213.251.145.96

wikileaks has caused a bit of a furore
you can look up what they are saying by going to 213.251.145.96
or by checking out the various papers who have been granted access to the files prior to the leaking

in some ways this seems to be following the protocol which the telegraph used to reveal info about MPs expenses in the summer of 2009

sclater: RT @learninganorak: Julian Assange: Readers' Choice for TIME's Person of the Year 2010 http://t.co/1YT8EB6 via @TIMENewsFeed
Original Tweet: http://api.twitter.com/1/sclater/status/14731574712999936

November 2010 CETIS2010 - notes

draft notes

CETIS 2010 Nottingham, November 15-16 2010

The annual CETIS conference is another example of ways in which JISC has agency to support and enrich communities of practice operating in the field of technology enhanced learning in the UK.

It's a few years since I last attended this conference; the community seems to have established a strong sense of identity since that time. Given the title of the conference "Never Waste a Good Crisis - Innovation & Technology in Institutions" and the financial onslaught on Higher Education lets hope that this strength stands it in good stead for the next few years.

You can find the Programme online which will give you links and a sense of the dominant agendas.

As with many conference the events were launched with a keynote, preceded by some welcoming remarks and a brief trip into a futuristic virtual higher education courtesy of Paul Hollins

Keynote


Anya Kamanetz, author of DIY University Edupunks, Edupreneurs and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education
@anya1anya on twitter

twitter visualisation link

Options available parallel session day 1

Open Innovation

Relationship Management in HE and FE

Cheaper, flexible, effective institutions: technology, politics and economics

Integrating and Subverting Corporate Systems for Educational Purposes

Next Generation Content

My account will focus on Relationship Management . The session included presentations (contact Sharon Perry s.perry@bolton.ac.uk); a practical scenario based exercise led by Dr Qin Han; and an account of experiences from the Derbi project at the University of Derby presented by Jean Mutton

Service Design references and Webliography

taguclan a sort of rough guide to the University. Developed to help prospective students learn about the university, compiled by existing students, an example of collaborative authoring/co-production.

twitter tag #rminhe
JISC CETIS relationship managment website

Those of you wanting to find out a bit more of the background to service design, may find the wikipedia entry on service design reasonably informative

CETIS report on service design - from University of Derby

Running notes on the presentation:

These sessions arose from JISC funded projects looking at Customer Relationship Management and Student Life-cycle Relationship Management

It can be seen as an example of applying commercial techniques to a higher education context. There already existing examples of the application of commercial techniques to public sector experiences - for example in the health service

Example from Goldsmiths - spotting the pinch points - debugging processes. In their case it was found that small changes to service delivery can make much larger impacts across the piece.

The initial thrust of the session was thinking about how we might use customer relationship management tools in an educational context. This actually applies to the frameworks for thinking and analysing how we optimise processes and deal with problems which are associated with the labrynthine procedures around the student experience.

During the disucssion it was observed that issues do arise surrounding the conceptions of what Universities are about, terms like customer implies/belies the comoditisation of education. It was observed that there was less resistance with the use of the word client. Engaging in these sorts of processes may help a university articulate its values and crystalise what it expects to emerge as the outcomes of its processes and to thereby identify intended and unintended outcomes of processes.


Part 2 - interactive session on Service Design

principles underpinning the service design approach

Part 3 - the DERBI experience

Jean Mutton introduced an account of the experience of the DERBI project at the University of Derby which introduced service design at the University of Derby, The small scale project led to an interesting set of improvements for the student experience in relation the their experience of the enrollment processes. myderbi @ myderbi on twitter

it seems to me that if we are talking about learning from business processes we might look to good experiences of the online interaction, and then see how we can incorporate such practices or model the interactions into our processes.

Perspectives/Issues Discussed

fail points

heuristics for management
spotting the fail points

some discussion

biographies


Qin Han studied service design and communities of service for her PhD research

Sharon Perry is one of the CETIS team

Jean Mutton is the Student Experience Project Manager - DERBI Project - University of Derby

Day 2

Enterprise Data - Wilbert Kram
Linked Enterprise Data in F/HE organisations stuff

Damian Steer from the ILRT explaining how they make use of linked data in Bristol.

http://researchrevealed.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/

Paul Miller, Cloud of Data - Making Data Work account of a few up and running semantic web applications


Particularly like the fact that he explained how Tripit works, and what its advantages are. Something I have been trying to say to Hugh for a bit of a while!

SIRI - iphone app - only available in the states at the moment. Came out of a Darpa project -> apple

PowerSet -> ms, bing

Trueknowledge (UK) 200m

Freebase - metaweb google

Tripit not bought yet


canonical source of community enriched data

Seån O'Riain DERI NUI Galway

Enterprise Linked Data - overview of the current deployment and extent of community

ref - open society foundation open data study

The report , commissioned by Open Society Institute’s Transparency and Accountability Initiative and written by Becky Hogge, provided insights on the UK and US processes to unlocking their data to their respective data.gov’s.

http://www.soros.org/initiatives/information/focus/communication/articles_publications/publications/open-data-study-20100519

http://www.soros.org/initiatives/information/about

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becky_Hogge

Tim Berners-Lee's five star scheme

http://lab.linkeddata.deri.ie/2010/star-scheme-by-example/


http://nlp.hivefire.com/articles/18041/the-role-of-community-driven-data-curation-for-ent/
The Role of Community-Driven Data Curation for Enterprises
http://www.springerlink.com/content/n057n28561m86vl6/


Ref to challenges for financial data integration Edward Curry, Andreas Harth, Sean O'Riain Challenges Ahead for Converging Financial Data. In W3C Workshop on Improving Access to Financial Data on the Web

http://sw.deri.org/2009/09/financial-data/

ref http://www/w3.org/2001/sw/rdb2rdf/

Feedback in Plenary: links and notes
take a look

Disruptive Innovation http://tinyurl.com/disruptive2010

Absorptive Capacity: A New Perspective on Learning and Innovation
Wesley M. Cohen, Daniel A. Levinthal; Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 35, 1990

http://faculty.fuqua.duke.edu/~charlesw/s591/Bocconi-Duke/Papers/C10/CohenLevinthalASQ.pdf


Designing Learning, towards a scalable interdisciplinary design science of learning

ref - transforming american education - learning powered by technology


Wang and Hannafin Design Based Research 1995

socio-cognitive engineering: a methodology for the design of human-centred technology European Journal of Operational Research

Socio-cognitive engineering: A methodology for the design of human-centred technology M. Sharples N. Jeffery, J. B. H. du Boulay, D. Teather, B. Teather and G. H. du Boulay

Copyright - fair use for the UK?

from the bbc news site http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11689463

reporting on a planned speech today (4/05/10)

"The second new announcement I can make today is to do with intellectual property. The founders of Google have said they could never have started their company in Britain.

