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

Implications of "Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World"

10.30 - 11.00 - Richard Hill, Sheffield Hallam, Culture, Critical-thinking and Computing

The presentation will illustrate one approach to tackling cultural challenges in the teaching of Postgraduate computing students. Using a combination of commonly available 'web 2.0' type tools and curriculum changes, some of the difficulties of addressing critical-thinking in a multi-cultural environment are explored.

11.00 - 11.30 Mike Leigh & Lucy Mathers, De Montfort University, A tool for developing information evaluation skills in a Web2.0 environment:

Presentation of the results of a project that created an information evaluation tool that enhances students' understanding of how to select materials for academic work; and also provides a 'quick and easy' method facilitating comparison of diverse source materials.

11.30 - 12.00 Su White, University of Southampton Share Collaborate and Exchange, reshaping education through technology: the EdShare experience.

Our presentation would be able to look at one institutions experience of the current web 2.0 world particularly in the context of our use of departmental infrastructure and our teaching and learning repository in computer science education. The presentation will then conclude by situating our current 2.0 context/experience in terms of emerging trends towards more pervasive use and experience of linked data

12.00 - 12.30 John Traxler, Wolverhampton University Web2.0 - the University Challenge & the Changing, Moving World

The ideology and technology of web2.0, the ideology and technology that transforms us all from readers to writers, has significant consequences for the institutions of higher education. It is accompanied and accelerated by increasing, almost universal, mobility and connectedness and contrasted by the fixity or perhaps sluggishness of many aspects of institutions of higher education. This presentation will focus on these contrasts, explore whether these fundamental or superficial and ask about the responses that could come from the institutions.

12.30 - 1.15 Lunch

1.15 - 1.45 Stylianos Hatzipanagos - the impact and relevance of Web 2.0 to the culture of Higher Education;

How and where advancements in technology are altering traditional pedagogical practices; - how and where advancements in technology are altering traditional pedagogical practices; - new literacies in relation to digital media and digital cultures; - theories and technologies of change in education and future directions.

1.45 - 2.15 Mark Childs The challenges that using immersive virtual worlds present to educators.

These include institutional (who controls the technologies educators are allowed to use?), cultural (what opposition do students and institutions have to learning that is virtual? fantastic? fun? and what responses are appropriate), ethical (can we make the use of technologies compulsory if they are difficult, novel, transgressive?).

2.15 - 2.45 Jamie Wood Social Bookmarking and inquiry-based learning:

Experiences and possibilities - this presentation will report on my experiences as a practitioner, using social bookmarking in History seminars with first year students and will then reflect on the possibilities for the use of social bookmarking (and Web2.0) more broadly in teaching and learning.

Rich Learning Environments - Education 2.0 or 3.0?

I have been working on various applications of technologies for learning for many years now. Along the way, I've been developing an idea of what I mean by a rich learning environment.

Rich learning environments are dynamic spaces which bring together personalised information and perspectives across a core of resources which can support the learner in addressing their educational needs. Rich learning spaces exploit the technology affordances of their component parts, but provide added value by simplifying and customising the interface to a set of complex and diverse resources based on a learners context and education needs.

These needs might be categorised into four broad areas personal space; institutional space; support space; and 'good for learning' space

Personal Space:
A learner will already make use of their own preferred tools and applications which may be used either in addressing the demands of formal learning (for example using google docs to create a word processed document) or informal learning (using delicious to store and find information and resources on topics related to study). Each learner will have (most likely) their own machine(s) (laptop, desktop, mobile (?) and within that operating system will have selected and be familiar with a set of tools. Some parts of this (e.g. Skype, text messaging) may not be clearly linked or associated with learning tasks, but none the less may be of great importance to the student.

Institutional Space.
The institution which the learning is studying in, or at which the learner proposes to study, will have 'spaces' which have a role in informal or formal learning and learning support. It is possible that the set of spaces will change during the learners route through education with the institution.]sites/sources will be of verying importance at different times.
At southampton you may have a number of discrete spaces - e.g. UOS web, ECS web, ECS web behind the firewall, Sussed, blackboard challenges some of these are password protected, vpn protected etc

Support Space
dependi8ng on the context of the student, there will be external spaces which mught be of use/relevant to formal and informal learning - e.g. In Southampton the SUSU.org web site provides additional information and support, for international students it may be that their home country embassy site, or some home office sites may be of importance

'Good for learning'
Students may benefit from information and resources which are located outside their current personal space, and outside the institutional space. For example the National Union of Students offers support and advice related to study and examinations. There are other sources of information (appoaches to leawrning inventories, second language study).

Social Space
underpinning the environment there is an integrating layer provided by social space. This incorporates email, messaging, and social software. It acts as the glue for the environment.

If we consider student whose topic of study is technology based, it may be that we could identify a set of sources/resources which could enrich the users perspective, but which are not obvious;y initially related to learning. E.G. In computer science/web technologies, maybe Zdnet, Slashdot, british computer society, ACM digital library, IEEE digital library it may be that a set of resources could be identified which are relevant and helpful to the rich learning environment user, which could usefully be integrated into a customised environment.

Challenges

Creating a rich learning environment presents a number of challenges

Integrating a set of resources to become an apparent coherent whole.

