As part of the OLnet project, and the Collective Intelligence sub-project an Open University team has prioritised the COP15 climate change conference, as a mini-experiment to put the Cohere semantic annotation and connection tool through its paces. This is part of our project's mission to research the impact and evidence base of the OER movement, and build its capacity via different forms of collective intelligence. Our specific interest is in experimenting with infrastructure to facilitate OER/CI (Open Educational Resources/Collective Intelligence) the latest update to the Cohere Mozilla Browser Add-On, which provides Diigo/Sidewiki-like web annotation as an addition to semantic connection making and map visualization.

Some of our questions:

• What happens when multiple analysts use Cohere to work to annotate and map significant connections between global resources and arguments, around a common issue?
• In what ways do we manage to render the emergent network coherently, and go beyond 'spaghetti'? * What views are missing? What social awareness is missing?
• Should we all work to a common node/link scheme, or leave it emergent, or both? * What work practices need to be agreed to help choreograph the technology? 
• Is the tag cloud now dead, eclipsed by semantic maps?
• ...and other questions relevant to answering what does "good" look like with this kind of collective intelligence?

Participants to the experiment have been: Simon Buckingham Shum, Anna De Liddo, Rebecca Ferguson, Ivana Quinto, Michelle Bachler, and Jack Park

Technology:

The team has tested the use of Cohere to collaboratively annotate COP15 related OERs together with web news, documents, blogposts etc, Results of the web annotations will be used then to inform an online dialogue on the main issues tackled during the United Nation Climate Change conference, as reported by the press or as micro and macro blogged by participants to the conference.

Result of the Cohere online dialogue will help us to evaluate how Cohere performs in supporting:

• active reading of web news,
• reflections on the differents and controversial positions, and
• online dialogue on cliamte change issues.

Experimentation details

As a joined OU effort to address key community questions around COP15 we chose the public's top Question that has been suggested on the OU Platform (see page: http://www.open.ac.uk/platform/join-in/your-votes/question-by-popular/Cl...) that is:

• How do we know that climate change is real and we're not just experiencing a weather cycle?

 We have divided the participants to the experimentation in two groups, one exploring OERs and another exploring Social media in general (such as Blogs, Wikis, Twitterings, and web pages in general).

We will then make a comparative analysis of the debates carried out by the two groups and we will underline how different/similar are the debates informed by those two different sources.

The main OERs repositories have been explored by the participants, by doing specific search for OERs about climate change that help answering the tackled question. Then participants have been asked to annotate key OERs creating ideas that help answering the tackled question.

Moreover they had to try to make connections between their ideas, other people ideas. In this process the main driving question and the identified relevant OERs have been used as evidences to base claims/ideas.

The OERs repositories that have been used during the experimentation are:

• www.OERcommons.org OER commons
• www.oerrecommender.org OER Recommender
• http://cnx.org/ Connections
• http://www.open.ac.uk/openlearn/home.php Open Learn

 But many other repository have been made available for the participants at the following links:

• http://cwr.unitar.edu.my/file.php/1/Index.htm (OERs repositories index)
• http://oerwiki.iiep-unesco.org/index.php?title=Repositories (from the OER wiki)

 In Summary

This experimentation has been both an evaluation study for Cohere and the new collaborative web-annotation feature, and also a study on OERs and OER repositories effectiveness in providing useful answers about climate science and climate issues.

Results of the experimentation can be explored here

We are now in the process of analyzing experimentation results.  At the end of the process we will be able to say what OERs and OERs repositories have been more effective in providing us with knowledge and information to answers the community question about climate change that we have been addressing  as a group during the experimentation.

Moreover we will come out with consideration about how different/similar are OERs to other Social Media resources if used to inform and debate large-scale social issues such as climate change.

Contribute:

If you want to participate to this evaluation study, or just contribute with your ideas and point of view to the online dialogue on climate change, please add a comment or drop me an email at a.deliddo@open.ac.uk. Otherwise you can just go to the Cohere site, register and start contributing with your idea to the online group discussion of the COP15 COHERE team. To join the team discussion you need an invite to join the team, so just drop an email to a.deliddo@open.ac.uk and I will send you one.