Science of the Invisible

Phones for Africa

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:00:00 +0000

Why online security isn't

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:00:00 +0000

For various reasons, over the last few weeks I've had to observe quite a lot of young people (ages 16-21) setting up online accounts for various services from banking to social networks. And in nearly every case, the user experience was crap and worked strongly against online security.

The minimum level of online security is, quite reasonably, create a username and password (of questionable strength) and confirm details via an email link. But in so many cases, it's so much worse than that. With great regret, we're dumping the fabulous delicious as a component of our first year PLE module next year because now that registration for delicious has switched to Yahoo, the system is so f*cked up and unfriendly that's it's untenable to continue with this useful service.

I watched a young person struggle with the O2 website, being asked screen after screen of "security" questions, multiple PIN numbers and passwords, and responding by generating throwaway details they had no intention of remembering just to navigate the maze required to get to their objective. And I just set up a new online bank account which required me to:

Fill in an online application form with my details.
Wait 7-10 days for a confirmation letter which asked me to send off a number of identification documents (originals, not copies).
Wait 10-14 days for online account details which I failed to enter into a website so badly designed that I couldn't find the right section because it kept redirecting me to the credit card section, necessitating two calls to the helpline, in order to:
Order a card reader necessary to withdraw or transfer money and
Wait up to 15 days for card reader to arrive.

And if one link in the chain breaks, one digit is typed wrongly or one letter goes astray, all bets are off. This isn't security. This is the opposite of security, encouraging people to cut corners, take risks and lie.

Drowning

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 09:00:00 +0000

I've figured out the only way I'll ever get my head around Wave is to keep plugging away at it until I find out what works and what doesn't. Unfortunately, opportunities to play with Wave have been very limited recently, so I was determined to use it during our PedR meeting yesterday, which I did.

I was hoping to make it a collaborative experience, but no-one else turned up with a laptop, and the iPod Touches much in evidence can't access Wave (easily). So while the chatter continued on Twitter, I squatted in splendid isolation in Wave.

One of the questions I was hoping to tackle was what is the optimum unit size in Wave for different functions, e.g. status update, liveblog, meeting record, wholedamnconference. To be honest, I didn't make too much progress, but I think I did decide that one blip per topic with multiple edits seemed to work better than a stream of blips each time I felt I wanted to record something, i.e. to create a document of record for a meeting, the unit size is moderately large.

Other than that, the only thing I was able to confirm (again) is that Wave feels much better when it's a collaborative experience - typing in isolation feels very sterile. So we have to wait for a much bigger user base. All in all, meh.

Finding the missing joy

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 10:05:00 +0000

For various reasons, I've been a bit depressed over the last couple of weeks. One of the reasons, (but by no means the main one), is the continued decline of Rocketboom, which has long been one of my main beacons in terms of originality of online content development. For that reason, I've been skipping a lot of episodes, in particular the excessive focus in internet memes. I was going to skip the latest episode, but for some reason I watched it. And I'm glad I did. I'm not a huge fan of Sesame Street, but there's no question that it has been consistently innovative. More than that, it has the sheer brio that so much online content is missing. Next time you're creating online teaching materials, take a lesson from the Cookie Monster:

It's not as simple as it looks. Brilliantly edited, but most of all, the sheer balls to just go for it.

No Natives Here

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 10:13:00 +0000

This study explores Web 2.0 technologies in an academic library through focus groups with undergraduates at Kent State University. Results reveal that students, despite being heavy users, are less sophisticated and expressive in their use of Web 2.0 than presumed. Students set clear boundaries between educational and social spaces on the Web, and the library may be best served by building Web 2.0 into its site and extending its services into course management systems.

No Natives Here: A Focus Group Study of Student Perceptions of Web 2.0 and the Academic Library'. The Journal of Academic Librarianship 35(6):523-532.

Comment: In my experience, this observation was true 2-3 years ago, but at the University of Leicester at least, is no longer true and the barriers between educational and social spaces online are breaking down rapidly.

The Monty Hall Problem

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 09:55:00 +0000

To a mathematician, it's obvious. To everyone else, it's just plain wrong. Imagine that you face three doors, behind one of which is a prize. You choose one but do not open it. The host - Monty Hall - opens a different door, always choosing one he knows to be empty. Left with two doors, will you do better by sticking with your first choice, or by switching to the other remaining door?

