November 2010 CETIS2010 - notes

draft notes

CETIS 2010 Nottingham, November 15-16 2010

The annual CETIS conference is another example of ways in which JISC has agency to support and enrich communities of practice operating in the field of technology enhanced learning in the UK.

It's a few years since I last attended this conference; the community seems to have established a strong sense of identity since that time. Given the title of the conference "Never Waste a Good Crisis - Innovation & Technology in Institutions" and the financial onslaught on Higher Education lets hope that this strength stands it in good stead for the next few years.

You can find the Programme online which will give you links and a sense of the dominant agendas.

As with many conference the events were launched with a keynote, preceded by some welcoming remarks and a brief trip into a futuristic virtual higher education courtesy of Paul Hollins

Keynote


Anya Kamanetz, author of DIY University Edupunks, Edupreneurs and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education
@anya1anya on twitter

twitter visualisation link

Options available parallel session day 1

Open Innovation

Relationship Management in HE and FE

Cheaper, flexible, effective institutions: technology, politics and economics

Integrating and Subverting Corporate Systems for Educational Purposes

Next Generation Content

My account will focus on Relationship Management . The session included presentations (contact Sharon Perry s.perry@bolton.ac.uk); a practical scenario based exercise led by Dr Qin Han; and an account of experiences from the Derbi project at the University of Derby presented by Jean Mutton

Service Design references and Webliography

taguclan a sort of rough guide to the University. Developed to help prospective students learn about the university, compiled by existing students, an example of collaborative authoring/co-production.

twitter tag #rminhe
JISC CETIS relationship managment website

Those of you wanting to find out a bit more of the background to service design, may find the wikipedia entry on service design reasonably informative

CETIS report on service design - from University of Derby

Running notes on the presentation:

These sessions arose from JISC funded projects looking at Customer Relationship Management and Student Life-cycle Relationship Management

It can be seen as an example of applying commercial techniques to a higher education context. There already existing examples of the application of commercial techniques to public sector experiences - for example in the health service

Example from Goldsmiths - spotting the pinch points - debugging processes. In their case it was found that small changes to service delivery can make much larger impacts across the piece.

The initial thrust of the session was thinking about how we might use customer relationship management tools in an educational context. This actually applies to the frameworks for thinking and analysing how we optimise processes and deal with problems which are associated with the labrynthine procedures around the student experience.

During the disucssion it was observed that issues do arise surrounding the conceptions of what Universities are about, terms like customer implies/belies the comoditisation of education. It was observed that there was less resistance with the use of the word client. Engaging in these sorts of processes may help a university articulate its values and crystalise what it expects to emerge as the outcomes of its processes and to thereby identify intended and unintended outcomes of processes.


Part 2 - interactive session on Service Design

principles underpinning the service design approach

Part 3 - the DERBI experience

Jean Mutton introduced an account of the experience of the DERBI project at the University of Derby which introduced service design at the University of Derby, The small scale project led to an interesting set of improvements for the student experience in relation the their experience of the enrollment processes. myderbi @ myderbi on twitter

it seems to me that if we are talking about learning from business processes we might look to good experiences of the online interaction, and then see how we can incorporate such practices or model the interactions into our processes.

Perspectives/Issues Discussed

fail points

heuristics for management
spotting the fail points

some discussion

biographies


Qin Han studied service design and communities of service for her PhD research

Sharon Perry is one of the CETIS team

Jean Mutton is the Student Experience Project Manager - DERBI Project - University of Derby

Day 2

Enterprise Data - Wilbert Kram
Linked Enterprise Data in F/HE organisations stuff

Damian Steer from the ILRT explaining how they make use of linked data in Bristol.

http://researchrevealed.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/

Paul Miller, Cloud of Data - Making Data Work account of a few up and running semantic web applications


Particularly like the fact that he explained how Tripit works, and what its advantages are. Something I have been trying to say to Hugh for a bit of a while!

