ShirleyKnot

Computer Science Conferences and Deadlines

2012-02-06T14:44:00.001Z

note for ref - review

January

ITICSE deadline
Australasian Computing Education Conference (Jan/Feb)
FIE Abstract Deadline

February

March

SIGCSE (US, Feb/Mar)

April

ICER deadline

May

June

ITICSE (Europe)
Koli Calling Deadline

July

August

Australasian Computing Education Conference deadline

September

SIGCSE Deadline
ICER (date and location varies - May-Sept)

October

FIE (North America - mostly US)

November

Koli Calling (Finland)

December

correlation

2012-01-16T16:55:00.001Z

One of the modules I teach is research methods to our Web Science Masters - we cover qualitative and quantitative methods

I like this

Testing my google form

2012-01-10T16:41:00.001Z

sometimes you have to use your blog for less than glamorous tasks which are related to everyday life.

Here is a link to a web form which I am testing at the moment

I promise to share insights and reflections in my next post - maybe even a bit of web science.

Meanwhile I am afraid its all rather head's down in Shirley as I deal with the tail end of the first semester teaching and get bid finished - hey ho

What is Web Science? Journals and Web Sites

2011-12-11T12:16:00.001Z

Anyone trying to find out exactly what is web science might find themselves on a bit of a quest….

As a definitive source and a breadcrumb trail of developments I would turn to publications hosted on the Web Science Trust web site http://webscience.org/

More recently there has been an announcement of a new journal - International Journal of Web Science

http://www.inderscience.com/browse/index.php?journalCODE=ijws

Not sure about this new publication - the content seems very web technology and the list of editorial board and reviewers does not seem that close to the web science community emerging through the web science trust.

the way they define their content reveals the space between the two communities as much by what it does not say as by what it claims

IJWS is a refereed scientific international journal. IJWS aims to improve the state-of-the-art of worldwide research in the areas of web theories, services, applications and standards by publishing high-quality papers in this area. IIJWS is committed to deepening the understanding of enabling theories and technologies for applying and developing the web as a global information repository

Writing Links and Advice

2011-10-24T08:12:00.001+01:00

Writing is a pervasive challenge for anyone in University, no matter is you are an undergrad, masters student, post grad, researcher or full time academic.

Writing is a craft which can be practiced and refined, and for which each individual follows a very personal path.

For that reason the list of links may be relevant and useful to all sorts of different people, at all sorts of levels, for all sorts of purposes.

Introductory - and foundational

Purdue Online Writing Lab

Helpful source of guidance, which covers the whole gamut on academic writing.

Annotated Bibligraphies

Here is a link to writing annotated bibliographies from Purdue. The sub task of creating an annotated bibliography is a key component of the skill used in academic writing - particularly relevant to the related works/literature review section of formal papers http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/614/01/

More Advanced Level

Tomorrow's Professor is a website run out of Stanford which is a frequent helpful source of information and advice

Tomorrow's Professor Msg.#1107 Writing an Article in 12 Weeks

IN HER BOOK WRITING YOUR JOURNAL ARTICLE in 12 Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success, Wendy Laura Belcher breaks down the writing process into manageable tasks to help anyone prepare an article for publication in just 12 weeks.

Tomorrow's Professor Msg.#1009 Writing About Your Research: Verb Tense

... gives some great tips on the use of present and past tenses in your writing. It is from the February 2010 issue of the online publication Graduate Connections Newsletter [http://www.unl.edu/gradstudies/current/dev/newsletter/] , pp 16-17, from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and is published by the Office of Graduate Studies. ©2010 Graduate Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Reprinted with permission.

Tomorrow's Professor Msg.#986 Demystifying Dissertation Writing

...a short piece on the development of a new book, Demystifying Dissertation Writing: A Streamlined Process from Choice of Topic to Final text, by Peg Boyle Single, Ph.D. Published by Stylus Publishing, LLC 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, Virginia, 20166-2102. ©2010 Peg Boyle Single.

Some reading - web science and repositories - the cat's whiskers*

2011-08-31T16:54:00.002+01:00

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 ;-)

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

Dicheva, D. and C. Dichev (2010). Finding Resources and Collaborators within Digital Collections. International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology. Toronto, Canada.
http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/WI-IAT.2010.146
Mitchell, S. M. and W. G. Lutters (2006). Assessing the Value of Computer Science Course Material Repositories. The19th Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training Workshops.
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1181857
Fincher, S., M. Kölling, I. Utting, N. Brown and P. Stevens (2010). Repositories of Teaching Material and Communities of Use: Nifty Assignments and the Greenroom. Proceedings of the Sixth international workshop on Computing education research. Aarhus, Denmark, ACM: 107-114.
http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/mik/papers/2010-08-nifty-greenroom.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

ePrints http://www.eprints.org/
Les Carr aka repository man http://repositoryman.blogspot.com/
EdShare http://www.edshare.soton.ac.uk/
Language Box http://languagebox.ac.uk/
HumBox http://humbox.ac.uk/
Web Science Subject Categorization http://webscience.org/2010/wssc.html

*The cat's whiskers - something which is really good, neat etc :-) I'm also missing my cat while we are in France....

motivating behaviours ....

2011-08-31T15:40:00.002+01:00

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.

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.

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

Charles Leadbeater http://www.charlesleadbeater.net/
Clay Shirky http://www.shirky.com/
FetchEveryone http://www.fetcheveryone.com/
Fitbit http://www.fitbit.com/
Fitbug http://www.fitbug.com/
Fitocracy http://www.fitocracy.com/
The British Library, Learning: mapping minds, http://www.bl.uk/learning/artimages/maphist/minds/jigsawpuzzle/jigsawpuzzle1766.html
xlcd Oversight http://xkcd.com/940/

Web Science Curriculum: Honourable Mention at ACM WebSci'11

2011-08-24T13:52:00.009+01:00

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.

Web Science‏ - YouTube What is Web Science? Why do we need to study the web? what do we know about the web? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02X_h4-qzb4

Links

ACM WebSci'11 http://www.websci11.org/home/
Web Science Trust Proceedings of ACM WebSci'11 http://journal.webscience.org/439/
Video of Web Science Curriculum Development Project presentation at ACM WebSci'11 http://videolectures.net/acmwebsci2011_white_artefacts/
Web Science Subject Categorization http://webscience.org/2010/wssc.html
WebSci'12 Northwestern University http://www.websci12.org/
Survey of Web Science Teaching http://www.isurvey.soton.ac.uk/2290

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.

Web Science Curriculum: next steps - debate with Computer Science

2011-08-24T12:23:00.006+01:00

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

Web Science‏ - YouTube What is Web Science? Why do we need to study the web? what do we know about the web? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02X_h4-qzb

Links

ACM WebSci'11 http://www.websci11.org/home/
Web Science Trust Proceedings of ACM WebSci'11 http://journal.webscience.org/439/
Video of Web Science Curriculum Development Project presentation at ACM WebSci'11 http://videolectures.net/acmwebsci2011_white_artefacts/
Web Science Subject Categorization http://webscience.org/2010/wssc.html
WebSci'12 Northwestern University http://www.websci12.org/
Survey of Web Science Teaching http://www.isurvey.soton.ac.uk/2290

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

Free university and online activism - #glasto11

2011-06-25T09:25:00.001+01:00

Looks like I have myself a schedule, for the daytime at least.

Saturday
12.00 Leftfield

Activism Online - discussion.

13.30 The Park, HMS Sweet Charity
free university

Ben Goldacre Bad Science.

Cabaret Tent

15.05 and 16.00 Mark Thomas, then Jeremy Hardy, Four Poofs and a Piano

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Glastonbury finds

2011-06-24T13:52:00.001+01:00

Do a search on twitter for Glastonbury #glasto11 for more

This year's ingenu find are Enigma vintage fashions on the Avalon Field, find them :-) warm welcome fabulous clothes, wonderful people. A legend already...

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:Top St,,United Kingdom

Walking, talking and thinking

2011-06-16T15:49:00.001+01:00

If wisdom is the goal, then students must "walk 10,000 miles, read 10,000 books" said the 17th-century Chinese philosopher Gu Yanwu

stumbled across this quote on a piece in the times higher by Steven Schwartz

I love running, and one of the things I get out of running is time to think

I also love walking, and much of the pleasure I derive has some of the same source. I enjoy being able to see the early morning sun, learn about my new surroundings, see the local flora and fauna, find a sense of space

And if

I also stumbled across some funded research which is researching walking in a thinking context working with PhD students

New Research Trajectories goes for a walk, gives you a sense of this activity

We used this sort of approach on an AwayDay the other year, and I am quite keen to organise an un-conference which uses walking as a device, I wonder if there would be much interest in the community?

Negotiating a web science curriculum

2011-06-16T10:25:00.002+01:00

As a single track conference Web Science does things right :-) good too, that the organisers are videoing all the tracks from http://videolectures.net
A healthy array of folk have blogged about the conference, giving you the chance to compare views and experiences - a practice at the core of this ultimately interdisciplinary community.

Blogs:
Dave de Roure in Nature
Nature e science blog

Web Science 2011

2011-06-15T13:40:00.002+01:00

Delighted that our paper has been nominated for the best paper award at Web Science 2011
Negotiating a Web Science Curriculum through shared educational artefacts
White et al http://journal.webscience.org/439/

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:Winninger Straße,Koblenz,Germany

Getting Ready for ACM Web Science 2011 - the curriculum workshop

2011-06-14T13:39:00.004+01:00

We are really excited about our paper at the ACM web science conference #websci11 this year, and what better prelude than a Web Science Curriculum Workshop
Our paper is titled Negotiating the Web Science Curriculum through shared Educational Artefacts, you can download a copy either from the conference programme web site, or from the ECS soton ePrints repository
We are scheduled to present during the Web Science Tools and Technologies Session on Thursday morning
These are working notes, which I hope will be of interest to other attendees
Twitter hashcodes

main conference #websci11
curriculum workshop #websci11cw
Alt Metrics #altmetrics

Workshop
structure - who, what

who is doing web science
what could we (people who teach web science) use from the community

At the workshop there are representative of three web science masters being taught
Aristotle University Thesaloniki, Greece,

taught masters - strong mathematics and economics perspective

Koln

Professional masters majority of the materials are online, synchronous online two or three evenigns per week, a number of weekend residentials,

five module perspectives, comes from an interdisciplinary background.
http://www.verwaltung.fh-koeln.de/aktuelles/2011/06/verw_msg_04049.html
RPI

ITWS Web Science undergraduate degree programme 110 across three years
IT and Web Science (ITWS) - masters (35) and PhD - a new specialisation

Southampton

One year taught Masters - for most this is a preliminary to a PhD studies

Other places which have activities which may not be full programme include (please comment if you want to be added)
Amsterdam, Linz
other places which propose to start soon (please comment if you want to be added)
TU Eindhoven - Bachelors Degree
Related disciplines
Digital Humanitites ( point from Faith)
........
What we need from the community
Definitions of web science
Topical Relevance:

topics for web science

What do students want to learn from a web science curriculum?
professional relevance
Where do students go next?
How do we teach web science?
specific examples, methods, approaches, pedagogy
Report on your Web Science Activity
want to contribute to our survey of web science teaching? go to https://www.isurvey.soton.ac.uk/2290
37+ attendees
Actions which arose ( with my comments/notes in <>brackets)

Action List

list of course/programmes/curriculum (wiki) Jim H
mailing list (announcements) - exists- use it (join)
co-ordinating calls, monthly meetings Craig
lecturer/expert list (talks, ideas etc) <this is one naturally for either Craig, or for WSCR profiles)
project ideas hcd
literature hcd
exemplary examples hcd
textbooks (online/discussion)
resources site hcd, stefane
match making service <after the event - enhancement >
datasets steffen S
commentary/discussion resources Su W
index (and connections of ideas to above)
review process (max)
list of people/areas <WSCR profiles>

Web History Repository - something for the web science Observatory?

2011-06-07T10:26:00.001+01:00

Came across this Web Site for a 'Web History Repository' the other day, it seems its the sort of info which might make itself part of the Web Science Trust's vision of a global Web Science Observatory, and is also relevant to the paper I will be presenting at the web science conference next week.

Collating data on web usage (which is what this repository is about, rather than being a repository of the Web History) provides information which researchers can analyse and which students and learn to use.

On that basis I am just noting a link, it should properly be called a web browsing history, which is a rather different matter - another case of lost in translation, although the data which it will collect should be useful and the argument for collecting it is valid.

Companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook constantly improve their products, based on the data that they collect from their users. Open-source software developers and researchers normally have no access to this data, which puts them into a disadvantage.

We aim to create a public repository of web usage data for the profit of these communities - and eventually you will benefit from better browsers, add-ons and other tools.

Who started the Web History Repository Project?
We are two researchers from the L3S Research Center in Hannover, Germany. The L3S focuses on fundamental and application-oriented research in all areas of Web Science.