Jason Rosenhouse explores the history of this fascinating puzzle. Using a minimum of mathematics (and none at all for much of the book), he shows how the problem has fascinated philosophers, psychologists, and many others, and examines the many variations that have appeared over the years. As Rosenhouse demonstrates, the Monty Hall Problem illuminates fundamental mathematical issues and has abiding philosophical implications. Perhaps most importantly, the problem opens a window on our cognitive difficulties in reasoning about uncertainty.

Has Blackboard outlived its shelf-life?

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 09:30:00 +0000

Yesterday we ~~cobbled together~~ carefully crafted an abstract for the 10th Durham Blackboard Users' Conference based on our experience that the impact the realtime web and the proliferation of communication channels is having on VLEs. In short, they have killed the VLE as a communication channel, and conversation (as opposed to nagging students by email) has moved elsewhere.

In that light, it was interesting to read a post by David Crotty (describing thoughts from Mark Cuban) which argues that participation in and the shelf-life of online discussions are inversely related. Our observations, ranging from The Apprentice to ALT-C, certainly seem to support the hypothesis. The VLE is no longer a contact sport. Rather, it has become the box through which a multiplex of channels make it onto the screens of the punters (or don't, as the case may be).

It's now perfectly possible for me to embed a Wave in Blackboard, although in reality, I'd be far more likely to embed some of the functionality of Blackboard (maybe the Gradebook) in a Wave. The conversations around learning are becoming ever more fragmented, and as they do so, participation becomes ever harder to measure.

Reflective FriendFolios

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 09:01:00 +0000

I'm developing the concept of FriendFolios for use as lightweight reflective e-portfolios for our first year students next term. The next stage is to develop the assessment criteria we will use. I don't intend to go into the long discussions we held here in the past about the wisdom / desirability / necessity of assessing reflection, if you want to, you can read them yourself.

There are two factors I want to consider in developing these assessment criteria:

Encouragement for students to engage in reflective practice.
Feasibility of providing feedback - staff workload.

The previous assessment criteria we used for wiki-based e-portfolios were:

Functionality & Appearance: 30%

Appearance and navigation is clear and consistent
All links work
Multimedia elements display correctly
Text is clear and readable, spelling and grammar are correct
Previously published materials respect copyright laws

Evidence: 30%

Organization connects all evidence into an integrated whole
Features or showcases evidence
Shows depth of knowledge and experience
Shows breadth of knowledge and experience
Includes a current curriculum vitae

Reflection: 40%

Addresses both career and personal development
Includes reflective comments about evidence as well as reflective comments about what this evidence says about you
Includes short-term goals (skills to add/improve)
Includes long-term goals (professional and/or personal aims)
Interpretation of your achievements is expressed

These worked reasonably well and weren't too difficult to use, although they were necessarily somewhat subjective, but I don't think they transfer well to the FriendFolio concept. I feel we need something more lightweight which measures engagement. How do we measure engagement on FriendFeed? Comments and Likes, but I also need a practical framework to assess the content of status updates. Functionality and Appearance goes by the wayside because FriendFeed takes care of that, and we're not really into collecting Evidence any more since this isn't going to be a document of record. Thinking ahead to next year when we plan to replace Google Reader and delicious with FriendFeed, I'm inclined to use the type of assessment criteria we use for sharing on BS1010, i.e. n items shared per week with suitable reflective commentary = n marks. (We will give the students examples of what we consider "good" reflective updates via our FriendFeed teaching accounts):

Over the course of the whole term:

An average of three or more updates each week with suitable reflective comments: 100%
An average of two updates each week with suitable reflective comments: 50%
An average of one update each week with suitable reflective comments: 20%
An average of less than one update each week and/or no suitable reflective comments: 0%

Is this enough? Is more guidance (beyond what will emerge from feedback) necessary?

The next issue is, how do I introduce this to students, bearing in mind the problem of skimming?

