This is a terrific short video of Johnny Lee’s Nintendo Wii remote controller hacks. The head tracking VR display screen application is particularly amazing and could have some powerful uses in educational games. I know of groups that are using complex technologies to achieve the same effect as this elegantly simple approach. Be sure to check out Johnny’s projects web site.
I’ve just discovered Wordle, a web application that creates word clouds from any body of text. Word clouds, like tag clouds, are a collection of individual words whose text size reflects the frequency of occurrence in a given body of text. Wordle has some nice layout tools to help you create beautiful word clouds. It’s easy to make your own. Here’s a word map from my weblog’s RSS feed. It’s easy to see the emphasis of words in my recent blog posts (click on the picture to see the whole word cloud).
In the past I’ve used a more formal version of this kind of approach in the battle against plagiarism. For my module’s assessment I get students to write a dissertation and occasionally one student tries to pass someone else’s work off as their own. There are a number of applications that compare text from one source against another to look for blatant copying, but another approach is to use textural analysis that compares the linguistic style and word count of one section of a piece of work with that of another section. If you suspect a student of incorporating someone else’s work you can use this approach to spot a change a style from one chapter to another. This is a useful approach when the plagiarised source cannot be identified.
Anyway, for fun I thought I’d use Wordle to compare the word maps from the recent blog posts of three leading learning technologists. It’s interesting to see the different word emphasis. Can you guess which map belongs to Josie Fraser, Scott Wilson and Stephen Downes?
I attended a couple of days of the IMS Summit on Interoperability Now and Next in Birmingham, UK last week. Sheila has written up some notes. I have to say I was disappointed by the learning design session. Five years after the learning design spec was finalised it’s still a complex business using the spec and current tools to define and implement a simple interaction. I keep feeling that IMS LD was a solution looking for a problem and I haven’t yet seen anything that solves any problems I have in learning & teaching.
Anyhoo I gave a presentation on using lightweight RSS for syndicating learning resources. Old stuff but still new to some. Sorry there’s no commentary to go with the slides. If asked ‘so what’ I’d ask you to look at slides 17-20 as these outline a simple approach that uses RSS as a manifest for delivering learning resources (and activities, in fact anything you can point a URL at). It’s lightweight (the ‘manifest’ lists title, description and URL to resources, not the resources themselves), has an implicit sequencing built in (simple linear), with metadata if required, and is in a format understood by many existing applications and content management systems.
This is interesting.
Firefly allows visitors to a web site to point and chat. Basically a Flash overlay movie with transparent background allows contemporaneous web site visitors to point at content on the site and instant chat with each other. Chat messages are currently anonymous but I expect that will change. Messages are also transient so unless you’re there to see them posted you won’t see them although a chat history is recorded.
Dave was one of the first users to demo in public but they’re now taking beta signups so you could add the app to your site too. What will you use it for?
Critics will ask ‘what’s the point?’. Sure, being able to comment on a web site so that subsequent visitors can share comments is not new, but there’s something kinda cool about being able to do this in real time. Of course if you have a high traffic site like Dave’s you’ll get several people online at once, but for my site and I suspect many others you may be chatting alone for a while 
You know the thing that puzzles me about services like Twitter and Jaiku et al, sometimes referred to as microblogging applications, is that you have to use a central server or service to create and distribute your Tweets or microbloglets or whatever-you-call-thems only to have them converted to RSS and syndicated. Why not just use RSS in the first place? You could create a lightweight RSS client that outputs your status, one-liner pearls of wisdom, or anything else you wish to tell your ‘friends’ about. Bake it into weblog or email or news-feed clients and you’re away. The beauty of using RSS is that everyone’s stream is distributed rather than collected at a central point, or bottle-neck as it sometimes becomes.
The benefit of a single service access point I guess is that it makes it easier to find new sources or feeds, but there are so many ways of finding RSS feeds that a distributed rather than centralised approach would be no problem. So what value do services like Twitter add? I guess that until we get better RSS clients – that is RSS creators rather than RSS aggregators – then the likes of Twitter offer client applications. But if we started to get other kinds of clients based upon RSS then just imagine the possibilities. You could syndicate your status and other Twitter-like info, but also mobile data, email, calendars, and in an educational context learning activities, reading lists, portfolios, lots of stuff. Of course you can syndicate a lot of this now but only via dedicated clients apps like purpose-built calendering service, VLEs, etc. An RSS client agnostic to content based around the triumvirate of title, description and link (plus attachment of it makes sense to add a file) would be a very flexible tool indeed.
