Serendipity35

A line I heard way back in the good old days of the emerging Internet was that doing research on the Net was like "trying to take a sip of water from a fire hose."  There's just too much information out here.

Over the years, all of us have developed ways of filtering the content.

One of the things that Yahoo.com was doing back in 1995 was acting as a web search engine. But it was also a web directory and eventually it diversified into a web portal. Those were the days of Yahoo!, MSN, Lycos, Excite and Altavista and they all saw part of their role as filtering the "better" content to users.

Now, Google is the big player. It began with search, but we all know that it tries (and often succeeds) at doing much more with the information on the Net.

As Web 1.0 became Web 2.0 and we were hit with a lot more content produced by users on blogs and other sites, some of those people also became "filters." In fact, we have thought of Serendipity35 as a kind of filtering service. If you like this blog, it may be because you like what we select to feature in the posts. Or perhaps you subscribe to just one of our RSS categories from the sidebar, filtering only posts about "openness" or only those about "educational technology" or "eLearning."

The point is that all of either create filters using tools like RSS feeds, or Twitter or Facebook groups or rely on others who we trust to filter and find the best things.

But the filters are clogged. The information is overloading the filters.

I have created several Twitter accounts simply to keep my different lives apart. For example, I created one account just for the poetry people I follow. And within that account I had to divide them up into groups such as "publishers" so that when I click a link I might actually be able to read the posts rather than be confronted by hundreds of updates that I cannot get through.

I have had to drop some people I follow on Twitter simply because they fill up my feed. You could spend your day just following the posts of a few Twitter accounts on technology like Mashable who has almost 2 million followers and has made about 23,000 posts.

And the same thing happens in Facebook, in your Google Reader and was especially apparent in the dreadful launch of Google Buzz which threw a bunch of people you have some contact with into your Buzz following list.

Maybe you can't handle the flood of posts from a site like ReadWriteWeb, but you're okay with reading about the one or a two that I read and report on. Unfortunately, MY filter is becoming clogged too. I'm not sure I can get through all the content on a site like that and even filter out a few topics of interest.

Clay Shirky says that this is not a case of information overload but "filter failure" and I agree. There has always been more information (books, movies, newspaper, magazines...) than any one of can handle. We have always had our filters and they have always involved people - parents, teachers, librarians, mentors, friends, colleagues - in some way.

Talking about social networking use by teenagers in schools, Lisa Thumann found that because there were so many options for students and teachers to use, that there was no agreement on what works - and there was frustration that probably causes some to just not use anything. "Yet another place to have to check for information," she concludes.

How do we fix the filters? What filters do you use?

A post on the NYT's Bits technology blog titled "‘Controlled Serendipity’ Liberates the Web" caught my attention because of the serendipity reference and because it referenced several URL-shortening services that I was researching online.

Bit.ly, the URL-shortening service, has people clicking millions of their links in social networks like Twitter and Facebook and e-mail. Last week, bit.ly processed 599,100,000 clicks, its highest number since starting in July 2008.

Many URLs now have multiple doppelgängers because of this aggregation of “controlled serendipity” with others and they with us. Are we really all human aggregators now?

URL shorteners like bit.ly ow.ly tinyurl.com are getting a lot of traffic. (By the way, I am not a big fan of the .ly domains which is the Internet country code for Libya.) One reason for the popularity of these services is Twitter with its 140 character limit. Many site and blog URLs can easily eat up most or all of the 140 character limit if you want to add a link. The shorteners can knock it down to about 12 characters by providing a redirect.

One problem is that if one of these services goes away, it will leave behind all the redirects that have been created - which would be millions of links for any of the popular services.

People can also use these shortened links to disguise the destination of a link. If you wanted to find out about consumer services from the Better Business Bureau, I could send you to http://bit.ly/2V4GXo or to http://bit.ly/2V4GXo. They look pretty much the same and neither gives you a clue as to where you are headed. One of them does go to the BBB, the other goes to a store link.

I sometimes assign my students to create a new topic page on Wikipedia in order to learn how it works from the inside. It is a bit difficult to find a topic that has no entry these days. So, I was surprised when I did a search on "content farming" and found no entry.

Firms that do content farming hire writers (perhaps experienced and professional - perhaps not) to create content for clients that is audience-driven. What are people searching for and NOT finding?

If you look at what is trending on sites like Twitter, Google or Yahoo, you can see what people are trying to find.

Jeff Jarvis has written and spoken a few times about the topic and sites like demandmedia.com which have made a business based on "listening to the customer" and giving them what they want. Their "manifesto" states:

"We believe that consumers tell you exactly what they need – if you’ll just take the time to ask or listen. The Internet is the world’s greatest market research platform; so we immerse ourselves in the billions of signals of consumer demand that it provides each day. While more traditional media companies focus on supplying experiences they believe consumers might like, we’re unapologetically dedicated to delivering the ones they already demand. This core trait guides the content we create, the social applications we develop, and the communities that we nurture. It’s incredibly liberating to operate this way, knowing that everything we do satisfies the real world interests of 100 million consumers each month."