So why not mosey along to the 'Web History Repository and take a look? Eelco Herder and his PhD student Ricardo Kawase are the creators of this site. I guess we can look forward to some publications

Thinking about rich learning environments - almost revisited

2011-06-06T11:04:00.002+01:00

I am working up our paper Rich Learning Environments revisited
and wanted to use this as a placemarker for a few diagrams and some thoughts.
My previous post on the cognitive digital apprenticeship is also relevant and tracking back through of my posts on PLEs can help understand how the ideas have been developing.
so this was one way in which I was trying to explain a rich learning environment

and this is another

The Digital Cognitive Apprenticeship - afforded by a rich learning environment

2011-05-31T06:07:00.001+01:00

The idea of talking about a digital cognitive apprenticeship arose around the time Hugh Davis and I made a presentation to the HEA Enhancement Academy team leaders meeting* in May 2011. Although the concept has much deeper routes linking back to the concept of university education providing a 'cognitive apprenticeship' time when I was working with Microcosm across the university to provide 'a campus wide structure for multimedia learning'.

Fast forward almost 20 years and the world is a lot more interconnected and a big focus for us is in terms of personal learning environments, where the title of our presentation was 'The personalisation of a learning environment: student-led connections online and offline'. The link will take you to the slides in ECS ePrints at Southampton.

The presentation in many ways was a chance to reflect upon and discuss our understanding of personal learning environments and the UK digital literacies agenda. We were particularly fortunate in having an audience drawn from colleagues who are actively involved in steering their institutions through change.

A lot of work has been going on to craft our own rich learning environment here at Southampton since I posted an account of what I mean by Rich Learning Environments late in 2009

Along the way, the University of Southampton has been among the front line of folk who have been surfing the open data wave - its a wave which is well on its way to becoming a veritable tsunami launched by Tim Berners-Lee's call for 'Raw Data Now' at his TED talk in 2009

We have been working with colleagues on creating a specification for our learning environment, and have reported on that project via a publication in the International Journal of Virtual and Personal Learning Environments (forthcoming) but a pre-print is available online from ePrints.

Our ultimate objective is to craft an environment which cultivates and supports situated and authentic learning with a community of scholars in a digital world.

We are seeking to harness the affordance of Web 2.0 and use linked and open data to integrate internal and external resources and services in a seamless manner.

We put a special value on enabling our academics to work with their students accessing authentic resources so that learning in their respective disciplines and fields of study can be situated.

We hold true to the idea that our university is nurturing a continually renewing community of scholars and again believe that we can craft the tools of social and (light) semantic web technologies to provide a platform which is agile to respond to changing and emerging techniques and technologies, a system which is fit for purpose in the 21st century.

We believe that our approach to situated and authentic learning addresses the agendas which are grouped under the headings of digital literacies, but we prefer to refer to the skills knowledge and understanding of a digital world. Hence our reference to the digital cognitive apprenticeship.

It is the role of universities to nurture the thought leaders and decision makers of tomorrow. Out students come to use with a mix of sophisticated and naiive understandings of the way in which they can use technology for their learning. If that was not the case, they would not be ready for a university education - we are no longer in an era when we believe knowledge is the prime objective (if that were ever true). Alvin Toffler was remarkably prescient when he observed that

"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn",

our apprentices will, we hope, progress to master all of the essential skills, knowledge and understanding so they can step forward with confidence into whatever future they choose to pursue.

references

Casquero, Oskar, Portillo, Javier; Ovelar, Ramón; Benito, Manuel and Romo, Jesús. iPLE Network: an integrated eLearning 2.0 architecture from a university's perspective. (2010) Interactive Learning Environments, Volume 18, Issue 3 September 2010, pages 293 – 308

Web Science Meetup - Consolidating networks of excellence

2011-05-15T08:20:00.002+01:00

More than 20 folk managed to get to Montpellier for the second Web Science meetup which managed to run the gauntlet of Friday the 13th :-)
There was a reassuringly wide range of disciplines represented - and accordingly a fairly broad range of topics were up for discussion. The group was convened by Clement Jonquet and Francois Scharffe using meetup and has arisen from the collaborations which we are establishing between the University of Southampton and LIRMM in Montpellier France. The meeting provided an opportunity to identify some of the common research agendas active in the Web Science community in Montpellier and its networks in France and Europe.
These notes are designed to help find out more about the presentations - expect further posts on future developments. There are also notes on the meetup page from Clement and on Clare Hooper's blog.
Slides from the presentation are, where possible going on the WebScience Meetup Wiki at LIRMM
After an welcome from Clement Jonquet, Stefano Cerri and Hugh Davis, and introductions round the table, the proceedings got underway.
People and interests - this is notes with links on each of the presentations where possible
Claudia Rodda (American University of Paris) talked about Human attention in digital environments which is the title of the book which she has recently edited and published.
Clare Hooper (TU Eindhoven) - talking about mixed methods and triangulation. Issues that some disciplines have pre-formed ideas about what research methodology is 'sound' and what is not. These arguments are key given the interdisciplinary nature of the web, and smacks of academic tribes and territories to my mind. Clare pointed to the recent CACM blog on the topic of Are we doing stats badly, and I was reminded of the paper by Halford et al in the 2010 web conference A Manifesto for Web Science?
Francois Scharffe (LIRMM) - talking about the data lift project (http://datalift.org/en/index.html)DataLift Project which is being funded by the French National Research Agency which is developing tools to enrich raw data through conversion, interlinking and publication into semantically accessible formats. Their previous presentation at SemWebPro in Paris 2011is also interesting
keynote from Wendy Hall (University of Southampton) @DameWendyDBE - who will also be giving a keynote at adaptive hypertext in Eindhoven.
Wendy placed particular emphasis on the extent to which the vision and dogged persistence of Tim Berners-Lee and his commitment to open and free standards.
Her account gave an excellent consolidated overview of the various research agendas which have emerged within web science
Excellent news is that there will be a web science track at the next web conference WWW2012 to be held in Lyon 16th to the 20th April 2012. It looks like the track will be run on the Friday, Wendy will be chairing the track and the montpellier meetup group will also be convening another meeting (also in Lyon) at the same time now scheduled for April 20th :-)
Her presentation concluded with a call /ambition for a world wide web science observatory: gathering evidence, sharing: data, tools, methods, and techniques. Questions which such an observatory might collectively address include:

is the web changing faster than our ablity to observe it?
how to measure or intrument the web?
how to identify behaviours and patterns?
how to analyse the changing structure of the web?
how can we measure the web, and to archive the data - so that it can be analysed today, tomorrow and forever?

This prompted me to recall the visualisation google search globe - is just one instance of a small piece of evidence - visualisation of the source of languages used for google searches which might be a part of such an observatory.
A very interesting session on Philosophy and the web was given by Alexandre Monnin, @aamonnz, @PhiloWeb http://web-and-philosophy.org slideshare philoweb
This contribution produced some lively discussion (pretty good considering it was after lunch) the discussion of web architecture took us firmly into the space of understandings of what the web is.
Alexandre is PhD student from Paris, where Harry Halpin currently has a two year fellowship to write about Philosophy and the Web - rich ground indeed. Alexandre gave an impressive persormance for someone who has not yet even got his doctorate, I expect we will hear more from him in the future.
Vincent Douzal from LIRMM was next up discussing webscience and traceability a natural hazards scenario
Interesting presentation which raised issues which are very much in the space of persistence of data and raised references to Ted Nelson for the second time in the day - probably a reflection on the fact that there were a good set of Hypertext folk in the room.
Sankar Punnaivanam and Alain Krief from Namur - talks about EnCOrE (Encyclopédie de Chimie Organique Electronique) - which reminded me of the presentation of automatic semantic enrichment by David Shotton from Oxford which I heard at an ALPSP event in 2010 titled Ready for Web 3.0 where I was presenting on how linked data can benefit higher education.
I was chairing the final session which brought together some of the work and perspectives on the web science curriculum. It was a tough job to squeeze in all the remaining speakers, since the programme had been a little indulgent in its timing over the afternoon.
Les Carr presented a stimulating perspective on the state and future direction of Web Science, which he explained as deriving to some extent from what he had learned from teaching the web science master's at Southampton. The roots of this presentation can be traced back to a very stimulating paper Could the Web be A Temporary Glitch which was part of the Web Science 2010 conference proceedings.
Among the quotable quotes which came from Les...
"the web is a performance - ICT = Informing and Communicating Technology"
(it must be good it was retweeted by Tony Hurst @psychmedia; how is that for hubs and authorities in action ;-)
Les also quoted his twitter definition of web science
webscience: The study of the technologies & policies that supports the co-construction of a linked online environment by a networked society
There was plenty of food for thought in this presentation - as ever with Les, not to mention gallons of energy which were a welcome addition towards the end of a long day.
Madalina Croitoru presenting some details of the Web Science curriculum project which will be topic of a paper to be presented at the 2011 ACM Web Science Conference in Koblenz this year.
Claudia Rodda raised questions about how to implement interdisciplinary in a curriculum.
Paul de Bra presenting about the bachelor degree in Eindhoven University of Technology which begins in Autumn 2011
The final slot from Hugh Davis was rather squeezed but did allow sufficient time to point to the work done by folk at the web science trust on the SKOS web science curriculum. His slides for the slot also include information on the way we are teaching our Web Science masters in Southampton
Note, these last few are all very relevant to the debate on Web Science Subject Categorisation. http://webscience.org/2010/wssc.html
Follow up activities:
Web Science 2011 Koblenz
next Web Science meetup
workshop proposals for WWW2012
Tweet visualisations:

Refs

Croitoru, M., S. Bazan, S. Cerri, H. C. Davis, C. Jonquet, G. Prini, F. Scharffe, S. Staab, M. Vafopoulos and S. White (2011). Wscd: Negotiating the Web Science Curriculum Development through Shared Educational Artefacts. ACM WebSci '11. Koblenz, Germany. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/22141/

Carr, L., C. Pope and S. Halford (2010). Could the Web Be a Temporary Glitch?. WebSci10: Extending the Frontiers of Society On-Line, Raleigh, NC: US., Web Science Trust. http://journal.webscience.org/304/

Halford, S., C. Pope and L. Carr (2010). A Manifesto for Web Science? . WebSci10: Extending the Frontiers of Society On-Line, Raleigh, NC: US., Web Science Trust. http://journal.webscience.org/297/

Hooper, C. (2011). Towards Designing Effective Systems by Understanding User Experiences. ECS, University of Southampton. PhD.

Shotton, D., K. Portwin, G. Klyne and A. Miles (2009). "Adventures in Semantic Publishing: Exemplar Semantic Enhancement of a Research Article. ." PLoS Computational Biology 5(4): e1000361. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000361

The two magic's, memes and technology affordances - a case for purposeful appropriation

2011-05-13T18:58:00.002+01:00

Two Magics
Way back in 2007 Tim Berners-Lee spoke about the two magics - the phenomena associated with the fact that the web - an artificial construct established by a set of microscopic rules has macroscopic outcomes.

Briefly the concept of the 'two magics' is associated Tim's concept of 'Philosophical Engineering'. The magics are a manifestation of the observation that the web is a socio-technical system in which we observe many different emergent phenomena where there is a cycle of inter-related developments.
The technology is engineered - a system is designed and implemented and we observe social and technical impacts.
Depending on your perspective the way in which the social and technological interact can be interpreted different ways (see Halford et al, 2010 'Towards a manifesto for web science', for some insights into this debate)
Tim states that the term 'magic' is used as a short hand term to label 'stuff you don't understand' (yet)
The bit of this idea which I am thinking about now is that, we observe that some of the phenomena associated with the web work and unexpectedly go viral.

My Perspective - affordances and internet memes - a case for purposeful appropriation
Generally my approach to understanding and analysing change and the interactions between technology and society takes a 'technology affordances' perspective after Gaver (1991, 1996). But more and more I am developing the idea of promoting 'Purposeful Appropriation'. The idea is similar in some ways to the idea of modelling behaviour - but of course I am not talking about behaviour I am talking about ways that we successfully use the web. With purposeful appropriate you observe some successful phenomena on the web. You analyse the underlying drivers for that success, you purposefully take (appropriate) the same approach, but you apply it in a different field, perhaps with additional insights which are appropriate to the new field.
Consider the case of Facebook. They observed that google made money by selling advertising as a side activity associated with the purpose for which people were drawn to their site. They also understood that in the advertising world demographics is valuable. Their social network initially constrained the demographic of their population (university grads at successful institutions), subsequently they have but significant effort into gathering data on the demographics (and behaviours) of their users, which they can use to target/personalise the adverts which are presented to their users, and presumable thereby achieve a better hit rate and higher advertising revenues.
We observe that ideas and behaviours spread in a way that is associated with the internet. Sometimes those are in the area of jokes or fashions like RickRolling or LOL Cats. Susan Blackmore popularised the idea of memes in her book on the topic, and had extended the ideas talking about Internet memes and technology memes (Temes).

