What is Web 3.0?

The semtech investigation and report looked at Semantic Technologies for Teaching and Learning,
TIROPANIS, T., DAVIS, H., MILLARD, D., WEAL, M., WHITE, S. & WILLS, G. (2009) Semantic Technologies in Learning and Teaching (SemTech) - JISC Report.

This analysis might prompt some readers to seek orientation from other sources, a few of those are listed below...hint - includes videos and the phrase Web3.0

some links to stuff which tries to answer this question...

a short film from Kate Ray


Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.


You can find background information on the film and related posts on Kate Ray's blog http://kateray.net/

or 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

Some tools for organising information

These complement my post on tools for visual literacy which is mostly what I am working on at the moment

Mendeley http://www.mendeley.com/review/

Dropbox http://www.dropbox.com

FormSmarts http://formsmarts.com/

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