Wednesday, 31 August 2011

Suggested readings - web science and repositories - the cat's whiskers*

Seems like a good time to post a selected reading list with links to papers that form a background to the Web Science Curriculum Repository (WSCR - pronounced whisker - think cats ;-)
CatsWhiskers
Madalina who has put in so much hard work on this project, and she is particularly fond of cats, so it seems appropriate
Anyway enough of the cuddly furry lolz stuff and onto the reading list...
Work that we are doing at Southampton on repositories is being led by Les Carr (aka repository man). ePrints is being delivered as a platform which is rich in technology affordances. ePrints is being used as the engine behind a number of educational repositories, hosted at Southampton, and at other universities, for example EdShare, HumBox and Language Box,  teachers on the Web Science programme at Southampton already use EdShare to store a large volume of materials, WSCR is a plan to collect Web Science resources across the community. In particular we intend that the artefacts within the collection will serve as a tool to 'emerge' the Web Science Curriculum. A formal definition of the Web Science Subject Categorization (WSSC) has been produced, but the subject area is constantly evolving and it is neither effective nor appropriate to suggest that the curriculum be defined alone by the more traditional methods of extended committee work.
Directly related to the Southampton perspective and experience
  • Davis, H., L. Carr, J. Hey, Y. Howard, D. Millard, D. Morris and S. White (2010). "Bootstrapping a Culture of Sharing to Facilitate Open Educational Resources." IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies 3(2): 96-109
    http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/17386/
  • Millard, D., Y. Howard, P. McSweeney, K. Borthwick, M. Arrebola and J. Watson (2009). The Language Box: Re-Imagining Teaching and Learning Repositories. International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies. Riga, Latvia.
    http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/17183/
  • Millard, D. E., Y. Howard, P. McSweeney, M. Arrebola, K. Borthwick and S. Varella (2009). Phantom Tasks and Invisible Rubric: The Challenges of Remixing Learning Objects in the Wild. Proceedings of the 4th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning: Learning in the Synergy of Multiple Disciplines. Nice, France, Springer-Verlag: 127-139.
    http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/17561/
  • White, S., M. Croitoru, S. Bazan, S. Cerri, H. C. Davis, C. Jonquet, G. Prini, F. Scharffe, S. Staab, T. Tiropanis and M. Vafopoulos (2011). Negotiating the Web Science Curriculum Development through Shared Educational Artefacts. ACM WebSci '11. Koblenz, Germany. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/22141/
Repository background
  • Cassel, L. N., G. Davies, R. LeBlanc, L. Snyder and H. Topi (2008). Using a Computing Ontology as a Foundation for Curriculum Development. SW-EL'08 Sixth International Workshop on Ontologies and Semantic Web for E-Learning in conjunction with ITS 2008, Montreal, Canada.
    http://compsci.wssu.edu/iis/swel/SWEL08/Papers/Cassel.pdf
I am sure there are lots more out there, but I found these particularly useful :-)
Southampton folk are advised that they may have to go via the library link to log into the non eprints journal holdings
Links
*The cat's whiskers - something which is really good, neat etc :-) I'm also missing my cat while we are in France....
Cat2













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    motivating behaviours ....

    Very often learning is a by product of exercises which through familiarity enable the learner to internalise understandings and perhaps reflect and abstract from their exerience.
    oversight.png
    according to the hover over text in the last frame of this cartoon (called Oversight)
    "I felt so clever when I found a way to game the Fitocracy system by incorporating a set of easy but high scoring activities into my regular schedule. Took me a bit to realize I'd been tricked into setting up a daily exercise routine"

    Systems that motivate
    I have also been taken in to play the game on a UK running website called FetchEveryone. Fetch (as it is known to its users) allows you to log your runs and provides quite detailed analysis of your performance (all dynamically calculated from your data). It compares your race performance with national standards, and applies known reckoning methods to predict performance in future races.
    Early additions included adding a personal annual challenge and generating league tables against the target. Then, noting that folk tended to set challenges (particularly of the do something every day for a month - in running terms known as streaking, and typcially titled something like AugustAthon, MayAthon (or whatever month you choose) it established a feedback grid called a ThingyThon.
    It also introduced a game called Conquercise, which is a Foursquare or Gowalla for runners, allowing them to 'conquer' areas as a result of being the person who covered a particular grid square the most frequently.
    FetchEveryone Conquercise Southampton

    One of the aspect of learning (which is related to motivation) is time spent on task. All of the examples above reward people for spending more time on task. The reward is personal, but the recognition and status is within the community.