SIRI - iphone app - only available in the states at the moment. Came out of a Darpa project -> apple

PowerSet -> ms, bing

Trueknowledge (UK) 200m

Freebase - metaweb google

Tripit not bought yet


canonical source of community enriched data

Seån O'Riain DERI NUI Galway

Enterprise Linked Data - overview of the current deployment and extent of community

ref - open society foundation open data study

The report , commissioned by Open Society Institute’s Transparency and Accountability Initiative and written by Becky Hogge, provided insights on the UK and US processes to unlocking their data to their respective data.gov’s.

http://www.soros.org/initiatives/information/focus/communication/articles_publications/publications/open-data-study-20100519

http://www.soros.org/initiatives/information/about

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becky_Hogge

Tim Berners-Lee's five star scheme

http://lab.linkeddata.deri.ie/2010/star-scheme-by-example/


http://nlp.hivefire.com/articles/18041/the-role-of-community-driven-data-curation-for-ent/
The Role of Community-Driven Data Curation for Enterprises
http://www.springerlink.com/content/n057n28561m86vl6/


Ref to challenges for financial data integration Edward Curry, Andreas Harth, Sean O'Riain Challenges Ahead for Converging Financial Data. In W3C Workshop on Improving Access to Financial Data on the Web

http://sw.deri.org/2009/09/financial-data/

ref http://www/w3.org/2001/sw/rdb2rdf/

Feedback in Plenary: links and notes
take a look

Disruptive Innovation http://tinyurl.com/disruptive2010

Absorptive Capacity: A New Perspective on Learning and Innovation
Wesley M. Cohen, Daniel A. Levinthal; Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 35, 1990

http://faculty.fuqua.duke.edu/~charlesw/s591/Bocconi-Duke/Papers/C10/CohenLevinthalASQ.pdf


Designing Learning, towards a scalable interdisciplinary design science of learning

ref - transforming american education - learning powered by technology


Wang and Hannafin Design Based Research 1995

socio-cognitive engineering: a methodology for the design of human-centred technology European Journal of Operational Research

Socio-cognitive engineering: A methodology for the design of human-centred technology M. Sharples N. Jeffery, J. B. H. du Boulay, D. Teather, B. Teather and G. H. du Boulay

Copyright - fair use for the UK?

from the bbc news site http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11689463

reporting on a planned speech today (4/05/10)

"The second new announcement I can make today is to do with intellectual property. The founders of Google have said they could never have started their company in Britain.

"The service they provide depends on taking a snapshot of all the content on the internet at any one time and they feel our copyright system is not as friendly to this sort of innovation as it is in the United States.

"Over there, they have what are called 'fair-use' provisions, which some people believe gives companies more breathing space to create new products and services.

"So I can announce today that we are reviewing our IP laws, to see if we can make them fit for the internet age. I want to encourage the sort of creative innovation that exists in America."

Mr Cameron will promise to work to ensure London's East End becomes a "world-leading technology city to rival Silicon Valley" in California.

He will announce that Google, Facebook and Intel are among the firms investing in the area.

Notes: Semantic technologies in Higher Education - revisited

Notes - We hosted a workshop at Southampton this week which revisited the agendas for Semantic Technologies in Higher Education

There are many different perspectives on semantic technologies - the folks assembled represented the spectrum including

• hardline technologists who want to build and implement systems (and who are well aware that they need to talk to users)
• post grads exploring semantic technologies (novel applications and uses)
• academics looking at how semantic technologies might impact on university eco-systems

Presentations - like all the info relating to this workshop details can be found at http://www.semhe.org/

Hugh Glaser - a retired ECS academic who is now Chief Architect with Seme4 made a presentation titled "Pragmatics of Semantic Technologies in Education: Linked Data" http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21666/

included a demo of RKB explorer as a device to explore how RDF can be used, and what problems need to be resolved when considering distributed sources of linked data

CRS - co reference service find URIs->store->publish->recommend a canon

Dave Lambert - video annotation tools

the paper http://www.semhe.org/2010/files/semhe10_lambert-yu.pdf
http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/member/dave-lambert

http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/member/hong-qing-yu

Hugh Davis and Chris Gutteridge


context and background from Hugh, previous research, current activities and ambitions for the university
Chris Gutteridge - account of experience, pragmatics

mentioned lots of stuff including...

From Chris Gutteridge thoughts about modelling

http://blogs.ecs.soton.ac.uk/webteam/2010/09/02/the-modeler/


areas

references/Webliography

Seme4 - http://www.seme4.com/

sameas.org

http://www.rkbexplorer.com/

http://sindice.com

lod http://richard.cyganiak.de/2007/10/lod/

http://www.geonames.org/

http://id.loc.gov/

http://dewey.info/

http://data.open.ac.uk/

http://www.zemanta.com/

The Semantic Web, Linked and Open Data briefing paper

Date: 01 Jul 10 A briefing paper by Lorna M. Campbell and Sheila MacNeill introducing the concepts of the Semantic Web, Semantic Technologies, Linked and Open Data.
Semantic Technologies

Readings digital literacies

- things have moved on since I gathered this set of references....
so probably best to search for some updates

Thankfully a lot of work has refuted the claims for digital natives :-) the world has moved on....