Yin vs Yang

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 09:00:00 +0000

S. Lin & R.C. Overbaugh (2009) Computer-mediated discussion, self-efficacy and gender. British Journal of Educational Technology 40(6): 999-1013

In the context of hybrid instruction, this study was designed to explore whether gender has an influence on learners’ preferences for synchronous or asynchronous modes of computer-mediated communication, and whether this decision impacts learners’ self-efficacy (SE) towards knowledge acquisition. The participants were 180 teacher-education students (151 females and 29 males) enrolled in a hybrid (blend of traditional classroom instruction and online learning activities) foundations course at a United States research university with a proportionally high percentage of full-time commuters and/or distance enrolees. The findings showed that, regardless of gender, two-thirds of the participants preferred asynchronous modes over synchronous ones. In addition, gender was weakly related to the participants’ SE in both modes. Linear regression indicated that SE, in turn, was weakly related to academic performance. The implications of these findings for instructional practice are discussed.

Comment:
Gender is not a significant factor, but 2/3 of the study group preferred asynchronous over synchronous communication tools.
Do I believe it? To what extent are teacher-education students representative of the students I teach? Am I happy about a gender study involving 151 females and 29 males? Surely the power of this study is limited.

#nuttsack

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 18:28:00 +0000

If, as a commenter in the Guardian maintains, Gordon Brown has the political instincts of socially challenged blob fish, I think I've just had a glimpse of Gordon's future:

#nuttsack

And with that hashtag, Gordon's future becomes clear...

Failure is an option

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 09:00:00 +0000

In May 2008 I wrote about skimming, and fact that:

When reading online, users spend more time on pages with more words, but only spend 4.4 seconds more for each additional 100 words. When you add more than 100 words to a page, users will only read 18% of the words on the page.
On an average visit, users read half the information only on pages with 111 words or less.

In the large first year course I am currently teaching, it has become painfully clear that many (most?) students are now failing to read instructions posted online, and that this trend has accelerated markedly from last year. Most of the questions we are being asked in face to face help sessions concern quite simple information contained in the online notes, and most of the students attending the help sessions are there because they have tried but failed to complete an assigned task.

Clearly, I need to put less information online for these students. At which point, they will complain, of course, and quite possibly fail to complete an assessed task first time round. At which point we will show them how to do it, or in, I suspect, the majority of cases, they will figure it out.

So maybe failure is an option. Maybe, for authentic and sustained learning practices, failure is the preferred option - preferred over the spoonfed student who always gets it right first time round?

Another interview with the future

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:10:00 +0000

In which I interview future me and tell myself about the future of education:

Why Research Universities Should Be Led by Top Scholars

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 14:00:00 +0000

Socrates in the Boardroom: Why Research Universities Should Be Led by Top Scholars. Amanda Goodall, 2009. Experts, not managers, make the best leaders:

"This is a fascinating book, focused primarily - but not exclusively - on correlations between the excellence of universities and the academic distinction of their leaders. Goodall demonstrates significant such correlations, particularly for American universities. This is a book of considerable interest and significance, and it should be required reading for every university trustee or governor." - Robert May, University of Oxford

"Goodall argues that the best research universities are run by the best scholars - it is not enough for a university president to be a good manager. This is an important message that all universities need to hear. I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the future health of the world's leading universities." - Sir Paul Nurse, president of Rockefeller University and winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in medicine

Engaging Students Through In-Class Technology

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 09:00:00 +0000

Engaging Students Through In-Class Technology (ESTICT) is a UK network of education practitioners and learning technologists interested in promoting good practice with classroom technologies that can enhance face-to-face teaching. The ESTICT moniker spans a number of inter-related Special Interest Groups (SIG). The first of these is Electronic Voting Systems (EVS) and Beyond.

You can now register for the first free event to be held at the University of Leicester on Thursday 26th November 2009. The aim of the day is to share best practice in the use of in-class technology, with a particular focus on the pedagogic uses of electronic voting systems (a.k.a. "clickers", audience response systems ARS, or personal response systems PRS). This event is aimed at those both those with experience of EVS who wish to share their best practice and those with an interest in the technology that would like to know more. Both experts and novice users are welcome. The keynote speaker will be Dr. Steve Draper, Senior University Teacher, Dept of Psychology, University of Glasgow. Steve is an acknowledged expert in the field of EVS and has published widely on it’s use in Higher Education.

Places are limited, so sign up soon. More info, full programme.

