What are the limitations of learning at scale? Investigating information diffusion and network vulnerability in MOOCs

by Rebecca Eynon 21/10/2014

while a lot is known about the mechanics of group learning in smaller and traditionally organised online classrooms, fewer studies have examined participant interactions when learning “at scale.”

by Rebecca Eynon 21/10/2014

Millions of people worldwide are currently enrolled in courses provided on large-scale learning platforms (aka ‘MOOCs’), typically collaborating in online discussion forums with thousands of peers. Current learning theory emphasises the importance of this group interaction for cognition. However, while a lot is known about the mechanics of group learning in smaller and traditionally organised online classrooms, fewer studies have examined participant interactions when learning “at scale.” Some studies have used clickstream data to trace participant behaviour; even predicting dropouts based on their engagement patterns. However, many questions remain about the characteristics of group interactions in these courses, highlighting the need to understand whether—and how—MOOCs allow for deep and meaningful learning by facilitating significant interactions. But what constitutes a “significant” learning interaction? In large-scale MOOC forums, with socio-culturally diverse learners with different motivations for participating, this is a non-trivial problem. MOOCs are best defined as “non-formal” learning spaces, where learners pick and choose how (and if) they interact. This kind of group membership, together with the short-term nature of these courses, means that relatively weak inter-personal relationships are likely. Many of the tens of thousands of interactions in the forum may have little relevance to the learning process. So can we actually define the underlying network of significant interactions? Only once we have done this can we explore firstly how information flows through the forums, and secondly the robustness of those interaction networks: in short, the effectiveness of the platform design for supporting group learning at scale. To explore these questions, we analysed data from 167,000 students registered on two business MOOCs offered on the Coursera platform. Almost 8000 students contributed around 30,000 discussion posts over the six weeks of the courses; almost 30,000 students viewed at least one discussion thread, totalling 321,769 discussion thread views. We first modelled these communications as a social network, with nodes representing students who posted in the discussion forums, and edges (ie links) indicating…

Development, Economics

Outside the cities and towns, rural Britain’s internet is firmly stuck in the 20th century

by Bianca Reisdorf 20/10/2014

The quality of rural internet access in the UK, or lack of it, has long been a bone of contention.

by Bianca Reisdorf 20/10/2014

Reposted from The Conversation. The quality of rural internet access in the UK, or lack of it, has long been a bone of contention. The government says “fast, reliable broadband” is essential, but the disparity between urban and rural areas is large and growing, with slow and patchy connections common outside towns and cities. The main reason for this is the difficulty and cost of installing the infrastructure necessary to bring broadband to all parts of the countryside—certainly to remote villages, hamlets, homes and farms, but even to areas not classified as “deep rural” too. A countryside unplugged As part of our project Access Denied, we are interviewing people in rural areas, both very remote and less so, to hear their experiences of slow and unreliable internet connections and the effects on their personal and professional lives. What we’ve found so far is that even in areas less than 20 miles away from big cities, the internet connection slows to far below the minimum of 2Mb/s identified by the government as “adequate”. Whether this is fast enough to navigate today’s data-rich Web 2.0 environment is questionable. Yes… but where, exactly? Rept0n1x, CC BY-SA Our interviewees could attain speeds between 0.1Mb/s and 1.2Mb/s, with the latter being a positive outlier among the speed tests we performed. Some interviewees also reported that the internet didn’t work in their homes at all, in some cases for 60% of the time. This wasn’t related to time of day; the dropped connection appeared to be random, and not something they could plan for. The result is that activities that those in cities and towns would see as entirely normal are virtually impossible in the country—online banking, web searches for information, even sending email. One respondent explained that she was unable to pay her workers’ wages for a full week because the internet was too slow and kept cutting out, causing her online banking session to reset. Linking villages So poor quality…

Ethics, Governance & Security

Designing Internet technologies for the public good

by Ian Brown 08/10/2014

People are very often unaware of how much data is gathered about them—let alone the purposes for which it can be used.

by Ian Brown 08/10/2014

MEPs failed to support a Green call to protect Edward Snowden as a whistleblower, in order to allow him to give his testimony to the European Parliament in March. Image by greensefa.