I had a similar thought 5 years ago and created a simple tool back then for Radio UserLand. The tool is still available though I doubt it works now, and I don’t have a copy of Radio to try it.
How many of us can identify with these questions?
What is this piece of information and what does it mean to me?
I need to find information about…
Do I need to know this?
How can I find the right material for my needs?
What do I know now, and how can I improve my knowledge?
These are question that we all will have asked ourselves at some point, or heard our students ask of us. Questions such as these require us to make meaning from information and to use that information in meaningful ways. As we spend greater amounts of time online, or with increasing frequency look to the online world for information, the challenge facing us is to make meaning from the deluge of digital content. Semantic technologies can provide part of the answer, providing that we are clear what the question actually is.
There is an assertion in the introduction to JISC CETIS conference session on Semantic Structures for Teaching and Learning that for many teaching practitioners semantic technologies have remained peripheral at best, and perhaps even completely unknown to most. From a technical standpoint this is almost certainly true. But we should not be surprised, for why would a teacher need to know, let alone what to know, about the software engines that drive much of educational technology infrastructure any more than they would want to understand the mechanical engine that drives their car, providing of course that the journey is successful and the desired destination is reached.
Yet some of the benefits that semantic technologies can bring are of interest to many, perhaps even most teachers, even if they don’t even know what these semantic technologies are.
Using current, often simple software technologies we can create maps of the curriculum that allow teachers and learners to navigate the learning landscape. These maps can use straightforward approaches to using metadata to make associations between content. Frameworks of competency for knowledge, skills and attitudes can allow the learner to better understand their own learning. Semantic technologies can link content in meaningful ways and can link learning intent to content.
These approaches work and utilise some of the core concepts of semantic technologies. But we could do much more. Our information requirements are often highly personalised. Your information needs may be different from mine, despite us sharing a common outcome for learning. Adaptive learning systems can know us and know our needs and present learning opportunities and content to suit, presenting you with different content to me. Learning environments are yet to offer the kinds of personalised experience promised in recent decades. Yet with semantic technologies personalisation can become a reality.
We can already specify our information needs to repositories of content and have new or updated content automatically delivered to us using RSS, originally part of the Resource Description Framework (RDF), now appropriated en masse by bloggers and providers of syndicated news. Personal aggregators of content provide unique and personalised combinations of information, mixing our formal learning with informal learning or entertainment. Today, relatively few repositories or content collections syndicate their content in this way, but in the future much of the web could be available in this rip-and-mix format.
The themes that will become increasingly important to teaching and learning include a greater use of metadata, but metadata that facilitates the discovery and use of content rather than what sometimes seems a millstone around the neck of cataloguers.
A better understanding of the needs of teaching and learning will result in better semantic technologies, more attuned to the needs of non-technical users and those that would rather pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. While educational technology in general and semantic technologies in particular remain exclusively in the hands of technologists, then they will continue to have little impact in the world of the online learner.
Self-archiving of publications must be the next big thing in academic repositories because hot on the heels of the Depot is PublicationsList.org. Unlike the Depot, PublicationsList.org is a commercial offering with a basic service allowing you to maintain a list of your own publications for free and for $20 they’ll host your self-archived ePrints for 12 months. Why would you pay to have your ePrints hosted when there are other free academic services offering self-archived ePrints? Well one reason might be ease of use. Maintaining a publications list is something I’ve never been able to do in a systematic way because a) I’m lazy and b) all the other services I’ve tried to date have poor interfaces when adding publication details. The Depot claims that it is easy to use because it only takes 10 minutes to add an article by typing into a series of web-based forms. Ten minutes per article? As all publications are indexed electronically I’m not sure why should I be typing anything.
I registered for a free account on PublicationsList.org and had my modestly small list of 14 journals articles and a book chapter imported complete with either PMIDs or DOIs in about 5 mins flat for the lot. You see PublicationsList.org have integrated something the Depot should seriously consider, integration with PubMed and Web of Science. Through a combination of these two databases I found all my publications and imported them directly into my PublicationsList.org account. Abstracts, keywords, PMIDs and DOIs automatically get imported too so even without including self-archived ePrints (which I don’t have anyway) you can link directly to citations or even electronic copies of my publications where available.