"The service they provide depends on taking a snapshot of all the content on the internet at any one time and they feel our copyright system is not as friendly to this sort of innovation as it is in the United States.

"Over there, they have what are called 'fair-use' provisions, which some people believe gives companies more breathing space to create new products and services.

"So I can announce today that we are reviewing our IP laws, to see if we can make them fit for the internet age. I want to encourage the sort of creative innovation that exists in America."

Mr Cameron will promise to work to ensure London's East End becomes a "world-leading technology city to rival Silicon Valley" in California.

He will announce that Google, Facebook and Intel are among the firms investing in the area.

Notes: Semantic technologies in Higher Education - revisited

Notes - We hosted a workshop at Southampton this week which revisited the agendas for Semantic Technologies in Higher Education

There are many different perspectives on semantic technologies - the folks assembled represented the spectrum including

• hardline technologists who want to build and implement systems (and who are well aware that they need to talk to users)
• post grads exploring semantic technologies (novel applications and uses)
• academics looking at how semantic technologies might impact on university eco-systems

Presentations - like all the info relating to this workshop details can be found at http://www.semhe.org/

Hugh Glaser - a retired ECS academic who is now Chief Architect with Seme4 made a presentation titled "Pragmatics of Semantic Technologies in Education: Linked Data" http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21666/

included a demo of RKB explorer as a device to explore how RDF can be used, and what problems need to be resolved when considering distributed sources of linked data

CRS - co reference service find URIs->store->publish->recommend a canon

Dave Lambert - video annotation tools

the paper http://www.semhe.org/2010/files/semhe10_lambert-yu.pdf
http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/member/dave-lambert

http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/member/hong-qing-yu

Hugh Davis and Chris Gutteridge


context and background from Hugh, previous research, current activities and ambitions for the university
Chris Gutteridge - account of experience, pragmatics

mentioned lots of stuff including...

From Chris Gutteridge thoughts about modelling

http://blogs.ecs.soton.ac.uk/webteam/2010/09/02/the-modeler/


areas

references/Webliography

Seme4 - http://www.seme4.com/

sameas.org

http://www.rkbexplorer.com/

http://sindice.com

lod http://richard.cyganiak.de/2007/10/lod/

http://www.geonames.org/

http://id.loc.gov/

http://dewey.info/

http://data.open.ac.uk/

http://www.zemanta.com/

The Semantic Web, Linked and Open Data briefing paper

Date: 01 Jul 10 A briefing paper by Lorna M. Campbell and Sheila MacNeill introducing the concepts of the Semantic Web, Semantic Technologies, Linked and Open Data.
Semantic Technologies

Readings digital literacies

- things have moved on since I gathered this set of references....
so probably best to search for some updates

Thankfully a lot of work has refuted the claims for digital natives :-) the world has moved on....

If nothing else, they reflect some of the ideas I am still coming across, I know that there have been a number of JISC publications, the learner experience work, and also Helen Beetham's work on Digital Literacies (refs needed)


Frand, J. L., "The Information Age Mindset: Changes in Students and Implications for Higher Education," Educause Review, vol. 35, pp. 15–24, 2000.
Haythornthwaite, C. A. and Kazmer, M. M., Learning, Culture, and Community in Online Education: Research and Practice: P. Lang, 2004.
Nathan, R., My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student: Cornell University Press, 2005.
Prensky, M., "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants," On the Horizon vol. 9, pp. 1-6, 2001.
Prensky, M., "The Emerging Online Life of the Digital Native: What They Do Differently Because of Technology, and How They Do It " Games2train, http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky-The_Emerging_Online_Life_of_the_Digital_Native-03.pdf 2004.
Wesch, M., " What Is Web 2.0? What Does It Mean for Anthropology? ," Anthropology News vol. 48, pp. 30-31, 2007.
Wesch, M., "Youtube Ethnography Project," Kansas State University http://mediatedcultures.net/, 2007.

Twitter at FIE

IEEE Frontiers in Education is a fine conference, and I was looking forward to being able to link up to some folk via the twitter back channel this year.

The conference organisers even rather optimistically declared a hast tag...

you can see the level of debate by visiting http://www.tweetviz.com/ and checking out #fie2010 :-(

probable the most read tweet is the one posted outside in the lobby

unfortunately there was no wifi in the conference room and I don't have a US data card. However the free wifi in my (different and cheaper) hotel, is free, works all the time and works in the rooms as well as the lobby. occasionally I text but mostly it's a silent scream

as @tgmcewan said thanks to #ibahn and #marriot

some more visualisations which are fab....

a map of knowledge and an infographic

just stumbled across these two, which I need to note ... something with a bit more analysis may come later!

first of is a map of knowledge - the Web 2.0 points of control map which was an output of a recent web2.0 summit
http://www.coolinfographics.com/blog/2010/9/9/the-web-20-points-of-control-map.html

second was an infographic example of the tube map ( where information and relation is priviledged over accurate scale). And I do insist on calling it a tube map, is was derived from the London tube, calling it a metro map does not work, as anyone who have ever travelled on the Paris Metro will tell you!!

this is a tube map representation of the most widely spoken languages in the world its the work of folks at PS transaltions, but I found it via the cool infographics blog.

http://www.pstranslation.co.uk/infog_languages.html

so thanks to the http://Guardian.co.uk for the original springboard, and if you want to follow this sort of area then the links from the cool info graphics blog are an excellent place http://www.coolinfographics.com/links/

Web Science Curriculum ( and Workshop)

work in progress

Its been a week of web science for me this week, along with a few extra lessons on language learning (the first half of the week was in France at Montpellier 2) and inter-disciplinary discussions.

The structure of this post is about the formal web science curriculum workshop (third in the series) but interspersed with some thinking and ideas related to what is going on in Montpellier ( who plan to host a new Masters in Web Science from academic year 2011-12)

At the end of this post there will be a list of links, a list of those who attended the workshop, and a list of folk from Montpellier who might be involved in the new proposed masters.

Web Science Curriculum Workshop Programme:
As yet only a few of the resources appear to be on the web, but I will link where I can, and expect to re-edit or republish this blog post when things change.

Intro and welcome from Cathy Pope (soton)

Further Welcome and Web Science Trust - Wendy Hall @DameWendyDBE

Round table introductions - all

Web Science subject categorisation - a proposal for discussion Michalis Vafopoulos @vafapoulos and Les Carr @Lescarr

What is Web Science? Nigel Shadbolt @nigel_shadbolt

What is Web Science? group discussion (ok, I won't be giving twitter names for all here!)