Give the people what they want. It's not a new concept.

Content farming has some linkage (especially from its critics) to link farms. Those are a group of web sites that link to every other site in the group. I think that link farms are a form of spamming. Your mail isn't being spammed, but the index search engines is being spammed (AKA spamdexing or spamexing). At one time, they had to be created manually, but now they are created through automated programs and services, so it's much easier and therefore more profitable to create them. They were originally created by search engine optimizers back in 1999 because search engines relied on link popularity to figure out a kind of ranking order for search results. I'm no expert on this, so I don't know that linking is THE way to get to the top of search results these days, but it probably is still a factor.

In a way, Wikipedia does content farming. If something isn't there that you're looking for, you can suggest that it be created or create the first version yourself. The content there is what people want to find.

The people who write for these content farms are usually free-lancers who get paid by the article. Many of them write for different sites and try to create as much content as possible in order to put together an income.

I could see colleges using a bit of this business model in their own marketing. Actually, they already do. Many schools hire companies to find out what are the courses, certificates and degree programs that are in demand by their target audience.

So, consumer demand drives things. Give users what they want, where they want it. I could look at the search terms that lead people to this blog and be sure to write posts about what was missing.
The companies that produce a lot of new content every day, like Answers.com and Demand Media, are moving up the list of top U.S. web properties. What chance do I have against a site Demand Media that produces hndreds or thousands of new pieces of content a day? WikiAnswers http://wiki.answers.com is the Q&A site driven by user-generated content that drives most of answers.com's traffic.

Well, I have taken the plunge back into being a student. After writing and presenting about many of the "open learning" initiatives online, I registered last week for my first course at P2PU. P2PU (as in Peer To Peer University) has a mission "to leverage the power of the Internet and social software to enable communities of people to support learning for each other." It combines open educational resources and structured courses to offer high-quality low-cost (or no-cost) educational opportunities. It is run and governed by volunteers.

I signed up for "Copyright for Educators, Cycle 2."  All courses are open for sign-up until Wednesday the 3rd of March and the courses will begin 12 March. This course is for educators and learners who want to understand how copyright affects the use of learning materials and how to use copyright to facilitate education.

The goals of this course are:
1. to help you identify copyright issues in education and give you a firm grounding in copyright, exceptions and, licensing
2. to help you recognize open licenses, and find open license material and apply open licensees to resources
3. to get you thinking, writing, and conversing about how to use  copyright exceptions and open licenses to enable education.


I have several reasons for taking the course. I have always had an interest in copyright issues for educators and have done presentations and workshops on it over the years. Though I don't consider myself an expert on copyright, I know more than most educators. Of course, that's fairly easy since most educators (perhaps I will need to qualify that as "U.S. educators") know very little about copyright other than claiming "fair use" when questioned about their use of copyrighted materials.

Since P2PU has more participation outside the United States, part of the appeal to me of this course is to learn something about copyright beyond the United States.

I also want to see how P2PU works from the inside. How are the courses designed? How are they facilitated? What kind of audience and interactions occur?

I know that when I have mentioned P2PU and other open courseware initiatives to other educators (and in posts on this blog), they have a very skeptical attitude about free and open learning. They are immediately wary of anyone "giving away" learning for free. They are distrustful of the quality of the courses and the instructors.

My only hesitation in signing up for the course was time. It runs 6 weeks. Although I am not teaching any courses his semester, I am designing a new grad course for summer session and my full-time job fills the daylight hours. If I just stop all my blogging though, I should have plenty of time to do the assignments! Of course, knowing myself pretty well, it is likely that taking the course will generate a lot that I will want to blog about, so...

The course "organiser" (instructor, facilitator...) for my course is Delia Browne. She is the National Copyright Director, Copyright Advisory Group of Australian Schools and Technical and Further Education Institutes(TAFEs) and an experienced intellectual property lawyer. In her current role, Delia manages the National Copyright Unit which provides specialist copyright advice to the education sector and conducts negotiations with collecting societies on behalf of schools and TAFE institutes. Prior to her current role, Delia worked at law firm Minter Ellison providing specialist copyright advice to the education and media/entertainment sectors. She is also a strong advocate of the open education movement and has actively participated in several international meetings and projects on promoting open resources, technology and teaching practices in education.

I would be very pleased to get an instructor with those qualifications for a course I would pay for at a local college.

Online courses, programs, degrees and institutions have been criticized as less than traditional classroom experiences since online learning first appeared. A few days ago, I posted an SNL parody about online degrees, but its not so far off from the real criticism those of us in education hear.

The study "Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies" published by the Department of Education reinforces both sides in the online argument. You can download the 93 page report, but for right now I will point to two findings.