Computers have developed enormously since the Second World War: alongside a rough doubling of computer power every two years, communications bandwidth and storage capacity have grown just as quickly. Computers can now store much more personal data, process it much faster, and rapidly share it across networks. Data is collected about us as we interact with digital technology, directly and via organisations. Many people volunteer data to social networking sites, and sensors—in smartphones, CCTV cameras, and “Internet of Things” objects—are making the physical world as trackable as the virtual. People are very often unaware of how much data is gathered about them—let alone the purposes for which it can be used. Also, most privacy risks are highly probabilistic, cumulative, and difficult to calculate. A student sharing a photo today might not be thinking about a future interview panel; or that the heart rate data shared from a fitness gadget might affect future decisions by insurance and financial services (Brown 2014). Rather than organisations waiting for something to go wrong, then spending large amounts of time and money trying (and often failing) to fix privacy problems, computer scientists have been developing methods for designing privacy directly into new technologies and systems (Spiekermann and Cranor 2009). One of the most important principles is data minimisation; that is, limiting the collection of personal data to that needed to provide a service—rather than storing everything that can be conveniently retrieved. This limits the impact of data losses and breaches, for example by corrupt staff with authorised access to data—a practice that the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (2006) has shown to be widespread. Privacy by design also protects against function creep (Gürses et al. 2011). When an organisation invests significant resources to collect personal data for one reason, it can be very tempting to use it for other purposes. While this is limited in the EU by data protection law, government agencies are in a…

Politics & Government

The life and death of political news: using online data to measure the impact of the audience agenda

by Jonathan Bright 09/09/2014

Editors must now decide not only what to publish and where, but how long it should remain prominent and visible to the audience on the front page of the news website.

by Jonathan Bright 09/09/2014

Image of the Telegraph's state of the art "hub and spoke" newsroom layout by David Sim.

The political agenda has always been shaped by what the news media decide to publish—through their ability to broadcast to large, loyal audiences in a sustained manner, news editors have the ability to shape ‘political reality’ by deciding what is important to report. Traditionally, journalists pass to their editors from a pool of potential stories; editors then choose which stories to publish. However, with the increasing importance of online news, editors must now decide not only what to publish and where, but how long it should remain prominent and visible to the audience on the front page of the news website. The question of how much influence the audience has in these decisions has always been ambiguous. While in theory we might expect journalists to be attentive to readers, journalism has also been characterised as a profession with a “deliberate…ignorance of audience wants” (Anderson, 2011b). This ‘anti-populism’ is still often portrayed as an important journalistic virtue, in the context of telling people what they need to hear, rather than what they want to hear. Recently, however, attention has been turning to the potential impact that online audience metrics are having on journalism’s “deliberate ignorance”. Online publishing provides a huge amount of information to editors about visitor numbers, visit frequency, and what visitors choose to read and how long they spend reading it. Online editors now have detailed information about what articles are popular almost as soon as they are published, with these statistics frequently displayed prominently in the newsroom. The rise of audience metrics has created concern both within the journalistic profession and academia, as part of a broader set of concerns about the way journalism is changing online. Many have expressed concern about a ‘culture of click’, whereby important but unexciting stories make way for more attention grabbing pieces, and editorial judgments are overridden by traffic statistics. At a time when media business models are under great strain, the…

Development

Why global contributions to Wikipedia are so unequal

by Mark Graham 08/09/2014

The geography of knowledge has always been uneven. Some people and places have always been more visible and had more voices than others.

by Mark Graham 08/09/2014

Reposted from The Conversation. The geography of knowledge has always been uneven. Some people and places have always been more visible and had more voices than others. But the internet seemed to promise something different: a greater diversity of voices, opinions and narratives from more places. Unfortunately, this has not come to pass in quite the manner some expected it to. Many parts of the world remain invisible or under-represented on important websites and services. All of this matters because as geographic information becomes increasingly integral to our lives, places that are not represented on platforms like Wikipedia will be absent from many of our understandings of, and interactions with, the world. Mapping the differences Until now, there has been no large-scale analysis of the factors that explain the wide geographical spread of online information. This is something we have aimed to address in our research project on the geography of Wikipedia. Our focus areas were the Middle East and North Africa. Using statistical models of geotagged Wikipedia data, we identified the necessary conditions to make countries “visible”. This allowed us to map the countries that fare considerably better or worse than expected. We found that a large part of the variation between countries could be explained by just three factors: population, availability of broadband internet, and the number of edits originating in that country. Areas of Wikipedia hegemony and uneven geographic coverage. Oxford Internet Institute While these three variables help to explain the sparse amount of content written about much of sub-Saharan Africa, most of the Middle East and North Africa have much less geographic information than might be expected. For example, despite high levels of wealth and connectivity, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates have far fewer articles than we might expect. Constraints to creating content These three factors matter independently, but they will also be subject to other constraints. A country’s population will probably affect the number of activities, places, and practices…

Development, Mapping

What explains the worldwide patterns in user-generated geographical content?