You can find a few links to memes and accounts of their role knowyourmeme.com, memedump.com, or memebase.com

But we also observe that 'Google' has become a verb, and as such it is a a term which encapsulates a set of behaviours and assumptions which has behind it a model and expectation of the way our information world exists both in the physical and virtual. We observe in many different ways that the internet, mobile communications and technology infrastructures - and the need to solve particular problems give rise to varied and interesting solutions. What I want to do is to think about the fundamental technology affordances which are associated with these solutions and see how they can be applied in the area of social and educational innovation away from their original context.
For this reason I find it useful to follow a fairly mainstream podcast from the BBC where the correspondent Peter Day looks at change and business across the world. The ideas and phenomena which are being reported are not in the research lab, they are being used and apparently they work - which is what makes them interesting - to some extent they have already moved from the micro to the macro. Which means they might be worth appropriating in another context!
Links and examples:
Peter Day's podcast is an easy way of stumbling across interesting snippets, he gets to a whole lot of places....
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/worldbiz
Peter Day's Podcasts - interesting series of programmes which often addresses new business models - eg micro payments in indian subcontinent, credit unions and affordable business loans in developing countries

An example of language translation

Not sure where I picked up this story originally, but there is some interesting use of mobiles and micropayments for translation services in africa

http://workingknowledge.com/blog/?p=1444

The same story was also featured in this blog, which is all about crowdsourcing :-) the latter article also have various links to related writings.

http://www.crowdsortium.org/2011/01/31/workforce-innovation-txteagle-microtasks/

refs

BLACKMORE, S. (2010). Dangerous Memes; or, What the Pandorans Let Loose. Cosmos and Culture: Cultural Evolution in a Cosmic Context. S. Dick and M. Lupisella, NASA: 297-318.

pecha-kucha at PLE_SOU

2011-05-11T15:04:00.003+01:00

Folk may have missed the deadlines for submitting a paper to PLE_SOU but there is still a chance to submit a pecha-kucha (or poster demo) or just register and join in our media-cast contest. I've just uploaded a set of slides for the pecha-kucha call to slideshare (and you can take a look at my previous post on it too).
The hard work of folk like Ricardo Torres, Graham Atwell, Cristina Costa and Ilona Buchem - plus the unbridled enthusiasm of the conference participants meant that the first conference, #PLE_BCN established a particularly high standard, for engagement, scholarly contributions and all round good fun!
So we are looking for a big dose of enthusiasm, imagination and creativity from this year's participants to match and even exceed our previous highs. The conference was also very international drawing experts from across Europe, North America and Australasia. Search YouTube with PLE_BCN to get a sense of the spirit.
So far the quality of paper proposals has been high and we are very keen to extend the community as far as possible. You can keep up to date with news and progress by following us on Twitter, and the conference promises to have a lively back channel enabling real-time interaction between attendees and those who can't make the event.
For more info on the media-cast, posters and demos you can go to the PLE_SOU website http://www.pleconf.com
You can also go along to Vimeo and join the PLE 2011 Group at Vimeo ready for the MediaCast
Come and join our vibrant community Southampton, UK July 11-13 #PLE_SOU. We are looking forward to it.

Getting to grips with French/Latin - Romanes eunt domus -> Romani ite domum

2011-05-11T09:59:00.001+01:00

Faced with translating the latin inscription on the 18th century Arc de Triomphe in Montpellier raised memories and debate on latin grammar. Along with recollections of innumerate latin masters, behaviourists who tried to modify students' behaviour by the local application of dictionary to head (with heft) we fondly recalled from Monty Python‘s Life of Brian

Lo and behold, I have just stumbled on a blog from a fellow computer scientist which cites just that scene - so thanks to @handee whose (unrelated) tweet led me there, and to @tomcrick for citing the relevant source on his blog

http://drtomcrick.wordpress.com/2011/04/23/romanes-eunt-domus/

[Brian is writing graffiti on the palace wall. The Centurion catches him in the act]
Centurion: What’s this, then? “Romanes eunt domus”? People called Romanes, they go, the house?
Brian: It says, “Romans go home. “
Centurion: No it doesn’t! What’s the Latin for “Roman”? Come on, come on!
Brian: Er, “Romanus”!
Centurion: Vocative plural of “Romanus” is?
Brian: Er, er, “Romani”!
Centurion: [Writes "Romani" over Brian's graffiti] “Eunt”? What is “eunt”? Conjugate the verb, “to go”!
Brian: Er, “Ire”. Er, “eo”, “is”, “it”, “imus”, “itis”, “eunt”.
Centurion: So, “eunt” is…?
Brian: Third person plural present indicative, “they go”.
Centurion: But, “Romans, go home” is an order. So you must use…?
[He twists Brian's ear]
Brian: Aaagh! The imperative!
Centurion: Which is…?
Brian: Aaaagh! Er, er, “i”!
Centurion: How many Romans?
Brian: Aaaaagh! Plural, plural, er, “ite”!
Centurion: [Writes "ite"] “Domus”? Nominative? “Go home” is motion towards, isn’t it?
Brian: Dative!
[the Centurion holds a sword to his throat]
Brian: Aaagh! Not the dative, not the dative! Er, er, accusative, “Domum”!
Centurion: But “Domus” takes the locative, which is…?
Brian: Er, “Domum”!
Centurion: [Writes "Domum"] Understand? Now, write it out a hundred times.
Brian: Yes sir. Thank you, sir. Hail Caesar, sir.
Centurion: Hail Caesar! And if it’s not done by sunrise, I’ll cut your balls off.

all of which makes my current french homework feel rather more straigthforward - now back to the todo list, and bad girl for being distracted by twitter

Web Science: History Glitches and a Manifestos - a few references for today

2011-04-27T10:14:00.003+01:00

The role of Paul Otlet in the precursors to the web and the history of information science is not well known. I came across this information some years ago, but was delighted to find it again today while reading a couple of web science papers from last year's conference in Raleigh.

so today's treasure is...

van den Heuvel, C. (2008). Architectures of Global Knowledge: The Mundaneum and the World Wide Web. Destination Library , 15, 48-53.

Francophone Roots for the web? some observations

You can pitch over to wikipedia for more info on Otlet and the Mundaneum interesting to think that along with Minitel and Reuters this is part of the francophone history of the web.

interestingly there is a different account of Otlet's life from the french version of wikipedia - which since I am currently looking at plurilingualism and interdisciplinarity is highly relevant.

Web futurology?

The paper by van den Heuvel was referenced in

Carr, L., Pope, C. and Halford, S. (2010) Could the Web be a Temporary Glitch? In: WebSci10: Extending the Frontiers of Society On-Line, April 26-27th, 2010, Raleigh, NC: US.

so thanks to Les Carr (aka @LesCarr and Repository Man) for that reminder, and thanks also for an interesting perspective on the web and web science.

This paper addresses the question of whether the Web that we currently enjoy is a permanent and fundamental phenomenon, or merely a fashionable popular enthusiasm for a novel kind of information sharing. I think in some ways it echoes the arguments which Malcolm Gladwell used in Outliers when he identified how various individuals in history have made achievements which are the combination of a particular set of contexts. In this paper it is the contexts of academic practice and the open values which academia pursue accompanied by the emergence of open publication as a respected practice which have (in part contributed to the phenomena which we know as the web today). For a deeper understanding, as ever, best read the actual paper :-)

Fabulous however, to reflect that this is the stuff which our undergraduate students experience as an everyday part of their degree courses in computer science at Southampton.

And while we are talking about the interplay between research and teaching at Southampton University it there is some good stuff on interdiscpinarity to be found from the same three authors in

Halford, S., Pope, C. and Carr, L. (2010) A Manifesto for Web Science. In: WebSci10: Extending the Frontiers of Society On-Line, April 26-27th, 2010, Raleigh, NC: US.

A result no doubt of our Web Science collaborations in Southampton, in no small part due to the hard (interdisciplinary) work that all these folk put into our Doctoral Consortium in Web Science (which has fully funded places available for highly qualified applicants :-).

This paper takes on the discussion about how we realise the interdesciplinarity of web science and break out from individual discipline based research silos.

"Our aim is to provoke and stimulate debate and to move beyond superficial popular psychology and sociology (which envisages engineering human behaviour) and to challenge some of the ways in which social science has engaged with technology and technical actors. To facilitate this, and taking our lead from Donna Harroway, the paper sets out a radical manifesto for web science".

It also has quite a lot to offer when it reminds us of the need to find, use and respect research which come from research traditions and forms of discourse which are different to those with which we are comfortable and familiar.

Take for example the following quote

"For whilst we might all agree that Web Science cannot develop without inter-disciplinarity, we should be clear from the beginning that this is no simple matter. We need to be realistic about what we are getting ourselves into. There will be big challenges in making ourselves understood to each other and developing collaborative understandings will require us to leave the comfort of our disciplinary silos. But, the promise of new forms of knowledge and understanding that are bigger than the sum of our parts are gains worth working for".

For me this has echoes with the ideas of plurilingualism - a policy approach backed by the UN, UNESCO and the EU.

I think these the challenges and benefits of working and cross fertilising between linguistic cultures are as great as those promised by interdiscipliarity and web science. Furthermore, the web does not exist in a single language, nor should it be bound by the invisible philosophical and epistemological constraints which come with any one linguistic tradition.

Plurilingualism argues for the need to continue to recognise and support discourse in more than one language - because of the need to communicate between many different languages, to respect those for whom communicating in only one language is not an option, and to respect and value the different types of discourse which are enabled by different languages and to respect and value the traditions which are an integral part of each different language. (Byram 2006)

Meanwhile, searching out some reading for a PhD student, here is something which I am sure is related in some way, I just stumbled across the essay (online) which Papert wrote as an introduction to Mindstorms. In some ways I see it as a bit of a technology affordances perspective and its added into my refs for today

Papert, S., (1980),The gears of my childhood Forword to Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas (Basic Books)

The quote (paraphrased) from mindstorms which sticks in my mind is to the effect that - the children in explaining how they are controlling the computer articulate (and thus concetise and formalise) their understanding of the mathematics which they are trying to model.

........

references

Byram, M., Plurilingualism in Europe (2006) British Council
Carr, L., Pope, C. and Halford, S. (2010) Could the Web be a Temporary Glitch? In: WebSci10: Extending the Frontiers of Society On-Line, April 26-27th, 2010, Raleigh, NC: US.
Halford, S., Pope, C. and Carr, L. (2010) A Manifesto for Web Science. In: WebSci10: Extending the Frontiers of Society On-Line, April 26-27th, 2010, Raleigh, NC: US.
Papert, S., (1980),The gears of my childhood Forword to Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas (Basic Books)
van den Heuvel, C. (2008). Architectures of Global Knowledge: The Mundaneum and the World Wide Web. Destination Library , 15, 48-53.

Thinking Web Science

2011-04-22T20:28:00.002+01:00

thinking web science is what I have been doing for the past few days, although its a constant backdrop to the research I do :-)
As ever, on a friday, I get a little peeved , when people who have hijacked the term web science when talking about science on the web or using the web for political science - decide to publish their stuff - but hey.
More interestingly ( I think) is a bit of speculation about a few of the manifestations of web science....
I find myself fascinated by the way in which new business models have emerged with increasing persistence of the web. I observe that the hard nosed profit oriented organisations are learning from each other, but also small organisations, concerned with rural development and sustainability are also finding out about this stuff, and turning it to their advantage.
Frequently when I chat to people about the social impact of the web I give examples of how these gains are manifested, but I thought it was time I recorded this information - if only so that I can go back and refer to it myself again in future. Some of them were not explicitly web science manifestations when they emerged, but are now mediated and accelerated via web-based communities.
One dimension of these activities is the power of the meme - ways in which ideas catch on, and how human beings are supremely adapted for extending simple ideas
so, what are the things I am thinking of?
short list to be elaborated with links and further info
1 - aggregated translation service in african countries where contributors are paid via micro payments to mobile phones.
2 - credit union style activites in india
3 - rural self education networks in india mediated by internet connections
4 - so calle "WI degree" common foundation, then negotiated curriculum
5 - dissemination of good practice to agricultural communities

... more later, supper now

Web Science Curriculum Development - update

2011-04-21T12:25:00.003+01:00

Our paper WSCD: Negotiating the Web Science Curriculum Development through Shared Educational Artefacts has been accepted for ACM WebSci'11

Abstract
The far-reaching impact of Web on society is widely recognised and acknowledged. The interdisciplinary study of this impact has crystallised in the field of study known as Web Science. However, defining an agreed, shared understanding of what constitutes Web Science requires complex negotiation and translations of understandings across component disciplines, national cultures and educational traditions. Some individual institutions have already established particular curricula, and discussions in the Web Science Curriculum Workshop series have marked the territory to some extent. This paper reports on a process being adopted across a consortium of partners to systematically create a shared understanding of what constitutes Web Science. It records and critiques the processes instantiated to agree a common curriculum, and presents a framework for future discussion and development.

The need to study the Web in its complexity, development and impact led to the creation of Web Science. Web Science is inherently interdisciplinary. Its goal is to:
a) understand the Web growth mechanisms;
b) create approaches that allow new powerful and more beneficial mechanisms to occur.

Teaching Web Science is a unique experience since the emerging discipline is a combination of two essential features. On one hand, the analysis of microscopic laws extrapolated to the macroscopic realm generates observed behaviour. On the other hand languages and algorithms on the Web are built in order to produce novel desired computer behaviour that should be put in context. Finding a suitable curriculum that is different from the study of language, algorithms, interaction patterns and business processes is thus an important and challenging task for the simple reason that we believe that the future of sociotechnical systems will be in their innovative power (inventing new ways to solve problems), rather than their capacity to optimize current practices.