Changing the game

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 09:00:00 +0000

Yesterday, Martin Weller blogged about remote conference participation, and set up a Cloudworks discussion page for the topic (thereby selflessly torpedoing his Technoratijuice ;-) I responded that:

I'm all for augmented conferences which mix real people with virtual people. We're going to have to find out how to do this much better over the next few years as education and carbon budgets are progressively cut back, so the quicker we get on with it, the better. Note that I don't want to do away with RL conferences and replace them with online events, I want to use technology to extract the maximum bang per buck (or per kg of CO2).
Which technologies? In principle, all of them. Go to where the audience is rather than expect them to sign up to whatever crappy website you've just invented. The snag with this is that there is a risk of salami-slicing the audience and consequently the discussion. Roll on the Google-Wave enabled conference when everything can be everywhere!

I've been involved in a lot of online meetings over the last year, but the one which sticks in my mind is altc2009, which seemed to me to be a tipping-point at which a community accepted the virtual presence alongside physical presence as of equal value rather than as a poor substitute. Sitting in the multi-parallel sessions in Manchester, I spent most of my time augmenting the reality of the talk I was at with the data flowing out of the talk(s) I would like to have been at.

For that reason, I was delighted yesterday when I found out that I have been invited to be one of the four web editors for ALT-C 2010. (I'm not trying to steal anyone's thunder, but I'll let the other three introduce themselves just in case cats are inadvertently being let out of bags here.)

This is a new post for ALT, and I'm not sure if they know what a web editor is going to do yet. More to the point, I'm not sure if they know what this web editor is going to do yet, so to alleviate any confusion, I'll tell you. The role of this ALT-C 2010 web editor is to stay out of the way while promoting the most efficient exchange of information through all of the online channels available. And if that sounds like the Tower of Babel, I think I just figured out what the job of ALT-C 2010 web editor really entails.

I hate lists - or do I?

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 13:00:00 +0000

Thoughts on the new Twitter lists feature:

video

My contribution to Open Access Week 2009

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 09:01:00 +0000

Yeah, I know it's a week late, but this is where it fits into our timetable. Over the next week, all 200 of our first year Biological Sciences students will take an awareness-raising quiz on copyright, creative commons and open access. This replaces an unpopular image processing session which we will run a different way this year. Thanks to my colleagues from the David Wilson Library and the people on FriendFeed who helped out with ideas and checking. Here's a taster of some of the questions:

A student is creating a public website for a medical charity and would like to include images from PLoS Medicine. The work is voluntary and there is no budget for the website. What is the most appropriate course of action?

Write to the original author of the article containing the image(s) and request formal written permission.
Write to PLoS Medicine and request formal written permission.
Write to the original author of the article containing the image(s) and PLoS Medicine to request formal written permission.
Use the image(s) on the website with appropriate citation(s).
Try to find similar images in other journals which allow reuse.

A student is creating a public newsletter for a medical charity and would like to include images from this paper. The work is voluntary and there is no budget for the newletter. What is the most appropriate course of action?

Use the images because this is for a medical charity.
Use the images because this journal has an Open Access policy.
Request permission for reuse via the publisher's website.
Give up because this journal will not allow reuse of images for this purpose.
Use the images because this is covered by Fair Use legislation.
Copy the images and change them slightly to avoid copyright.

A student is preparing for an assessed presentation on a module and would like to include an image from the BBC News website in it. Taking account the licence for images on the BBC News website, what is the most appropriate course of action?

Include the image in the presentation without a citation.
Include the image in their report with a citation to the original URL (web page).
Include the image in their report with a citation to the BBC News website homepage.
Try to locate a different image.
Don't include an image.
Draw the image using Microsoft PowerPoint.

A final year student is asked to publish their project report as a journal article in Current Cancer Studies, an Open Access journal. The project report includes a (properly cited) image of an unusual type of tumour cell from Wikipedia. What is the most appropriate course of action?

Include the image in the journal publication, and take no further action.
Contact the creator of the original image (cited as "NormanEinstein" on Wikipedia) to request permission, and do not publish the article unless permission has been obtained.
Include the image in the journal publication, and cite the original source.
Don't publish the paper.
Publish the paper without the image.

FriendFolios

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 09:00:00 +0000

Several observations emerged from the first run through of our undergraduate PLE module last year, and I can already see signs of then re-emerging this year. The first is weariness with having to sign up for yet another service. There are also problems in terms of tracking usage across various services (in particular Google Reader). While building a PLE based on a distributed toolset is optimum in terms of the tools available, we always knew we would be sacrificing the convenience of doing everything inside a big-box VLE. However, a bigger concern is for those services where I was able to track usage was that after the course ended, so did student use.

