Web Science Meetup - Consolidating networks of excellence

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

from tragedy to joy - the real story of the commons

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.

1. 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]
2. Ian Angus. The Myth of the Tragedy of the Commons. Socialist Voice, August 24, 2008 [back]
3. 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 :-)

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

How linked data will benefit higher education

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

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

Abstract:

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

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

View more presentations from Su White.

Refs

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

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

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

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

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



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


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

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

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

RDFa

MySociety http://www.mysociety.org/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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/

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....

ALT-09 Semantic Technologies for Education

This is a slightly expanded version of the abstract which was constrained by the word limits of ALT

ALT workshop proposal
Semantic Technologies in Education – exploring the practitioners’ perspective
Abstract
This workshop will collect and share insights into current understandings and future applications of semantic technologies in education.University education is embracing Web2.0 including social networks and the read/write-web. We are aware of predictions that the Semantic Web (Web 3.0) is imminent. Researchers are developing understandings of semantic technologies, and experimenters are utilising novel Semantic Web applications.
This workshop will :

• augment the findings of a recent JISC survey on semantic technologies in education;
• calibrate the findings against the experience and understandings of members of the ALT community;
• use feedback to further develop the survey’s technology roadmap.

JISC commissioned an investigation into semantic technologies in learning and teaching (SemTech) due for completion early in 2009. The SemTech Project Website summarises information about semantic technologies in education and contains an analysis of the technologies and applications thus far identified.
Following a brief overview of our investigation of semantic technologies in education the workshop will consist of structured group discussions from selected perspectives (educational, technical and organisational).

We expect participants to come from a wide range of backgrounds with varying levels of prior knowledge and expertise, and will work carefully to make the activity as productive as possible for all participants irrespective of their different needs and expectations. The workshop structure will be fine-tuned to match the particular interests of participants, who will work in groups of eight using flip charts to produce a poster for a two-minute poster pitch. A second peer review group activity will comment on each poster. A plenary session will identify next steps

Each participant in the workshop will receive a copy of the SemTech report, plus detailed activity guidance notes which they can also take away and use in their own institution. Participants will use the workshop to:

1. establish a base level of awareness of current developments in semantic technologies and the way in which they can be used in education
2. establish a basic understanding of current range and use of semantic technologies in education, as identified by the SemTech study
3. identify and share knowledge of semantic technologies in UK education.
4. comment on and add to findings in the JISC report on Semantic Technologies in Education
5. identify colleagues at other institutions who share their interest in semantic technologies in education
6. discuss, plan and agree future collaborations to further their interest in semantic technologies in education

A summary record of the discussion will be available to participants after the event, and will be subsequently published electronically, via the SemTech wiki and a workshop blog-post

Basic Structure – total 90 minutes
1. Welcome and Overview of method (workshop team)Individual introduction plus explanation helping participants understand the role of their contribution. 10 minutes
2. Introductions - Tables amongst themselves Tables will each have been labelled with clear flag to encourage workable set formation (see activity 5 below) 5 minutes
3. Scoping of the proposed activities and tasks (Su White)
familiarising participants with the proposed structure of the workshop). 5 minutes
4. Findings thus far/Context Hugh Davis, Sheila MacNeill, Thanassis Tiropanis. 10 minutes
5. Small group activities (table groups of ~eight participants)
Overall Question: What is our understanding of the actual and potential role of semantic technologies in education? 15 minutes
Note: Guest discussants will be allocated to help lead table discussions. These additional contributors, beyond the workshop team, are not yet formally identified they will be identified/invited through a call for participation
Groups will each be tasked with producing a flipchart poster summarising their discussion/finding. After the discussion there will be a two minute poster pitch from each group
These contributions will reflect the expertise and interests of the participants and are likely to range across the spectrum of educationally led to technically led. Groups will be encouraged/directed to form around like interest areas exact size and number of groups will depend on number of participants and the range of interests, but groups will be table sets of ~eight. Max nine groups. Groups can choose to select one of the following focus areas from three predominant perspectives of educational, technical or organisational:
• Exploratory: Identifying potential benefits accrued from the introduction of semantic technologies in their teaching/institution;
• Application oriented: Identifying additional technologies and applications for the survey;
• Technically Led: Discussing ways of augmenting or enhancing existing applications;
• Socio-Technical: Identifying and discussing use cases (e.g. semantic technologies for distance education; the international student; the work place learner;
• Organisation Challenges: Identifying and discussing barriers and drivers to greater use of semantic technologies in educational activities.
Groups produce flip-chart poster summarising
• Their perspective /discussion
• Any proposed next steps/action plan

6. Small Group Feedback via Poster Pitch
Two minutes per group - Groups to display FlipCharts on wall ready for peer review. 20 minutes
7. Comment/Feedback Round – Peer Review using post it notes for annotations (each group will be allocated another group’s poster to read/discuss and review). 10 minutes
8. Plenary feedback/discussion Next Steps and Action Plan (Su White) 15 minutes

Facilitating the workshop and ensuring success
An experienced educational developer who has run many events of this type on previous occasions is leading the session facilitation.

The workshop will be advertised to the wider learning and teaching community before the ALT-C2009 conference via a range of media including direct email, the ALT-C CrowdVine, Twitter, Blogs, the SemTech Blog and personal blogs of the workshop leaders. This advertising will also be used to identify any players who have emerged as active contributors since the publication of the SemTech report, or any players who are particularly keen to participate in this area.

It is proposed that the participants will work in small groups during the discussion phase using Flipcharts and pens to capture their contributions. During the annotation phase, they will use post-it notes to add comments and observations of the findings of the other groups. We will initially capture high quality photographic images of the flip charts (before and after annotation). It may be that this information is also reprocessed into alternative digital formats if that is considered to be particularly helpful/constructive.

Throughout the workshop a pair of colleagues will act as rapporteurs for the whole process, capturing the discussions and outputs for publication on the SemTech wiki (http://wiki.semtech.ecs.soton.ac.uk) and via an ALT-C09 blog posting.

Information will be captured as images of the outputs as well as notes of the discussions with extensive linking to referred information/resources.

ALT-C 2009: "In dreams begins responsibility" - choice, evidence, and change.
8-10 September 2009, Manchester, UK.