UK government Con-Dem-Nation of Web Science

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.

CETIS Repositories and Open Web Position Paper

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

Back in the loop - rant

OK
back in the blogosphere, but not sure for how long
desperately grappling with my online identities
am I a runner?
am I an academic?
am I just plain eccentric?

what I do know is that I have not posted since September partly because I have been doing other things, but also partly because each time I tried to post, the text appeared in Hindi! this was not my intention, but its taken til now to spot the transliteration button at the bottom on the config page and work out that I needed to change it - not that I spent a great deal of time on it you understand, but still it was a barrier

• And that is what I am interested in from a research point of view.
• I came back to this blog because I have been editing my home page, and then thinking it would be better to do this via the blog.
• And then that added another item on the todo list ( which I am currently ignoring) which is that I probably need to separate my online identities.
• And then that made me think about the fact that I maybe want to register a few more domain names
• And that reminded me that each domain will need a visual identity
• and that made me think about a life online, and the fact that I only live it a bit, because I also have a life offline....

phew...
and did I mention the really good pages from British Columbia on digital tatoos?
But coming back to the life online, there are a few ideas....

If we are talking about using technology for education, we might need to think about the realities of people's lives.

Academic researchers who live online have a world view which is shaped by their experience, but it aint the world view of joe and joanna public.

I have a list of considerations:
remember:

1. your students do not have the same priorities as you do
2. it might be dangerous to base our models of how students prefer to learn of the leisure habits of an indeterminate number and proportion of young people
3. early adopters and early majority have a different experience/perspective to the late majority
4. educators need to take charge of how they go about educating
5. the bandwidth of face to face communications can be incredibly high
6. its a good idea to remove the barriers to learning
7. learning can only be done a bit at a time
8. the magic number seven plus or minus one was a good paper, but we might be happier with even less complexity
9. the map is not the teritory
10. academic evangelists do not have the same perspective as neophyte learner

Now of course, the technogazers have a valid argument that you should not focus on the implementation problems, but think about the big picture, however, if we are dealing with education here and now, then the human issues actually do matter. So as a future gazer I can say, discount the problems, but as a teacher using the technology I need to understand the problems in order to overcome them. That means, logically that the problems need to be categorised accoding to their impact - half life - will it go away in time if so, how does that change things? does the exisitence of the problem give us insight into something which is important - ie and insight into the learning process?

When I was going through my dilemma of am I a runner/academic/eccentric I was also thinking that its important that I am all of these things.

Talking to my running sisters reminds me that there are lots of people who are not online all the time, do not have routine access, and who have rather clunky models of how inter-webby thing might work. We could think of them affectionately as the world wide plebs
Plebs - definition from the free dictionary
common people, folk, folks - people in general (often used in the plural); "they're just country folk"; "folks around here drink moonshine"; "the common people determine the group character and preserve its customs from one generation to the next"

so here we are back in the life online
some of us have one, some of us don't... some of us who do, are not there all the time

and I am coming back to some old ideas - technology affordances, barriers to learning hmmm...

Towards a Theory of Education 2.0

I'm very excited about the workshop at the COOP '08 conference I am attending late in May. I went along to the eduserv symposium because I thought it would help focus me on what's happening right now.

The symposium was quite wide ranging and it has helped me think about how I need to make some aspects of my argument more specific and associated with curriculum 

Wanting to pull some ideas together for towards a theory of education 2.0.

Think I will address it specifically from perspectives of situated learning, authentic learning, and informal learning.

Also need to take a view which comes from Gaver's classic perspective of technology affordances

Sort of ties up with the VLE is dead perspective from Martin Weller

Also takes some guidance from Dave Millard's work on 2.0 applications

Needs a few diagrams to map the space

links: eduserv symposium, COOP-08 abstract