SIGCSE 2012 - another outing for the Web Science Curriculum

Web Science (and me) are going to SIGCSE 2012

There is quite a bit of Web Science in the conference this year - although it is hardly taking centre stage.

This blog will be refined over the next couple of days but here we are for starters...

ACM SIGCSE is the Special Interest Croup for Computer Sciecne Education - so as someone who is working in computer science, teaching and researching in computer science and web science, and particularly interested in computer science education and the web science curriculum, you can understand that I would be pitching up to take the pulse of the community.

On top of that, I am able to present the paper which I co-wrote with Michalis Vafopoulos - now of the university of central greece, titled

Web Science: expanding the notion of Computer Science - the paper is in ECS eprints http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/22710/ and will also be in the ACM conference proceedings.

This paper develops further some of the ideas expressed in our highly commended paper presented at the 2011 Web Science Conference in Koblenz last year  Negotiating the Web Science Curriculum through Shared Educational Artefacts which is also available from ECS  sprints  http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/22141/ , direct from the Web Science Trust,  http://journal.webscience.org/439/ or via the ACM digital library.

Web Science Perspectives

Pre-conference

Open Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Computers and Society (SIGCAS)

This session is hosted by the current char and the immediate past chair of the ACM Computers and Society Special Interest Group. With the interdisciplinary nature of web science it is always interesting to see how different people are talking about changes. I am hoping to have some time catching up with these folks

SIGCAS is the ACM Special Interest Group that addresses the social and ethical consequences of widespread computer usage. SIGCAS' main goals are to raise awareness about the impact that technology has on society, and to support and advance the efforts of those who are involved in this important work.

Our members are computer professionals from both industry and academia, as well as ethicists, psychologists, sociologists and others. We welcome students from a variety of disciplines. Our areas of involvement include computer ethics, universal access to computer technology, security, privacy, and reliability. We collaborate with other ACM bodies that are engaged in related work, such as USACM, SIGITE and SIGCSE.

Ben Schneiderman provides a testimonial for the group on its web site http://www.sigcas.org/ which is also testament in a way that Web Science definitely belongs in the SIGCAS community, since probably the first time that the ACM community go a formal heads up on the emerging importance of web science and its implications for the broader computer science community was in the paper in CACM which Ben published in 2007 titled Web Science: A Provocative Invitation to Computer Science.

Main Program(me) - a timeline view

 

Thursday:

Plenary Session
Keynote Speaker: Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. - I have a doctoral student (Jian Shi)  looking at students learning programming - so this is really relevant to his area of study

this presentation took the perspective of designing learning rather than delivering teaching, and there was a lot of emphasis on reframing the learning experience - for example flipping the classroom, and critique approaches.

some time was spent talking about team software engineering projects, and various items of advice on how to run sessions - allocating peer marks from a budget, advertising to get external clients - keeping team sizes at 3,4 and 5 with  preference for 4 team memnberts

recommended book to emerge Peopleware by Decosta - have put it on my Kindle Wishlist! should also put time to read on my wish list ;-)

 

Computer Science Curriculum 2013 – Reviewing the Strawman Report from the ACM/IEEE-CS Task Force

This is really relevant to the pitch we are making in our paper, so should be interesting.

http://cs2013.org/

presenters of a very useful (and well attended) session were Mehran Sahami (stanford) Steve Roach (U Texas at El Paso, Ernesto Cuadros-Vargas, San Pablo Catholic University, David Reed Creigton University

The Strawman report - http://ai.stanford.edu/users/sahami/CS2013/strawman-draft/cs2013-strawman.pdf

There was an introduction from Sahami, followed by a presentation of the Body of Knowledge by David Reed

The body of knowledge is chapter 5 in the Strawman report

The consultation on this has been widely representative of different sizes and types of institution, but entirely US centric.

this may not be true as far as the external reviewers were concerned.

main points which came up - revision of BOK, there is a move away from programming to principles to software development fundamentals which is independent of paradigm

seeks to broaden thinking away from equating programming fundamental with introductory programming courses

information assurance and security

parallel and districted computing

networking and comms - replaces net-centric

platform based development (elective only)

curriculum organisation

there tiered classification of BOK units

 

 

 

 

 

for each of the content areas, the topics are listed  and there is an expectation of certain learning outcomes classed under three broad categories

 

 

 

 

special note of interest - software developed by  Ernesto Cuadros-Vargas at San Pablo Catholic University for evaluating existing curricula against the recommended curricula

Friday

 

 

Saturday

 

General Perspectives

Other stuff of interest

Teaching Ethics in Computer Science: Active Learning - workshop

 

THINGS TO FOLLOW UP

Kent state uni are running a digital sciences interdisciplinary bachelors which may be of interest

refs

Shneiderman, B. 2007. Web Science: A Provocative Invitation to Computer Science. Communications of the ACM, 50 (6), 25-27.

