User generated content

We had some quite heated debates at the Concede Project meeting yesterday on the nature and direction of user generated content (UGC). When we met in Erlangen, Germany for our last project meeting in May this year, we came up with a definition of UGC: User generated content is "content created and shared freely by students and/or teachers that has not been formally peer reviewed". 

We think this definition works, and it appeared recently for example, in my keynote slides for the Budapest EDEN Research Workshop. The debate centred not upon what UGC actually is, but rather upon what happens to it once it is being used (or re-used) by others. For example, does UGC lose its informal nature when components of it are incorporated into say, a peer reviewed journal article, or an assessed essay at a university? My view is no, it doesn't. The wiki page, or blog content, or whatever the UGC format is, remains informal in nature, regardless how elements of it are being used or repurposed. But here lies an interesting point that we made at the project meeting - one of the aims of Concede is to enhance the quality of UGC so that it can be incorporated into higher education provision. It could be argued than that any UGC that has been incorporated into a formalised, peer reviewed piece of work (e.g. as a citation) is an indicator of high quality.

Further, we discussed the idea that although UGC is not formally peer reviewed, it is constantly being informally peer reviewed. Blogs like this one for example, are open for comments from all, novice, enthusiast and expert, to provide feedback, suggestions, even refutations, via the comments box under each post. This is of course, one of the most instant forms of peer review available. We had a very interesting time yesterday, locked into our room on the 11th floor of the Technical University of Budapest's tallest building. I will be writing an interim evaluation report on Concede in the next month or so, as we are nearly midpoint in the project. I will share some of it here on this blog later...


User generated content by Steve Wheeler was posted from Budapest, Hungary and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.