Rebecca Galley

Community indicators: a framework for observing and supporting community activity on Cloudworks

Cloudworks (Cloudworks.ac.uk) is a social networking site designed for sharing, finding and discussing learning and teaching ideas and experiences. Design and development of the site has been based on an iterative analysis, development and implementation approach, underpinned by ongoing research and evaluation. To this end, we have been seeking to establish strategies to enable us to systematically position transactions and emerging patterns of activity on the site so that we can more reliably use the empirical evidence we have gathered. In this article we will introduce a framework we have developed for observing and supporting community development on the site. In building our framework we have used empirical evidence gathered from the site, then related it to the literature from a range of disciplines concerned with professional and learning communities. We link research relating to distance learning communities with studies into Computer Mediated Communication, self-organising communities on the web, and wider research about the nature of learning organisations and continuous professional development. We argue that this framework can be used to capture the development of productive communities in the space (i.e. how far cohesive, productive groups can be said to be emerging or not) and also help focus future development of the platform, and provide guidelines for community support.

Collectivity, Performance and Self-representation: Analysing Cloudworks as a Public Space for Networked Learning and Reflection

It has been argued that processes of participatory culture, afforded by social media and technologies blur the boundaries between creative production and consumption, and open up novel, public spaces for, and styles of, networked learning; social spaces that promote collaborative knowledge building, and shared assets. However, empirical evidence on the application of such technologies for supporting teaching and learning in higher education contexts is only slowly emerging. The chapter explores these concepts in the context of analysis of emergent patterns of behaviour and activity in Cloudworks, a specialised networking site, and a public space for aggregating and sharing resources and exchanging ideas about the scholarship and practice of education, with particular emphasis on the relationship between ICTs and teaching and learning. Combining notions of self-representation and collective intelligence with dimensions of expansive learning, activity patterns, performance and expression within the site are analysed. The chapter contextualises findings through a critical lens and offers insights that can shape the future research agenda for productive learning in networked environments.

Student workload: a case study of its significance, evaluation and management at the Open University

Distance students are time poor and some drop out of their studies because they fall behind with coursework. This raises the issue of how course teams decide upon how many study hours should be included in a course. This article presents a number of Open University projects that have addressed student workload management and relates how learning design has incorporated these findings into advice for new module development. Moreover, the article also discusses how recent automatic feedback systems can motivate and support time-poor students when writing their assignments. This is an important finding as drop-out can occur when students are unable to devote the necessary time to their summative assessments and drop out of the learning process.