Do you want to connect? Recommendation Strategies for Personal Learning Networks

Do you want to connect? Recommendation strategies

for building Personal Learning Networks

Kamakshi Rajagopal, Jan van Bruggen, Peter SloepPLE conference, 11 July 2013

Introduction

Exercise

Table

Introduce yourself to the others at your table. Make a mental note of who you want to meet up with later in the conference.

Individual

Write down 10 tags - one tag per card - that describe

• your work

• the topics you find important in the PLE conference

TablePool all the tags in the centre of the table, and read them all. Staple similar tags together, and choose one marker tag for the group.

Example: create, creativity and creation

Individual

Next, individually, make tagsets: write down marker tags that belong together according to you

One-to-oneMatch on similarity with everyone at the table

A = total number of used cards = 5 + 4 = 9

B = number of piles which have both your colours = 1+1=2

One-to-OneMatch on dissimilarity with everyone at the table

Ex: Overlapping tagsets, with overlap 2:

[learning, writing, reading]

[learning, network, writing, blog, wiki]

Table

Who are your best matches? Share the outcome with the others at the table. Do the results match your initial ‘gut’ feeling?

What did we do?

Content Relevance

Experience of

Breakdown

Desire to Connect

Similarity matching or Dissimilarity matching?

Method: User profiles

•Scoop.IT profiles as the starting point for tagsets

•Selection on the basis of Scoop.IT posts with comments

•Keyword extraction + stemming

Method:Matching

•based on Similarity

•based on Dissimilarity

Method: User Evaluation

1.Content Relevance: The Scoop.IT contains new and relevant content for me

2.Experience of Breakdown: This Scoop.IT feed makes me re-assess my thoughts about this topic

3.Desire to Connect: I would like to engage in a discussion with the curator of this Scoop.IT feed

Results1.Experience of Breakdown strongly

correlates with Desire to Connect

If you feel you have learnt something from someone, you very likely want to connect

2.Matching on dissimilarity is better at predicting Experience of Breakdown

Plenary session•Questions? Comments?

•User profiles: How can qualitative profiles be improved?

•Matching: How can qualitative matching be improved?

Contact

@krajagopal

http://kamakshirajagopal.wordpress.com/

http://portal.ou.nl/web/krg/blog