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Landing Rhapsody
I've been fortunate enough to spend a good amount of the day last Friday poking and prodding at Landing between the phone calls at work, and have noticed some things. None of them will come as a surprise to the regulars here, but I thought I'd weigh in with my own thoughts.
Landing seems vastly under-exploited. It's got a similar "vibe" to Facebook, with many of the same features (fewer widgets, obviously). and while I have arguments with the "feel" of the site, it seems to me that it could be a very useful social facilitator. That's important to a learning setting. Our brains have a huge amount of social hardware, and we evolved to learn about the world in that setting.
(One of the big reasons I'm interested in AR is to see just how far this goes. How will our learning - and living - experience change once we can interact with digital objects that have been embedded into our world? How much more intuitive will our learning experiences become, and how will it change our opinions towards education? towards computers? towards our world in general?)
I think that the interface leaves something to be desired, all said. It's a little hard to know exactly what to do with it upon signing in! I suppose that's just like any person coming into a new social situation, but it's Landings' job to minimize that stalling period. Case in point - I've known about Landing for a few months now, and have only now decided to wade in.
I'm not sure how much of it is the UI/"feel" of the site. It doesn't look too bad (though the grey is killing me), but there's something about it that screams "2002" to me. I'll have to think about that more before I can comment fully. There's nothing wrong with what's being done. It just feels as if something's not being done right. It feels like it just needs to be attacked by a professional designer.
The big concern, as has been voiced here before, is that it needs more undergraduates. A big impediment to that is visibility! It's buried at the bottom of the myAU site, and there's little sign of it elsewhere. The only ones who are going to find it are the ones that decide to go hunting specifically for a social networking site. Perhaps they're going to familiar Facebook to find their online campus - this seems likely. And that's fine, too - it embeds their campus experience into their online social world instead of separating it. Maybe Landing just needs a really awesome Facebook widget to tie the two together.
On thinking on this awhile, it may not just be a lack of visibility. I'm beginning to wonder if new Undergrads, upon looking at Landing, conclude that it's "for Grad students" and leave it alone. If they're perceiving themselves to be socially inferior (not uncommon in an education environment) they may just be doing what's instinctual and leaving the alphas alone. It'd be an interesting poll, maybe I'll set it up.
The reason why I'm considering whether the above happens is because, upon logging in to the Landing this morning, I was struck by an immediate sense of my own pretentiousness. Through looking at a few Activity posts and a new Group (woo Vodcast) it felt as if I were the only Undergrad in a room full of Grad students. Who was I to be interjecting myself here, blathering on about my wholly unrealistic goals and undeveloped ideas? How boring it must seem to them.
Fortunately, my sense of pride is perfectly capable of beating up my sense of embarrassment in this case, to either your benefit or disappointment ;) I do wonder, though - is the prominence of Graduate student leaders in this community actively hindering Undergraduate participation? I'm not going to pursue this line of thought more deeply in this post - it deserves its own, and deserves a good deal more thought and investigation. It's an interesting question, and I like those.
There's a lot of potential here, and I hope that Landing exploits it well. I'd like to have a community to draw upon - I think it's important to the educational experience. But, more on that later.
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Thanks Colin - this is really useful stuff!
There are quite a few newcomers. We started with about 600 users from an earlier pilot, mainly grad students, and are now up to about 2800, but the growth has been steady rather than exponential so we are not seeing much in the way of a network effect, which suggests at least partly that there is not much of a network among (in particular) undergraduate students. Bit of a chicken and egg problem there! We really need more links in and more ways to spread the word.
This is not a social network, however, like Facebook or LinkedIn - it *has* social networking tools, but it's a much more flexible social space than that, catering for a very different set of social organisations and very different distribution of interest and power than a more generic system, so we would expect a different kind of growth. I'd very much like to see more ways in, though, especially from places like Moodle and MyAU: numbers matter. Networks are valuable but not as important here as large sets and groups with shared interests, I think, at least when starting out and at this point in the development of the site where we have some passionate users, some interesting content being shared and the makings of a vibrant community. Once it gets bigger there will hopefully be more of a need for the differentiation you get from networks.
