http://www.listphile.com/

The basics

Listphile is “a powerful tool for organizing and collaborating around structured information. Call it a database tool, if you will (but please don’t scare anyone away). Listphile was borne of curiosity, and the belief that we learn more effectively when we have a framework for collaboration and knowledge sharing.” The site allows you to create lists, with entries in them (effectively databases with record), controlled by the fields which are to be completed for each entry. The interface is useable, very richly featured  and has recently been improved in speed, along with some more features being added. Note especially – lists can be embedded in other websites; RSS feeds can be used to pipe the entries around; there are good controls over who can edit and contribute to a list; and there are a wealth of design features. The one down side: lists cannot be private. However, the tool is so useful, otherwise, that this factor was discounted in making it ‘top 10′.

Slides

Presenting the key affordances and possible uses of Listphile:

Video

Discussion and live demonstration of slides:

What is great

Listphile has three great qualities: first, it has a lot of powerful design features to enable teachers to set up the kinds of lists / databases they want students to work with; second there are strong collaborative features and clear indicators of who is doing what within a given list, enabling students to ‘own’ their particular piece of the larger enterprise; and third, the added features (maps, exporting and so on) really make listphile flexible. Fundamentally, the only reason not to use listphile is that it is a very public site – you have to place your list in the public domain (though you can control its further use via Creative Commons licenscing). In every other way, it is excellent.

Scenarios for using this tool

Collective definitions

The context for this example is a class of over 1000 students studying first-year management. One of the main learning outcomes in this unit is for students to learn many different terms in the contemporary and recent historical field of management (for example, activity-based costing, scientific management, evidence-based decision making, human resources, and so on). One of the challenges in this unit is that students learn the words, but not the meanings, and are often unclear about the origins and current use of the terms. Students are required collectively to maintain a list of words in listphile, as they encounter them, providing a definition, and a source of information. The unit controller establishes the list in advance and creates a very structured set of fields for each entry so as to guide the students in what to do. Most of the collaborative and similar features are turned off, but comments are permitted. The list is used primarily as a reference point for students, but is built by students. The unit controller cues students to use the list in lectures and tutorials by highlighting key words. At the end of the semester, each student submits an assignment in which they review their use of the list and present evidence (screenshot or similar) of the number of contributions they have made. The list remains private; it can be ‘emptied’ and reused each time the unit runs. The unit controller can, over time, compare and contrast the entries made (the list could be extracted from the website and downloaded for future reference if needs be).

Listphile:

• gives the cognitive structure of the task – listing;
• can be used by 1000s of students all at once, because each entry is granular; and
• enables tracking of what students have actually done.

Geographic listing

Using the embedded Google Map feature, students in a geography class are required to create entries that link to specific geographic features of the terrain in the location they are studying. The site is public and students are told that this work will continue over several years, with more and more being added in successive iterations of the unit. For each entry, a student selects a location using addressing or coordinates in Google Maps (within listphile) and then adds information, according to the fields established by the unit controller in the data base – for example, vegetation, land use, etc). One of the key aspects of the task is for all students to work together on understanding the information. Thus, one of the fields required is a question that students pose to each other, which is then explored by other students in the comments field. Students are required to present a review essay at the end of the semester, along with evidence from the list as to their contributions, both original and the discussion they promoted. The work itself is not assessed directly.

Listphile:

• is public – open communication promotes good student behaviour;
• can be used to promote cognitive interaction within the site; and
• includes discussion about lists and their contents.

Good and bad design

50 web design students are studying in a practical unit on usability; they are required to maintain and contribute to a publicly accessible list of websites that demonstrate particularly good or bad usability features; this is one assignment in addition to more applied tasks involving the review and building of sites themselves. Because the lists include links, images and similar visual information, there is a easy opportunity for students to combine both visual review and written commentary. All students are required to contribute three examples within the first 3 weeks of semester; then students vote on the best and worst examples, using the in-built voting features. After voting finishes, towards the end of semester, the best and worst websites are presented back to the students by the unit controller with his detailed critique / analysis, as well as a commentary on whether he would have chosen those sites. Additional skills are learned in this task, such as using screen capture to render websites into images for the list, with annotations to be added as well.

Listphile:

• provides a locus for digital creativity to be expressed;
• has a voting feature for polling group opinion; and
• is not just text.

Alternatives

Flexlists is probably the best alternative, but it is more of an ‘application’ in a browser than an explicitly social-media sharing service; however, that may suit some teaching areas and problems better than Listphile. There are countless more specific listing / categorising websites which may have scholarly uses (for example  22books enables booklist creation) but the power of Listphile is in its customisable, open-form approach.