If nothing else, they reflect some of the ideas I am still coming across, I know that there have been a number of JISC publications, the learner experience work, and also Helen Beetham's work on Digital Literacies (refs needed)


Frand, J. L., "The Information Age Mindset: Changes in Students and Implications for Higher Education," Educause Review, vol. 35, pp. 15–24, 2000.
Haythornthwaite, C. A. and Kazmer, M. M., Learning, Culture, and Community in Online Education: Research and Practice: P. Lang, 2004.
Nathan, R., My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student: Cornell University Press, 2005.
Prensky, M., "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants," On the Horizon vol. 9, pp. 1-6, 2001.
Prensky, M., "The Emerging Online Life of the Digital Native: What They Do Differently Because of Technology, and How They Do It " Games2train, http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky-The_Emerging_Online_Life_of_the_Digital_Native-03.pdf 2004.
Wesch, M., " What Is Web 2.0? What Does It Mean for Anthropology? ," Anthropology News vol. 48, pp. 30-31, 2007.
Wesch, M., "Youtube Ethnography Project," Kansas State University http://mediatedcultures.net/, 2007.

Twitter at FIE

IEEE Frontiers in Education is a fine conference, and I was looking forward to being able to link up to some folk via the twitter back channel this year.

The conference organisers even rather optimistically declared a hast tag...

you can see the level of debate by visiting http://www.tweetviz.com/ and checking out #fie2010 :-(

probable the most read tweet is the one posted outside in the lobby

unfortunately there was no wifi in the conference room and I don't have a US data card. However the free wifi in my (different and cheaper) hotel, is free, works all the time and works in the rooms as well as the lobby. occasionally I text but mostly it's a silent scream

as @tgmcewan said thanks to #ibahn and #marriot

some more visualisations which are fab....

a map of knowledge and an infographic

just stumbled across these two, which I need to note ... something with a bit more analysis may come later!

first of is a map of knowledge - the Web 2.0 points of control map which was an output of a recent web2.0 summit
http://www.coolinfographics.com/blog/2010/9/9/the-web-20-points-of-control-map.html

second was an infographic example of the tube map ( where information and relation is priviledged over accurate scale). And I do insist on calling it a tube map, is was derived from the London tube, calling it a metro map does not work, as anyone who have ever travelled on the Paris Metro will tell you!!

this is a tube map representation of the most widely spoken languages in the world its the work of folks at PS transaltions, but I found it via the cool infographics blog.

http://www.pstranslation.co.uk/infog_languages.html

so thanks to the http://Guardian.co.uk for the original springboard, and if you want to follow this sort of area then the links from the cool info graphics blog are an excellent place http://www.coolinfographics.com/links/

Web Science Curriculum ( and Workshop)

work in progress

Its been a week of web science for me this week, along with a few extra lessons on language learning (the first half of the week was in France at Montpellier 2) and inter-disciplinary discussions.

The structure of this post is about the formal web science curriculum workshop (third in the series) but interspersed with some thinking and ideas related to what is going on in Montpellier ( who plan to host a new Masters in Web Science from academic year 2011-12)

At the end of this post there will be a list of links, a list of those who attended the workshop, and a list of folk from Montpellier who might be involved in the new proposed masters.

Web Science Curriculum Workshop Programme:
As yet only a few of the resources appear to be on the web, but I will link where I can, and expect to re-edit or republish this blog post when things change.

Intro and welcome from Cathy Pope (soton)

Further Welcome and Web Science Trust - Wendy Hall @DameWendyDBE

Round table introductions - all

Web Science subject categorisation - a proposal for discussion Michalis Vafopoulos @vafapoulos and Les Carr @Lescarr

What is Web Science? Nigel Shadbolt @nigel_shadbolt

What is Web Science? group discussion (ok, I won't be giving twitter names for all here!)

Round table presentations of what we are teaching, planning, and what collaborations we would like

Dave de Roure @dder

+++overview+++

Rather than being a documentary narrative, this account is a synthesis of the discussion which mixes parts for points raised in various sessions

draft curriculum for discussion - paper developed by Michalis Vafopoulos ( @vafapoulos on twitter ) and Les Carr was presented and discussed.