Another useful feature of PublicationsList.org is that you can include a list of your publications on a web page such as an institutional research group page or your virtual research environment either as a simple button (see below) or as an embedded list. On the down side PublicationsList.org doesn’t interoperate with other ePrints repositories such as institutional repositories but it remains to be seen if this is a serious limitation. The Depot for example only seems to have a couple of dozen entries in the publicly available browse list.
It’s early days yet for ePrints repositories but there are ways of making these services easy to use and many could learn from PublicationsList.org’s example. Now if the Depot or equivalent institutional repository services could make importing of publications as easy then they’d probably get a lot more takers, me and my whopping 15 publications included.
At the JISC CETIS Metadata and Digital Repositories and Educational Content SIG meeting at the University of Strathclyde yesterday we heard about a number of interesting projects, but it was project SWORD and Julie Allinson’s very clear presentation that restored my faith in educational technology and the ability of educational technologists to work with and build upon existing dare I even say ‘main stream’ technology rather than to reinvent it or make it overly complex.
“SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) will take forward the Deposit protocol developed by a small working group as part of the JISC Digital Repositories Programme by implementing it as a lightweight web-service in four major repository software platforms: EPrints, DSpace, Fedora and IntraLibrary.”
The project looked at a range of existing publishing protocols and evaluated these against the project’s aims. And do you know what they concluded? They concluded the Atom Publishing Format and Protocol was the best fit for the project’s requirements. True, there will be some proposed extensions to the protocol but each repository that adopts the APP as part of the project will accept native APP requests to deposit materials.
This is great news and a smart move I think. There are millions of APP devices in people’s pockets able to capture and create content since Nokia adopted APP in most of its newer phones as part of its Lifeblog application (link to PDF Nokia spec). These devices and many others besides as well as desktop and web-based applications currently deposit their content into informal repositories. Soon they will be able to deposit into formal or institutional repositories and who knows, the web 2.0 revolution in content production may arrive on campus.
Some people may think from comments I’ve made that I am against repositories, or don’t see their value. Not so, and quite the opposite in fact. I see repositories everywhere, or at least places that store content in a format that’s available for others to discover and use. Only most people, me included, probably wouldn’t call them as such. I think the reason is because a ‘repository’ suggests something or a service you have to visit or go to to find content. However for many people that are using content produced by others, the content comes to them. By previously identifying what I’m interested in and by setting up the right kinds of subscription service more of the same can come to me without any effort on my part via RSS content syndication. RSS is shifting the point of engagement with repositories away from the remote site and more on to the desktop. It’s a bit like having the paper boy delivery your Sunday paper rather than you having to go and collect it (it’s Sunday morning now so excuse the weak analogy).
One of the desktop apps that I uses most days is a very good RSS aggregator, NetNewsWire. By using NNW stuff comes to me. Not just the latest lolcats and posts from my buddies’ weblogs, but all kinds of stuff. A snap shot this morning includes the latest publications from a couple of dozen academic journals (thanks to the excellent Zetoc), a half dozen ‘proper’ academic repository saved searches (including JORUM), a dozen saved searched from a bibliographic database (thanks to PubMed), PodCasts containing interactive multimedia e-learning content (not just video/audio) the latest discussion amongst the students from my course module’s discussion forum, and loads more useful information before even getting to weblog entries (which are mini repositories, or at least content management systems in their own right). In short much of what I’m interested in comes to me rather than me having to go and fetch it.
So I see repositories everywhere, but I seldom think of them as such. I just know what content I’m interested and when I find it, increasingly I can register my interest in getting more of the same by subscribing to an RSS feed. The smart academic repositories are already wise to this and offer content syndication via RSS. Are these web 2.0 repositories? Really, who cares, but the others will ignore this shift in what it is to be a repository at their peril.
A year ago this month I wrote the edublog simile generator. I’ve not sought its wisdom for some time but as I’ve been struggling with some edublogging nonsense recently I thought I’d look it up to get some inspiration. It’s still amusingly relevant as the first simile I got was “In the future we the people will be web 2.0 ready”.