ACM WebSci'11 is in Koblenz this year - and we are going to present a paper :-)

"Web Science is concerned with the full scope of socio-technical relationships that are engaged in the World Wide Web. It is based on the
notion that understanding the Web involves not only an analysis of its architecture and applications, but also insight into the people, organizations, policies, and economics that are affected by and subsumed within it. As such Web Science, and thus this conference, is inherently interdisciplinary and integrates computer and information sciences, sociology, economics, political science, law, management, language and communication, geography and psychology".

Following the great news, our extended abstract proposal has been accepted, we are working on the final version of the paper we will present. You can find out abstract in EPrints. Students who are interested in following a PhD in Web Science can do so via our Doctoral Consortium which combines a preparatory Masters Degree with three years of intersdisciplinary study typically supervised by a small team of academics representing the component fields of study.
Meanwhile, Michalis Vafopoulis, who is also part of our team, and who has been leading the subject categorisation initiative for the web science trust has made the outcomes of that work available via the Web Science Trust pages which was one of the outcomes of previous Web Science Curiculum workshops at the conference.
Along with the fact that Jim Hendler is convening Web Science Curriculum workshop at this year's conference, it looks like it is going to be a pretty good year for folk developing and teaching Web Science as an academic discipline.
....
Croitoru, M., Bazan, S., Cerri, S., Davis, H. C., Jonquet, C., Prini, G., Scharffe, F., Staab, S., Vafopoulos, M. and White, S. (2011) WSCD: Negotiating the Web Science Curriculum Development through Shared Educational Artefacts. In: ACM WebSci '11, 14-17 June 2011, Koblenz, Germany. (Submitted)

ready for a mobile world?

2011-04-21T10:20:00.002+01:00

The redoubtable Brian Kelly twittered the outcomes of a quick survey he had done of the Russell Group University's front page

"Are Russell Group Unis ready for the Mobile Web? Findings from the #MobileOK tool: http://bit.ly/eZ47Tv"

So when I cam across this (now old) xcd cartoon, i thought it was appropriate to put the two together

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/server_attention_span.png

"Yesterday I attended Nominet’s launch event for the W3C UK and Ireland Office (and note that tweets containing the #w3cuki hashtag are available on TwapperKeeper). A number of talks covered the Mobile Web including “Mobile web: where diversity is opportunity” by Dr. Rotan Hanrahan, the Chief Innovations Architect of MobileAware. Dr. Hahrahan informed the audience about that many assumptions about Web sites are based on desktop browser experiences and many of the assumptions are wrong in a mobile context.
This made me wonder whether the assumptions we have regarding the design and structure of institutional Web sites will be valid for mobile access. The W3C have developed mobileOk which is “a free service by W3C that helps check the level of mobile-friendliness of Web documents, and in particular assert whether a Web document is mobileOK“.
Are the home pages of Russell Group Universities ‘mobileOK’, I wondered, or have they been designed and tested for desktop access only? Yesterday I used the mobileOK checker service to check the home page of the 20 Russell group Universities".

The results are given on Brian's web page.
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2011/04/19/are-russell-group-universities-ready-for-the-mobile-web/

from tragedy to joy - the real story of the commons

2011-04-13T15:57:00.005+01:00

some thoughts and thanks to Alan Dix - as is so often the case there seems to be synchronicity in the atmosphere :-)
I'm doing some background work for a paper we have on the stocks just now and was doing a bit of tidying and reference chasing and context setting.

Sunrise - a frosty morning on Southampton Common
in the process I came across a short but compelling post from Alan Dix on "the *real* tragedy of the commons"

I’ve just been reviewing a paper that mentions the “tragedy of the commons”¹ and whenever I read or hear the phrase I feel the hackles on the back of my neck rise.
Of course the real tragedy of the commons was not free-riding and depletion by common use, but the rape of the land under mass eviction or enclosure movements when they ceased to be commons. The real tragedy of “the tragedy of the commons” as a catch phrase is that it is often used to promote the very same practices of centralisation. Where common land has survived today, just as in the time before enclosures and clearances, it is still managed in a collaborative way both for the people now and the for the sake of future generations. Indeed on Tiree, where I live, there are large tracts of common grazing land managed in just such a way.
It is good to see that the Wikipedia article of “Tragedy of the Commons” does give a rounded view on the topic including reference to an historical and political critique by “Ian Angus”²
The paper I was reading was not alone in uncritically using the phrase. Indeed in “A Framework for Web Science”³ we read:

In a decentralised and growing Web, where there are no “owners” as such, can we be sure that decisions that make sense for an individual do not damage the interests of users as a whole? Such a situation, known as the ‘tragedy of the commons’, happens in many social systems that eschew property rights and centralised institutions once the number of users becomes too large to coordinate using peer pressure and moral principles.

In fact I do have some sympathy with this as the web involves a vast number of physically dispersed users who are perhaps “too large to coordinate using peer pressure and moral principles”. However, what is strange is that the web has raised so many modern counter examples to the tragedy of the commons, not least Wikipedia itself. In many open source projects people work as effectively a form of gift economy, where, if there is any reward, it is in the form of community or individual respect.
Clearly, there are examples in the world today where many individual decisions (often for short term gain) lead to larger scale collective loss. This is most clearly evident in the environment, but also the recent banking crisis, which was fuelled by the desire for large mortgages and general debt-led lives. However, these are exactly the opposite of the values surrounding traditional common goods.
It may be that the problem is not so much that large numbers of people dilute social and moral pressure, but that the impact of our actions becomes too diffuse to be able to appreciate when we make our individual life choices. The counter-culture of many parts of the web may reflect, in part, the way in which aspects of the web can make the impact of small individual actions more clear to the individual and more accountable to others.
Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons”, Science, Vol. 162, No. 3859 (December 13, 1968), pp. 1243-1248. … and here is the danger of citation counting as a quality metric, I am citing it because I disagree with it! [back]

Ian Angus. The Myth of the Tragedy of the Commons. Socialist Voice, August 24, 2008 [back]

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/ [back]

There are some dimensions to this argument which I am in the process of clarifying in my head, so I thought it timely - another synchronicity, Alan Dix had just been the external examiner to one of our star EngD/PhD students Clare Hooper (supervised by another worthy blogster and academic Dave Millard)

Like Alan, I have some personal experience of commons.

My own common at home, when I am not on sabbatical in Montpellier is a fine local open space, site of scientific interest and well used place for thought and play. We are fortunate in Southampton of having many parks and open spaces, and I probably do some of my best thinking there.
As an academic in the University of Southampton, based in ECS we live breathe and eat the commons. We share our academic publications through eprints, our learning resources through EdShare, and are among those at the bleeding edge of open and linked data through activities such as open.soton.ac.uk.

Our research in Web Science is concerned in its interdisciplinary manner in not only the Technology, Engineering and Analytics of the Web but also to the web as a 'social machine'. This latter aspect is to my mind most interesting (and thus most important) in the interactions between the social and the technological, the affordances which emerge and the artefacts associated with those affordances.
Understanding the power of the social, and having the skills, knowledge and understanding to engineer the tools of the web had enabled Southampton to realise small contributions such as the open data projects and its predecessors such as eprints and edshare. It has enabled us to make our own contributions to the commons; we have put our wealth into the common ground, and we have turned our thoughts to why this should be done, and what beneftis accrue. We are lucky to attract scholars (who are also practitioners) like Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Stevan Harnad who make their own forceful contributions and who engage those in power with discussion on the way forward for the common good.

Here in Montpellier, there are open spaces and a socialist local government who are consciously endeavouring to engineer the city for the greater good. We see public transport subsidised and well used, large scale social programmes and experience the vibrancy of a young city which at its heart hums to the sound of human discussion rather than choking in car fumes. Trying to understand this social entrerprise (and using the engines we have on the web) enabled me to find a fine wiki - wikisara which seems to have a collection of GPS routes of public transport networks from across France, and a resource which is far more useful than the static map, conscientiously produced by the good burgers of this fine town. it is a general observation that public mapping is one interesting social manifestation of the web, and projects like open street map and open cycle map are testimony to the fact these are not merely french phenomena (far from it)

At the same time as I appreciate the social use of wikis in france, I also experience the hegemony of the french publishing industry - observing the differences in online publishing models between france and the UK - and the extent to which you have to pay for stuff in france! I also note that the french take on web sites (reflected in much of southern europe) is far less concerned with form and function, but more often a frustrating content free showcase which seeks to limit the visitor's experience rather than offering them open information to explore and use.

I want to find out more about these differences in manifestations and web artefacts, and I want to begin to understand what causes some of these differences.

Here, the points made by Alan Dix citing Ian Angus have real strength. A simple shorthand - history is about power, and if we have commons as a part of our history, we also have the heritage of the forces of power and hegemony.
Some thoughts about the common land

Common Land when cleared was more useful to a single powerful person than to many less powerful individuals.
The powerful individuals changed the commons for their own specialised use
There was a finite supply of land which could be usefully converted from common land to personal use

Alan gives wikipedia as an example of commons emerging, and I have a PhD student doing some very interesting work looking at trust and the growth of wikis in different cultures.
hmmm... there is more to do and say, and I will be doing some more thinking about this one - thanks Alan, very useful :-)

Time for some chit chat - bring on the pecha kucha planning

2011-03-25T08:55:00.003Z

it all started with a little early morning reading

"Just checked in on the pickled herring in the refrigerator at work. To my horror and relief, it's still there"

I was intrigued

"Settled on 3 ppt slides and a 3-member doo-wop group in identical red sequined dresses singing backup".

I was hooked
maybe I should have titled this post more than a red herring

pechakucha, (literally translated from the Japanese as chit chat), twenty slides of twenty seconds (20x20) the CHI 20 second madness all coalesced during my run this morning....thanks to Cathy Marshal @ccmarshall and Mark Bernstein @eastgate and their animated herring conversation on twitter and to Cristina Costa @cristinacost from our PLE conference committee who will be organising the petcha-kutcha at #PLE_SOU
I have contributed to pechakucha before, our LSL interns last year presented their work via a petcha-kutcha. I have organised poster pitches at conferences and for my students, but with the time and space of a sabbatical and a good run along the riverside I was able to bring together a whole load of ideas
why?
because (includes)

I think visually, and I am a great believer in the Cartier Bresson docrine that the photograph can capture a certain moment
I have been documenting my runs with pictures, and often my everyday life.
I sometimes subscribe to Tufts adage that "Powerpoint is evil"
I am tired of being subjected to Death by PowerPoint
Pictures are a step towards interlingularity
I have so many things I want to communicate
I always like as many people as possible to be involved in conversations
we are planning to offer a petcha kutcha session at PLE_SOU
I am already intrigued by the prospect of an animated herring and a doo-wop band
I once read that there was space for communicating computer science through the medium of interpretive dance
I have lots of things I want to communicate ( oh I said that before)

so what are some those things?

What it is like coming to live in Montpellier
What I plan to do with my sabbatical
What I have achieved on my sabbatical
What we mean by Institution Personal Learning Environments
How personal learning environments have a place in the web science agenda
What I think web science is
What other (ordinary) people think web science is
What other (academic) people think web science is
What is happening with semantic technologies in higher education
The role of visualisation is communicating scientific ideas
What we are offering to staff, students and the whole university through the Southampton Learning Environment - its not just a system, its a mindset

In addition I want to introduce PetchaKutcha into my teaching - as a discipline to myself (slides at the start of a lecture)

it will train me to develop my visual thinking skills
it will help me build up a repertoire of images
it will introduce students to the idea and practice of petchakucha

I will also get my second year students to choose between a pecha kucha and a three minute poster pitch as a means of presenting their posters to the class
so its a pretty hectic thing ( and it was a lot quicker thinking it than recording it)
you can find examples of pechakucha on youtube and vimeo, and when they become rather boring, you understand the benefit of really getting down to the bare bones. However the best examples are stimulating, creative and highly communicative. Browse, search, observe - I hope, like me, you will try to learn and emulate the best, and hopefully produce some really riviting slide shows ( and of course if you want people to watch them on an iPad you had better make sure you don't record them in Flash!)
now I need to jot down all those images I had in mind...
Footnote:

PechaKucha Night was devised in Tokyo in February 2003 as an event for young designers to meet, network, and show their work in public.
It has turned into a massive celebration, with events happening in hundreds of cities around the world, inspiring creatives worldwide. Drawing its name from the Japanese term for the sound of "chit chat", it rests on a presentation format that is based on a simple idea: 20 images x 20 seconds. It's a format that makes presentations concise, and keeps things moving at a rapid pace.
http://www.pecha-kucha.org/

or as Wired would have it

"The result, in the hands of masters of the form, combines business meeting and poetry slam to transform corporate cliché into surprisingly compelling beat-the-clock performance art".
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/15-09/st_pechakucha

What is web science?