by Mark Graham 08/09/2014

As geographic content and geospatial information becomes increasingly integral to our everyday lives, places that are left off the ‘map of knowledge’ will be absent from our understanding of the world.

by Mark Graham 08/09/2014

The geographies of codified knowledge have always been uneven, affording some people and places greater voice and visibility than others. While the rise of the geosocial Web seemed to promise a greater diversity of voices, opinions, and narratives about places, many regions remain largely absent from the websites and services that represent them to the rest of the world. These highly uneven geographies of codified information matter because they shape what is known and what can be known. As geographic content and geospatial information becomes increasingly integral to our everyday lives, places that are left off the ‘map of knowledge’ will be absent from our understanding of, and interaction with, the world. We know that Wikipedia is important to the construction of geographical imaginations of place, and that it has immense power to augment our spatial understandings and interactions (Graham et al. 2013). In other words, the presences and absences in Wikipedia matter. If a person’s primary free source of information about the world is the Persian or Arabic or Hebrew Wikipedia, then the world will look fundamentally different from the world presented through the lens of the English Wikipedia. The capacity to represent oneself to outsiders is especially important in those parts of the world that are characterised by highly uneven power relationships: Brunn and Wilson (2013) and Graham and Zook (2013) have already demonstrated the power of geospatial content to reinforce power in a South African township and Jerusalem, respectively. Until now, there has been no large-scale empirical analysis of the factors that explain information geographies at the global scale; this is something we have aimed to address in this research project on Mapping and measuring local knowledge production and representation in the Middle East and North Africa. Using regression models of geolocated Wikipedia data we have identified what are likely to be the necessary conditions for representation at the country level, and have also identified the outliers,…

Development

Geotagging reveals Wikipedia is not quite so equal after all

by Mark Graham 18/08/2014

Wikipedia is often seen as a great equaliser. But it’s starting to look like global coverage on Wikipedia is far from equal.

by Mark Graham 18/08/2014

Reposted from The Conversation. Wikipedia is often seen as a great equaliser. Every day, hundreds of thousands of people collaborate on a seemingly endless range of topics by writing, editing and discussing articles, and uploading images and video content. But it’s starting to look like global coverage on Wikipedia is far from equal. This now ubiquitous source of information offers everything you could want to know about the US and Europe but far less about any other parts of the world. This structural openness of Wikipedia is one of its biggest strengths. Academic and activist Lawrence Lessig even describes the online encyclopedia as “a technology to equalise the opportunity that people have to access and participate in the construction of knowledge and culture, regardless of their geographic placing”. But despite Wikipedia’s openness, there are fears that the platform is simply reproducing the most established worldviews. Knowledge created in the developed world appears to be growing at the expense of viewpoints coming from developing countries. Indeed, there are indications that global coverage in the encyclopedia is far from “equal”, with some parts of the world heavily represented on the platform, and others largely left out. For a start, if you look at articles published about specific places such as monuments, buildings, festivals, battlefields, countries, or mountains, the imbalance is striking. Europe and North America account for a staggering 84% of these “geotagged” articles. Almost all of Africa is poorly represented in the encyclopedia, too. In fact, there are more Wikipedia articles written about Antarctica (14,959) than any country in Africa. And while there are just over 94,000 geotagged articles related to Japan, there are only 88,342 on the entire Middle East and North Africa region. Total number of geotagged Wikipedia articles across 44 surveyed languages. Graham, M., Hogan, B., Straumann, R. K., and Medhat, A. 2014. Uneven Geographies of User-Generated Information: Patterns of Increasing Informational Poverty. Annals of the Association of American Geographers (forthcoming). When…

Child Safety, Governance & Security

Young people are the most likely to take action to protect their privacy on social networking sites

by Grant Blank 14/08/2014

So are young people completely unconcerned about their privacy online, gaily granting access to everything to everyone? Well, in a word, no.

by Grant Blank 14/08/2014

A pretty good idea of what not to do on a social media site. Image by Sean MacEntee. Standing on a stage in San Francisco in early 2010, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, partly responding to the site’s decision to change the privacy settings of its 350 million users, announced that as Internet users had become more comfortable sharing information online, privacy was no longer a “social norm”. Of course, he had an obvious commercial interest in relaxing norms surrounding online privacy, but this attitude has nevertheless been widely echoed in the popular media. Young people are supposed to be sharing their private lives online—and providing huge amounts of data for commercial and government entities—because they don’t fully understand the implications of the public nature of the Internet. There has actually been little systematic research on the privacy behaviour of different age groups in online settings. But there is certainly evidence of a growing (general) concern about online privacy (Marwick et al., 2010), with a 2013 Pew study finding that 50 percent of Internet users were worried about the information available about them online, up from 30 percent in 2009. Following the recent revelations about the NSA’s surveillance activities, a Washington Post-ABC poll reported 40 percent of its U.S. respondents as saying that it was more important to protect citizens’ privacy even if it limited the ability of the government to investigate terrorist threats. But what of young people, specifically? Do they really care less about their online privacy than older users? Privacy concerns an individual’s ability to control what personal information about them is disclosed, to whom, when, and under what circumstances. We present different versions of ourselves to different audiences, and the expectations and norms of the particular audience (or context) will determine what personal information is presented or kept hidden. This highlights a fundamental problem with privacy in some SNSs: that of ‘context collapse’ (Marwick and boyd 2011).…

