Full Circle Associates

From Stephen Downes' OLDaily comes this pointer...

Yasuhisa Tamura, Norm Friesen, Toshio Okamoto and Rory McGreal, in their paper Metadata for Synchronous and Asynchronous Collaborative Learning Environments raise an issue that I've seen floating around, unaddressed, for many years: how do we make sense of group text interaction across platforms? Has this been one of the barriers that has blocked research about online interaction?

Abstract

This paper proposes a data-model for the standardized representation of both synchronous and asynchronous text-based and other communications. Such communications are widely used in e-learning practice today, and have been studied under the rubrics of "computer conferencing," "Computer-Mediated Communication" (CMC), "Computer Supported Collaborative Learning" (CSCL), and many other names and titles. This paper begins with an overview of this rich research tradition to date, and of its relation to metadata and relevant standardization activities. It then considers the use of these communication and collaboration technologies in educational settings and software systems. It identifies specifiable uniformities in the structural and behavioural characteristics of these systems, and then uses these uniformities as a basis for its proposed data or metadata model. This paper then concludes by considering the advantages presented by such a standardized model, which extend from data portability and system independence to new possibilities for automated evaluation or analysis of communication data, and performance.

The conclusion offers up a few tasty tidbits and a provocative proposition:

By simultaneously enabling a wide variety of functions and leveraging their common characteristics, the standardized model proposed in this paper has the significant potential to increase the interoperability, sharing and reuse of collaborative educational applications and resources. This model extends data portability while supporting system independence. And it facilitates the automated evaluation or analysis of communication data, and performance.

Working in a global setting, I wonder if we can ever automate the evaluation or analysis based on our very diverse communication structures and styles. But trying to at least surface patterns that can inform the improvement of distributed communication would be wonderful. And it should include not only chat and discussion boards, but wikis, blogs and whatever is coming next!

Here is a link to the pdf, thanks to Rod