Round table presentations of what we are teaching, planning, and what collaborations we would like

Dave de Roure @dder

+++overview+++

Rather than being a documentary narrative, this account is a synthesis of the discussion which mixes parts for points raised in various sessions

draft curriculum for discussion - paper developed by Michalis Vafopoulos ( @vafapoulos on twitter ) and Les Carr was presented and discussed.

Web Science Draft Curriculum

The proposal brings forward a taxonomy which provides a structure for the intersecting topic areas across the curriculum

The discussion to some extent turned on what was missing from the list - but any brief account cannot do justice to the issues raised. We had an initial bash at the discussion immediately following Michalis' presentation, returning to it, and refining our ideas as the day progressed.

My assumptions

students + curriculum -> web scientist
curriculum = knowledge + processes
study= cognitive apprenticeship

inter-disciplinarity is about the negotiated understanding of meaning

borrowing from the concept of the barefoot psychotherapist

parallels with language learning

When considering the work/research/focus areas of the list it appears that the web scientist might be an identified by the fact that the reseacher's specialisms did not alone sit in an existing recognised discipline area, essentially web scientists have to be inter-disciplinary. During informal discussions with Mark Weal we agreed that it might also be helpful to portray the information space through some form of associative map. I suspect that different colleagues will find different styles of representation useful, although the taxonomic approach has strength since it mirrors that used in the ACM curricula.

There was a definite thread running through the presentation which Nigel Shadbolt made that learning from existing disciplines/fields of studies which are by nature inter-disciplinary may be of advantage. The discussion time after this presentation was wide ranging, and if possible I will try to link to other accounts which folk make. Pragmatically one way in which the field can be established and create its identity is through attaching itself to other established disciplines, thereby demonstrating its role and value.

One alternative approach to the curriculum mapping which was suggested during the subsequent dicussions was to take an approached based on the IEEE software engineering body of knowledge

Another suggestion was to take a look at the Achievement Standards Network

Probably worth thinking about a few ways in which we portray/understand web science. Our Southampton perspective is one of co-creation - or in social science talk web science is the product of co-constitution. There are a few (some classic) pictures which can help illuminate this understanding.

How we see the web science curriculum at Southampton: We began teaching a web science masters in 2009/10 Les Carr and Mark Weal plus Cathy Pope have been to key players in designing the structure of the course, but there has been extensive input through discussions with a whole host of academics who are contributing to the teaching, some of whom offer single lectures, others who have a more significant role in the classes.

When we think about what is web science, we have various visualisations which capture the extent of the area, some of which address content, other parts of which address process. You can find more details on the course web site, and through resources which we have deposited in EdShare (our educational repository).

We host a Web Science Doctoral Consortium - http://webscience.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
We run an MSc in Web Science - http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/admissions/pg/msc/1011/web_science.php
We routinely deposit our learning resources in EdShare

But it is may be more useful to consider a process orientated understanding of web science which has been presented by Tim Berners-Lee. Students of web science, like all masters' students will need to develop their critical thinking and analytic skills across the set of processes. The curriculum needs to be more than a mapping of the landscape, since the ways of thinking and analysing data which are special to Web Science are an inextricable part of the field.

By way of observation, we got into discussions where understandings pivoted on linguistic understandings. Many of the discussions were constrained by concepts of existing ways of working.

One of the heated questions was about where web scientists would get jobs, surely Web Science for students is more about a mindset rather than a ticket for a job, I find myself returning to the model of higher education as a cognitive apprenticeship. The issues is that students of web science, and practitioners (academics or in the field) will acquire a set of skills and a model of knowledge and understanding which is mediated by the consideration and exploration of web science phenomena. I look at web science ( like I look at so many different parts of life) from a technology affordances perspective (after gaver). This belies the fact that I additionally come from a social constructivist perspective. for those reasons, I would wish to privilege approaches over content.

However when we return to the issue of where students will work when they have graduated from the course, the problem is created when we seek to gain accreditation, or agreement from our institution to support and instantiate a subject as a formal programme. At that time we are asked to explain or anticipate (for a commodified model of education) Where will our students work, Where will they gain their work experience, What are the topics which they can study? Who are the academics who will teach them.

The discussion about what is web science, and where to web scientists work is of particular importance to those who expect to incorporate a period of internship, work-placement - or french 'stage'. I favour an approach in the curriculum which enables the learners to gain self knowledge and confidence. In terms of placements and internships I see opportunities for students to take placements in orgnaisations where they are able to pursue activities where they practice web science in context (for enterprises such as tourist boards or regional development agencies, for small businesses, or as interns for research groups at Universities)

sound points made by colleague from Amsterdam (Hans Ackermanns)

what people want
sharing of resources
beruit - french or arabic text on web science
highland and islands - working in health related areas - seeking to share video resources
discussions of possible text book - maybe an electronic version would be more apposite!
remote teaching by agreement with other institutions/institutes - real time with video conferencing
DERI are prepared to participate and exchange

I would like to make a strong argument for remote learning - I see web science as requiring a participative curriculum, where the students play a strong role in creating their curriculum and helping take forward our understanding of web science. We are talking about learning at masters level, but I think this might also be applicable at undergraduate level. It seems to me that the very inter-disciplinary nature of the web science necessitates an active role for the students in creating their own understandings, and personally experiencing their own understanding of interdiscipinarity , not withstanding the fact that we are trying to establish web science as a discipline in its own right.

If we believe we are seeking to educate the thought leaders of the next generation, then we would be doing them a disservice if we construct a web science curriculum which is predominantly didactic.
===notes===
proposals - koblenz - text book on web science
web science book already translated into greek and chinese
approaches - stand alone masters, specialist modules, seeking to develop computer science 'flavoured' with web science
scarcity of people who can deliver - seeking to find people across the country, contribute remotely


===
participants
=== - links incorporated where I have been able to find that the institution has a specific web science initiative/programme

Jack Kopeski - OU Milton Keynes

Joanna Luciano - Rensselaer -

Chris Baker - University of New Brunswick

Michalis Vafopoulos - Thosaloniki

Hugh Glaser - Linked Data consultant

Nick Gibbons - University of Southampton

Hans Akkermanns - The Network Institute NV Amsterdam http://www.vu.nl/en/research/interdisciplinary-research-institutes/ni/index.asp

Elizabeth Brooks - UHI - head of computing network

Connor Hayes - DERI - NUI Gallway Ireland

Stéphane Bezane - UIR web science at USJ Beirut looking for ways of setting up exchanges for students and sharing materials (lebanon - on interest to Montpellier)

Birgit Proell - Johannes Keppler University , interested in sharing materials

Su White - Southampton/Montepellier 2

Marco Antonio Cassanova - Brazilian Web Science Institute http://www.webscience.org.br

Geraldo Xexéo - Brazilian Web Science Institute http://www.webscience.org.br

Sergej Sizoc - Koblenz

Lei Zhang - Tsinghua University (name means the water is clear and the trees are growing)

Hugh Davis - Southampton/Montepellier 2

Bernie Hogan - Oxford Internet Institute

Mark Weal - University of Southampton

Wendy Hall - University of Southampton

Nigel Shadbolt - University of Southampton

Claudia Roda - American University of Paris, Interested in sharing materials

===
interactions - and questions to continually ask....
===

what are you proposing?

what are you arguing?

so what did you mean by that?