Governance & Security

Monitoring Internet openness and rights: report from the Citizen Lab Summer Institute 2014

by Ben Zevenbergen 12/08/2014

Informing the global discussions on information control research and practice in the fields of censorship, circumvention, surveillance and adherence to human rights.

by Ben Zevenbergen 12/08/2014

Jon Penny presenting on the US experience of Internet-related corporate transparency reporting.

根据相关法律法规和政策，部分搜索结果未予显示 could be a warning message we will see displayed more often on the Internet; but likely translations thereof. In Chinese, this means “according to the relevant laws, regulations, and policies, a portion of search results have not been displayed.” The control of information flows on the Internet is becoming more commonplace, in authoritarian regimes as well as in liberal democracies, either via technical or regulatory means. Such information controls can be defined as “[…] actions conducted in or through information and communications technologies (ICTs), which seek to deny (such as web filtering), disrupt (such as denial-of-service attacks), shape (such as throttling), secure (such as through encryption or circumvention) or monitor (such as passive or targeted surveillance) information for political ends. Information controls can also be non-technical and can be implemented through legal and regulatory frameworks, including informal pressures placed on private companies. […]” Information controls are not intrinsically good or bad, but much is to be explored and analysed about their use, for political or commercial purposes. The University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab organised a one-week summer institute titled “Monitoring Internet Openness and Rights” to inform the global discussions on information control research and practice in the fields of censorship, circumvention, surveillance and adherence to human rights. A week full of presentations and workshops on the intersection of technical tools, social science research, ethical and legal reflections and policy implications was attended by a distinguished group of about 60 community members, amongst whom were two OII DPhil students; Jon Penney and Ben Zevenbergen. Conducting Internet measurements may be considered to be a terra incognita in terms of methodology and data collection, but the relevance and impacts for Internet policy-making, geopolitics or network management are obvious and undisputed. The Citizen Lab prides itself in being a “hacker hothouse”, or an “intelligence agency for civil society” where security expertise, politics, and ethics intersect. Their research adds the much-needed geopolitical angle to…

Development, Mapping

What is stopping greater representation of the MENA region?

by Mark Graham 06/08/2014

Negotiating the wider politics of Wikipedia can be a daunting task, particularly when in it comes to content about the MENA region.

by Mark Graham 06/08/2014

Wikipedia has famously been described as a project that “ works great in practice and terrible in theory”. One of the ways in which it succeeds is through its extensive consensus-based governance structure. While this has led to spectacular success—over 4.5 million articles in the English Wikipedia alone—the governance structure is neither obvious nor immediately accessible, and can present a barrier for those seeking entry. Editing Wikipedia can be a tough challenge—an often draining and frustrating task, involving heated disputes and arguments where it is often the most tenacious, belligerent, or connected editor who wins out in the end. Broadband access and literacy are not the only pre-conditions for editing Wikipedia; ‘digital literacy’ is also crucial. This includes the ability to obtain and critically evaluate online sources, locate Wikipedia’s editorial and governance policies, master Wiki syntax, and confidently articulate and assert one’s views about an article or topic. Experienced editors know how to negotiate the rules, build a consensus with some editors to block others, and how to influence administrators during dispute resolution. This strict adherence to the word (if not the spirit) of Wikipedia’s ‘law’ can lead to marginalization or exclusion of particular content, particularly when editors are scared off by unruly mobs who ‘weaponise’ policies to fit a specific agenda. Governing such a vast collaborative platform as Wikipedia obviously presents a difficult balancing act between being open enough to attract volume of contributions, and moderated enough to ensure their quality. Many editors consider Wikipedia’s governance structure (which varies significantly between the different language versions) essential to ensuring the quality of its content, even if it means that certain editors can (for example) arbitrarily ban other users, lock down certain articles, and exclude moderate points of view. One of the editors we spoke to noted that: “A number of articles I have edited with quality sources, have been subjected to editors cutting information that doesn’t fit their ideas […]…

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