    This reward for persistent behaviour is a factor which runs as a thread in various commentaries on social media - for example Charles Leadbeater's We Think, and Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus.

    Pervasive monitoring
    For exercise activities various pervasive monitors have emerged which take some of the over the tasks of data collection.
    Fitbug is another example of such a system - a glorified pedometer from which to upload data, ie designed for a specific purpose, this time using a subscription model (perhaps further motivation??) and running a closed system - although it does incorporate league tables (a fantasy footfall league!). Fitbit is more sophisticated measuring activity levels with a 3d motion detecter. It only available in the US but lets you choose between subscription and free use plus it is making its API available for interface with other apps (although data download is only available with the subscription model).
    Systems such as Fetch allow you to submit data collected automatically by specialist devices such as heart monitors and GPS tracking systems. It appears, superficially, that folk who are able to submit such data are more persistent in their updates, and perhaps, more persistent in their commitment to exercise. That is certainly the claim which is made for the Fitbug.

    Games with a purpose
    Games with a purpose have a long history. According to The British Library the first jigsaw puzzles were devised by John Spilsbury to help teach geography (1776) , make a map of the worlds and you kind of get familiar with the different countries, towns and where  they all are.

    Monitoring for learning
    I am particularly interested in the way in which social software is being harnessed to reinforce behaviours. My thinking is that this might be extended to motivating time on task for our undergraduate students. I am not aware of any other systems which are currently operating along these lines.
    My challenge is to work out how to devise a game which would be appropriately motivating, and how create a closed and trusting community which would enable personal data to be aggregated for individual and  group advantage. My thinking is that students themselves are likely to be the best people to design such a system, using their understandings to build something which is appealing and purposeful.
    In many ways a good system would provide data which could be examined to provide guidance for subsequent learners addressing similar tasks.  The Fetch system administrator performs and publishes this type of analysis and distributes the findings in regular newsletters - an example them of citizen science which is gathering data on a larger scale and from larger cohorts than is often available for academic sports scientists.
    Using tracking derived from Educational administration and infrastructure might provide some of the means by which we could allow learners to submit data automatically to an educational version of Fetch.

    Links
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    Wednesday, 24 August 2011

    Web Science Curriculum: Honourable Mention at ACM WebSci'11

    We were delighted with our honourable mention for our paper on Web Science Curriculum at the 2011 ACM Web Science Conference in Koblenz, Germany.

    Our paper on negotiating a Web Science Curriculum was shortlsted for best paper at ACM WebSci'11, and better than being a runner up, we received an honourable mention:-). You can download the PDF here from eprints, and there is also a video of the presentation. The paper provides an account of work to specify a Web Science Curriculum based on the Web Science Subject Categorization which had previously been led by Michalis Vafopolous from Aristotle University of Thesaloniki, Greece

    Not surprisingly I have carried on thinking about what we have written. The project to create the repository will be getting underway in the autumn, and there are a few folk from other universities outside the original consotrium who are interested in joining in the collaborative effort to collect and collate a range of the resources we use for teaching Web Science and use them as a bottom up source for specifying the curriculum.

    We are also continuting to gather data on how and where web science is cropping up in the curriculum. Undergrad, postgrad, summer schools, electives or just plain intermingled. The survey is still live if you want to make a contributionhttp://www.isurvey.soton.ac.uk/2290 

    Reference and Download
    White, S., Croitoru, M., Bazan, S., Cerri, S., Davis, H. C., Folgieri, R., Jonquet, C., Scharffe, F., Staab, S., Tiropanis, T. and Vafopoulos, M. (2011) Negotiating the Web Science Curriculum through Shared Educational Artefacts. In: ACM WebSci '11, 14-17 June 2011, Koblenz, Germany.

    The paper, abstract and video can all be accessed from the same page on the journal pages hosted by the Web Science Trust http://journal.webscience.org/439/

    The next conference WebSci'12 is being held at Northwestern University in Evanston Illinois about 20 miles from Chicago. http://www.websci12.org/ we certainly plan to be there one way or another.

    The debate
     There has been some talk about the impact of the web and web science on computer science in general - all of which is relevant to the discussion about the web science curriculum

    In April 2010 Ed H. Chi from google posted on BLOG@CACM. Hot on the heels of the then UK government announcing that it had funded the Web Science Research Institute at Southampton to the tune of £30m Ed's blog was titled Time to rethink computer science education: The (social) web changes everything.