Issues in a web science masters

===
montpellier folks
===

Stefano Cerri

Madalina Croitoru

Clement Jonquet

LIRMM montpellier

University Montpellier 2

===
links
===

http://wiki.websciencetrust.org/w/Web_Science_Subject_Categorization_%28WSSC%29:_a_proposal_for_discussion

http://web science.org

http://wiki.websciencetrust.org/w/Curriculum

1. Towards a Science of the Web: the Power of Networks. Wendy Hall. http://mediaplayer.group.cam.ac.uk/component/option,com_mediadb/task,view/idstr,CU-Personnel-2007-WISETI/Itemid,99999999

2. Introduction to Web Science. Video of a lecture by Nigel Shadbolt.

3. Web Science Lectures at Georgia Tech. http://webscience.cc.gatech.edu/lecture-series

4. ESWC2008 Panel Does the Semantic Web Need Web Science. Wendy Hall moderator. http://videolectures.net/eswc08_hall_dsw/

5. Web Science Research Initiative Curriculum Workshop Report. http://webscience.org/filemanager/active?fid=42

6. What is the Future of the Web? A presentation by Tim Berners-Lee followed by a panel discussion with Berners-Lee, Hall, Shadbolt, Spivak, moderated by Hender and McGuinness. Links to ReadWriteWeb coverage. http://tw.rpi.edu/launch/

7. Building a Pragmatic Semantic Web Alani, H., Hall, W., O'Hara, K., Shadbolt, N., Chandler, P. and Szomszor, M. (2008) Building a Pragmatic Semantic Web. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 23 (3). pp. 61-68.http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/15787/

8. Web Science: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Understanding the Web Hendler, J., Shadbolt, N., Hall, W., Berners-Lee, T. and Weitzner, D. (2008) Web Science: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Understanding the Web. Communications of the ACM, 51 (7). pp. 60-69. ISSN 0001-0782 http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/16555/

9. Why Study the Web? vide of lecture by Nigel Shadbolt http://archive.zepler.tv/266/

10. Upcoming Web Science Events http://webscience.org/events.html

Digital Literacies considered - Digital Discourses and Subject Specialisms

work in progress
Some reflections on the Digital Literacy Workshop at ALT-C 2010 - has tag #altc2010

Considering the prospect of convincing my academic colleagues to find space for Digital Literacy in the curriculum would most likely be taking on the task single-handed of pushing water uphill. If on top of that I was asked to devise an institutional strategy which helped put Digital Literacy at its core.


......
WIP - notes

use - visualise

http://twitterfall.com #altc2010
http://visibletweets.com

Tuesday
Donald Clarke's refs/ observations - uses the teaching of physics as a proxy for methods in lectures generally

The media equation - Byron Reeves & Clifford Nass http://www.amazon.co.uk/Media-Equation-Television-Information-Publication/dp/1575860538

Ferris Bueller's Day Out - video clip

(? of course how do you measure the discourse which is happening in people's head)

socrates plato and aristotle - ref to the philosopher's song - link to video

Newton - anecdote, lectured to empty classes
Feinnman - brilliant lecturerer - read the biography - read the preface to lectures in physics
Mazur - "Data is not the plural of anecdote" - (?narrative and hypnosis)

Revisiting technology, organisational change and how we research it

One area that I am particularly interested in is the impact of technology on organisational change. I have been spending a little time recently researching into this area, and there are number of publications which I think are worth revisiting, particularly in the context of research methods generally and those concerned with Web Science in particular.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Social Interactions in the Web,  in CACM, Hendler et al 2008

For now this post is mostly a note to self, but will repay some further thought and development. If you have comments or pointers to other work, that would be excellent.

A few years ago, when wanting to present some of my findings to a conference, my paper was rebuffed by (what I thought to be a low grade and shallow) reviewer, whose comments on the work was sparse, but which began 'I don't much care for this sort of research'.

As someone who takes an interdisciplinary approach my research typically uses a mixed methods approach. I am aware that in the area of technology enhanced learning, we are often at an intersection between researchers from the social sciences (often education, psychology, anthropology) and those from the more logical positivist traditions of the hard applied sciences such as computer science. The challenge is always to find ways of overcoming epistemological differences between disciplines and engaging in useful and constructive dialogue across any perceived divides.

its interesting to note that this issue is at the core of a large part of what we are tacking in Web Science - which was described in one of the earliest papers (Berners-Lee et al, 2006) as being concerned with  the Engineering, Technology and Analytics of the web as well as being "The science of decentralised information systems". It is however also pointed out that that Web Science is fundamentally a study of socially embedded technology (and thus my implication inherently inter-disciplinary). Subsequent publications (for example Hendler et al 2008) identify the role of 'social machines" and talk about the inter-relationship between the Engineering and Technology and the Social Dimensions

In that context, these publications which come from the field of management science and information science, which, in themselves represent fields of study which have probably already experienced Biglan's hard applied/soft applied intersection.

There are a number of approaches which have arisen following on from Gidden's work on structuation which are of interest. Orlikowski has been influential in discussion of research methods appropriate for this area.

References:

Berners-Lee, T., Hall, W., Hendler, J. A., O’Hara, K., Shadbolt, N. and Weitzner, D. J. (2006) A Framework for Web Science. Foundations and Trends in Web Science, 1 (1). pp. 1-130. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/13347/

Hendler, J., Shadbolt, N., Hall, W., Berners-Lee, T. and Weitzner, D. (2008) Web Science: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Understanding the Web. Communications of the ACM, 51 (7). pp. 60-69.

DeSanctis, G., & Scott Poole, M. (1994). Capturing the Complexity in Advanced Technology Use: Adaptive Structuration Theory. Organization Science, 5(2), 121-147. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2635011

Giddens, A. (1986). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration

Also available in the Hartley Library Southampton

Orlikowski, W. (2000). Using Technology and Constituting Structures: A Practice Lens for Studying Technology in Organizations. Organization Science, 11(4), 404-428 http://www.springerlink.com/content/r21881t5637408h5/

Orlikowski, W.J. and Baroudi, J.J. (1991) Studying Information Technology in Organizations: Research Approaches and Assumptions. Information Systems Research, 2 (1), 1-28 http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.103.107&rep=rep1&type=pdf


Orlikowski, W. J. and Barley, S. R. (2001). Technology And Institutions: What Can Research On Information Technology And Research On Organizations Learn From Each Other? MIS Quarterly, 25(2), 145-165. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3250927

Potential Projects: Tools and Environments for Learning Potential Projects: Tools and Environments for Learning

As students progress through their education we observe that they customise and build their own learning environments bringing together sets of preferred tools in a manner which is individual and responsive to their personal needs.