2011-03-23T12:16:00.001Z

This post is WIP as part of an exercise preparing for a symposium which we plan to hold in Montpellier some time in May. As I worked through the process I was reminded that a key topic in web science is provenance and trust. I also understand that web science is of course inter-disciplinary, but suggest that the phrase 'web science' is going through an extended period of "negotiated understanding of meaning".

I am interested in definitions and explanations manifest via text, images and videos. I am taking the canonical web pages as coming from WebScience.org - and will provide links to various classic definitions, but at this stage I am also particularly interested in what people outside of the web science trust think web science is. That means I will be interested in the differences and similarities between the canonical and emerging definitions, and seeing if I can make any inferences from that data.

Coming from Southampton, teaching on our Web Science Masters and having been at the finges of Web Science since its inception, I have a bit of an idea to begin with, and of course turn to the classic XXXX cluster diagram we all know and love.

you can take the simple version

or the more elaborate version

Nigel Shadbolt's WebScience Cluster Diagram

if you go to the web science trust facebook page you will find that people have been tagged within this diagram (ho ho)

Nigel Shadbolt and Wendy Hall both have videos answering the question "What is Web Science?" and Les Carr has a slide share titled What is Web Science

Taking the everyday approach

I intend in subsequent posts to take a more measured academic approach to the definition. Meantime I am working on the sort of approach that I think an everday kind of person might use - search engines plus wikipedia. I am also only presenting generic information in this post. I plan at least two future editions

educational/curriculum approach
published research and current projects

so if we try to find out what is web science, what are the various versions suggested?

First take simple google searches, using web science, web science definitons, "web science" definitions

I should note that I have been following a google search on Web Science as a search term for some time, and also have been tracking "web science" and "websci" on twitter.

Also if I have already looked at this area in a posting on the 2010 Web Science Curriculum Workshop held in Southampton Last year

Simple Searches

www.fuzzzy.com is a social network which gathered its first members in November 2006. It describes itself as a social network for web science, includes collection of bookmarks, but unfortuantely the last time any were recommended by the editors was late 2010. Inevitably it suffers from spam postings, and simple bookmarking to links which are basically web applications. There are no

it seems to have a strong european input, and its greatest contributor is one Janos Haits from Budapest, Hungary

have some interesting visualisations which can be compared to the original sourced from the web science trust

they also have a visualisation tool which is quite interesting

Journals

there are of course folk trying to get into the act by proposing journals - it is worth noting that journal.webscience.org is hosted by the WebScience Trust wiki and is a repository of proceedings from the Web Science conferences and other events which have been nominated by the WebScience Trust.

for example

Does not actually seem to be up and running yet, but I guess people are trying to get on the bandwagon.

International Journal of Web Science (IJWS) ISSN (Online): 1757-8809 - ISSN (Print): 1757-8795

Time for some publications

2011-03-21T14:39:00.001Z

Bit of a round up on advice on where to publish and how to publish, seems timely revision, we are never too old to learn!

Also thought this might be useful to friends, colleagues and of course PhD students.

I have a couple of papers in the mix at the moment, and am on a mission to get some decent publications out there while I am on sabbatical at LIRMM in Montpellier, so its in focus for me just now.

Seems that Abby Day (formerly of Lancaster, and now based at he University of Sussex) got herself a bit of a reputation a few years ago advising people who to get published in Journals. You can get a short version of her advice in a downloadable article titled How to write publishable papers you can see a snapshot below.

Actually a bit more searching located all three parts of her advice via the author pages of The International Education Journal: Comparative Perspectives (IEJ).

Day points out that some of the empirical basis for the article's guidance are derived from research which was sponsored by Emerald which looked at the quality indicators of academic journals Day, A. and Peters, J. 1995 Quality indicators in academic publishing', Library Review, vol 45 no 3/4.

Emerald, like many journal publishers has author pages which include a set of writings on the topic of how to get published and disseminate your work.

My post was actually prompted by the fact that pubications are on the top of my todo list just now, and that I came across a (timely) tweet pointing me to a Prezi which claimed to be able to help "

The source of this work is a researcher from Melbourne who tweets as the @thesiswhisperer (great handle isn't it) and who had a blog of the same name and is known in the real world as Inger Mewburn (again a distinctive handle, but perhaps less easily recalled).

The prezi has

a few links to related work - a post on Publish2PhD
anatomy of types of papers
reference to helping Doctoral Students to Write, Kamler and Thompson (writing a tiny text)
writing a spew draft - links to a post about using scrivener to help in this process ( and had me resolving to take another look at tinderbox)
writing a scratch outline
cleaning the mess - clarify your ideas - may be itterative
murder your darlings (edit and revise)
leave it to relax/proove/rest (we are talking bread making analogies here) - critical friends too
this prezi is not too much like 'powerpoint on acid' - others can be. I find myself thinking how long did it take her to create that.....

I think this post might usefully be linked to something I identified last year which was related to a learning technologies roadmap, and also various pieces on places to publish. More of that later...

Refs:

Day, A., 1996, How to get research published in Journals, Gower, Aldershot, UK

Day, A. and Peters, J., 1995 Quality indicators in academic publishing', Library Review, vol 45 no 3/4

Brown S., Black., Day A., Race P., 1998, 500 Tips for getting published: A guide for educators, researchers and Professionals, Kogan Page, London, UK

Mendeley and repositories - pragmatics in a Web World

2011-01-06T16:49:00.002Z

I tried playing with Mendeley a good few months ago but did not feel I had particularly mastered the mechanics even if I thought I understood the principles.

I was aware that Les Carr had written about Mendeley via twitter, but just as I am preparing for a sabbatical I am rather more focussed on what tools I need to use and master. I guess in terms of web science this could be seen as "eating your own dog food". The bit of Web Science i find interesting is the emergence, place and role of "social machines" plus the observations of the way in which the technology and engineering of the web respond to social manifestations. Web 2.0 may have been copyrighted, but it was right there in Tim Berners-Lee's conception of the Read Write Web - as with so much of what we recognise in technology today the story is one of incremental distributed development from the bottom up, rather than grand design from the top down. Although having the odd insight into the possible grand design is proving very useful :-)

In that context I made the following comment on the previous blogs comparing Mendeley and Institutional Repositories which Les authored as Repository Man.
.......

Hmm.. I contrast Mendeley and IRs in a rather different way.

An institutional repository where rich data is collected which enables the dynamic building of a sort of contour map of research (substitute or add other spheres of focus eg educational resources).

For the individual researcher/teacher it generates a useful map of their home territory, but combined with other local researcher's deposits it shows estates, villages, cities. (although such visualisations only exist in my head - and there is something about Korbinky's the map is not the territory in there

I use my IR because it's effectively a cloud server with overheads but it's part of my local infrastructure and I have to/need to/ want to use it a bit.

The contents of Mendeley on my desktop (when I understand what I am doing) is the by product of my personal intellectual endeavours to note, observe, perhaps reflect and create order out of information I have processed as part of some research activity. it's the proxy for those photocopied collections of annotated papers of old. It's quite useful and reassuring if I can use it's tools on different platforms and then aggregate the results of those disjoint bits of effort.

If I am lucky it may help to let me reason and derive or represent understanding.

I use it If there is a low threshold to storing external info via Medeley i might use it in the hope of getting some extra value from it.

If/ when I master the tool then I can share and compare, perhaps add or contest my understanding if others have gone about using it in the same way as I have, in my particular sphere of interest. My collection becomes an artefact. The sets of collections a set of artefacts for discussion, but perhaps also mathematical analysis and or abstract reasoning.

Of course it might be that my conception of Mendeley has been mediated by my need/compulsion to use my local institutional repository. And the understandings of IRs innate thus gained.

Functionally I think of Mendeley as an alternative and potentially better solution to using a reference manager and some form of half cocked personal electronic 'librarianship'.

I am planning to try to use Mendeley (again) because I plan to share my collections (content and abstract structure) with a few folk I can think of, but don't mind sharing with other folk too if they are interested. But that use will only be sustained if the overheads are low and I master it! If I am pressed and Mendeley is flakey I will stick with the half-cocked methods.

I am not an evangelist of open sharing but I do have it as an objective which I would like to work - that may be about personal politics as much as being part of my academic identity.

That same view prevents me being antagonistic to my IR even if I sometimes find it frustrating. I guess that with my IR, overheads and mastery within my control , so I knuckle down and use it.

213.251.145.96

2010-12-14T19:19:00.002Z

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

2010-11-15T14:01:00.003Z

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?

2010-11-04T09:20:00.002Z

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

2010-11-03T15:22:00.002Z

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

towards a model for digital literacies - things have moved on since I gathered this set of references....

2010-10-30T00:25:00.003+01:00

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

2010-10-29T13:50:00.002+01:00

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....

2010-09-28T11:21:00.001+01:00

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)

2010-09-23T14:45:00.001+01:00

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

2010-09-07T10:30:00.001+01:00

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

2010-08-25T12:53:00.001+01:00

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

2010-08-10T12:48:00.001+01:00

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

2010-07-12T14:58:00.003+01:00

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

2010-07-08T09:06:00.001+01:00

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

2010-06-21T11:35:00.001+01:00

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

2010-06-17T06:43:00.001+01:00

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

2010-06-10T11:37:00.004+01:00

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?

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

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.

Something to read....

2010-06-09T14:34:00.005+01:00

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.

Modified Delphi Technique

2010-06-09T14:13:00.003+01:00

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

2010-06-09T11:10:00.001+01:00

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

2010-06-08T09:23:00.004+01:00

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

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.

What is Web 3.0?

2010-05-29T15:49:00.002+01:00

The semtech investigation and report looked at Semantic Technologies for Teaching and Learning,
TIROPANIS, T., DAVIS, H., MILLARD, D., WEAL, M., WHITE, S. & WILLS, G. (2009) Semantic Technologies in Learning and Teaching (SemTech) - JISC Report.

This analysis might prompt some readers to seek orientation from other sources, a few of those are listed below...hint - includes videos and the phrase Web3.0

some links to stuff which tries to answer this question...

a short film from Kate Ray

Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.

You can find background information on the film and related posts on Kate Ray's blog http://kateray.net/

or 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

Some tools for organising information

2010-05-29T15:44:00.001+01:00

These complement my post on tools for visual literacy which is mostly what I am working on at the moment

Mendeley http://www.mendeley.com/review/

Dropbox http://www.dropbox.com

FormSmarts
http://formsmarts.com/

UK government Con-Dem-Nation of Web Science

2010-05-26T18:33:00.002+01:00

So...
it has been decided to go for quick and easy cuts, the civil servants are keen to please neir new masters, and the new masters (for it is such, there are so few women) are much minded to make propoganda gains at every opportunity

how does it go

first we have a treasury announcement that there will be a "cut of £18 million by stopping low priority projects like the Semantic web ",
At this stage you have to admire their ambition, in thinking that they can cut the semantic web, but hey, that's another story...

some time later the same day, the announcemnt is modified to read

£18 million including funding for the Institute of Web Science, a proposal which is still under development, and low priority projects like the SME Adjudicator.

http://www.bis.gov.uk/news/topstories/2010/may/bis-savings

Sir Tim and Professor Nigel make an announcement (see footnote for full text)

Yesterday, as part of its £6 billion spending cuts, the new Government announced that it was unable to offer funding to the proposed Institute for Web Science.

Now either this had been the result of some hard bargaining from the lib part of the condemnation team, or maybe the zealous civil servants were not apprised of the benefits of such initiatives which only a few weeks early the Tories had trumpeted in their technology manifesto, where linked data was seen as a key to cutting wasteful spending, and creating additional wealth

in particular

our plans to open up government data and spending information will .. help us to cut wasteful spending, ... it will also create an estimated £6 billion in additional value for the UK
http://www.conservatives.com/policy/where_we_stand/technology.aspx

this was surely then a rash cut? don't we think?

the words mysterious and ways leap to mind....

......
Footnote the following statement on the cut of proposed funding for the Institute for Web Science

The Institute for Web Science: Statement by Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee & Professor Nigel Shadbolt

Issued 17.30, Tuesday 25 May 2010

Yesterday, as part of its £6 billion spending cuts, the new Government announced that it was unable to offer funding to the proposed Institute for Web Science.

The following statement has been issued by Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt, of the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton:

____

"We are obviously disappointed at the announcement. However, we do understand that immediate decisions had to be made about what not to start, pending a wider review of priorities in the Spending Review.

Today, the web site of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills notes that the Institute for Web Science remains a proposal still under development.

Naturally, many people have been asking what this means for Web Science and we wanted to provide an assurance that the future remains bright.[1]

Many people have also been asking about the future of the open linked data initiative in the UK after the change of government.

It is clear from the new government's Big Society declaration [2], the Coalition Partnership [3] and speeches such as David Cameron's to TED [4] before the election that open government data is a high priority. Our understanding is that the data.gov.uk portal will in fact grow significantly in the months to come.

Linked data and the new technologies supporting it will, in the near future, enable better public services to be delivered for less, and promote new business opportunities.

The government is maintaining its commitment to the linked data it has already published and to the very large amount which remains to be published.

Recall that the process of opening up UK government data is really in its early stages, and while much has been accomplished there is very much more yet to be done.