    Even tho' the subsequent tory government pulled the funding in its headline grabbing 'battle against the deficit' the question of rethinking computer science remains, although it has to be said that the piece did not attract large amounts of comments.

    Previoiusly (2007) Ben Schneiderman had published Web science: a provocative invitation to computer science in CACM (download from the University of Maryland), and in 2008 Jim Hendler et al provided ACM members with an insight into Web Science with Web Science: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Understanding the Web (available from ECS eprints)

    Mark Bernstein attended the Web Science Curriculum workshop which proceeded this year's conference in Koblenz, and spotted some tensions in the interdisciplinary agendas which pursuing web science inevitable uncovers....

    A thread of angst in the Web Science Curriculum workshop, clearly, is multidiscplinarity. The dominant discipline is computer science, to the extent that computer science is a discipline. The fear that sociology and the rest of the social sciences will be read out of meeting is clear, but the desire for multidisciplinarity is equally evident.
    One problem, of course, is that students in most countries enter a discipline in their mid-teens – too young to be expected to do useful research. Worse, new initiates are inclined to be more doctrinaire and less tolerant of deviance than their elders. The old Liberal Arts degree might fit Web Science better than trying to reconcile social science and engineering across disparate faculties
    http://www.markbernstein.org/June11.html#note_40458
    certainly at Web Science 2010 the paper by Susan Halford et al. clearly laid out some of the additional agenda's and prior experience which Web Science needs to embrace. It is very easy for computer scientists to keep doing the same old same old.

    I am hoping to take some of these ideas to the 2012 SIGCSE conference in the US in March next year. In particular I would like the computer science community and those in the wider family of computing subjects to engage in a discussion which identified a place for web science.  I am also keen to take this discussion further forward with some of our colleagues who work in web science but who come from a distinctly social science perspective.  By then we should have more data on what teaching is taking place, and more information on what is finding its way into the curriculum.

    Links
    White, S., Croitoru, M., Bazan, S., Cerri, S., Davis, H. C., Folgieri, R., Jonquet, C., Scharffe, F., Staab, S., Tiropanis, T. and Vafopoulos, M. (2011) Negotiating the Web Science Curriculum through Shared Educational Artefacts. In: ACM WebSci '11, 14-17 June 2011, Koblenz, Germany.
     
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      Web Science Curriculum: next steps - debate with Computer Science

      Following on from our honourable mention for our paper on Web Science Curriculum at the 2011 ACM Web Science Conference in Koblenz, Germany, I have been doing some thinking about the relationship between web science and the various computing curricula.
      As I mentioned previously there has been some talk about the impact of the web and web science on computer science in general - all of which is relevant to the discussion about the web science curriculum

      In April 2010 Ed H. Chi from google posted on BLOG@CACM. Hot on the heels of the then UK government announcing that it had funded the Web Science Research Institute at Southampton to the tune of £30m Ed's blog was titled Time to rethink computer science education: The (social) web changes everything

      Even tho' the subsequent tory government pulled the funding in its headline grabbing 'battle against the deficit' the question of rethinking computer science remains, although it has to be said that the piece did not attract large amounts of comments.

      Previously (2007) Ben Schneiderman had published Web Science: a provocative invitation to computer science in CACM (download from the University of Maryland), and in 2008 Jim Hendler et al provided ACM members with an insight into Web Science with Web Science: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Understanding the Web (available via ECS ePrints)

      What I am doing now is looking at the various curricula in the computing family and seeing how good a fit we can see for Web Science. I am still mindful of Mark Bernstein's observation that perhaps a better place for Web Science could be found in the Liberal Arts tradition (http://www.markbernstein.org/June11.html#note_40458 ), however I also believe that it is possible for subjects to move their debates and methodologies.

      Computer Science is certainly one which would fall very much between Biglan's 'Hard Pure' and 'Hard Applied' categories. In research and across the range of different degrees that are offered we observe a wide range of approaches and focus from abstract and mathematical to practice based and observational. It is true that in much of what we see published in web science, those topic areas which yield to modelling and simple experimentation - often extensions to current network science perspectives, are more pervasive than studies which require long term data collection and analysis.

      Footnote

      Links

      White, S. and Vafapoulos, M. (2011) Web Science: expanding the notion of Computer Science. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/22710/

       

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