The Southampton Learning Environment seeks to establish a framework in which to provide personalised and personalisable information and services.

Project students undertake dissertation work related to the Southampton Learning environment will have the opportunity to address challenging problems across a range of focus areas associated with the development of this exciting new environment.

Indicative areas include but are not restricted to

• Interface specification and design

• Linked data for interoperability

• Widgets to support learning

• Personalisation framework

• Widget container

• Id management framework

• Evaluation of learning environment tools

• Tools for research/visualisations

see also - something to read

http://shirleyknot.blogspot.com/2010/06/something-to-read.html

LSL research agendas - something on Impact factors and Road Maps - notes for information

information from http://sciencewatch.com/dr/sci/09/jan18-09_2/ produced by Thomson Reuters

The Journal of Engineering Education is very highly rated, ISI impact factor of 3.0, its worth understanding the associated roadmap which they have developed which is very relevant to research agendas in LSL

National Academy of Engineering Education Research Benchmark and Frameworks http://www.nae.edu/cms/11560.aspx

Engineering Education Research Colloquies - Engineering Education Research Agenda


References:

* The Steering Committee of the National Engineering Education Research Colloquies. The National Engineering Education Research Colloquies. Journal of Engineering Education, Vol. 95, No. 4, October 2006, pp. 257-258.


* The Steering Committee of the National Engineering Education Research Colloquies. The Research Agenda for the New Discipline of Engineering Education. Journal of Engineering Education, Vol. 95, No. 4, October 2006, pp. 259-261.

#PLE_BCN

What an excellent, and interesting event, the immaculate planning, brilliant setting, and dedication to designing an event which made real communication happen was a refreshing change from the usual conference fare of dutiful presentations by inexperienced postgrads and academic posturing from over-inflated egos. Official web pages for the conference are at http://pleconference.citilab.eu/ A massive thank you to all the organizing committee, but especially to

Plenty of discussion and time for though with a conference which worked to challenge the standard format integrating components of bar camps and unconferences. This makes for some work for the participants (which is good), and does not necessarily result in the super smooth corporate commodified conference, but something which participants take with them afterwards because they joined in at the time.


Opening (un)keynote was a joint effort from Alec Couras and Graham Atwell @courosa and @grahamattwell. It included a whole load of contributed slides, and was structured around eight questions. There were a few tech issues, the usual stuff about computers not talking to the av system and computer and projection screen resolution challenges, but it was well aligned with (my) observation that (real) learning is messy!

The second unkeynote from Jordi Adell and Ismael Peña-López @ictologist and @jordi was crafted to ensure maximal participation, literally getting attendees to vote with their feet and express their views

The hash tag for the event was #PLE_BCN, and the twitter back stream peaked 5000 well before the close of play. You can take a look at the twitter stream (as we did during the conference) by using the visualiser tool http://visibletweets.com/ . Official web pages for the conference are at http://pleconference.citilab.eu/ .

Session chairs were asked to be innovative in their approaches, you can see Graham Atwell's blog http://www.pontydysgu.org/2010/07/how-we-share-our-ideas-ple_bcn/ It provides details from session chairs about how they will run their session - mine was rather tame by comparison, asking presenters to provide tag cloud style summaries prior to their short formal presentation, and trying to link the perspectives on the two items during an extended joint discussion slot!

Thoughts

Emerging definition - well when Hugh and I discussed it we decided to take part of O'Reilly's definition of what is Web2.0, and extend it...the web as a platform (for learning)


things I found/the conference used

Visible Tweets

Cirip

http://www.cirip.ro/grup/plebcn/cloud?limit=200&nr=30&cols=4&us&lg=en

Scribble Pad
http://moourl.com/ple1


things that made me seasick

google wave

prezi

People who also presented in our session which was about PLEs and Institutions

TOWARDS AN ELEARNING 2.0 PROVISIONING STRATEGY FOR UNIVERSITIES Oskar Casquero, Javier Portillo, Ramón Ovelar, Jesus Romo, Manuel Benito

MAKING IT RICH AND PERSONAL: MEETING INSTITUTIONAL CHALLENGES FROM NEXT GENERATION LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS Su White, Hugh Davis, Pete Hancock, Debra Morris

FULL IMMERSION LANGUAGE LEARNING IN ON-CAMPUS UNIVERSITY COURSES Bradley Bowers (did not attend/present)

ANAGRAMMING PLE: EMPOWERING PROFESSIONAL LEARNING THROUGH MICROBLOGGING Gabriela Grosseck, Carmen Holotescu

People in the session I chaired


AN APPROACH TO INTER-WIDGET COMMUNICATION SPECIFICATION Tobias Nelkner, André Kemena

PERSONAL DASHBOARDS FOR AWARENESS IN SOCIAL SOFTWARE ENGINEERING Wolfgang Reinhardt, Sebastian Nuhn could not attend

DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE INTEGRATOR FEDERATED WITH PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE ENVIRONMENTS
David White


participant blogs

http://ibuchem.wordpress.com/2010/07/08/ple_bcn-conference-day-1/

remote viewers blogs/comments

http://www.masmithers.com/2010/07/08/the-ple-as-a-tool-and-institutional-lock-in/

A few of the new Twitter folk I met/followed from the conference - there were a lot!

@pgsimoes Paulo Simões

@samscam Sam Easterby-Smith

@ocasquero - Oskar Casquero interesting paper which complemented our paper on Rich Learning Environments by laying the ground with working definitions of the environment labs doing work implementing sytems which are in our Rich Learning Environment

@ggrosseck Gabriela Grosseck

http://pleconference.crowdvine.com/


http://visibletweets.com/

there were a number of presentations which looked at mobile platforms and discussed widget frameworks - sort of stuff I want to follow up

Work Related to the Southampton Learning Environment - which we put in a framework of a Rich Learning Environment

Sappo Campus - Portugal

Work in the Basque Country from Oskar Casquero et al

there were also various presentations on widget use and frameworks which could be usefully followed up - more when I have refined this blog

How linked data will benefit higher education

I have been having a bit of fun preparing for a presentation to the ALPSP for a day long event titled Ready for Web 3.0.

