Kumu – Connect the dots.

Create beautiful maps that bring the big picture to life, allowing you to see your data and problems more clearly. We call it 100% problem-solving complexity-busting goodness. See for yourself how Kumu can help you make a bigger impact today.

Map and Connect Elements & Connections. Whether those elements are people, companies, issues, funders, or any other factors in a problem you care about — Kumu has the flexibility to handle it all.

Add Context with Tags & Attributes. After building out your map, you’ll want to add rich context information to both the elements and their connections. Track whatever’s important to you. With Kumu, you’re in the driver’s seat.

Bring Your Data to Life with Perspectives. Now you’re ready to create beautiful and insightful maps. Kumu makes it easy to extract insights from your data by allowing you to adjust colors, sizes, shadows, haloes, bullseyes, patterns, widths, arrows, and more (whew!) based on the underlying data. Choose whether to view all of your data, or add a filter to focus on what truly matters.

Read

A Global Pull Platform to Engage for the Commons

We will build an open source distributed network of issue-related learning and collaborative environments incorporating tools that will enable data collection, reporting, curated knowledge base, news streams, collective action, possibilities navigation, deliberation, visualization, social graph, evaluation and reputation/trust-net, as illustrated in this design map.

Read

Catalyst Map

Catalyst Map (CM) will make use of Google’s open source tools. Google News, Sites, Documents, Calenders, and YouTube will help quest creators and contributors to organize and facilitate the logistics of quests. Users will also sync their profiles with Facebook and LinkedIn to add multiple layers for networking and sharing.

The project builds on the network created through the production of the award winning short film, ‘Coalition of the Willing’. We have 1100+ followers on Twitter and 5000+ on Facebook who are anticipating the CM system.

Read

Social Networks Adapting Pedagogical Practice

SNAPP is a software tool that allows users to visualize the network of interactions resulting from discussion forum posts and replies. The network visualisations of forum interactions provide an opportunity for teachers to rapidly identify patterns of user behaviour – at any stage of course progression. SNAPP has been developed to extract all user interactions from various commercial and open source learning management systems (LMS) such as BlackBoard (including the former WebCT), and Moodle. SNAPP is compatible for both Mac and PC users and operates in Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari.

Most of the student data generated from Learning Management Systems (LMS) include reports on the number of sessions (log-ins), dwell time (how long the log-in lasted) and number of downloads. This tells us a lot about content retrieval in a transmission model of learning and teaching, but not about how students are interacting with each other in more socio-constructivist practice. Discussion forum activity is a good indicator of student interactions and is systemically captured by most LMS. SNAPP uses information on who posted and replied to whom, and what major discussions were about, and how expansive they were, to analyse the interactions of a forum and display it in a Social Network Diagram. The following figures illustrate how SNAPP re-interprets discussion forum postings into a network diagram.

Read

Emergent Learning and Learning Ecologies in Web 2.0

In this paper we argue that it might be useful for educational institutions to actively explore alternative frameworks such as complexity theory, communities of practice, connectivism, and the underlying threads of  emergent learning to inform their planning and strategy. We will attempt to bring together elements of all these  areas of research and practice  to develop a framework for emergent learning that can be applied across education, work, and social networking, with their increasingly blurred boundaries.

We explore the following:

• What are the conditions that enable emergent, self-organised learning to occur and to flourish?
• What mechanisms of validation are effective, can emergent learning networks be self-correcting, and if so, how?
• Is it possible to link, or even integrate, emergent and prescribed learning, and if so, how?

Read

Read also: Presentation

Presentation Recording