"Few rigorous research studies of the effectiveness of online learning for K–12 students have been published. A systematic search of the research literature from 1994 through 2006 found no experimental or controlled quasi-experimental studies comparing the learning effects of online versus face-to-face instruction for K–12 students that provide sufficient data to compute an effect size. A subsequent search that expanded the time frame through July 2008 identified just five published studies meeting meta-analysis criteria..."

"Students who took all or part of their class online performed better, on average, than those taking the same course through traditional face-to-face instruction. Learning outcomes for students who engaged in online learning exceeded those of students receiving face-to-face instruction..."

Transparency by Design is an initiative, conceived by the Presidents’ Forum, that has its stated mission "to assist adult learners in becoming educated consumers of higher education and lead universities and colleges toward greater accountability and transparency." Members are regionally accredited, adult-serving, distance education institutions. In 2008, the Initiative chose WCET to provide quality assurance on the standards of data reporting.

Last summer, WCET launched the website, College Choices for Adults, to provide adult learners information to better inform their decision-making process. Using program-level learning outcomes, measurements and results, that were more difficult to find online previously is part of that transparency. As the site grows, new data (progress rates and student satisfaction data) is added as well as new institutions and programs.

Transparency by Design institutional members pledge to uphold the "Principles of Good Practice for Higher Educational Institutions Serving Adults at a Distance" that were developed. Those principles contain many of the key concepts of transparency - disclosure, responsiveness, accountability etc.

Trying to promote transparency in higher education institutions delivering distance learning programs is certainly a good idea. Institutions might consider these principles even for a self-serving reason. Transparency to those you serve leads to greater trust in the integrity of the institution.

The current stories about the Toyota auto recalls just won't go away and the company is being hurt badly by them. But as new information emerges that they were not transparent about knowing that there were problems, their reputation falls even more. As I was preparing this post, the television news ran a story about Toyota Motor Corp. President Akio Toyoda's testimony to Congress. Something he said in his prepared statement registered with me as a description of what may be wrong with many online programs right now. "We pursued growth over the speed at which we were able to develop our people and our organization, and we should sincerely be mindful of that." Indeed...

In these tough economics times, many schools look at online courses as a way to grow programs and enrollment without additional buildings and classroom. Hiring additional adjuncts to teach those sections also keeps down the cost. But the rapid deployment and growth is often not supported.

Unfortunately, many of those adjuncts are not prepared. I don't mean they aren't prepared to teach the subject matter; they are not prepared to teach it ONLINE.

Ten years ago when I was much more deeply involved in online course design, I was asked to do some spying on a big, national online university. Actually, I was asked to apply to teach for them so that I could see firsthand what demands they would make, what the content would look like and how I would be compensated. The big revelation for me from that experience was that this "for-profit" was doing a much more stringent job of vetting and preparing instructors and courses than my own traditional university.

Instructors were required to take training and learn in an online environment before ever being allowed to teach in one. The courses were highly structured and far more media-rich than the text-based courses many colleges were offering at that time. There was very little "intellectual freedom" for the instructor - the course you were given was what you taught. Don't get creative. Still, there was continuity and consistency in those sections that does not always exist in online programs.

A recent post on The Chronicle of Higher Education site, "Community Colleges Explore National Collaboration to Fight For-Profit Marketing Machine," points at the inability of smaller colleges (like individual community colleges) to match the marketing budgets of the for-profit institutions.

I understand the need for a "marketing collaboration" led by the American Association of Community Colleges. It has been tried before. A pooling of resources had once created a distance learning effort called the International Community College that after four years of planning was never able to launch.

This new effort is pure marketing - purchasing “leads” on potential students from online portals or an online clearinghouse to showcase programs. For-profit institutions have taken away many traditional students, particularly community-college candidates looking for job advancement.

I would much rather see money being spent on better courses and better prepared faculty.

Here in New Jersey, the New Jersey Virtual Community College Consortium (NJVCCC) is a partnership of the state’s 19 community colleges that tried, with some success, to pool all their courses across the schools and allow a student to pick and choose online offerings to complete a degree. What has worked for them is cooperative purchasing, collaborative professional development opportunities and trying as a group to establish online course quality assurance and inter-institutional communication.

Looking through the rough drafts I have for posts to this blog, I realized that I had started three posts about transparency of one kind or another.

Transparency is a term that gets more and more attention these days in many fields. In one instance I was thinking of writing about it in the context of how companies operate, and in another post I was thinking about it in education.

Transparency, in those two domains, concerns openness, communication, and accountability. It is the metaphorical extension of the "true" meaning that we learned about a "transparent" object being one that can be seen through.

For a business, transparent procedures would include open meetings, financial disclosure statements, freedom of information (some legislated by the government), budgetary review, audits, etc.

Transparency requires policies, practices and procedures that allow it to be available to users/clients/students.

More to come...