The presentation I made ties in with our work on the Southampton Learning Environment and my personal take on Rich Learning Environments. You can take a look at the slides and check out the main refs below :-)

Abstract:

The potential impact of widespread use of linked-data in Higher Education is immense. Everyday understandings of the power derived by placing raw data in the public domain is growing. It promises to transform education, interconnecting administrative data, enriching and embellishing teaching resources while providing tools and resources for learners and researchers alike.

Ready for Web 3.0: How will Linked Data benefit Higher Education?

View more presentations from Su White.

Refs

you might like to read what Tim Berners Lee has to say on some of the Design Issues

Tim Berners Lee - Design Issues: Linked Data http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData

Tim Berners Lee on the Next Web A TED talk from tbl (2009) - the "Raw Data Now" talk

From WC3 - a quick introduction to linked data Linked Data intro from WC3 on Slideshare

Interlinking with DBPedia http://wiki.dbpedia.org/Interlinking



Tiropanis, T., Davis, H., Millard, D., Weal, M., White, S. and Wills, G. (2009) Semantic Technologies in Learning and Teaching (SemTech) - JISC Report
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/projects/semantictechnologies.aspx


Paul Miller (2010) Linked Data Horizon Scan – JISC report
http://linkeddata.jiscpress.org/

Paul Miller's Blog http://cloudofdata.com/

XCRI project http://www.xcri.org/Welcome.html

RDFa

MySociety http://www.mysociety.org/

data.gov http://data.gov.uk/apps

The Semantic Squirrel http://www.ploscompbiol.org/doi/pcbi.1000361

Tiropanis Thanassis , Davis, H., Millard, D., Weal, M., White, S. and Wills, G. (2009) Semantic Technologies in Learning and Teaching (SemTech) - JISC Report

http://semtech.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

White, S., Davis, H. C., Morris, D. and Hancock, P. (2010) Making it rich and personal: meeting institutional challenges from next generation learning environments. In: The PLE conference 2010, 8-9 July 2010

http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21327/

visual thinking - maps and clouds

Given the overheads of putting all the images in one post, I am creating sub posts.
This one is maps and clouds

What is emerging is a continuum of visualisations from static through to dynamic, and from models through to metaphors ( sounds like a target for a magic quadrant visualization ;-)

the map below is a visualisation which incorporates real information - the colours and interconnections both explain relationships which exist with the data.

Its a map which is quite often come across - a visualisation of the Links of Data (LOD) as a cloud. The image owes its source to Christian Bizer from Berlin. The date on this diagram is July 2009. May be worth visiting the original source to check out any updates.




Also here is a further visualisation of web trends, another hybrid visualisation which is towards the model end of the spectrum.

Visual Thinking continued - graphic facilitation and recording

I come across the idea of graphic facilitation or graphic recording following up the work on Learning Maps which appears on the periodic table of visualisations.


















The learning map featured on the periodic table is Pepsi's The Revolution on Beverage Street (left) - which was developed to represent the supply chain activities for that company.

It seemed to me that representing the dynamics of emerging discussions, conclusions and thinking might sometimes be more usefully represented visually rather than in the usual textual report and proceedings format - or at least the two methods might complement each other.

I am a keen proponent of mindmaps for my own use, and can use them to record information, but I am really not much of an artist, and so looking at the work of specialist graphic designers and artists in this respect in interesting. Hope to have some (almost) first hand experience of graphic recording very soon, meanwhile why not take a look at some of the links?

Other intersting folk in the area include - Thinking Visually http://www.thinkingvisually.com/graphic.html

http://www.flickr.com/photos/thinkingvisually

They are sort of related to the analytical work you find from Davis McCandless http://www.davidmccandless.com/ who writes for the Guardian Datablog.

Information is Beautiful


David hosts the Information is Beautiful website which arose from the book of the same name http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/ )

He works with ( and praises) Steanie Posavec (who is with Norcot) http://www.notcot.com/archives/2008/04/stefanie-posave.php .

Her work with Jack Kerouacs on the Road - analysis and visualisations is something to behold, and might even be of interest to hypertext buffs.

Companies who do graphical recording/facilitation













Graphic Change is a UK company who do graphic facilitation. You can use graphic facilitators to come along to your meeting and act as visual scribes.I am full of admiration for the skill they must apply. Its interesting to consider how they evolve/emerge their images.

I assume that graphic facilitators have a particularly rich visual vocabulary which combined with an understanding of the language of pictures enables them to construct visuals in this way

readings: technology enhanced learning

If you are looking to understand where some of my current ideas on TEL and Rich Learning Environments are coming from you might like to look at the following foundational texts and papers. Mostly they are not especially recent, but they do provide a framework for understanding.
The important thing is to look at the beginnings and then consider how these ideas and approaches have been developed in the future. It may also be worth looking at the most recent edition of any work and finding out from the introductions how and why the revisions have been made.


ANDERSON, L. W., KRATHWOHL, D. R., AIRASIAN, P. W. & CRUIKSHANK, K. A. (Eds.) (2001) A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, New York : Longman
BEETHAM, H. & SHARPE, R. (Eds) (2007) Rethinking pedagogy for a digital age. Oxford: Routledge, Falmer
BIGGS, J. (2003) Teaching for Quality Learning at University, Maidenhead, Society for Research into Higher Education/Open University Press.

BLOOM, B. S. (1956) Taxonomy of educational objectives; the classification of educational goals, New York, Longmans.

BLOOM, B. S. (1984) The 2 sigma problem: The search for methods of group instruction as effective as one-to-one tutoring. Educational Researcher, 133-16.

GAVER, W. W. (1991) Technology affordances. Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: Reaching through technology. New Orleans, ACM Press.

GAVER, W. W. (1996) Situating Action ii: Affordances for interaction: The social is material for design. Ecological Psychology, 8111-130.

JONASSON, D. H., MAYES, J. T. & MCALEESE, R. (1993) A manifesto for a constructivist approach to uses of technology in higher education. IN DUFFY, T. M., LOWYCK, J. & JONASSEN, D. H. (Eds.) Designing Environments for Constructivist Learning. Berlin, Springer Verlag.

LAURILLARD, D. (1993) Rethinking University Teaching: a Framework for the Effective Use of Educational Technology, London, Routledge.
this work spawned a wide range of approaches to TEL which incorporated or developed the conversational model of learning
LAVÉ, J. & WENGER, E. (1991) Situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation Cambridge University Press
this was first published in 1990 as a report from the Institute for Research on Learning report 90-0013
MARTON, F. & SÄLJÖ, R. (1894) Approaches to learning. IN MARTON, F., HOUNSELL, D. & ENTWISTLE, N. (Eds.) The experience of learning. Edinburgh, Scottish Academic Press.

MAYES, J. T. (1995) Learning Technology and Groundhog Day. IN STRANG, W., SIMPSON, V. & SLATER, D. (Eds.) Hypermedia at Work: Practice and Theory in Higher Education. University of Kent at Canterbury, University of Kent at Canterbury.