Vafopoulos, M. Web Science Subject Categorization (WSSC) Web Science Trust http://webscience.org/2010/wssc.html

Vafopoulos, M. May 16-18 2011. The Web Science Subject Categorization (WSSC). In Proceedings of the ACM WebSci '11, (Koblenz, Germany).

White, S., Croitoru, M., Bazan, S., Cerri, S., Davis, H. C., Jonquet, C., Prini, G., Scharffe, F., Staab, S., Tiropanis, T. and Vafopoulos, M. May 16-18 2011. Negotiating the Web Science Curriculum Development through Shared Educational Artefacts. In Proceedings of the ACM WebSci '11, (Koblenz, Germany).

White, S. and Vafopoulos, M.N. 2012. Web Science: expanding the notion of Computer Science. 43rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, 28th February-3rd March 2012 (Rayleigh, NC, 2012).

 

Computer Science Conferences and Deadlines

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

November 2010 CETIS2010 - notes

draft notes

CETIS 2010 Nottingham, November 15-16 2010

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

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

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

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

Keynote


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

twitter visualisation link

Options available parallel session day 1

Open Innovation

Relationship Management in HE and FE

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

Integrating and Subverting Corporate Systems for Educational Purposes

Next Generation Content

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

Service Design references and Webliography

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

twitter tag #rminhe
JISC CETIS relationship managment website

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

CETIS report on service design - from University of Derby

Running notes on the presentation:

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

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

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

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

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


Part 2 - interactive session on Service Design

principles underpinning the service design approach

Part 3 - the DERBI experience

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

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

Perspectives/Issues Discussed

fail points

heuristics for management
spotting the fail points

some discussion

biographies


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

Sharon Perry is one of the CETIS team

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

Day 2

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

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

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

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


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

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

PowerSet -> ms, bing

Trueknowledge (UK) 200m

Freebase - metaweb google

Tripit not bought yet


canonical source of community enriched data

Seån O'Riain DERI NUI Galway

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

ref - open society foundation open data study

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

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

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

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

Tim Berners-Lee's five star scheme

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


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


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

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

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

Feedback in Plenary: links and notes
take a look

Disruptive Innovation http://tinyurl.com/disruptive2010

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

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


Designing Learning, towards a scalable interdisciplinary design science of learning

ref - transforming american education - learning powered by technology


Wang and Hannafin Design Based Research 1995

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

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

Twitter at FIE

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

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

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

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

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

as @tgmcewan said thanks to #ibahn and #marriot

#PLE_BCN

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

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


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

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

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

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

Thoughts

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


things I found/the conference used

Visible Tweets

Cirip

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

Scribble Pad
http://moourl.com/ple1


things that made me seasick

google wave

prezi

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

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

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

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

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

People in the session I chaired


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

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

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


participant blogs

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

remote viewers blogs/comments

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

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

@pgsimoes Paulo Simões

@samscam Sam Easterby-Smith

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

@ggrosseck Gabriela Grosseck

http://pleconference.crowdvine.com/


http://visibletweets.com/

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

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

Sappo Campus - Portugal

Work in the Basque Country from Oskar Casquero et al

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

Semantic Technologies for Education at ALT-C

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/

F-ALT09

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....

ALT-09 Manchester - why I will be there

The thing about conferences is that you get out of them what you put in. ALT-C 2009 is in Manchester this year, and I will be attending. We have an proposal for an exciting workshop on semantic technologies in the last stages of submission (details further down this post). I don't attend every year but I do think that ALT-C is a really interesting conference which reflects the whole range of activities fostered by the learning technologies communities across the UK. I found the Fringe events last year particularly rewarding, never mind the rest of the programme.

It's useful in many different ways. The various permutations of 'this what I did in my teaching' presentations serve to remind us of the breadth and wealth of different educational activities which are undertaken in classrooms across the world. Respect too the fact that many delegates are in relatively junior roles, without any significant budget, and the only way they are going to get a place at a conference is if the are actually presenting either a paper or poster. The best way to understand a tradition, I think, is to engage in a debate which discusses that tradition. Newcomers need to be welcomed and helped understand the existing discourse.

Admittedly ALT-C is UK centric, but it does attract a growing list of international delegates many of whom go on to be regulars. Plus there is no shame in it UK focus, since it soon becomes clear that there is much happening here which is world leading. The combined impact of educational drivers and supportive funding from bodies including the JISC, the Funding Councils, and the HEA mean that much work at the leading edge is taking place right here in our backyard - UK HE plc. Never mind additional input from a host of different institutional innovation grants, and even the odd bit of funding from the likes of the ESRC and EPSRC.

Now sufficiently established to have generated its own fringe F-ALT, the event in Manchester this year it titled "In dreams begins responsibility" - choice, evidence, and change" and promises to be the usual interesting and eclectic mix. You will find me at the fringe, catchup up with old chums, and (hopefully) running this rather interesting workshop of semantic technolgies in education. If this revision is accepted you can expect us to be putting out a call for participation, we are looking for expert discussants, and workshop attendees who feel they want to join in this important new development, so if semantic technolgies for education is in your sights, read on....