Last week I argued that FriendFeed would be much more palatable to students than services we are currently using, based on the Facebook paradigm and continuous partial attention. I had planned to use WordPress for student's reflective ePortfolios next term, but that's another service to sign up to, and I can't see it being any more palatable than most of the others. If we believe our tag line that:

FriendFeed is like Facebook for <insert degree here>

why not use it? I want some of that FB marketing! If we get students to create "a network" (let's come back to that one in a minute) on FriendFeed, we may be able to plug into the familiarity of this type of site rather than the strangeness of Wordpress to this cohort.

Students will be able to chose where to make their "FriendFolio" public or private, sharing only with staff and chosen associates. Status updates as reflection? This is close to the reflective Twitterfolios I considered last year. I previously determined that chronological scaffolding of reflection is important in achieving success. FriendFeed is ideally suited to this.

Recently, John Postill argued that "social network sites" are inherently antisocial and should instead be called "personal network sites". Choice of names is important in achieving acceptability, and I certainly don't intend to call the FriendFolios e-portfolios within earshot of the students. I'm thinking in terms of encouraging ownership of reflection by calling them "your FriendFeed" in the same way that they refer to "my Facebook".

Comments?

Not Waving but Drowning

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 09:00:00 +0000

OK, so now I owe you two apologies. The first is for the title of this post (which I'm assuming has been done to death in the last month). The other is for writing about Google Wave, because either you don't yet have a Google Wave account and you're fed up with hearing about it, or you do have a Google Wave account and you're fed up with hearing about it.

I wanted to tell you what I'm doing with Google Wave right now. Mostly, I'm staring at it with a vague feeling that this could be useful, but I don't know what for. When I'm not doing that, I'm cursing it for having the worst user interface I've seen in a long time - why Google thought it was a good idea to carve screen real estate into tiny patches is beyond me. Presumably they've never heard of netbooks. I'm prepared to forgive Wave for a lot of things right now (like the total lack of accessibility, which is presently zero) because this is an early stage alpha product, but I'm struggling to see how they're going to overcome this defect based on the way Wave works. Maybe I shouldn't be so forgiving. Google is very fond of trotting out its tame blind man T.V. Raman, but has still managed to ignore accessibility completely. Is that an acceptable approach to software design in the 21st Century?

So far, I'm unimpressed by anything I've seen within Wave, but I have thought up a couple of gadgets I need. The first is a decent notification system built into Wave (yes I know there's a Firefox plugin, but for reasons we don't need to go into here, I don't use Firefox for Wave). The other is a Meeting Manager - I just create a meeting wave and it polls all the attendees for availability, books a location, takes notes and makes coffee. The snag with that one is that as a mere mortal who doesn't like pizza, unlike say, writing in HTML5, I'm never going to dive into python deeply enough to write anything beyond a Hello World robot.

So the reason I wrote this post is to let you know that if you don't have access to Wave yet, you're really better off because you're not missing anything. But the reason I wrote this post is I can't shake a vague feeling that this could be useful, but I don't know what for.

Shurely shome mishtake?

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 09:00:00 +0000

While I support Harvey Watson's Campus Cops iniative on Facebook, surely this is going a bit far?

:-)

New PubMed Interface Demonstration Video

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 16:31:00 +0000

Twittering the student experience

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 08:00:00 +0000

Alan Cann, Jo Badge, Stuart Johnson, Alex Moseley. Twittering the student experience. ALT-N, Vol. 17, October 2009.

How I Learned to Love FriendFeed - The Director's Cut

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 08:01:00 +0000

After my posts earlier this week, I was asked if I would make a screencast of how I have changed the way I use FriendFeed. Although I don't consider myself an expert, I'm happy to share this information, so here it is:

One more thing: I just figured out a hashtag in a Friendfeed status update is a clickable realtime search link: #bs1010 :-)

Crowdsourcing a new camera

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 08:30:00 +0000

After a long and happy life, my digital camera (a Canon Ixus 500) seems to be dying, so it's time to crowdsource a new one. You did such a great job helping me crowdsource a new netbook recently that I'd like to give you another chance :-)

Features I need:

Compact
Good macro and low light performance
Cheap :-)

I'm thinking about a Panasonic Lumix, but I've heard bad things about the battery life - any experience? My alternative would be the Canon Ixus IXUS 120 - but I'd welcome other suggestions.

