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Final Report ETG Customisable Portals Mowbray Emerging Technologies Grant Scheme 2010 Project Final Report 1. Title of Project Customisable portals: Evaluating web integration tools for collaboration and accessing and sharing information. 2. Project Leader and contact details Ms Lee Mowbray Building C3B Room 318, Learning & Teaching Centre Macquarie University [email protected] 3. Completion date December 2010 Report author: Lee Mowbray, Educational Development Group, Learning & Teaching Centre Page 1 1. The technology This project focused on comparing and evaluating three customisable portals or personalised start pages: PageFlakes (www.pageflakes.com), iGoogle (www.google.com/ig) and NetVibes (www.netvibes.com). There is a proliferation of Web 2.0 services and applications, which enable people to share information, work collaboratively, access content and media, engage in discussion, keep in contact with colleagues and reach new audiences. A subset of these is termed customisable portals, also known as Personalised Start Pages and metagators. These web pages allow you to include multiple blocks of web content into one web page. In general, they have two main components: i. feeds which allow you to view content from different websites on one page by subscribing to the sites through RSS, and ii. widgets that are interactive apps that do everything from monitoring the weather radar to displaying an embedded webpage. These tools are designed to be easy to use, with flexibility and functionality for creating customized appearance and functionality but retaining the same basic structure. This project explored the functionality and collaborative features of PageFlakes, iGoogle and NetVibes, particularly in relation to encouraging student engagement, collaboration, accessing relevant learning resources and motivating higher order thinking and learning. The three portals were compared using criteria including ability to share, advertising, number of available widgets, ease of navigation, interface, flexibility i.e. for configuring components to own specifications, authoring options (notes, to do lists), information options (RSS feeds), research (searches, filtering), collaboration and networking (shared gadgets), communications (email, Skype) and personalization. 2. The Teaching and Learning Context By aggregating multiple widgets and information on to a single web page, the portal can provide an excellent starting point and scaffolded pathway to the wider Internet and relevant resources. Each widget or block of information supplies a summary and links to the actual webpage (see Figure 1). Figure 1 A widget from Netvibes: feed of contents of an educational journal Each of the three portals can be used by learners to create a Personal Learning Environment (PLE). Learners can individualize their webpage to meet his or her specific needs and provide rich possibilities for self-organized learning environments (Gillet, Law Report author: Lee Mowbray, Educational Development Group, Learning & Teaching Centre Page 2 and Chatterjee, 2010). This has the potential to add value to online content, especially by making it more personalised, attractive and engaging for students. Additionally, teaching staff can potentially save time by publishing and sharing these portals of RSS feeds with students. These portals have the potential to provide tools to support learner’s cognitive processing, including: searching widgets to locate and filter relevant resources e.g. feed from social bookmarking with search tag, blog search widget, twitter feed with search tag collecting gadgets to gather resources, e.g. web links and bookmarks, feed from social bookmarking sites, embedded images, video and podcasts, communicating widgets e.g. email, status widget, twitter feed authoring tools to create new items to think with e.g. text box, sticky notes, To do list The project looked at a range of examples of customisable portals in education. Table 1 shows two of these portals. Components and contents were examined and compared. Of note, an iGoogle example is not included below as shared iGoogle pages are not public and therefore cannot be accessed unless by email invitation. Page details Components on the portal 590 e-Innovations Portal Text box (Pageflakes) e.g. ‘About Me’ http://www.pageflakes.com/ Web links (Pageflakes) e.g. Higher Education Technology edutech/27350107/ Websites Blog posts e.g. Sakai Learning Capabilities Brainstorming Pageflakes RSS news feed from journal e.g. Educause News iGoogle RSS feed from journal e.g. eLearn Magazine Netvibes Podcasts e.g. The Teachers’ Podcast Video e.g. Generational Diversity movie Text box with web links and text e.g. announcements Feed from delicious links Mediated Cultures: Digital Multiple tabs Ethnography at Kansas State Feed from student blog posts (and student’s research blogs) University – Michael Wesch Feed from KSU blog http://www.netvibes.com/w Feed from student blog comments esch#Digital_Ethnography Wiki updates feed Pageflakes List of updated wiki pages iGoogle Group’s recently tagged links (Diigo) Netvibes YouTube video Wall * private page / password Specialised resource page of feeds e.g. Social Media Research accessible Resources Themed or topic pages e.g. Zeitgeist – feeds from blogs, wikis, delicious, etc Video communication from teacher (via seismic, which allows a reply) Google news feed A group blog feed Table 1 Example of customisable portals used in Higher Education Report author: Lee Mowbray, Educational Development Group, Learning & Teaching Centre Page 3 3. The Capability of the Technology -– to assess the effectiveness of the technology Learning and teaching processes Customisable portals, such as PageFlakes, iGoogle and NetVibes can be used as an effective and beneficial tool for improving and enhancing communication, collaboration and resource sharing, for students. Possibilities include: • teachers creating a portal and sharing with students in their unit. Contents could include a reading list, feeds from relevant journals, Diigo/Delicious feeds of relevant tagged bookmarks, feeds from collaborative spaces like blogs or wikis, etc. • students create a portal for the unit and invite peers to share. This could provide a focus for discussion and collaboration. • groups of students create a portal page for a particular topic or project. Contents could form part of the process i.e. planning, collaboration or reflection. • forms part of a student’s eportfolio as a reference point or collection of relevant web resources for future units or studies. Customisable portals can also be utilised by staff for personal research and sourcing relevant resources and information. Strengths o The strength of components like RSS feeds are that the user can subscribe to a site and as soon as new content is updated on the site, it is automatically inputted to your feed. In other words, the latest information is automatically ‘sucked’ in to one place for the student to access. o The layout, user interface and style are easily personalised. As new sources or gadgets become available, it is a simple matter to incorporate into the portal. Each portal has a tabbed interface that allows the user to toggle between tabs for different purposes i.e. units of work, references, topics, etc. o The addition of new widgets or moving current ones around the pages is quick and easy so students can use the page to support thinking and to prioritise workflow. o Pages are easily shared. Just click on the Community or Share button on the page you wish to share and enter the email address of the recipient. Pageflakes has the advantage as user content, for instance notes on a message board, are dynamic so every person who is sharing a particular page can see messages from other users as they are added. Weaknesses o Advertising – PageFlakes, in particular, introduced a Sponsored Content advertisement, which is displayed on each page and is a Flash movie. This means it has colour, movement and hence, creates a huge distraction for the user. See Figure 2. Report author: Lee Mowbray, Educational Development Group, Learning & Teaching Centre Page 4 Figure 2 Pageflakes o Cluttered appearance – it is easy to make a page cluttered with too many widgets and artwork. Some of the portals also have extra columns and frames that can make the content difficult to navigate or read e.g. Figure 3. o Figure 3. iGoogle o Some portals do not allow shared pages to be collaborative once shared. The shared page is interactive and editable by the user but becomes their personal page and therefore not dynamic to all i.e. updated user content does not upload to other users who have access to this page. Netvibes is an example of this - see webnote in Figure 4. Report author: Lee Mowbray, Educational Development Group, Learning & Teaching Centre Page 5 Figure 4 Netvibes Issues or potential issues o Customisable portals are currently all free and all content resides on the web, in their servers. Gadgets or widgets that are RSS feeds or other content aggregators, import content from other sources and are therefore not created by individual users, so storing or saving data is not required. If gadgets contain data or content created by the user personally, then backing up or archiving needs to be considered. o As shown in Appendix 1 and 2, the public’s use of the portals has changed over the previous two-year period (2009 – 2010), with iGoogle losing popularity and plunging below both other portals. Netvibes has also lost users and unique visitors to the site have varied widely across the year. This variation could be the result of changes in technology, including the introduction of apps for mobile technology like iPad and iPhone, high and sustained use of social networking sites like Facebook and changes to the portals themselves. This study did not extend to analysing these trends however the fact that change is inherent in technology solutions raises the potential issue of installing a solution which may not be sustainable. o Widgets and gadgets are freely available and editable, which necessitates a level of any technical understanding by the user. Tutorials, online ‘How to’ resources or workshops would possibly need to be developed to satisfy this need.
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