Offering personalisation and customisation of an environment so that it enables the user to retain use of their preferred tools, but also that it perform and educational function of supporting the learning

Providiung innovative and user friendly methods of accessing and overseeing (and perhaps organising/re-organising) complex information sources.

There is a challenge of how to customise the environment (at first use, during the course of use)

Education and Web2.0

Working with EdShare and OneShare building resource collections for use in education brings up a whole variety of discussion topics about the nature of Web2.0, the social web, and the role of sharing and repositories in UK Higher Education.

Our project ran a very interesting workshop on this topic early in November 2009. Below is a collection of notes and observations, plus a few photos, which capture something of the day.

we made lots of time for group discussions, folk here are considering issues around metadata ( or does it matter data as I like to think of it).

As you might imagine there is space for a variety of views between the hard line, information scientist formal categorisation

and the more pragmatic what can be generate automatically,

and do we need that information anyway, lets just get it tagged by users, kind of approach.

Ali Dickens from the subject centre for Language, Linguistics and Ares Studies (LASS) is involved in Language Box (for Linguists), and Humbox (for humanities).

She is planning to run a full day session on copyright on December 14 2009. At our workshop she led a session where she asked folk to do a risk analysis on issues around copyright.

Its a topic which attracts a lot of interest, and we like to call our interactions with the lawyers on this one poking the dragon. You can see from the flipcharts what we might poke the dragon for.

the final session of the day was another practical task, using post it notes to look at our favourite web2.0 applications, and think about the technology affordances within those categorisations.

International Dimensions of Graduate Employability

Notes and thoughts on an the international dimension of graduate employability following a workshop at Oxford Brookes

little, global perspectives

interesting question
what percentage of our students have had experience of employment
track across the years
survey year 1 (jumpstart)
survey year 1 (info 1010)
survey year 2 (info2009)
? survey year 3 on exit
survey masters on admission
?? is it a condition of their visa that they cannot work?

question, was the decline of placement rates over time response to Quality agendas (difficulty of managing quality, and cost of supporting students out of institituion, plus cost of

definition

a blend of understanding, skilful practices, efficacy beliefs (or legitimate self-confidence) and reflectiveness' Knight and Yorke 2003

presentation slides will be available on HEA centre website and also project website

Shiel, leadership foudation fellowship, elearning

overview of the internationalisation
?? putting the world into world class education
perspecives


Take home messages

People
Benda Little, CHERI. Principal Policy Analyst, Centre for Higher Education Research and Information Open University,

Chris Sheil, Chris Shiel, Director of the Centre for Global Perspectives, Bournemouth University

Notes
The event was run by the FDTL project
http://www.enhancingemployability.org.uk
http://www.reflexproject.org - report to the European Commission.
HE academiuy website - document on Internationalisation

HE academiuy website - document on Internationalisation (difficult to find - a case for a repository?? repositories rather than content managemnts

thoughts
handouts all available at the

Semantic Technologies for Education at ALT-C

We are hoping to get folk to sign up for our workshop on semantic technologies for education which will be held at this year's ALT-C in Manchester in the UK. I'm just preparing the materials and about to send out a mailing, so this blog in a placeholder in the meantime. You may have read the original proposal for the workshop in a previous posting on this blog ALT-09 Semanitic Technologies for Education.

The workshop is numbered 0255 scheduled to take place on Tuesday 8th September at 13.40-15.00 in room 4.204.

Biographies
Sheila MacNeill, Educational Content SIG Cooordinator (University of Strathclyde) Sheila MacNeill is the Educational Content (EC) SIG Cooordinator. Sheila joined CETIS in July 2004 and is currently seconded 3 days a week to CETIS, based at the University of Strathclyde. When not at CETIS, Sheila is a Learning Technologist with LT Scotland, where she is involved in the development of a range of online learning resources for schools and colleges. She is actively involved in the development of resources which utilise interoperability standards

Hugh Davis, University of Southampton, Director of eLearning and Head of the ECS, Learning Societies Lab.

Thanassis Tiropanis, University of Southampton, ECS Learning Societies Lab, Thanassis is the principal investigator for the JISC SemTech project.

Su White, University of Southampton, ECS Learning Societies Lab is a project team member with SemTech.

Working jointly with Sheila MacNeill from JISC CETIS, colleagues from The Learning Societies Lab at Southampton, plan to use the workshop to stimulate the debate on Semantic Technologies for Education. The ALT-C community represent a significant cohort of educational users who are likely to be working with students and using semantic technologies in the near future, so are a key target audience for disseminating the findings of our survey of semantic technologies for education which was conducted earlier in 2009.

If you want a sneak preview, the survey is online at http://semtech-survey.ecs.soton.ac.uk/. Researchers reviewed thirty-six tools and services. Most of the tools identified were not purpose-built for education but are valuable to education by virtue of their use and deployment of well-formed metadata or data interoperability and integration.

The survey identified four essential types of application area:

(i) collaborative authoring and annotation
(ii) searching and matching
(iii) repositories, VLEs and authoring tools
(iv) infrastructural technologies for linked data and semantic enrichment.

The use and uptake of related tools and services by UK HE institutions was also investigated, you can find further information online at http://wiki.semtech.ecs.soton.ac.uk/