Leveraging FriendFeed for authentic science education

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 08:01:00 +0000

Yesterday I wrote about How I learned to stop worrying and love FriendFeed. Today I want to look forward to my future plans for FriendFeed.

At our tweetup last Friday, Jaideep Mukherjee asked me if I don't always just want to jump on the latest bandwagon in terms of tools for teaching. It's a reasonable question and I can see why he asked me, but the answer is a straightforward no. I want to jump on the best tools for teaching. My ideal situation would be nice and stable, where I was confident about every aspect of the technology I was using and how to use it, and where I didn't have to spend a lot of time each year launching something new. Unfortunately, learning technologies are evolving so fast that's not possible at present, so I can see why Jaideep (and many of my other colleagues) are confused. Heck, so am I, that's why I blog.

In August 2009, Facebook acquired FriendFeed for US$47m. Lots of longstanding FriendFeed users were unhappy about that, and rumbling continues on the site about whether Facebook is planning to run FriendFeed down. This is the first big caveat, but other than sticking my head in the sand and pretending FriendFeed doesn't exist, there's not much I can do about it other than keep a watching brief.

What interests me is whether FriendFeed can be used to improve the way we deliver out first year PLE module. Our first year students are very confused about RSS. Not so much how to subscribe to RSS feeds, but why they should bother. Many of my colleagues are similarly confused, unwilling to be lured away from email tables of contents. Using Google Reader doesn't do them any favours - it's a good feed reader but very confusing for newcomers and it doesn't allow us to have conversations (feedback, if you want) with students about their choices. When we follow up by dropping social bookmarking (delicious) into the PLE mix, students get even more confused, and some go into meltdown. We need to simplify the channels while retaining access to the full range of information.

Next year, I plan to tell our PLE students:

FriendFeed is like Facebook for science

Using the Facebook paradigm, they will create a Friendfeed account, subscribe to RSS feeds, bookmark and share items and build a network. We will use FriendFeed as a feedback channel to guide them. Assuming FriendFeed is still around, this should work much better than our past approach to building a PLE. (They'll also use other tools, but their PLE will be based around FriendFeed, which will be the main communication channel, vertically and horizontally). And if it isn't, we'll use something else with equivalent functionality. OK Jaideep?

The reason I think this is more likely to be successful than our past approach is threefold. First, if based on the Facebook paradigm, FriendFeed is a lot simpler than what we've been trying to do with Google Reader and delicious. Second, FriendFeed provides us with a direct feedback channel to each student (as well as broadcast feedback), which can be used to support and encourage them. There's a lot to be said for continuous partial attention. Once you get over the unfamiliarity, FriendFeed is sticky. But most importantly, this approach will only be successful if students want to participate. So what do they want? They want to be "scientists", even though at this stage most only have hazy ideas of what that actually entails. There's plenty of science on FriendFeed, and opportunities to interact with genuine research scientists outside of the VLE silo will be a strongly motivating factor for some of the high fliers. To try to build this into our approach, I'm thinking in terms of the following sort of assessment criteria, and I'd like your input please:

Create an account on FriendFeed and complete their profile in a professional manner (x% marks).
Subscribe to n (5? 10?) science-related RSS feeds from a suggested list (plus any others they want to) (x% marks).
Build a network of peers (we will provide a list of FriendFeed usernames) (x% marks).
Each week, contribute at least 3(?) science-related items to FriendFeed (x% marks), "Like" at least 2(?) items contributed by peers (x% marks), and make at least 1(?) substantive comment (examples will be given) on a science-related item (x% marks).
Since hashtags in FriendFeed status updates are clickable search links (e.g. #bs1010), students will still be able to build module repositories using specified hashtags.
We will give support and feedback by joining in the conversations on FriendFeed, using direct messages where appropriate. We will monitor students engagement though each user's feed and the FriendFeed "Comments" and "Likes" counts, but marks will not be awarded (via the Blackboard gradebook) until the end of the module.

Comments?

Related: Scientists Still Not Joining Social Networks