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Your Course Site and the Participatory Web

by Doug Mills, CITES EdTech Consultant

"Anyone with teenagers (and many with preteens too) can attest to the popularity of hosted services such as Xanga and MySpace. How might such services enhance your course site and how might they be harnessed?"The term "Participatory Web" refers to the explosive use of the World Wide Web as an open forum where users quickly and easily make personal contributions through weblogs, wikis, annotated bookmark lists, multimedia repositories, podcasts, and tagging and commenting on any or all of the above. For these users, the emphasis in web browsing has largely shifted from consuming to producing information and from individualized experience to community. This phenomenon, also commonly expressed in the term "Web 2.0," is evidenced in the rapidly expanding number of free providers of such services (often with a premium option at a price). One has only to Google the phrase "free photo hosting" or "free weblog" to illustrate the point. Anyone with teenagers (and many with preteens too) can attest to the popularity of hosted services such as Xanga and MySpace. How might such services enhance your course site and how might they be harnessed? The possibilities seem limited only by the needs and creativity of the individual instructor, but here are some thoughts on what, why, and how to help get you started, as well as some related issues to consider.

What?

We have already featured articles on weblogs, wikis, and podcasting in our recent series on emerging technologies. Please see those articles for a review of what these technologies are and how you can get started with them. In this context let me just say that I've been very impressed with the services provided by Edublogs.org (my demo blog) and Wikispaces.com (my demo wiki)*, but there are countless other services available as well!

In addition to these services, though, I'd like to point out at least two other types of services: multimedia repositories and social bookmarking. Online image repositories seem to be the fastest growing segment of these services, and the reasons are not difficult to discern. First, the pervasive use of digital cameras means that everyone (except maybe Aunt Tilly in Idaho) has digital images on their computers. Uploading these images to a central location where I can share them with anyone in the world with an internet connection (sorry Aunt Tilly) is a no-brainer. Second, the business model for such services is much clearer than with many other online services - people like to print pictures and that's something you can charge for. Flickr.com (my Flickr site) is probably the best known of these sites and has lots to offer, but all that matters is finding one with features that meet your needs. In addition to image-hosting sites, however, there are sites that host other types of media such as audio and video files. My favorite video-hosting sites thus far are Vimeo.com (my demo site) and YouTube.com (my demo site).

Social bookmarking services provide a means for users to keep and share their browser bookmarks online. Probably the most well-known of these is de.licio.us and Digg.com. The power and uniqueness of social bookmarking merits its own article in the future...

"Tagging refers to the ability of any user browsing an image or bookmark that has been made public to attach a label to enhance future searching and categorization."While on the surface multimedia repositories and social bookmarking services seem like very different creatures, the very powerful feature they have in common is tagging. Tagging refers to the ability of any user browsing an image or bookmark that has been made public to attach a label to enhance future searching and categorization. In addition, many of these services include some means of rating content as well, either by direct user ratings (four out of five stars) or by indicating how many users have chosen to add a specific bookmark to their collection - the higher the number, presumably the better the resource.

Why?

The following is an incomplete list of why you might want to enhance your course's web presence with one or more of these types of free online services:

