4 research outputs found
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“Fairy rings” of participation: the invisible network influencing participation in online communities
Individuals participate in many different ways in online communities. There is an extensive body of research describing participation as a key metaphor in communities of practice and stressing that participatory mobility is influenced by underground multidirectional activities, directed away from the notion of periphery to the centre practices and taking the shape of expansive swarming and multidirectional pulsations. This article describes an ongoing observational study proposing a model that attempts to determine how users participate in online communities and what influences them to alter the way in which they participate. We performed daily observations on user participatory behaviour in 50 online communities using public domain – anonymous data available in the communities. The specific communities were selected because they are related to learning and support learning activities within their networks. The data observations collected were analysed using Compendium, a hypermedia knowledge mapping and sense-making tool, to represent and structure the data, make complex cross data queries, test hypotheses and build representation of real examples to support our claims. Initial findings indicate that users connect, participate, contribute and collaborate on a shared objective, transferring information and pooling knowledge within and between communities in four different modes. During their online journey, users switched between modes of participation or even remained in one specific mode, implying that the way in which users participate in an online community is not just related to the mode of participation and the level of engagement with the community but it is also due to hidden reasons or motivations, an invisible network of interactions of elements that affect the willingness of the user to participate. This layer is not immediately evident in the user actions but can be inferred by analysing user reactions. It is argued that user participation in online communities occurs in two layers; the “visible” layer of participation with the different modes; and the “invisible” layer of element interactions, similar to formations observed in nature when a radically spreading underground network of fungi activity results in a ring or arc formation of mushrooms, also known as a “fairy ring”. These underground multidirectional activities influence participation and participatory mobility. Following an open scientific inquiry approach and an open research paradigm we plan to share these observations with a wider audience of practitioners, researchers and theorists for all to test or contest our arguments, and to enrich, question, or support our model
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OERopoly: A game to generate collective intelligence around OER
Collective Intelligence (CI ) is a phenomenon that emerges at the crossroads of three worlds: Open Educational Resources (OER), Web 2.0 technologies and Online Learning Communities. Building CI for the OER movement means capturing the richness of information, experiences, knowledge and resources, that the movement is constantly generating, in a way that they can be shared and reused for the benefit of the movement itself. The organisation of CI starts from collecting the knowledge and experiences of OER's practitioners and scholars in new creative forms, and then situating this knowledge in a collective 'pot' from where it can be leveraged with new 'intelligent' meanings and toward new 'intelligent' goals. This workshop is an attempt to do so by engaging participants in a CI experience, in which they will contribute to, and at the same time take something from, the existing CI around OER, Web 2.0 technologies and Online Learning Communities
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Planning the OER landscape
The Open Educational Resources (OER) field will soon be entering its second decade and is thirsting for an analytic frame for the eco-system of content, tools, projects, institutions and enthusiasts. Community members are expressing concerns about redundancy and repetition in the field and the difficulty of tracking new developments and building on the work of others. We need to understand OER activity in a way that is descriptive of projects, goals and target audiences, and analytic with respect to educational efficacy and promising models. As the field advances, we need to create a common language, share a collective understanding of the gaps in the landscape and consider processes to improve connections and lessons learned.
In this paper we look at options to “map” OER as they travel from institutional ideas to community use to next generation learning. Such a map will be of limited value imposed from outside but instead we need to form the right seeds for a map to emerge as dynamic and capable of being owned. There are many options for presentation that can be considered such as roadmaps, process diagrams, cartoons and animations. Each representation has different merits for communication, and indeed a hybrid approach may be what is needed. A particular approach used in looking at data from more than 100 funded projects has been to use an online system, Cohere, for researchers to describe the characteristics of each project and to derive different views. These provide possible starting points for more general summaries of work on OER