http://slinkset.com/

The basics

Slinkset is an open, user-generated form of the kind of popular news or information aggregator sites like Digg in which a rolling array of snippets of information (often links to websites) are presented with the most recent and popular (as voted by users) appear at the top, and the rest fall to the bottom. Once offscreen, it’s common for them never to be viewed since most users only look at the first page of entries. Slinkset enables this kind of site to be built from scratch, for any purpose and with good controls over privacy, who can post information, and what categories are used to organise the information.

Slides

Presenting the key affordances and possible uses of Posterous:

Video

Discussion and live demonstration of slides:

What is great

Slinkset immediately presents itself in a way that appeals to the user: a big green button calls out for people to ‘try it now’. However, once inside, there’s a bit to learn. The site might be harder to set up than many applications (because it has to be customised), but it is very easy to use, once established. Slinkset is great because it picks up a key way in which people use the web – rapid access to the ‘latest’ information. While most public sites tend to be overwhelming, a specific-purpose slinkset site could be a great way for students to collaboratively build a resource base for their studies, or even to provide commentary on the unit they are studying. It strips away communication options (no discussion or chat), and minimises organisation and structure to emphasise the time and popularity based scrolling of content. The voting option makes this social media and, genuinely, can tap into the wisdom of the crowd of users, so long as they are aware of the consequences of voting items up and down the list.

The customisation tools are especially handy, since they make the service much more easily adapted to education requirements which, being honest, are not quite the same as many ‘public’ forms of web based information and communication. Indeed, Slinkset might be best used ‘against the grain’, not in the way it was intended.

Scenarios for using this tool

Public communication

30 students in a unit on sustainable development learn that the provision of public information and education about sustainability is critical to making for a more sustainable community: in other words, everyone is responsible. They are tasked with a collective authentic assessment activity, which is to use slinkset to promote the best possible ideas for everyday sustainability, and the information that goes along with those ideas. The website is released publicly and students continue to contribute to and submit ideas as they research them. Students are also required to promote the website among their social networks to encourage audience participation and readership. The assessment tasks associated with this example would include both assessment of number and quality of contributions, and also a final assignment that considers why some ideas are more or less popular than others and what that might say about sustainability in public discourse. The site can be maintained and continued over several iterations of the unit of study.

Slinkset:

• provides rapid and controllable form of public communication which doesn’t require any real website building capability;
• manages group collaboration for this communication easily: individuals work as individuals for collective result; and’
• provides interactivity through the voting feature to encourage audience participation.

Wisdom of the crowd

1600 first-year education students studying online only via OUA in a unit on learning technologies are provided with a slinkset website (by invitation) which remains private to them. Part of their work, during the unit, is to review and comment on the kinds of web applications which are available online and decide whether or not they are suitable for school education and give reasons for that judgment. The unit controller prepares, in advance, a list of 20 websites and services (such as slinkset) which she will release to students after the first few weeks of the unit via the website. Students must then select some to visit, analyse and vote on; they can also comment on the sites. The large number of students in the group mean that a good analysis can be made of the resulting votes. Students are asked to review the final outcome, decide whether the majority is indeed correct in the rank order that the voting provides and continue to comment on the sites through slinkset. Since the unit controller can provide additional resources and information via links in the slinkset sidebar, the website also becomes an alternative way of communicating relevant information to students.

Slinkset:

• combines scaffolding with the task – the lecturer uses a different part of the screen to communicate instructions;
• enables 1000s of students to collaborate with little overhead; and
• creates a sense of collective engagement through the voting process.

Collaborative resource sharing by a group for project

A small group of postgraduate students studying pharmacy are researching cases involving the negative effects of the prescription of drugs which, while safe alone, have negative consequences for patients when prescribed together. They are each required to present an individual research paper considering the relative importance of the pharmacist in the maintenance of safe drug use, vis a vis patients and doctors and the drug industry; however, they are also required to demonstrate collaborative work to support that individual paper. The group decides to share resources and information using slinkset and build their informal collaborative learning around this site since it enables greater control over access and use. They use various collaborative features, including RSS feed, to keep in touch as the list develops, share ideas and comment on each other’s work. The fact that the site does not emphasise ‘editing and revision’ but, instead, the constant aggregation of ideas and links to information suits the students who are using it to pool material, rather than to engage closely in discussion about that material (which is the task for their research paper).

Slinkset:

• does not distract students into curating the resources; and
• pools material for all to use.

Alternatives

There are none. Slinkset is pretty much the only social news service which can be customised from scratch.

Further discussion and concepts

Slinkset has a nice feature for interlinking with other web publishing services, discussed by Nick Peachy on his Social Media and Education blog, and with a more extensive discussion inthe paper, From Information to Knowledge. There is no easily available research or discussion of its use in higher education aside from these references.