1. Raising the level of educational debate:
Cloudworks: Social networking for learning
and teaching
Gráinne Conole
16th June 2009
Exeter University

2. Bridging the gap
Debate
Sharing
Community-based
Cummulative
“Open Design”
Adaptive
Contextual Affordances of new Characteristics of Personalised
Networked technologies good pedagogy Situative
Immersive Social
Collective Experiential
Reflective

3. Cloudworks:
social networking for learning & teaching
Blogging Youtube
Live commentary RSS feeds
Facebook
Flckr
Changing practices through use of social networking
Tagging
Commenting Following
Many repositories of good practice, but little impact
Embedding
Twitter Slideshare

4. The aims of Cloudworks
1. A place for conversation about
learning, teaching and technology and
discussion about problems
2. A place to share learning designs
3. A place to look for inspiration and to find
people
4.A place for existing learning technology
communities to have an online space

5. Ideas behind Cloudworks
1. Low barrier to entry – • 6. Link with
imperfect is OK! communities, rather than
2. People-orientated (not a replace
repository!) • 7. Recognise role of
3. User-folksonomies, not learning technologists and
taxonomies other mediators
4. Tool- and process- • 9. Recognise ownership
agnostic issues
5. All content publicly • 10. Specific to learning
available technology (not just
another Facebook or
Ning)

6. Clouds:
Learning and teaching ideas
Design or case studies
Tools or resources
Questions or problems
Cloudscapes:
Conferences
Workshops
Course team
Student cohort
Research theme
Project

8. Examples of use
Aggregation of student
generated course
resources and course
twitter stream
Conference collective
blogging and backroom chat
Workshops: workshop material,
live blogs of sessions and plenary
discussions, aggregate of group
discussions

11. Features
• Dynamic list of clouds + new comments
• Comments on clouds + cloudscapes
• Can “follow” people + cloudscapes
• RSS feeds of cloudscapes + people
• Embedding: pictures, video, presentations
• Twitter feeds for people +cloudscapes

12. +
Statistics
Since July 2008 Increasing use and comments
• No. of clouds: 652 • No. of comments: 879
• No. of users: 789 • No. of different tags: 861
• No. of cloudscapes: 50 • No. of unique visits: 19, 202
• No. of page views: 98, 100 • No. of visitors: 12, 518

19. Coming soon…
Pedagogy schema
• Interactive widgets
• Different pedagogy schema
• Aim to think differently, take a
fresh perspective
• Designed to be fun and easy to use

20. Pedagogy profile
Assimilative
Info handling
Assimilate
Communication
Assessment
Info handling
Experiential
Assimilative
Assessment
Info handling
Productive
Adaptive
Experiential
Productive
Pedagogy profile:
Communication
Adaptive
Maps types of
student tasks to
Productive
course structure
Experiential
Block 11
Block 5 3 4 1 0 0 4
Block 2
Block 2 6 3 3 3 3 2 4
Adaptive
Block 3
Block 3 6 3 3 3 4 3 4
Total
Total 17 9 10 7 7 5 12
Assessment

21. PM
L140 En rumbo – Unidad 1 Task Matrix Summary 21
L140 En rumbo Task Profile Review
40.00
34.50
35.00
30.00
Student Hours
25.00
20.00 Task Type
14.75
15.00 13.00
10.00
5.00 2.50 3.25
0.75 0.00
0.00
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23. Open Design in practice

24. Design, use, reuse
Deposits
OER
Creates
Designer
Design Deposits
Quiz + beginners route
Uses
Learner A
OER Quiz + advanced route
Chooses Learner B Uses
Design
Repurposes
Tutor & deposits

25. Prior designs
Process design New designs
& resources
Clouds in
Cloudworks
OER repositories
New OER
& designs
Pedagogical
Patterns

26. Further information
• Papers
▫ Conole and Culver (submitted), Cloudworks: applying social networking
practice for the exchange of learning and teaching ideas and designs,
special issue of CAL09, Computers and Education, submitted April 09.
▫ Conole and Culver (submitted) Cloudworks: social networking for
learning design, Australian Journal of Educational Technology,
adaptation of paper presented at Ascilite Dec 08, submitted April 09
▫ Conole, G. and McAndrew, P. (submitted), A new approach to supporting the
design and use of OER: Harnessing the power of web 2.0, M. Edner and M.
Schiefner (eds), Looking toward the future of technology enhanced education:
ubiquitous learning and the digital nature.
• Relevant sites
▫ OULDI
 http://ouldi.open.ac.uk
▫ Olnet
 http://olnet.org
▫ Cloudworks
 http://cloudworks.ac.uk
▫ CompendiumLD
 http://compendiumld.open.ac.uk