Web Science Draft Curriculum

The proposal brings forward a taxonomy which provides a structure for the intersecting topic areas across the curriculum

The discussion to some extent turned on what was missing from the list - but any brief account cannot do justice to the issues raised. We had an initial bash at the discussion immediately following Michalis' presentation, returning to it, and refining our ideas as the day progressed.

My assumptions

students + curriculum -> web scientist
curriculum = knowledge + processes
study= cognitive apprenticeship

inter-disciplinarity is about the negotiated understanding of meaning

borrowing from the concept of the barefoot psychotherapist

parallels with language learning

When considering the work/research/focus areas of the list it appears that the web scientist might be an identified by the fact that the reseacher's specialisms did not alone sit in an existing recognised discipline area, essentially web scientists have to be inter-disciplinary. During informal discussions with Mark Weal we agreed that it might also be helpful to portray the information space through some form of associative map. I suspect that different colleagues will find different styles of representation useful, although the taxonomic approach has strength since it mirrors that used in the ACM curricula.

There was a definite thread running through the presentation which Nigel Shadbolt made that learning from existing disciplines/fields of studies which are by nature inter-disciplinary may be of advantage. The discussion time after this presentation was wide ranging, and if possible I will try to link to other accounts which folk make. Pragmatically one way in which the field can be established and create its identity is through attaching itself to other established disciplines, thereby demonstrating its role and value.

One alternative approach to the curriculum mapping which was suggested during the subsequent dicussions was to take an approached based on the IEEE software engineering body of knowledge

Another suggestion was to take a look at the Achievement Standards Network

Probably worth thinking about a few ways in which we portray/understand web science. Our Southampton perspective is one of co-creation - or in social science talk web science is the product of co-constitution. There are a few (some classic) pictures which can help illuminate this understanding.

How we see the web science curriculum at Southampton: We began teaching a web science masters in 2009/10 Les Carr and Mark Weal plus Cathy Pope have been to key players in designing the structure of the course, but there has been extensive input through discussions with a whole host of academics who are contributing to the teaching, some of whom offer single lectures, others who have a more significant role in the classes.

When we think about what is web science, we have various visualisations which capture the extent of the area, some of which address content, other parts of which address process. You can find more details on the course web site, and through resources which we have deposited in EdShare (our educational repository).

We host a Web Science Doctoral Consortium - http://webscience.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
We run an MSc in Web Science - http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/admissions/pg/msc/1011/web_science.php
We routinely deposit our learning resources in EdShare

But it is may be more useful to consider a process orientated understanding of web science which has been presented by Tim Berners-Lee. Students of web science, like all masters' students will need to develop their critical thinking and analytic skills across the set of processes. The curriculum needs to be more than a mapping of the landscape, since the ways of thinking and analysing data which are special to Web Science are an inextricable part of the field.

By way of observation, we got into discussions where understandings pivoted on linguistic understandings. Many of the discussions were constrained by concepts of existing ways of working.

One of the heated questions was about where web scientists would get jobs, surely Web Science for students is more about a mindset rather than a ticket for a job, I find myself returning to the model of higher education as a cognitive apprenticeship. The issues is that students of web science, and practitioners (academics or in the field) will acquire a set of skills and a model of knowledge and understanding which is mediated by the consideration and exploration of web science phenomena. I look at web science ( like I look at so many different parts of life) from a technology affordances perspective (after gaver). This belies the fact that I additionally come from a social constructivist perspective. for those reasons, I would wish to privilege approaches over content.

However when we return to the issue of where students will work when they have graduated from the course, the problem is created when we seek to gain accreditation, or agreement from our institution to support and instantiate a subject as a formal programme. At that time we are asked to explain or anticipate (for a commodified model of education) Where will our students work, Where will they gain their work experience, What are the topics which they can study? Who are the academics who will teach them.

The discussion about what is web science, and where to web scientists work is of particular importance to those who expect to incorporate a period of internship, work-placement - or french 'stage'. I favour an approach in the curriculum which enables the learners to gain self knowledge and confidence. In terms of placements and internships I see opportunities for students to take placements in orgnaisations where they are able to pursue activities where they practice web science in context (for enterprises such as tourist boards or regional development agencies, for small businesses, or as interns for research groups at Universities)

sound points made by colleague from Amsterdam (Hans Ackermanns)

what people want
sharing of resources
beruit - french or arabic text on web science
highland and islands - working in health related areas - seeking to share video resources
discussions of possible text book - maybe an electronic version would be more apposite!
remote teaching by agreement with other institutions/institutes - real time with video conferencing
DERI are prepared to participate and exchange

I would like to make a strong argument for remote learning - I see web science as requiring a participative curriculum, where the students play a strong role in creating their curriculum and helping take forward our understanding of web science. We are talking about learning at masters level, but I think this might also be applicable at undergraduate level. It seems to me that the very inter-disciplinary nature of the web science necessitates an active role for the students in creating their own understandings, and personally experiencing their own understanding of interdiscipinarity , not withstanding the fact that we are trying to establish web science as a discipline in its own right.