  • Facilitate student contributions
    While the current version of Illinois Compass, for example, allows students to turn in and "publish" assignments for the whole class to view, or participate in online discussions, including linking to images hosted elsewhere, what if the instructor of a tourism or field survey course wanted students to contribute images after weekly outings? Individual accounts in Flickr for each student in the class with everyone able to choose each other as contacts would allow for easy uploading, sharing, commenting, and rating by everyone. Similarly, the use of a wiki for the development of a course glossary, the use of blogs for public personal journals available to all class members or just the instructor and the individual student, and the use of social bookmarking to develop a course resource list are all easily possible Web 2.0 enhancements to an existing course web site.
  • Supplement opportunities for collaboration
    The use of a wiki to support team projects seems almost too obvious to mention - the ability of a group of people to work together to create their own web space so easily is so much more powerful than a shared discussion board and so much easier than creating web pages using HTML. In addition, the ease of contributions and comments in the other types of online services can also facilitate online collaboration.
  • Keep your site updated via RSS
    All of these technologies provide support for RSS (Really Simple Syndication, see previous article), which means that updated information can be fed into your existing course site, keeping it up to date as students make their contributions.
  • Add a pubic element to your course site
    The current version of Illinois Compass does not provide a means for allowing people who have not been added to the grade book roster to view course content (this has been addressed in a future version of the product). Using one or more of these free services can provide a public dimension to your course site if desired.
  • Create persistent URLs for multimedia
    Although images added to various tools inside Compass via the provided "image" interface work fine when a course is copied from semester to semester, any images uploaded to Compass and added "by hand" via HTML coding do not tend to fare so well due to changes in the image's web address. Links to images residing external to Compass, such as at Flickr, do not have these problems.
  • Incorporate expanded resources
    By using the power of tagging, it is possible to connect to resources contributed by millions of users. Here's a link to all the images in Flickr with a tag of "damselfly." Of course it is possible that some of these images have been tagged incorrectly (i.e., some of these images are no doubt dragonflies, not damselflies) but this too can be a learning experience as students are called upon to evaluate the resources for themselves (similar to discerning the reliability of a wikipedia article...)
  • Share content between separate classes or sections
    This was a point made by a professor at a recent technology conference - he gives students in his various courses access to the blogs of all students he's teaching and requires them to comment on a certain number of each other's blogs, regardless of which course they're enrolled in. He finds that this cross-pollinates the courses he's teaching on different literary periods.
  • Make use of "advanced" features
    Uploading a video clip to Vimeo automatically converts it to Flash video format; images uploaded to an account in bubbleshare.com provides access to several different formats of slideshows which can be embedded into your course site:



    It is of course possible to create such things without the aid of these free online services, but for many, this is an attractive option.

How?

There are at least three approaches to incorporating the types of resources we've been discussing into an existing course site. The easiest approach of course is to simply provide a link from the existing course site to the external blog, wiki, etc. In Illinois Compass, this can easily be done using the URL tool.

A second approach, requiring some comfort in working with HTML, is to use an inline frame. This is the approach used for the Bubbleshare slideshow above. The basic HTML necessary for this is as follows:

<iframe height="y" width="x" src="URLofResource"></iframe>

where "y" is the desired height of the iframe window in pixels and "x" the desired width. "URLofResource" refers to the web address of the resource we want to appear inside our iframe. In some cases the service provides the necessary code to accomplish this. In the Bubbleshare example above it was only necessary to cut and paste.

<iframe height="304px" width="375px" src="http://www.bubbleshare.com/album/43408/mini?size=360x270&amp;interval=3&amp;style=rounded"
</iframe>

This HTML can be added, for example, to the header or footer of an Illinois Compass organizer page. If you need to adjust the height or width of your iframe simply change the numbers.

A third approach involves using the RSS feed from a resources site along with an RSS to JavaScript converter site such as Feed2JS or RSStoJavaScript to generate the code needed to embed the RSS feed into a web page (again such as the HTML header or footer of a Compass organizer page!)

To view examples of these different approaches as applied to the free online service discussed in this article, send an email to edtech@uiuc.edu to request access to a demonstration course inside Compass.

Issues

Are any of these services right for you? Here are some additional considerations.

First, most of these sites are able to provide "free" services because they accept paid advertising. How obnoxious this is varies from site to site, and with some there is almost no advertising at all (Blogger.com, Edublogs.com, Wikispaces.com if you get your wiki via Edublogs, and Flickr are all virtually ad free, and there are others). The question to ask here is how much, if any, advertising am I and my students, willing to live with.

A second consideration is student privacy. In general these services are intended to be world accessible, although with many of them it is possible by various means to limit who can access your content. How public or private do you want your students' contributions to be and is it possible for this to be controlled in the service you are looking at?

A third consideration is copyright/intellectual property. Most of these services are rightly concerned that users post only content that they have the right to post. They vary, however, in the extent to which they are able to offer protection of your own intellectual property - a very difficult thing to do if content is on a web site available to the world. Many of them do, however, offer the easy ability to add Creative Commons licenses to your content to specify your desires (see past article on Creative Commons).

In some situations on campus, a college or unit may be providing some of these services. If you're part of such a group, by all means take advantage of them! But for those who do not have access to University-based options for a Web 2.0 service, there may well be a good free solution out there. To further discuss the possibilities of how you might tap into the participatory web to enhance your course's online presence, or for more help in how to do so, drop us a line at edtech@uiuc.edu.

*Note that wikispaces.com will provide a free wiki site if you register with edublogs.org and request the wikispaces site in that process.