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.

What do you want?

Can you help us?

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

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

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

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

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

The question is - WHAT DO YOU WANT??

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

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

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

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

TELUSS - Virtual Group Discussions

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

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

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

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

1) what technologies students use for learning and for study

2) what support students receive when using technology

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


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

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

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

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

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

4)

Learning and Studying with Technologies - TELUSS

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

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

1) Big Picture

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

2) Local Practice

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

Hype vs Hope ( and truth and reality)

In addressing this we need to be able to :

sort out the hype of behaviours

challenge headline grabbing ideas and stuff that sells books

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

Find evidence from the reality of practice


Remember that

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

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



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

CETIS Repositories and Open Web Position Paper

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

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

The EdShare Approach: Web 2.0 from the Ground Up

JISC CETIS Repositories and The Open Web
April 2010

Background


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

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

The EdShare Approach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fostering engagement

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

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


EdShare Southampton Example


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

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

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

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

Ada Lovelace Pledge 2010

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

campaigning for visual literacy

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