Also remember that this work, while essential for the UK’s good governance, prosperity and competitiveness as a place to do business, is part of a wider global movement.

The UK over the last 12 months has played a leading role in this movement. Recently we have seen a re-launch of the USA's portal, data.gov [5], with a large easily accessed trove [6] of linked open data from US government, and many applications.

There is more being added to data.gov.uk all the time, whether it is the NaPTAN data, a GB national system for uniquely identifying all the points of access to public transport, or the eagerly anticipated COINS database detailing Treasury spending [7].

As we enter a phase of cutting back on many things, the linked open data movement is a crucial tool, for government, public and industry to get the most value from the important resources being opened up. During times of austerity, transparency is essential, and open data will play a crucial role."

Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt

[1] http://www.webscience.org

[2] http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/media/407789/building-big-society.pdf

[3] http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Nl1/Newsroom/DG_187877

[4] http://www.ted.com/talks/david_cameron.html

[5] http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2010/05/white-house-data-trove-celebrates-first-birthday/1

[6] http://www.data.gov/semantic/catalog

[7] http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/may/24/data-journalism

Posted by Joyce Lewis on 25 May 2010.

What do you want?

2010-05-12T17:11:00.002+01:00

Can you help us?

We are interested to learn what students make of the ways in which we use technology as part of the fabric of activities while they are at University.

Here at the University of Southampton we have been using technology for learning for almost twenty years.

Over that time the world has changed, our newest undergrads can probably not remember a time without the web, probably have their own computers, and many carry and rely upon phones for communication (text and emails) and electronic diaries.

Computers are now part of leisure time (the vast majority of students appear to be on Facebook for social contact and leisure chats) and many students may be surprised that there are certain areas where the university still reles on paper based methods rather than uses a computer system to manage and automate our adminstrative processes.

Of course some of the ways in which we manage our processes may be historical, or we may be constrained by administrative needs and preferences for paper records and personal contact.

The question is - WHAT DO YOU WANT??

In 2009 we worked in partnership, with SUSU and ran an electronic survey about the student experience of technology in learning at the University. We have analysed the results that many students provided for that survey. Now, we would like to work in a more in-depth way with a group of students from across the University. We would like you to think about what technology works well for you, how it works well and what you value about the way in which it works. We would also like you to think about the downside of using technology in your academic work. Most of all we would like you to help us come up with some solutions which could really make a change.

In order to complement the information we have gained from the surveys we are looking for volunteers to take part in some short electronic consultations.

You will be asked to respond by a mix of email and web forms - and a few of you may be invited to some face to face meetings.

If you are interested in helping us understand what students want, so that we can feed this into the planning and change processes please email Su White

TELUSS - Virtual Group Discussions

2010-05-06T13:35:00.002+01:00

When faced with many possible choices of what to do next, it is sometimes difficult to decide what changes need to be given the top priority.

Academics and support services at the University of Southamtpon have been reviewing the technology infrastructure and support which we provide for students at the University.

This activity is taking place under the catch-all title of "The Southampton Learning Environment'. As part of this activity we are gathering information from new and existing sources which build a picture of everyday experience of technologies for learning at the university. We are calling this project TELUSS(Technology Enhanced Learning University of Southampton Surveys) - because we are asking students to tell us what it is like

In 2009 we carried out an extensive survey with students mainly to identify

1) what technologies students use for learning and for study

2) what support students receive when using technology

3) what are the major problem areas which exist in relation to using technology

Following on from this study we are looking to recruit student experts to provide some in depth insight into this important aspect of university life

Discussion with the groups will be managed using a combination of email and web through a four stage process

1) recruit participants (by responding to an email request)

2) asking an initial single question about potential for improving the technology infrastructure for learning (on and off campus)

3) asking students to consider a list of points which have been consolidated from the answers to the first question and to vote on the three items which they consider to be the most important.

4)

Learning and Studying with Technologies - TELUSS

2010-05-06T10:56:00.002+01:00

We can expect students at University to use a whole range of technologies in many different ways to help them learn and study for their degrees.

Academics are likely to be interested in this from two separate, but inter-related perspectives

1) Big Picture

What is the big picture view of current practice and the implications of this for the future long term development of practice in Higher Education?

2) Local Practice

What are the current practices and needs of our existing students in our own institutions - and how does this look compared to the big picture?

Hype vs Hope ( and truth and reality)

In addressing this we need to be able to :

sort out the hype of behaviours

challenge headline grabbing ideas and stuff that sells books

Beware of the hyperbole of moral panic, alarmism, and generalisations based on the leisure habits of time-rich young people

Find evidence from the reality of practice

Remember that

The behaviours of our students are likely to be constrained by time and driven by pressing imperatives

The needs and purpose of university education includes introducing learners to new ideas, and equipping them with multiple literacies, not least digital literacies

Question:
You probably already use technology in many different ways to help you learn and study for you university degree what three changes would you suggest the University introduce which would make a real difference to that aspect of your study at Southampton.

CETIS Repositories and Open Web Position Paper

2010-04-13T12:28:00.003+01:00

Here at Southampton we have been doing 'stuff' with 'stuff' to make it shared for a long while :-) EPrints has become established for archiving, publishing and revealing research collections, and the use of EPrints has been embedded into university processes (particularly those related to promotions and academic progression). It seemed obvious to the researchers in our group ( Learning Societies Lab) that a learning from web 2.0 behaviours and taking resources associated with learning and teaching into the world of public and shared information was a natural progression for contemporary academic practice.

Below is a position paper from the EdShare team which is to be presented at the CETIS repositories and open web group meeting in late April 2010

The EdShare Approach: Web 2.0 from the Ground Up

JISC CETIS Repositories and The Open Web
April 2010

Background

At Southampton University we have been involved in repositories for teaching and learning for many years. Our first repository in 2005 was called CLARe, a simple EPrints installation with a Learning Object schema, deployed for the Language teaching community. Our evaluations of CLARe showed that people were disappointed with the plain repository interface, and described the experience as ‘flat’ (it was hard to navigate and nothing was interlinked) and ‘dead’ (there was no information on how people had used resources, or what they thought of them). It was clear that the Web 2.0 systems that were appearing at the time (such as Flick’r and YouTube) were changing people’s expectations of what a repository should offer.

We ran a follow up project called CLARe Tools (CLAReT) in 2007 that tried to address these issues with a more modern interface. However, in our evaluation workshops we found that while the superficial problems had been addressed, deeper issues emerged. It became clear to us that the problem wasn’t just an interface issue, it concerned long held assumptions about the way in which teachers thought about their digital teaching materials. Web 2.0 features were not sufficient, what was required was a rethink of the whole approach.
In the light of our experience, we turned to popular Web 2.0 sharing sites in order to try and analyse what has made them successful. Why are people keen to upload photos to Flick’r, but not to upload handouts to a teaching repository? The result of our rethinking has been a family of projects and repositories built around a common set of EPrints extensions called EdShare, which between them over the last two years have made thousands of new resources available online.

The EdShare Approach

Going into our projects we were conscious of the predominant practice of all kinds of people across Universities (both teachers and specialist staff), who support learning, for re-using small parts, elements and ideas from their own as well as colleagues’ and other collaborators’ materials. It was clear that there were materials that could be shared.

We wanted to rethink our approach to teaching and learning repositories by learning from successful Web 2.0 sharing sites – not by copying their user interface elements in a facile way, but by re-examining the core purpose and focus of the system itself.

We came to believe that a good way to understand the difference is to look at what services the sites offered their users. Research repositories succeed because the service they offer is one of Archiving, recording research outputs for posterity. The problem is that no one wants to archive their teaching resources.
In comparison, the popular Web 2.0 sites offer a different set of services:

• Hosting: storing digital content online, and making it public via a page with its own URL.

• Organisation: allowing the creation of composite structures (such as channels or albums), which are also available via a page with its own URL.

• Community: creating awareness of the site’s community, through comments, recommendations and explicit profiles that give users their own public page.

This resulted in number of key extensions to EPrints that together transform a static repository into a living community site. Inline previews ensure that resource pages are focused on the resource and not on metadata, collections allow users to gather together useful resources regardless of whether they were the original depositors, comments and usage stats create automatic attention information that helps with quality assessment, reveals activity and motivates user engagement, profile pages foster a sense of authorial identity and community, and remix tools encourage the reuse and reinvention of materials.

Fostering engagement

In on-going JISC-funded initiatives based in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, we have worked with our community of teachers and subject specialists to develop a different approach to the organisation, sharing and collaboration of the everyday teaching resources. We have drawn on the success of Web 2.0 applications such as Flick’r and YouTube; we have learned from the observed popularity of placing content to the fore, collaborating with known individuals, small communities; ease for providing comments, preference for low-threshold barriers to adding content, the importance of the search experience, interest in metrics (especially of views) as well as the attractions of personalisation and profile sharing.

We have deployed a number of sites using the EdShare extensions, including EdShare Southampton (www.edshare.soton.ac.uk) our institutional learning and teaching repository; HumBox (www.humbox.ac.uk), a share for use by the HEAcademy Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies Subject Centre’s Open Educational Resources Project; LORO (a repository for the Department of Languages at the Open University); and WBLR (a new repository for the University of Worcester).

EdShare Southampton Example

In the first year of operation for EdShare Southampton, we worked with a collaborative, co-design approach, seeking to link with our community both to understand concerns and motivations, as well as to build alliances to maximise our capacity to influence and support sharing and increased collaboration across the institution.

Supporting sharers in adding minimal metadata, we have added as much useful automatically generated metadata as feasible. We know the institutional affiliation of people as well as their name. EdShare Southampton has also been integrated with the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) management system of the University from the outset. Everyone who has a University login identity is able to add content to EdShare.

We have found that our work of developing the infrastructure to support sharing educational resources across the University has complemented work to develop a culture for sharing acros the institution.

Hugh Davis,
Seb Francois,
Yvonne Howard,
Patrick McSweeney,
Dave Millard,
Debra Morris,
Marcus Ramsden,
and
Su White

Ada Lovelace Pledge 2010

2010-03-24T13:50:00.002Z

I'm lucky enough to work in a world where I am surrounded by inspirational high achieving women. It makes meeting my pledge on Ada Lovelace day an easy task :-)

so where to begin? home of course, in Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton

Here in Learning Socieities Lab (LSL) we have an array of female researchers, postdocs, postgrads and summer interns who are the ultimate role models for every young woman who aspires to take a role in our technological future.

Let me tell you about a few of them who I've been lucky enough to work with this year

Its a big year for LSL because we are going to have a massive graduation ceremony in the summer. Of our female post grads, Reena Pau, Ilaria Liccardi and Asma Ounas will all be stepping up and for their intellect and hard work they need a massive round of applause. We have many other postgrads, but this year, these are the three who are in the limelight.

In our lab EA Draffan, Debra Morris and Yvonne Howard are three incredibly smart and hardworking, all different, but all fabulous team workers who help us to carve out our path.

This year I have been working with folk who have established the Doctoral Consortium in Web Science, and amongst the female students on that programme, its Lisa German, a female post grad who came into Web Science with a law degree who I think can be particularly inspirational. Of course I cant think about Web Science at Southampton without thinking of Wendy Hall (Dame Professor of course) who I know is a massive role model for many of our female post grad and under grad students, and who continues to be an inspiration for me.

And that reminds me of some of the fabulous undergraduate students who we have on our computer science, software engineering and IT degrees. This year I have four female project students and they are all amazing. Carly Wilson and Anna Asanova won scholarships this year to participate in the Hopper and what an impact that made on them. Big thanks and admiration here to Wendy who is the first out of the US president of ACM, and who established our participation in the Hopper when she was head of school for ECS. My other two female project students are Colette Haladjian and Christia Houry. Another third year, a tutee rather than a project student is Colette Munelly, she too is making great progress, carving out her path as she approaches here finals. All five of those undergrads are active in ECS women and I know that the collaborative effort of ECSWomen forms an important part of the supportive fabric which they find in ECS. And that reminds me to mention Kate Macarthur chair of ECS women and a post grad in IAM, and of course Joyce Lewis, who does so many different things for the school so many of which make it a place where young women can work and believe they will acheive and be recognised for that achievement. If you are looking for female role models then in ECS we have richness indeed.

Along the way this year there have been many other women in technology who are making a difference. One who has to be mentioned this year is Sue Black (University of Westminster) is well know in the UK, her work for Bletchley Park and with the BCS has really brought her into the spotlight, but I also have a big thank you to say to her for being a mentor to one of our students, never mind here amazing example of what you can achieve when you put your mind to it.

And for me, cheery faces and excellent achievements of women from the Ed Tech communities like Helen Keoghan and Frances Bell, Josie Taylor and Josie Fraser all leap to mind. There are many more, but this is not an Oscar thank you speech, just a personal reflection.

And that I guess is what ties together , thank you everyone, you've been fabulous.

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Whatever she does, whether she is a sysadmin or a tech entrepreneur, a programmer or a designer, developing software or hardware, a tech journalist or a tech consultant, we want to celebrate her achievements.