I am especially bothered by the problems of preferential attachment and confirmation bias, whereby those who tagged and added stuff early on define the shape of the space far more than those who arrived later and appear therefore to 'own' the site - particularly worrying that it seems biased to graduate students, especially those studying distance education and literature. It is rather tempting to play with the dynamics of things like tag clouds so that the early adopters don't have quite such a strong say: in a system I built some time ago I introduced a dynamic ageing factor that gave a massive boost to new tags so they could compete with the existing population, but (if they didn't get used) killed them off equally fast. From what you and others are saying, I think we need something similar here.
Hard to say for sure what the proportions of different designation of user might be. We can fairly reliably identify staff (they have an AU email address) and can associate some students with formal courses but, because the Landing deliberately makes no use of AU administrative hierarchies, those who enter the system for reasons other than formal courses don't get coralled into groups that we can easily count. In fact, because people tend to stick around when courses finish (we encourage alumni to stay) even those course groups give an inaccurate perspective. It should be technically possible to link class databases with a query run against the Landing's user database but we'd need a bit of FOIP clearance on that. I'd rather, in accordance with the principle of ownership that underpins everything else on the site, get that information from people who are totally in control of it and who can choose whether or not to be counted. Unfortunately, most of those who fill in the 'course' fields of the profile are asked to do so formally, so it is a bit skewed.
We are working on some quite big interface improvements and greatly value all suggestions and conversations about that - this is everyone's site and we'd really like anyone with an interest to contribute to it. The current look and feel is a work-in-progress by designers in the Advancement department who do most of the AU outward-facing stuff. I think the idea was to provide a sense of place and continuity with the rest of AU sites, only slightly less formal, but it isn't super-inviting and I'm liking some of the ideas coming out of this and other conversations at the Friends of the Landing group. Some of the new improvements will come from the new release of Elgg, which is the 'interface' release that makes many of the standard tools notably more friendly to use and improves navigation a little. We are additionally thinking of shifting from a deliberate tools focus to a social focus for the main organisation of the site, so it should be easier to get a sense of different ways of engaging with others - making groups, networks, sets, whole community, etc modes of engagement more explicit. We are also exploring things like breadcrumb trails to help get a sense of where you are now, and we are very keen to encourage people to share ideas, stories, help and hints that we can point to when new users (especially) log in. Each and every criticism, suggestion, reflection or story is very welcome! Please keep those great ideas coming.
Jon
ps and of course, anyone and everyone with a login ID is very welcome indeed to join the advisory group, Friends of the Landing, and help to shape the site and how it develops!
Hi Jon;
Sorry if this post is a bit of a word salad. Just started typing and everything fell out onto the page in no particular order ;)
I'm actually a touch embarrassed about the original post here! I've learned a bit more about the timeline of development, and the goals, of Landing, and I was a bit off the mark. I thought it was older than it was now! Given that it's rather new I think it's doing well, all in all. The bias towards distance ed. and like is concerning, certainly, but I don't think it's as bad as all that. We're all interested in the topic after all - at least, interested enough to sign up for it!
I do understand the concern for the Founder's effect, though. On that note, I wonder if you've considered a change to the "Recent Activity" widget on the main page? I feel rather self-conscious about my icon showing up five times in a row, especially if it's for something silly like changing permissions on a blog post or adding personal bookmarks. It's been a (very slight) deterrent for me. I don't want to be seen as spamming the place after all!
The fact that Undergrads don't have a network is pretty apparent - speaking as one, anyways, the chat on the Moodle boards I've been in has been polite, but stilted. In a brick-and-mortar school you sit with them three days a week, have to get notes from people if you're ill and miss a day, etc, etc. Many more ways to make friends and get networks started. I like this problem, though, it's interesting! Sounds like blog material, iff you don't mind.
I'm curious what the overall intention with Landing is, if it's not a social network. To my knowledge, a social network is just a place where people can make connections and interact; no other requirements. This would seem to meet that criteria. What else do you want to do with it? Sharing notes and ideas about courses, learning together - these are all social ctivities. Wouldn't it just qualify as a type of social network? Maybe my terminology is jumbled.
I look forward to seeing where we go from here!
- Colin