Available: http://www.scribd.com/doc/16529191/SHEEN-Sharing-Benchmarking-and-Requirements-Report-Final-Public-Draft
Currier, S. (2009) SHEEN Sharing Review. Final Public Draft. Higher Education Academy. Available: http://www.scribd.com/doc/16529201/SHEEN-Sharing-Review-Report-Final-Public-Draft
Hughes, A. (2009) Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World: Report of an independent Committee of Inquiry into the impact on higher education of students’ widespread use of Web 2.0 technologies. JISC. Available: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/documents/heweb2.aspx
IMS (2003) IMS Digital Repositories Interoperability - Core Functions Information Model. Version 1.0 Final Specification Available: http://www.imsglobal.org/digitalrepositories/index.html
JISC Emerge (2009) JISC Emerge: A User-Centred Social Learning Media Hub: Supporting the Users and Innovation R&D Community Network . JISC. Available: http://reports.jiscemerge.org.uk/Publications/
Margaryan, A., Milligan, C. And Douglas, P. (2007) CD-LOR Deliverable 9: Structured Guidelines for Setting up Learning Object Repositories. Available: http://www.academy.gcal.ac.uk/cd-lor/documents/CD-LOR_Structured_Guidelines_v1p0_000.pdf

Image on 1 st slide by ycc2106:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ycc2106/103383461/ available under Creative Commons: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/deed.en_GB
Slides by Sarah Currier, Consultant, SHEEN Sharing Project
http://www.sarahcurrier.com/
[email_address]
Slides © 2009 Higher Education Academy.

Top Hats & Trainers: formal repositories & informal Web2.0 sharing: a dance for educational communities: SHEEN Sharing Project

by morageyrie on Nov 09, 2009

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