Room to write

As you can see writing is becoming a bit of a theme for me at the moment. 

We are putting our feet in the water tentatively with a regular writing date which fortnight my will coincide with #SUWT (shut up and write Tuesday, for the initiated). 

Open to all comers the only condition is that you want to write or do some writing related task. 

The idea is that by determining a day long slot writing for discussion and feedback participants can find a time that suits them to join the group.

The processes incorporated in the meetings are being drawn from a repertoire of proven approaches based on existing research and observations  drawn from academic and commercial contexts. 

Some of the approaches may well challenge existing assumptions about how to go about writing.  In many ways that is what makes this initiative interesting. 

Our objectives are as follows

Discover joy and sociability in writing

Increase personal writing  productivity

Overcome block and barriers

Have fun

Writing tools and writing pools

I have been spending a bit of time reading and thinking about writing, as well as actually doing some of the stuff. 

I have been listening to an audiobook of Dorothea Brande, and doing my 750 words each day. 

I have also been reading Julia Cameron, the creative way, and quite a lot of Boice, especially professors as writers, but also some of his papers. 

I have also been doing my fair bit of writing and editing, so much that I had to do some hand saving dictation yesterday evening, 

Next week I will be upping the ante slightly, by starting off my writing Tuesday's. I am booking a room each Tuesday, ordering in tea, coffee fruit and lunch, and then inviting all and sundry to join me for writing tasks through the day. 

On top of that I am going to take a closer look at Bouce's plan for generative writing, and combine it with Brande's idea of a daily timetabled short writing slot, in addition to my lately rather peripatetic, "morning pages' 

So... That is the plan, let's see how it goes. 

Elbowing writing problems out of the way

One omission from my recent post on writing and research was any reference to the work of Peter Elbow. He is probably best known for his promotion of free writing but he also has a great deal to say about the role of our understanding and use of spoken language. Spoken language, he argues, can be used as a tool to help us write more clearly particularly when it comes to harnessing it for editing existing texts. I particularly like this quotation from his 2013 paper "Using careless speech for careful, well crafted writing – whatever its style". 

"We can’t count on speech (or freewriting) to yield crisp clear sentences, but when we harness the resources of speech by reading aloud to revise, we can count on the intonational habits of the mouth and ear to produce sentences that are stronger and clearer than are often produced when people try to write with care". 

Ironically I find his writing a little dense in parts and often skip over parts of the text but that is a minor issue, because in my experience what he is saying is eminently 

Elbow, Peter (2013) "Using Careless Speech for Careful, Well-Crafted Writing— Whatever Its Style," The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning: Vol. 19: Iss. 1, Article 3. 
Available at: http://trace.tennessee.edu/jaepl/vol19/iss1/3

Writing as research and other ideas

I have been doing a lot of thinking and writing about writing just recently.

Just about every module that I teach includes some aspect of writing, I supervise phd students who have to write a lot, and I spend a great deal of my own time thinking and writing as well. So anything which can make the process more enjoyable and more productive has to be a good idea, and if I can find ideas and share those ideas so much the better.

I can't quite recall what started me on this latest expedition back into the territory of writing and thinking. I suspect that I came across ideas in a book for research supervisors supporting PhD students (Kamler and Thompson, 2014).

I found the book pretty heavy going overall, that they were gems within the text and the concluding chapter was particularly useful from my point of view. I think it was this edition, downloaded with great pain as an e-book from the University library, that reminded me of the concept of writing as research (more of which in another post) .

I also recall that I read in weekend edition of the newspaper an article about Robert Boice's famous book a How writers journey to comfort and fluency (Boice, 1974). The main issue with this book is that it costs at least £65 and you can be pretty hard to come by.

However being a resourceful academic I made use of that ultimate research tool, the search engine, and found myself a few related articles which I have collected together in my Mendeley group,  a few of which are referenced at the bottom of this piece.

One by Boice which made a lasting impression on me, brought together sources as diverse as hypnosis, spiritualism and surrealism - if you are ever come across information on automatic writing, you are advised to take note of this quote

Having made a foray into the online sources of papers by Boice, I returned to the task of finding a book. I managed to locate a much cheaper but related book, Professors as Writers (Boice, 1990) which was available in electronic format. Reading that alerted me to hold other set of publications. So I made some time and did a load of reading and lo and  behold, I am chugging away with my writing, and champing at the bit to share my newfound prizes with other people.