If we believe we are seeking to educate the thought leaders of the next generation, then we would be doing them a disservice if we construct a web science curriculum which is predominantly didactic.
===notes===
proposals - koblenz - text book on web science
web science book already translated into greek and chinese
approaches - stand alone masters, specialist modules, seeking to develop computer science 'flavoured' with web science
scarcity of people who can deliver - seeking to find people across the country, contribute remotely


===
participants
=== - links incorporated where I have been able to find that the institution has a specific web science initiative/programme

Jack Kopeski - OU Milton Keynes

Joanna Luciano - Rensselaer -

Chris Baker - University of New Brunswick

Michalis Vafopoulos - Thosaloniki

Hugh Glaser - Linked Data consultant

Nick Gibbons - University of Southampton

Hans Akkermanns - The Network Institute NV Amsterdam http://www.vu.nl/en/research/interdisciplinary-research-institutes/ni/index.asp

Elizabeth Brooks - UHI - head of computing network

Connor Hayes - DERI - NUI Gallway Ireland

Stéphane Bezane - UIR web science at USJ Beirut looking for ways of setting up exchanges for students and sharing materials (lebanon - on interest to Montpellier)

Birgit Proell - Johannes Keppler University , interested in sharing materials

Su White - Southampton/Montepellier 2

Marco Antonio Cassanova - Brazilian Web Science Institute http://www.webscience.org.br

Geraldo Xexéo - Brazilian Web Science Institute http://www.webscience.org.br

Sergej Sizoc - Koblenz

Lei Zhang - Tsinghua University (name means the water is clear and the trees are growing)

Hugh Davis - Southampton/Montepellier 2

Bernie Hogan - Oxford Internet Institute

Mark Weal - University of Southampton

Wendy Hall - University of Southampton

Nigel Shadbolt - University of Southampton

Claudia Roda - American University of Paris, Interested in sharing materials

===
interactions - and questions to continually ask....
===

what are you proposing?

what are you arguing?

so what did you mean by that?

Issues in a web science masters

===
montpellier folks
===

Stefano Cerri

Madalina Croitoru

Clement Jonquet

LIRMM montpellier

University Montpellier 2

===
links
===

http://wiki.websciencetrust.org/w/Web_Science_Subject_Categorization_%28WSSC%29:_a_proposal_for_discussion

http://web science.org

http://wiki.websciencetrust.org/w/Curriculum

1. Towards a Science of the Web: the Power of Networks. Wendy Hall. http://mediaplayer.group.cam.ac.uk/component/option,com_mediadb/task,view/idstr,CU-Personnel-2007-WISETI/Itemid,99999999

2. Introduction to Web Science. Video of a lecture by Nigel Shadbolt.

3. Web Science Lectures at Georgia Tech. http://webscience.cc.gatech.edu/lecture-series

4. ESWC2008 Panel Does the Semantic Web Need Web Science. Wendy Hall moderator. http://videolectures.net/eswc08_hall_dsw/

5. Web Science Research Initiative Curriculum Workshop Report. http://webscience.org/filemanager/active?fid=42

6. What is the Future of the Web? A presentation by Tim Berners-Lee followed by a panel discussion with Berners-Lee, Hall, Shadbolt, Spivak, moderated by Hender and McGuinness. Links to ReadWriteWeb coverage. http://tw.rpi.edu/launch/

7. Building a Pragmatic Semantic Web Alani, H., Hall, W., O'Hara, K., Shadbolt, N., Chandler, P. and Szomszor, M. (2008) Building a Pragmatic Semantic Web. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 23 (3). pp. 61-68.http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/15787/

8. Web Science: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Understanding the Web Hendler, J., Shadbolt, N., Hall, W., Berners-Lee, T. and Weitzner, D. (2008) Web Science: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Understanding the Web. Communications of the ACM, 51 (7). pp. 60-69. ISSN 0001-0782 http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/16555/

9. Why Study the Web? vide of lecture by Nigel Shadbolt http://archive.zepler.tv/266/

10. Upcoming Web Science Events http://webscience.org/events.html