http://phile.com/
The basics
Phile explicitly mobilises the idea that knowledge online is best served up by a community, not individuals. Phile says of itself “There are lots of websites about big, broad topics, but not all topics are big. And even for big topics, a smaller, focused site is sometimes better than a bigger, more general site. What kind of information do you care about when you look up a movie? It depends on whether you’re a community of horror movie fans or concerned parents. We allow you to create a site with just the information your community cares about — not more, not less.”
Phile basically allows a group of people to be organised to develop and maintain the content of a specific sub-site within the overall phile site. A Phile site has a home page, ‘stacks’ (specific topics-organised information), and forums for discussion. Group membership can be customised. The site has particularly good explanations as to what it does, how it works and how to use it. This information reduces the burden on teachers (to some extent) of explaining the service.
What needs to be explored
Is the interface confusing or not? There is a strong temporal element of organisation – things added in order, rather like a blog or a Facebook lifestream. It is also useful to investigate the inbuilt ‘ask questions’ capacity which promotes student interaction (asking questions of material presented by a lecturer), but also allows the teacher to use questions to guide what students are doing. Indeed, a critical aspect that needs to be explored is the interrelationship – as encoded in the service – between the discussions of material and the presentation of that material. This dyad (information / conversation) is critical to most of the new web 2.0 applications.
Pedagogic Challenge
The pedagogic challenge for phile could be to determine the extent to which students become the authors or the audience of the site. Technologically, the site allows either to occur (or both!). The challenge is, specifically, how does a teacher provide sufficient natural scaffolding within their design of the site’s content and the activities to be done by students to ensure that students are neither ‘mute’ (waiting for the lecturer to do something) nor so talkative that the site turns into a discussion group without much attention to the content. While it is good business practice and a norm of social media for people to be both contributors and receivers within the same setting, teaching and learning often requires that people stop doing one to focus on the other. The challenge is to guide and manage the shifts from one behaviour to another.
Alternatives
The new groups feature for Posterous (added in early 2011) would probably make this service work as well. Note that Phile is rather more about webpage creation than a traditional group application, such as Grou.ps