Moving on from Boice, a number of useful publications are pitched at fiction authors. nonetheless I think much of the advice is equally relevant and useful two academic authors. Julia Cameron devised a method of daily pages for creativity, which has much relevance to writers. The method is explained in The Artists Way, which for my money has a little too many references to God and uncovering genius, however, I came across it via a motivational web site called 750 words, and it does present a well structured approach which can definitely make positive contributions to the writing process.

Interesting, some aspects of cameron's approach can be found in a much earlier publication by Dorothea Brande titled Becoming a Writer (Brande, 1934) which has been widely cited and is much admired by many famous authors.

Interestingly, the advice of Cameron and Brande is actually borne out by the evidence which Boice (originally a psychologist, but much concerned with professional development)  assembled whilst he was working at Stanford

There are of course lots of resources online which relate to academic writing

A goto destination for academic advice is always the tomorrow's professor website, run by Rick Riess, this site is a gem of a source for educational and professional development items which will be relevant and useful for academics and post grad students particularly, But in some cases even for undergraduate students. Listed below I just a short selection of the currently available relevant resources:

1191 Want to Publish More? Then Train Like an Athlete1430 Writing Rocks

1425 Writing the Broader Impacts Section of Your Research Proposal

1374 Three Phases of Writing for Publication

1345 Let's Get Ready for Summer Writing

1226 Optimizing Your Writing Process: Write Nonlinearly

1209 The Practice of Writing

Another one is the Academic coaching and writing web site which is particularly useful since it has a writing ebook, and many links to interesting and relevant articles. 

Bibliography

Boice, R. and Jones, F., 1984. Why Academicians Don’t Write. The Journal of Higher Education, 55(5), pp.567–582. Available at: http://doi.org/10.2307/1981822.

Boice, R. and Meyers, P.E., 1986. Two Parallel Traditions Automatic Writing and Free Writing. Written Communication, 3(4), pp.471-490.

Boice, R., 1990. Professors as writers: A self-help guide to productive writing. Stillwater, OK: New Forums Press.

Boice, R., 1994. How Writers Journey To Comfort and Fluency: A Psychological Adventure. Praeger, Greenwood Publishing Group, 88 Post Road West, Box 5007, Westport, CT 06881.

Boice, R., 1995. Writerly Rules for Teachers. The Journal of Higher Education, 66(1), pp.32–60. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2943950.

Brande, D., 1934. Becoming a writer

Cameron, J., 2002. The artist's way. Penguin.

Kamler, B. and Thomson, P., 2014. Helping doctoral students write: Pedagogies for supervision. Routledge.

Webliography

Academic coaching and writing:  http://academicwritingandcoaching.org

Tomorrow's Professor: http://tomprof.stanford.edu/

Project preparation and how to read a paper

Followers will know I think reading and writing are rather important.

Project students at all levels, postgrads and interns all need to work on this, not to mention post docs and academics.

Here are some pointers to materials which can be used as foundational tools for those wishing to update their skills, or just think and reflect.

Practically the FutureLearn MOOC on Developing Your Research Project is helpful. Although, I do take exception to the supporting material which talks about learning styles, but that is the theme for another post.

https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/research-project

A team of academics developed an online course on research methods which is well worth a skim read with some drilling down to explore issues (just like you might use a text book).

http://www.erm.ecs.soton.ac.uk

Moving on to the practicalities of reading academic papers, I can point to two useful resources,

1. A short practical piece by Michael Mitzenmacher of Harvard

http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~michaelm/postscripts/ReadPaper.pdf

 

2. A paper presented at a CS conference titled "How to read a paper" by Srinivasan Kerchav from Waterloo in Canada.

http://ccr.sigcomm.org/online/files/p83-keshavA.pdf

 

CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 UK

Better projects, dissertations and writing...

At this time of year, the whole cycle of student research, projects and writing and dissertations come into sharp focus.
I am always on the look out for good tools and models of good practice to help students understand and engage with the whole process in both a constructive and holistic manner.
Today's example was a slide explaining the contribution of some research into the teaching of derivatives to students of Economics.

Since I am often teaching engineers (of one sort or another) I often use the metaphor of engineering the document.
The image above comes from a presentation by A L Alzira Jimenez presented at the IMA International Conference on Barriers and Enablers to Learning Maths: Enhancing Learning and Teaching for All Learners, 10 – 12 June 2015, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland (programme details)
The example uses a table, which removes some of the pressure to write prose and at the same time, clearly states the contributions of the work and links back to sources discussed in the literature review.
IIt demonstrates (to a small degree) visual literacy - a favourite theme of mine, and hopefully removes some of the stress of writing.
The use of tables in this way is not confined to the contributions, however this is an area often neglected by students in their write ups maybe because conclusions and future work are stuff written at the end if the activity.
Perhaps most importantly, it can function as a thinking tool, helping author review and enhance the quality of their work - engineering a clearer explanation.
Anything which makes this process more enjoyable AND improves final product has to be a good thing.

CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 UK

Project Students - its that time of year again

this is the time of year that I get to meet a whole new batch of project students. Its interesting, but also reminds me that these folk may be new to academic conventions.

I place a big emphasis on developing writing, because so often folk are let down by their written communication of good work.

Today I chanced on a very excellent web site which provides concrete examples of good referencing style

http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~pxc/refs/index.html

well worth a good look

Tools and Tips: getting to grips with writing

A slightly more academic aspect of the sorting out your working life theme is my efforts to make a dent in the academic writing task.

I have always found writing an abstract a great way to kickstart the writing effort, but over the past few weeks I have been working on a rather more systematic approach.

The effort was triggered by good intentions; but the arrival of an email from the Tomorrow's Professor list titled " Want to Publish More? Then Train Like an Athlete". really caught my eye, and, I have to say, my imagination….

Perfectionism is a deadly enemy of good performance. It’s like being judged every time you write a sentence or paragraph. It’s far better to go ahead, make mistakes and learn from them. Rather than expecting great output from a burst of frenzied inspiration, the idea behind Boice’s brief regular sessions is to work with moderate daily expectations, knowing this will lead in time to better results.

to be continued...

Science Fiction in Computer Science Education - or "Do you know what 42 is?"

another wip page - better to post than just save!

Becky Bates, Judy Goldsmith, Valerie Summit, Nanette Veilleux

interesting discussion on how SCiFi can contribute to CS Edu

Valerie Summit Emory University

- first year seminar class

 

Robots and Robotic - what can robots and robotics do?

Moxon's Master by Ambrose Bierce (1909) - in Can Such Things be - available for free download via amazon for Kindle, also available on Project Guttenberg

A logic named joe Leinster (1946)

 

Nanette Veilleux - Simmons College in Boston

We were out of our minds with joy David Marusek (1995)

read short stories/novel/articles and discuss

Super Sad True Love Story - Gary Shteyngart

http://supersadtruelovestory.com/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

'not your father's science fiction'

journal article - talks about social capital (relevant to ash)

ambient stereotype threat

 

Judy Goldsmith University of Kentucky

ai - read research papers do survey, implement, read scifi book or game review

can write short stories

minority report - emerging sci...

reviewing the reality of the technology

list of options given to student - about half the list is female authors

 

Rosalyn Berne University of Virginia

nano talk - conversation with scientists and engineers about ethics, meaning and belief in the development of nanotechnology

Humanities/ethics specialist working in university of virginia, engineering and applied science

example of minority report as an ethical novel - in a computer context

 

Diamond Age

 

Becky Bates - Minnesota State

quwetions which you can ask which arise from science fiction

what is sentience

are the repilcants sentient

do the human charachters

 

the computer wore tennis shoes - 1969  cf space odessy

who owns my info?

william gibson pattern recognition, war games neal stephenson, snow crash, super sad love story

intellectual property

ironman 2, counting heads

did hal commit murder? daniel dennet

identify types of agents and explain your decisions THX1138 - film show after star wars

 

if you want to encode emotions what would you do - star trek - data

Tron, MCP just a greedy growing algorithm

- opportunity for creativity in computer science - opening the mind for learning

 

http://bates.cs.mnsu.edu/scifi.html will have a lot of this information

questions and comments

this was a popular and engaged session which gendered debate, questions and suggestions

 

 

observation seems as if it could be a really good agent for crowd sourcing

OU got a scifi author to write censored - cory doctorow -

read the machine stops - E M Forster T100 my digital life <follow up>

Moon - as alternative to 2001

short stories out of I Robot

 

robopocolypse - what happens if every car in NYC becomes controlled by evil robot?

bicentennial man - disney version of IRobot

what do you think would happen if robots took over the world, no jobs etc etc

see conflict - the last story in IRobot

Iain M Banks books

Monkey Huts Kurt Vennegurt -

Writing Links and Advice

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.

Walking, talking and thinking

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?

Time for some publications

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 the 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

campaigning for 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 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

Readings for TEL Project Students

When I first meet my project sutdnets I usually suggest a set of readings and useful web sites
this post contains links to some of the standard sources which might be useful in a contextual basis. Of course 

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,