MAYES, T. & de FREITAS, S.  (2006) Review of e-learning theories, frameworks and models JISC e-Learning Models Desk Study. Bristol, JISC.

O'REILLY, T. (2005) What Is Web 2.0 – Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html.

O'REILLY, T. ( 2007) What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software. Communications & Strategies, 1: First Quarter 2007,17.

readings: Modified Delphi Technique

Delphi technique goes back to the Rand Corporation in the US just post 1939-1945 war, although I guess the reference to the original delpi (the ancient greek oracle) is indicative of the roots of this approach.

There is an intersting paper which exemplifies an early(ish) application of the modified delphi in the context of higher education.

Alfred R Hecht, A Modified Delphi Technique for Obtaining Consensus on Institutional Research Priorities. Research Brief. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the North Central Region AERA Special Interest Group on Community College Research, July, 1977
http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/contentdelivery/servlet/ERICServlet?accno=ED140912

The paper is rather old, but reads quite well and is clear. Additionally its quite instructive to read a 1977 paper and see what it looks like! personally, I love the way that people like ERIC and ACM Digital Library are making digitisations of older papers available as PDF images.

As a more recent  (tho' still fairly old) paper which is relevant to modern day applications
Custer et all 1999 is useful JVTE v15n2: The Modified Delphi Technique - A Rotational Modification

The wikipedia ref is OK but probably not helpful to the typical undergrad working on a project.

Linstone and Turrof’s book is online (for which some of the chapters may be useful, but which is probably a bit too much for you to read http://www.is.njit.edu/pubs/delphibook/

Why use the modified Delphi?

• Basically focus groups can be problematic
• Members can skew the responses by influencing group dynamics

Delphi and modified delphi is also sometimes knows as quick consultancy

A useful brief account of the technique can be found in A Handbook of Techniques for Formative Evaluation By Judith W. George, John Cowan

• It is possible to run it in either entirely remotely with deadlines on the voting and responses
• Or to run it partly electronically and partly face to face, where you do the setup electronically, but then go through the consultation in a group in a fairly short time. 
• Its a very efficient approach to get a good volume of evaluation data

Also worth considering - Nominal Group Technique - see wikipedia entry as a starting point

I plan to put some more info on my blog elaborating ways to use the approach, which will include a growing set of refs. You may also want to look at the TELUSS project

I would be interested in a student project to develop a tool to manage all the stages of the process of a modified delphi technique

Rich Learning Environments - what do they mean

This post revisits some of the discussions from previous posts which looked at a definition of rich learning environments
I would like to set it in the context of changes which continue to take place as the use of technology in everyday life.

My previous post Rich Learning Environments laid out a basic framework for our emerging understanding of the needs and behaviours of existing students and learners.

What is in the background?

Affordances Perspective

Any discussion of technology for learning to my mind has to start with Gaver and a consideration of what (not necessarily intended) consequences the presence, use and availability

Affordances of Web 2.0 and the Social Web

Another reference point of which we can usefully be aware, was the definition of Web2.0 which O' Reilly initially addressed at conferences, workshops and through blog publications - and which was subsequently published

What is interesting here is that we can think about Rich Learning Environments as realising all of the core features which O'Reilly associates with Web2.0

• the web as a platform

• you control your own data

• services not packaged software

• architecture of participation

• cost-effective scalability

• re-mixable data source and data transformations

• software above the level of a single device

• harnessing collective intelligence

http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html#mememap

A little bit of Education

A recent interesting view which has been developed by school teacher Andrew Church in New Zealand, is an eduationalist's perspective ( termed 'Bloom's Digital Taxonomy' ) which considers the impact or affordances of technology which have recently come into use.

References

GAVER, W. W. (1991) Technology affordances. Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: Reaching through technology. New Orleans, ACM Press.

GAVER, W. W. (1996) Situating Action ii: Affordances for interaction: The social is material for design. Ecological Psychology, 8111-130.

O'REILLY, T. (2005). What Is Web 2.0 – Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html. last accessed June 2010


O'REILLY, T. ( 2007) What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software. Communications & Strategies, 1: First Quarter 2007,17. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1008839 last accessed June 2010

Visual Thinking Revisited

This is an update on my previous blog on visual literacy. For me, I think that high quality communication is key in every aspect of life, personal and professional, this post includes some thoughts, some references and some examples.

Why? 1) I'm interested in learning, and technology and change; 2) I'm active in teaching and researching learning technology and change

that means that I spend quite a lot of time thinking about what is happening, and trying to make sense of the evidence I find,

I have a set of visualisation tools I regularly use and thought it would be good to learn their proper names and actually categorise them

I was prompted to do this by a variety of experiences, but primarily one excellent resource (the periodic table of visualisation methods) and numerous bad experiences of me, my colleagues and students presenting information in unintelligible ways

Making Sense - Visualisation as a tool for thinking

cut a bit of slack here, using the wrong tool is sometimes ok, because its about a work in progress, making sense of your information and trying to find ways of understanding and communicating what you have found. After all playing with different sorts of visualisations will give you personal experience on which you can refine your understanding.

Communicating Understanding - Visualisation as a tool for talking

when we want to enter into a discourse about our understanding, then finding the best way to present information to afford that discourse is quite useful

while I am doing that, I would like to quote Tufte's observation "Graphical excellence is that which gives to the viewer the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time with the least ink in the smallest space"

So....

Data Visualisation

Expressing ideas in terms of visualisation can be a powerful tool for deepening your own understanding, and also for communicating new ideas.

Visualisations can range from the strictly factual (e.g. a graph derived from a set of data) through to ideographic (explaining the perceived inter-relationship between sets of ideas and concepts)

In some ways a table which summarises analysis of artefacts (a set of reviewed software or a set of reviewed papers) can be seen as a type of visualisation.

Visualisations can help save words in written reports, and can also be used to help structure an argument in a paper or a visual presentation. Most importantly they can contribute effectively to the communication of ideas, stimulating debate and disseminating understanding.

References

A few references for visualisations are listed below:

• Tufte, E. R. (1983) The visual display of quantitative information, Cambridge, MA, Graphical Press LLC. You can find out more about Tutfe's work via his web site http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/
• Lengler R., Eppler M. (2007). Towards A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods for Management. IASTED Proceedings of the Conference on Graphics and Visualization in Engineering (GVE 2007), Clearwater, Florida, USA. Paper which describes this work
• http://www.visual-literacy.org is the website which is associated with Lenger and Eppler's work. You can find the Periodic Table of Methods of Visualisation, which is an interactive web page with illustrative popup of each of the visualisation methods identified, at
  http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html

Tools List

Periodic Table of Methods of Visualisation categorises visualisations into six broad types.