It doesn’t matter how new or old your blog is, what gender you are, what language you blog in, or what you normally blog about – everyone is invited to take part. All you need to do is sign up to this pledge and then publish your blog post any time on Tuesday 24th March 2009. If you’re going to be away that day, feel free to write your post in advance and set your blogging system to publish it that day.

campaigning for visual literacy

2010-02-17T18:27:00.001Z

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 couple of 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://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 download . The site include a link to the original paper and a range of associated materials.

Note: Editing this post will be intermittent, but as I work on this I am collecting and noting examples via delicious and you can see links to papers and examples by looking at my public delicious tags.

Finally there is a work in progress of tools (image examples and discussions to be added)

Tools List

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

Data

Information

Concept

Strategy

Metaphor

Compoud

This page 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 an analysed

Tables

Pie Charts

Magic Quadrant

Concept Visualisation

Concept Map

this is a formal modeling tool commonly used for knowledge rep0resentation and ontology creation.

Mind Map

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 provides an interactive snapshop of mapping software.

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

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

Spray Diagram

Stakeholder Rating Map

Portfolio Diagram

Strategy Map

Life Cycle Diagram

S Cycle

Hype Cycle

Stakeholder Map

Fishbone Diagram

Tree

Timeline

Temple Diagram

Cycle Diagram

Funnel Diagram

Scatter Plot

Pie Chart

Bar Chart

Histogram

Continuum

Cartesian Co-ordinates

Other Stuff

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)

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

visualising words and their semantic interconnections

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".

tag cloud
tag crowd

http://www.tagcrowd.com/

"TagCrowd is a web application for visualizing word frequencies in any user-supplied text by creating what is popularly known as a tag cloud or text cloud.

It was created by Daniel Steinbock, a doctoral student in Design and Education at Stanford University.

Today, text clouds are primarily used for navigation and visualization on Web 2.0 sites that employ user-generated metadata (tags) as a categorization scheme. (Flickr is a good example.)
TagCrowd is doing something different.

When we look at a text cloud, we see not only an informative, beautiful image that communicates much in a single glance, we see a whole new perspective on text.

TagCrowd is taking tag clouds far beyond their original function:

* as topic summaries for speeches and written works
* as blog tool or website analysis for search engine optimization (SEO)
* for visual analysis of survey data
* as brand clouds that let companies see how they are perceived by the world
* for data mining a text corpus
* for helping writers and students reflect on their work
* as name tags for conferences, cocktail parties or wherever new collaborations start
* as resumes in a single glance
* as visual poetry"

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
http://www.gapminder.org

refs
to complete

Concept Mapping - Trochim 1989 ( trochim's six steps)
data analysisTukey 1977

Implications of "Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World"

2010-01-25T17:21:00.003Z

10.30 - 11.00 - Richard Hill, Sheffield Hallam, Culture, Critical-thinking and Computing

The presentation will illustrate one approach to tackling cultural challenges in the teaching of Postgraduate computing students. Using a combination of commonly available 'web 2.0' type tools and curriculum changes, some of the difficulties of addressing critical-thinking in a multi-cultural environment are explored.

11.00 - 11.30 Mike Leigh & Lucy Mathers, De Montfort University, A tool for developing information evaluation skills in a Web2.0 environment:

Presentation of the results of a project that created an information evaluation tool that enhances students' understanding of how to select materials for academic work; and also provides a 'quick and easy' method facilitating comparison of diverse source materials.

11.30 - 12.00 Su White, University of Southampton Share Collaborate and Exchange, reshaping education through technology: the EdShare experience.

Our presentation would be able to look at one institutions experience of the current web 2.0 world particularly in the context of our use of departmental infrastructure and our teaching and learning repository in computer science education. The presentation will then conclude by situating our current 2.0 context/experience in terms of emerging trends towards more pervasive use and experience of linked data

12.00 - 12.30 John Traxler, Wolverhampton University Web2.0 - the University Challenge & the Changing, Moving World

The ideology and technology of web2.0, the ideology and technology that transforms us all from readers to writers, has significant consequences for the institutions of higher education. It is accompanied and accelerated by increasing, almost universal, mobility and connectedness and contrasted by the fixity or perhaps sluggishness of many aspects of institutions of higher education. This presentation will focus on these contrasts, explore whether these fundamental or superficial and ask about the responses that could come from the institutions.

12.30 - 1.15 Lunch

1.15 - 1.45 Stylianos Hatzipanagos - the impact and relevance of Web 2.0 to the culture of Higher Education;

How and where advancements in technology are altering traditional pedagogical practices; - how and where advancements in technology are altering traditional pedagogical practices; - new literacies in relation to digital media and digital cultures; - theories and technologies of change in education and future directions.

1.45 - 2.15 Mark Childs The challenges that using immersive virtual worlds present to educators.

These include institutional (who controls the technologies educators are allowed to use?), cultural (what opposition do students and institutions have to learning that is virtual? fantastic? fun? and what responses are appropriate), ethical (can we make the use of technologies compulsory if they are difficult, novel, transgressive?).

2.15 - 2.45 Jamie Wood Social Bookmarking and inquiry-based learning:

Experiences and possibilities - this presentation will report on my experiences as a practitioner, using social bookmarking in History seminars with first year students and will then reflect on the possibilities for the use of social bookmarking (and Web2.0) more broadly in teaching and learning.

Rich Learning Environments - Education 2.0 or 3.0?

2009-12-07T18:22:00.003Z

I have been working on various applications of technologies for learning for many years now. Along the way, I've been developing an idea of what I mean by a rich learning environment.

Rich learning environments are dynamic spaces which bring together personalised information and perspectives across a core of resources which can support the learner in addressing their educational needs. Rich learning spaces exploit the technology affordances of their component parts, but provide added value by simplifying and customising the interface to a set of complex and diverse resources based on a learners context and education needs.

These needs might be categorised into four broad areas personal space; institutional space; support space; and 'good for learning' space

Personal Space:
A learner will already make use of their own preferred tools and applications which may be used either in addressing the demands of formal learning (for example using google docs to create a word processed document) or informal learning (using delicious to store and find information and resources on topics related to study). Each learner will have (most likely) their own machine(s) (laptop, desktop, mobile (?) and within that operating system will have selected and be familiar with a set of tools. Some parts of this (e.g. Skype, text messaging) may not be clearly linked or associated with learning tasks, but none the less may be of great importance to the student.

Institutional Space.
The institution which the learning is studying in, or at which the learner proposes to study, will have 'spaces' which have a role in informal or formal learning and learning support. It is possible that the set of spaces will change during the learners route through education with the institution.]sites/sources will be of verying importance at different times.
At southampton you may have a number of discrete spaces - e.g. UOS web, ECS web, ECS web behind the firewall, Sussed, blackboard challenges some of these are password protected, vpn protected etc

Support Space
dependi8ng on the context of the student, there will be external spaces which mught be of use/relevant to formal and informal learning - e.g. In Southampton the SUSU.org web site provides additional information and support, for international students it may be that their home country embassy site, or some home office sites may be of importance

'Good for learning'
Students may benefit from information and resources which are located outside their current personal space, and outside the institutional space. For example the National Union of Students offers support and advice related to study and examinations. There are other sources of information (appoaches to leawrning inventories, second language study).

Social Space
underpinning the environment there is an integrating layer provided by social space. This incorporates email, messaging, and social software. It acts as the glue for the environment.

If we consider student whose topic of study is technology based, it may be that we could identify a set of sources/resources which could enrich the users perspective, but which are not obvious;y initially related to learning. E.G. In computer science/web technologies, maybe Zdnet, Slashdot, british computer society, ACM digital library, IEEE digital library it may be that a set of resources could be identified which are relevant and helpful to the rich learning environment user, which could usefully be integrated into a customised environment.

Challenges

Creating a rich learning environment presents a number of challenges

Integrating a set of resources to become an apparent coherent whole.

Offering personalisation and customisation of an environment so that it enables the user to retain use of their preferred tools, but also that it perform and educational function of supporting the learning

Providiung innovative and user friendly methods of accessing and overseeing (and perhaps organising/re-organising) complex information sources.

There is a challenge of how to customise the environment (at first use, during the course of use)

Education and Web2.0

2009-11-16T15:47:00.003Z

Working with EdShare and OneShare building resource collections for use in education brings up a whole variety of discussion topics about the nature of Web2.0, the social web, and the role of sharing and repositories in UK Higher Education.

Our project ran a very interesting workshop on this topic early in November 2009. Below is a collection of notes and observations, plus a few photos, which capture something of the day.

we made lots of time for group discussions, folk here are considering issues around metadata ( or does it matter data as I like to think of it).

As you might imagine there is space for a variety of views between the hard line, information scientist formal categorisation

and the more pragmatic what can be generate automatically,

and do we need that information anyway, lets just get it tagged by users, kind of approach.

Ali Dickens from the subject centre for Language, Linguistics and Ares Studies (LASS) is involved in Language Box (for Linguists), and Humbox (for humanities).

She is planning to run a full day session on copyright on December 14 2009. At our workshop she led a session where she asked folk to do a risk analysis on issues around copyright.

Its a topic which attracts a lot of interest, and we like to call our interactions with the lawyers on this one poking the dragon. You can see from the flipcharts what we might poke the dragon for.

the final session of the day was another practical task, using post it notes to look at our favourite web2.0 applications, and think about the technology affordances within those categorisations.

International Dimensions of Graduate Employability

2009-11-16T15:19:00.002Z

Notes and thoughts on an the international dimension of graduate employability following a workshop at Oxford Brookes

little, global perspectives

interesting question
what percentage of our students have had experience of employment
track across the years
survey year 1 (jumpstart)
survey year 1 (info 1010)
survey year 2 (info2009)
? survey year 3 on exit
survey masters on admission
?? is it a condition of their visa that they cannot work?

question, was the decline of placement rates over time response to Quality agendas (difficulty of managing quality, and cost of supporting students out of institituion, plus cost of

definition

a blend of understanding, skilful practices, efficacy beliefs (or legitimate self-confidence) and reflectiveness' Knight and Yorke 2003

presentation slides will be available on HEA centre website and also project website

Shiel, leadership foudation fellowship, elearning

overview of the internationalisation
?? putting the world into world class education
perspecives

Take home messages

People
Benda Little, CHERI. Principal Policy Analyst, Centre for Higher Education Research and Information Open University,

Chris Sheil, Chris Shiel, Director of the Centre for Global Perspectives, Bournemouth University

Notes
The event was run by the FDTL project
http://www.enhancingemployability.org.uk
http://www.reflexproject.org - report to the European Commission.
HE academiuy website - document on Internationalisation

HE academiuy website - document on Internationalisation (difficult to find - a case for a repository?? repositories rather than content managemnts

thoughts
handouts all available at the

Semantic Technologies for Education at ALT-C

2009-08-07T16:40:00.011+01:00

We are hoping to get folk to sign up for our workshop on semantic technologies for education which will be held at this year's ALT-C in Manchester in the UK. I'm just preparing the materials and about to send out a mailing, so this blog in a placeholder in the meantime. You may have read the original proposal for the workshop in a previous posting on this blog ALT-09 Semanitic Technologies for Education.

The workshop is numbered 0255 scheduled to take place on Tuesday 8th September at 13.40-15.00 in room 4.204.

Biographies
Sheila MacNeill, Educational Content SIG Cooordinator (University of Strathclyde) Sheila MacNeill is the Educational Content (EC) SIG Cooordinator. Sheila joined CETIS in July 2004 and is currently seconded 3 days a week to CETIS, based at the University of Strathclyde. When not at CETIS, Sheila is a Learning Technologist with LT Scotland, where she is involved in the development of a range of online learning resources for schools and colleges. She is actively involved in the development of resources which utilise interoperability standards

Hugh Davis, University of Southampton, Director of eLearning and Head of the ECS, Learning Societies Lab.

Thanassis Tiropanis, University of Southampton, ECS Learning Societies Lab, Thanassis is the principal investigator for the JISC SemTech project.

Su White, University of Southampton, ECS Learning Societies Lab is a project team member with SemTech.

Working jointly with Sheila MacNeill from JISC CETIS, colleagues from The Learning Societies Lab at Southampton, plan to use the workshop to stimulate the debate on Semantic Technologies for Education. The ALT-C community represent a significant cohort of educational users who are likely to be working with students and using semantic technologies in the near future, so are a key target audience for disseminating the findings of our survey of semantic technologies for education which was conducted earlier in 2009.

If you want a sneak preview, the survey is online at http://semtech-survey.ecs.soton.ac.uk/. Researchers reviewed thirty-six tools and services. Most of the tools identified were not purpose-built for education but are valuable to education by virtue of their use and deployment of well-formed metadata or data interoperability and integration.

The survey identified four essential types of application area:

(i) collaborative authoring and annotation
(ii) searching and matching
(iii) repositories, VLEs and authoring tools
(iv) infrastructural technologies for linked data and semantic enrichment.

