What I want to do is I want to in Scholar
compare the way in which classroom discourse goes on,
in a different way.
And in fact, it's no different from discussion boards
or any learning environment which uses a activity stream feed for learning.
So, I'm going to walk you through a bit of Scholar now and just
give you an example and then I'm going to do
some generalizations about what's going on here.
We're going to show you the Scholar environment to illustrate the way in which they need
not be a distinction between learning face to face in the same time,
in the same space and learning at a distance,
asynchronicity, not in the same time frame.
And how the architectural differences are really not different.
So, just by way of background,
I'm going to give a little bit of instruction
to how Scholar works because that's a way to
explain to you the logic of what I'm saying.
So firstly about Scholar,
It's a web application where you just simply sign into a cloud by server.
Or alternatively you can create an account and when you create an account,
we ask you what your date of birth is for
no other reason other than we have two kinds of accounts in the system.
One account in the system which is for under 18,
which is a very locked down space which is very safe.
And another type of account of over 18 which
can be much more open and connected to the Web.
So I'm going to log in now and I'm going to take you to a tab that I've already opened.
And you can see here is my account here's my profile page and behind my name is a menu,
where I can do a number of things.
I can send updates to people,
I can build a profile in the about area,
I can nominate my interests,
I can look and I can invite peers, all sorts of things.
When I go into Scholar I land in a space called community and what I land on,
is I land on my profile page.
And behind my name here is a menu where I can do all sorts of things.
I can create updates,
I create some information about who I am and I can define interests,
I can find peers and you can see already that I belong to a number of communities.
A community might be a research community, it might be a class.
So a basic organisational unit is a group of people called a community.
And what I have is I don't have friends or followers, I have peers.
So, this is a pretty important distinction for us.
We want to actually have a lot of the logic of social media in here.
But friends are a really bad idea if you're doing learning
and followers are an even worse idea because it's just a measure of popularity.
So we want to do something which is some,
we want to nuance this in a different way.
Let me show you something about the architecture of this and
let me go to a thing called an update.
So when I go to make an update,
then I have a stream here of updates that I've made of
various kinds and updates of things which just go to my peers.
People who've chosen one on one to be people connected with me.
So in an update I can put all,
I can put text, I can put in quotes,
I can put in special characters,
I can put in mathematical formula,
I can put in links.
Importantly also, I can put in images,
I can put in videos,
I can put in audio,
I can put in any other file or I can embed
external media of any kinds in this space which might be a YouTube video,
it might be a bit of code on GitHub or whatever.
And you see, the very first thing about this is,
this is the opposite of a tweet.
See how big this space is?
I can make this space smaller of course if I want to,
but we're immediately suggesting this is more serious than a tweet.
However, if I want that update,
if I link my Facebook account or a link my Twitter account.
It will become a tweet or become a Facebook post
and when I click on that it brings me back into Scholar.
So our story where we describe what we are trying to achieve here,
it's a bit like Instagram.
Instagram is a nice place to do pictures.
Facebook or Instagram but when I brought it in Instagram I it left intact.
So if you feed from Instagram to Facebook,
you click on the picture and you come back into
Instagram and that's a nicer place to do pictures than Facebook is.
So we want to be to knowledge what Instagram is to pictures.
We want to be a specialist space where serious conversations can happen around knowledge.