• Data
• Information
• Concept
• Strategy
• Metaphor
• Compound

This post looks at visualisation methods which I have found useful and relevant to my academic activities, either for research or for marshalling arguments and explanations either for teaching or explaining my understandings to friends and colleagues. It is interesting to consider this collection of methods against the repertoire of methods which are routinely used in particular disciplines (e.g. Computer Science and Management) In some cases, where such methods have been specifically designed to communicate a formal development process, or to document and subsequently manage a development process there is a stronger degree of literality and rigour, than might be found in some of the conceptual methods/thinking tools such as mind maps.

• One interesting role which has emerged out of the field of graphic visualisations is that of the graphic facilitator.
• Methods such as graphics cafes are also interesting.

Data Visualisation

These visualisations provide a direct mapping between the information which is presented, and the data which was collected and analysed.

Basic visualisations which most students  produce include tables, graphs, histograms, pie charts, and magic quadrants.  They are probably the most common visualisations which you will find in published papers. Often we are as more constrained by our medium of presentation (eg double column journal pages) that we are by the objective of clear communication.

Tables, Pie Charts and stuff

This is data representation, there is a one to one relationship between the data and the representation. With tables we can choose information, and communicate our undertanding by the location of information, we may also gain by putting a lot of data in one place, which people can use as a signpost, when they then follow an explanation through the text.

Concept Visualisations

I am particularly interested in concept visualisations because I am intersted in the communication of ideas - when we speculate and theories we are dealing in the conceptual. Some visualisation methods are more rigorous than others being associated with specific research practices' accepted analytical methods.  Others function as thinking tools, which represent incomplete (or not yet complete) representations of understandings.  

Concept Map

This is a formal modelling tool commonly used for knowledge representation and ontology creation.

Mind Map

This MindMap from Flickr courtesy of Mike Ellis from http://electronicmuseum.org.uk . The mindmap approach was designed originally and championed by Tony Buzan. Mind mapping is a thinking tool which can also be used for formally to record information spaces and to manage workflows. Its worth looking at the Buzan web site as a follow up, mindmaps may be drawn by hand or using software, and there are many tools available which can be used to create mind maps on computers. The diagram linked from in the Radar Diagram (below) provides an interactive snapshop of mapping software 

you probably already know about the following, but do some web searching if you are in doubt!

• Venn Diagram
• Cluster Diagram
• Layer Chart
• Concentric Circles

Radar

from http://www.visual-literacy.org/pages/maps/mapping_tools_radar/radar.html

Compound Visualisations:
According to the visualisation periodic table, there are six types of compound visualisations - although I think that if you go to Tufte he identifies quite a few which have been generated with firm mappings to their data source.
 

Knowledge Map
These are basically hypothetical maps (often in the style of maps created by early mariners) which seek to demonstrate the 'landscape'. They also remind me in style of maps which accompany books like The Lord of the Rings and Swallows and Amazons.

You probably need a great deal of imagination to create a convincing knowledge map, but they can be highly persuasive and powerful in communicating an overview of content and issues in a particular area.

I find label knowledge maps a little misleading, and wonder if mythical maps, or metaphor maps might be more accurate. To me the term knowledge implies a degree of certainty and finality which I do not think is actually communicated in the final product.

I have come across a couple of knowledge maps which are probably of interest to folks in my research area.

Knowledge Map

Permanent link to this comic: http://xkcd.com/256/
Image URL (for hotlinking/embedding): http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/online_communities_small.png

eLearnland

Learning Map


early work in this area was done by companies seeking to explain the intricacies of their organisaiton. Probably the most famous is the work done by Pepsi on Beverage Street. There is a paper which explores this work The Learning Map Approach by James Haudan and Christy Contardi Stone, a white paper published in The Change Handbook, Peggy Holman, Tom Devane and Stevan Caddy. Here the approach is one of metaphor rather than formal modelling, although it may be possible to incorporate meaning via metaphor, such as sense of proximity and distance, known and unknown.

from http://elearningargentina.files.wordpress.com/2008/03/informal-learning.jpg

Underground Map

This is called a metro map by the folks at visual-lliteracy.org, but since the original map (a visualisation which depicts conections and interconnections, but priviledges this over scale accuracy) was designed for the London Underground, I think it is more accurate and respectful to call it an Underground Map - the paris metro map is a totally different beast!

This example visualisation of Web Trends was produced in 2007 by Otto Nassar (version 2)

According to the web site at http://informationarchitects.jp/wtm4/

"The map has been featured all across the web from .... The Web Trend Map plots the Internet’s leading names and domains onto the Tokyo Metro map. Domains and personalities are carefully selected through dialogue with map enthusiasts, and every domain is evaluated based on traffic, revenue, and character. "

Version 4 - a rather different beast is shown below

Other Stuff

Information is Beautiful

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/

rather fabulous site to browse to gather ideas and models of information graphics

Colorschemer

if you are going to present visual information, you will need to choose decent colour schemes! take a look at http://www.colorschemer.com/blog/

The Visual Thesaurus http://www.visualthesaurus.com/

visualising words and their semantic interconnections

tag cloud

just as you see on the left of this post, it offers both a mapping and a compact visual analysis of the information

Wordle http://www.wordle.net/

"Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends".

Gallery of Data Visualization - the best and worst of statistical graphics

http://www.math.yorku.ca/SCS/Gallery/intro.html

Gapminder is an online visualisation tool. It works with a collection of provided data sets, useful for getting an idea of what visualisations might look like.

http://www.gapminder.org

visualcomplexity.com is a website which provides an index into many different visualisation methods and tools

http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/

The last time I looked, the main categories of visualisation were

Art (62)

 Biology (50)

 Business Networks (25)

 Computer Systems (29)

 Food Webs (7)

 Internet (30)

 Knowledge Networks (105)

 Multi-Domain Representation (60)

 Music (33)

 Others (59)

 Pattern Recognition (24)

 Political Networks (20)

 Semantic Networks (30)

 Social Networks (89)

 Transportation Networks (45)

 World Wide Web (55)

Further reading 

 Concept Mapping with thanks to the online concept mapping resource guide http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/mapping/mapping.htm

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Trochim, W. (1989). An introduction to concept mapping for planning and evaluation.  In W. Trochim (Ed.) A Special Issue of Evaluation and Program Planning, 12, 1-16.

Trochim, W. (1989). Concept mapping: Soft science or hard art?  In W. Trochim (Ed.) A Special Issue of Evaluation and Program Planning, 12, 87-110.

Trochim, W. Reliability of Concept Mapping. Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the American Evaluation Association, Dallas, Texas, November, 1993. 

Tukey, John W (1977). Exploratory Data Analysis. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0-201-07616-0. OCLC 3058187.