The use and uptake of related tools and services by UK HE institutions was also investigated, you can find further information online at http://wiki.semtech.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

Seminar on iTunesU

2009-08-04T12:48:00.005+01:00

The debate ranged from whether iTunesU was a tool for education as well as marketing, to issues about committing to a platform which can be seen to exclude some users. ITuneU isof particular interest for two the ECS research groups (IAM and LSL). ECS-TV was spawned in IAM (Intelligence Agents and Multimedia) and current projects include work to find effective ways of capturing and accessing video resources in our EdShare institutional learning and teaching repository. EdShare is hosted in LSL (Learning Societies Lab) and we are working hard to extend and develop its functionality in a way that suits the working lives of academics and students at University.

Lawrence Stephenson from Apple's iTunesU came down to Southampton today to give us a seminar covering recent development from Apple, and the logistics and details of how - a man who is passionate about education :-) Lawrence is driving the iTunesU initiative in the UK

Lawrence gave us an overview of the Universities who have so far committed to appearing on iTunesU, to date there are 10 UK universities already on iTunesU, with more than a hundred institutions lined up to be online via the portal in the near future.

Discussions which arose from the presentation included

User generated content
Populating the site
Relationship between EdShare and any future initiative
The role of ECS-TV in as a role model
New modes of teaching and interactions

Unfortunately, because of intellectual property constraints we were not able to record this seminar, so if you want to hear what Lawrence was saying you will have to invite him to a seminar of your own!

sign up process:
there are a series of steps/requirements to be met in order to have a presence on iTunesU these include:

High level of institutional commitment
Looking for 200 pieces of digital content
Process of populating the digital content (Ultimately the institution is responsible for its own content)
Formal agreement
Launch on a TUESDAY

NOTE: the quickest it has been done is three months

Notes and Links:

Apple's overview of iTunesU
Open University's evaluation of impact
Current UK presence include
University of Oxford, Open University, Warwick, UCL

Back To School

2009-07-29T14:59:00.003+01:00

Its always good for a teacher to go back to school. This year, in anticipation of setting up a sabbatical at a French University, I decided to go back to school and brush up my French. I was fortunate, in that I was going to be in Paris for a conference in any case for a conference.

Maybe its my personal preference, but I found a couple of weeks intensive study an excellent option. It gave me a chance to focus and refine my understanding, and once again I found myself musing on ways we could take an intensive approach in our regular courses at University.

So what was their recipe for success?

small classes with expert tuition
highly motivated learners
intensive, highly focussed topic area

ITICSE 09 UPMC Paris

2009-07-21T15:44:00.017+01:00

More on ITiCSE:

Fab working group (Professional Values In CS Education) expertly run by Ursula Fuller and Bob Kleim from University of Kent in the UK. You can take a look at the proceedings, and expect our working group report to emerge at the end of the review process as a publication in inroads.
I will be participating in a workshop on a similar area which Tony Jenkins from Leeds will be running at Kent in August 2009 at the HEA-ICS conference.

As well as taking part in the working group on profesional values in computing education, I was at ITiCSE to present a paper about the relationship between research and teaching.

In some ways there are aspects of these two activities which overlap, and in both the paper and the working group we are interested in the perspective of change starting from the curriculum design.

Activities which find and exploit natural links between research and teaching are powerful additions to the traditional curriculum with its content led, technological bias. Researchers are highly tuned learners, and typically activities which relate research and learning, also contribute to the learners understanding of the value of independent/informal learning in a highly authentic context. I've done a few blogs on this subject already, and its a recurrent (and I think, imporant) theme in my work at Southampton..

Our working group at ITiCSE was really strenghtened by contributions from Diana Fitch, who is a careers expert who work very closely with our academic team in ECS at Southampton ( just part of the stuff she does supporting colleagues in a range of schools across the university). Her expertise and understanding of employers' views brings an important addition to the academics' analysis of the curriculum and its interpretation of the requirements of professional accreditation.

The conference was well organised with helpful student assistants

As it turned out, it was a pretty heavy commitment, and I was left exhausted at the end, but hey...

Some good papers in the sessions I was attending, Lil Bloom from toronto was presenting some interesting stuff on working with CS people on communication skills. I already use the university of Toronto materials about writing with some of my students, at various levels. Her paper included some fine examples of good practice.

Highlights
I have a few pics,

I was awed by the UPMC building which is in the process of being renovated.

We went to a few restaurants, and had good meals accompanied by good conversation. We went to the Big Ben Bar next to the Blue Train for a few wines one evening, that was after the reception where the stalwart few were rewarded for our waiting by a final wine course of some quality champagne. But did not take pics
However on campus, the mural/grafitti of a fish tank was impressive

particularly liked the escalators in our building, although we never figured out when exactly they actually worked...

The coach left for the boat trip ridiculously early, with a few photo opportunities

After the boat trip (we had to wait an hour an a half on the quay, but the food was good, I did not take any of the the usual tourist pics although we went past Notre Dame, Quay D'Orsay etc etc)

and...as I was saying... after the boat tripUrsula and I went to find her hat shop in rue St Sepulchre

Diana was a star, fortuitously speaking excellent french, the result of a fine international education.

Joyce and Chuck, who completed our team were good folk, and helped us understand a different perspective on values education.

The picture of the working group taken on the final day shows a rather tired band of people. Thanks to Karen Fraser (HEA-ICS) for this bit of photo journalism!

Afterwards I went to Gare de Lyon, had a nice lunch ( and got to understand why the big ben bar had a resident cat) I then got on the TGV for the south.

I was a bit exhausted so don't have so many pics from then....

Professional Values, Attitudes and Development in the Computing Disciplines

2009-07-03T18:29:00.004+01:00

If the phrase being in the pink means anything to you, you will appreciate this photograph of our working area at UPMC (Paris VI), host to the 2009 ACM SIGCSE ITiCSE conference.

We are working on professional values, attitudes and development in the computing disciplines. More later, but in the meantime, admire the architecture and the interior design

F-ALT09

2009-06-26T16:45:00.010+01:00

Like all good festivals, ALT has developed a very healthy fringe (F-ALT), and I have just signed up to join the fringe gang in sunny Manchester to take part in a whole host of unconference events.

True to form, the ALT fringe helps renew the life blood, and keep the debate going. We are a strong party of bloggers and twitterers (tag is falt09 & #falt09 for twitter), so take a look at the fringe pages, sign up as a fringe participant (no cost) while you put ALT-09 in your diary, Manchester, UK 8-10 September 2009 and sort out your conference registration right now.

Presenter's booking deadline: 29 June 2009.
Earlybird booking deadline: 6 July 2009.
Bookings close: 14 August 2009.

Quite apart from the fringe, and the fabulous workshop of semantic technologies for education that I will be running with a few others from CETIS and Southampton, there are a few good reasons for attending - see an earlier post of mine....

Darmstadt - a road less travelled?

2009-06-21T18:17:00.005+01:00

on the road, is this one less travelled? This photo comes from a post #IATEL run, and you could run through my #IATEL post to see where the idea comes from....

IATEL: Interdisciplinary approaches to technology enhanced learning

2009-06-19T16:57:00.009+01:00

They wanted to call it an educamp ( a barcamp for education), and the folk at TU Darmstadt who organised this conference collected together a broad selection of contributors to augment their core community of post grads working in TEL within a particularly inter-disciplinary framework. You can take a look at their programme on the Interdisciplinary approaches to technology enhanced learning website, which will give you a flavour of the objectives.

It seemed to me there was a lot of discussion centring on learner choice, which put me in mind of the phrase, a road less travelled. I was thinking that when we have created learning environments, we have made highways (like VLEs) and expected our learners to take them. In fact they are each going down their own personal road, so it seemed that an appropriate quote
would be:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the 'one less traveled' by,
And that has made all the difference.
would be

According to wikipedia (yes google helped me find it) Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken" is sometimes mistakenly entitled "The Road Less Travelled" which comes from the final lines of the poem: - apparently the critics think its ironic, basically you can read it as regret (not a likely intent) or positive choice...

my point it that learning is about choice, often learners make choices without realising that they have made choices, and later may regret the consequences but never link it with the original choice.

I see part of the role of education to assist learners in becoming more aware of their choices...

Our theme was about learning (in the/from the) network, where learning and network are both purposefully ambiguous words such that the phrase can be interpreted in many different ways.

the conference took an open structure, topped and tailed with kenotes presentations, but placing a big emphasis on what was effectively an active learning process for the participants working in workshop discussion sessions for each of the themes. The workshop process (posters, explanations, analysis, intense discussions) were effectively given a whole working day, with the them co-ordinators doing some heavy-weight analysis during the overnight break - and missing a rather fine social event with some intersting bands and singers!

The way the organisers described the structure was as follows:

“As a direct consequence of such an interdisciplinary approach, the conference format will not be defined by a preponderance of presentations and papers. In separately moderated and creative discussion forums one is able to examine and work towards a common understanding of the issues at stake. such an approach should also enable an assessment of how and to what extent the idea of interdisciplinary research is sustainable: whether it simply brings forth an only loosely fitting framework, or whether it evolves into a truly encompassing project that leads to results, insights and solutions which go beyond the simple sum of the individual trajectories.”

The two keynotes in our theme, followed the workshop discussion, and provided an interesting afterthought the the fairly intensive discussions which had preceeded it. One keynote was from Hugh Davis (the demise of the VLE) and Graham Attwell (a take on Personal Learning Environments), and the session was being directed by Max Mühlhäuser from Darmstadt, and led and managed by some very able PhD students.

There was a pleasing complementarity and dovetailing of the two views which Hugh and Graham presented, I guess in some senses representing a distillation of observations based on the UK experience, as well as incorporating some of the various points which had emerged from the preceeding discussions and other keynotes.

Graham's presentation was wonderfully eclectic in its references, looking at personal learning. I have asked him if he could make some kind of map of the references so that we could have an overview for consideration. Amongst other things he suggested that constructionism is not a pedagogical theory....and that we would see the appropriating of google wave for learning

Hugh's presentation, I think, reflected his perspectives as a computer science academic leading in technology enhanced learning, and as a university director of education responsible for e-learning across the university. He was also arguing for the priviledging or priotitising the personal needs of the learner over the thus far default choice of working with technologies which are adopted because of organisational priorities.

Alongside the presentations and discussions there was a very useful twitter stream (#iatel, and occassionally #iatel09)

Each of the groups plans to take forward their discussions into a published journal paper, and I for one, enjoyed being part of the proceedings, and am looking forward to the additional work, which will turn our speculations into some clear ideas and statements.

pictures from the conference are available under a CC licence from Flickr

Refs
in no particular order, and for all sorts of different reasons
Graham Attwell http://www.pontysysgu.com - a bridge to learning
Conference web site http://www.gkel.tu-darmstadt.de/iatel/de
...
papers which I thought about during the presentations
Bloom's The 2 Sigma Problem
Becher and Trowler, Academic Tribes and Territories
Biglan's Disciplinary Differences
Cox et all Vicarious Learners
Mazur - Peer Instruction

Essential Reading for Project Students

2009-06-04T16:07:00.011+01:00

Basic Advice
I suggest that you dip into the following publications to get a sense of the sorts of things which I expect you to read. They cover the current discussions and debates surrounding technology enhanced learning plus some classic views of concepts which I expect you to be grappling with in your project.

You may wish to bookmark this page, and check from time to time to see if the list has changed/grown.

Orientation followed by research - refining your understanding

Its often a good idea to do some browsing of documents, and maybe a few web searches to get some initial orientation from a topic area before immersing yourself in the papers.

When you read the papers, I am looking for you becoming familiar with the basic structure of academic papers, and also developing your own understanding of and model for academic writing.

Technology Affordances
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, 8, 111-130.

Semantic Web in Education

Ohler, J. Semantic Web in Education EDUCAUSE Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 4 (October–December 2008)
see also the special issue of JIME edited by Terry Anderson and Denise Whitelock
Anderson, T and Whitelock, J. (2004) The Educational Semantic Web: Visioning and Practicing the Future of Education: Journal of Interactive Media in Education 2004 (1)

Web 2.0
FRANKLIN, T. & VAN HARMELEN, M. (2007) Web 2.0 for content for learning and teaching in higher education. JISC www. jisc. ac. uk/media/documents/programmes/digitalrepositories/web2-contentlearningand-teaching. pdf.
O'REILLY, T. (2005) What Is Web 2.0 – Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/ 09/30/what-is-web-20.html
Vicarious Learning
MAYES, J. T. & NEILSON, I. (1996) Learning from other people's dialogues: questions about computer based answers. IN COLLIS, B. & DAVIES, G. (Eds.) Innovating learning with innovative technology. Amsterdam: North Holland.
e-learning, technology enhanced learning
MAYES, T. & FREITAS, S. D. (2006) Review of e-learning theories, frameworks and models JISC e-Learning Models Desk Study. Bristol, JISC.
JISC Podcasts
listening and browsing the JISC podcasts can help you become oriented in the field. http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/podcasts.aspx
JISC Publications
you may find it helpful to browse the JISC publications website to find relevant reports. Often you will find the reference list for such reports more instructive as a starting point for research than a host of google searches! link to JISC publications index http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications.aspx

keywords
technology affordances, vicarious learning, personal learning environments, e-learning, technology enhanced learning, tel, web 2.0,