"Agreed. All this is new to our students, and we also have to get around the fact that they prefer the PubMed interface to the much clunkier WoK search interface (it's like a journey back in time...)" - AJCann
"Seen the new Web of Knowledge citation graphing tools? Fancy, but not of huge value to researchers and authors as far as I can see - maybe I'm missing something?
BTW, I like the misspeak neologism I coined during the video "Pub of Knowledge" ;-)" - AJCann
"@Jo, Moira - sad to say, but workload (mine) is an even bigger issue than pedagogy here. I like the peer-assessment element. Can you point me at an example of how this would work Jo?" - AJCann
"Unbearably slow. I subscribe to ~400 feeds. I'm on the point of abandoning Flock, and I suspect I will as soon as Chrome becomes available for OS X. A browser-based/desktop solution is not what I'm looking for, needs to be web-based and mobile." - AJCann
"I'm not sure. In part it may be that they have absorbed the rather secretive culture prevalent in life sciences research. They seem to regard themselves as in competition with each other rather than in collaboration. That's true in a culture where plagiarism is prominent. Mostly, we just don't have a very collaborative society - why help someone else?" - AJCann
"Martin asked "What were the wikipedia complaints?".
If the Wikipedia contributions survived for a defined period without substantial revision of errors, students were awarded the mark. This was done to simplify the assessment and avoid protracted arguments over "quality" of microchunked output. Apart from the fact that they didn't like the process being public (which I had thought might be a strong motivating factor for them - surely it's better to contribute to public knowledge than to write *another* coursework essay?), they couldn't accept the crowdsourcing element of the assessment, even though I explained it to them repeatedly, emphasised that I was moderating the process, and in practice, the whole thing went very well from my perspective." - AJCann
"@Sarah, Carolyn: As you both point out, access control is very important for ePortfolios. With WetPaint, students can choose to make their site public or private, but it's their choice. Those with private wikis will allow access to a designated staff member for assessment during the project. A variety of editing levels is also available: http://www.wetpaintcentral.com......
Fine granularity of access control where some parts of the site are private and some public is not available in Wetpaint, but if a student wants to achieve this, e.g. to show to an employer, we will advise them to make a private portfolio, clone and edit the site and make that available, either publicly or as a private site with specified invitations." - AJCann
"To me, ownership is very important. If you scan the interblogs for commentary about PebblePad, etc, students don't like them. They have some nice features, but if the technology is imposed by the Institution, there is little or no "ownership". Granularity of access control is very important, but we're prepared to sacrifice a little bit of that (and some of the bells and whistles of commercial systems) in order to win hearts and minds, or there will be not true reflection, only the stilted stuff you see when you tells students "you've got to write xxx on PebblePad each month"." - AJCann
"After a lot of consideration, we're going to recommend that students set up their ePortfolios using WetPaint.com, but it will be a suggestion, non-mandatory. I'm confident that that means that 90%+ will use Wetpaint. The interesting thing will be what the others do, or if some sort of meme starts and many shift to a different system - was that what you meant by cluster effect?" - AJCann
"In that case, there are no facts (whereas to practical purposes, we know there are).
however, what I'm trying to get at here is the distinction between learning and thinking. I don't see much thinking in secondary (or tertiary) education." - AJCann
