catherine's blog

The Evaluation Group at CARET has been looking at and experimenting with MIT's Simile toolkit, as one (relatively user-friendly) way to use semantic tools for data representation and exploration. We are increasingly interested in thinking about incorporating semantic technologies into "social computing" approaches and tools.

A big advantage of Simile is that it hides a lot of the heavy-duty programming (in this case, Java) from the user, enabling easy / streamlined building of interactive web pages. A disadvantage is that the more we use it (at least until we get our own version installed!), the slower it gets, because whenever a local user loads a locally-hosted page with Simile stuff on it, the page then has to make a call on the MIT server.

Last Tuesday, I was privileged to attend the WiSETI Annual Lecture, given by Prof. Christine Davies at Robinson College, Cambridge, and sponsored by Schlumberger. WiSETI, the "Women in Science, Engineering and Technology Initiative" at the University of Cambridge, aims to advance the aspirations and careers of women in science- and technology-related professions. This annual invited lecture is a highlight in the WiSETI calendar, and a great opportunity to learn about frontier research from an eminent woman professional in the field. WiSETI lectures are also notable for including a more personal element in the discussion: it is common for invitees to discuss how they have managed work/life balance, and to offer insights into their personal career histories and trajectories. This event was no exception.

This is a post about metaphors, and the way that they help to shape and nuance—and sometimes, to constrain—our thinking. Note that I don’t necessarily consider 'constraint' to be a bad thing, intellectually speaking. Sometimes, setting formal boundaries for thinking is precisely what inspires creativity. Think what Bach did with the fugue.I’m intrigued by the sudden resurgence of the antennae metaphor in the overlapping contexts of information search, personal information management, and resource discovery. The antennae metaphor is handy because it works as a shorthand for both dispositions and activities. It usefully describes info-related user behaviours, such as alertness, vigilance, and the constant scanning of one’s environment for information.

Detailed notes from yesterday’s Metadata and Repositories SIG Meeting at Birkbeck are now available on Wetpaint. My post yesterday forgot to thank organiser Neil Fegen and the team from Heriot-Watt, who ended up having a nightmare journey from Edinburgh down to London when their plane was cancelled and re-routed to a different airport! They heroically managed to arrive in time for the afternoon’s developer demo session.

I'm just back from today’s CETIS Metadata and Repositories SIG Meeting at Birkbeck, and wanted to post some notes while they’re fresh. Notes and comments arising from the crazily brave, “live-and-uncensored” demo sessions will get posted separately: for the curious, these included ORE; Becta Vocabulary Management System (VMS); ENTAG; FeedForward; and SOURCE.

Last week, I had the opportunity to meet Mark Childs from Warwick, in the context of his short visit to CARET. Over an informal lunch, a bunch of CARET researchers and learning technologists battered Mark with questions about his work on interesting projects such as DIVERSE (developing video resources for students) and his PhD research on Learners' Experiences of Mediated Environments.

We had a very enjoyable group discussion around the issues and challenges associated with researching learning in relation to students' lived experiences, and how patterns of learning and student behaviours alike are increasingly mediated by technology. Mark had a lot of stories to share, particularly in relation to using qualitative methods, and the challenges posed by researching learning in mediated environments. He is especially interested in issues associated with "presence" in virtual worlds, such as Second Life. Thanks to Mark for his time and input!

After the recent scuffles between tech blogger Robert Scoble and Facebook over data portability and privacy, comes the announcement that Facebook - along with Google - has now joined the DataPortability Workgroup - (announced yesterday by Ben Metcalfe, the DataPortability founder, on his blog).

The optimistic vision for open social networks, where users will be able to share content freely across social networking sites, seems to be getting closer. Google and Facebook are, obviously, two of the biggest holders of social and personal information on the internet - on the one hand, they have enormous user populations clamouring for this facility, on the other, they presumably have a whole bunch of powerful advertisers and companies dying to "work with" all those rich user profiles.

Like many people, I received a rather terse email over the Christmas period (Dec. 16) informing me that the EduSpaces services was due to be terminated. I'm still catching up with the story. While I've been on holidays, there's been a fair bit of to-ing and fro-ing about the news in the ed tech blogosphere, so I'm pleased to read that the Curverider folks have now reached an agreement with TakingItGlobal.org. EduSpaces is not going to go away!

Intel's decision to pull out of the One Laptop Per Child project, founded by Nicholas Negroponte, is a blow to the project's ambitions.

According to today's BBC report, the project, which aimed to bring computing to children in developing nations via a custom-built, low-cost laptop, seems to be stalling. The original plan was for costs to be kept low by selling in volume, with governments placing large orders of one million. That has not materialised. Costs per unit crept up accordingly, with the final versions trialled in Uruguay and Nigeria reportedly costing closer to USD 200 (GBP 95). What does this mean?

In a strictly pragmatic sense, it's hard to fault Intel for acting the way it did. Intel has its own competing product, the Classmate, which rivals the OLPC's AMD-powered XO. Clearly, OLPC were not happy about this, seeing it as a direct threat to the success of their project. The OLPC apparently asked Intel to stop backing rival low-cost laptops, but the company refused to do so.

On 15 November 2007, Matt Riddle and I attended the “Poke 1.0” symposium at London Knowledge Lab organised by Neil Selwyn. Some brief thoughts and notes on the day here: overall, it was a really exciting and energising event, and I felt there was a strong sense of a nascent research community starting to coalesce. Here are parallel reviews by Lewis Goodings and Juliet Eve.

This post sort of follows on from my musings on Pownce, and the relative (in)utility of the current glut of social networking "services".

Received any Spock trust invitations lately?

Spock, a self-described “people search application that allows you to see what your friends and colleagues are doing on the web”, could potentially tell us something about the future of metasearch engines—those clunky crawlers that tried, and mostly failed, to bridge the gap between structured web directories like Dmoz, and the chaotic openness of Google’s PageRank™ technology. Although its interface design, a web-2.0-ified “Google Classic Home”, is so trendy that I’m afraid it’s already terribly dated.

Workshop notes and resources from the session I ran on Wednesday, "Runaway Objects: Preserving Our Digital Belongings", are now available on the Runaway Objects wiki.

I've included the list of proposed research projects compiled by participants, and a bunch of references and resources. Creating an account at the wiki will enable you to edit pages and add your own comments and suggestions for relevant research techniques, "methodologically interesting" projects to check out, and further reading.

The workshop was aimed specially at new researchers. We discussed issues around the proliferation of "digital belongings" (personally meaningful digital artefacts) in our lives, looked at some relevant qualitative / quantitative methods, and brainstormed relevant issues and research approaches. Despite the 9am start-time, we had a good group (with a diverse background in HE, FE and healthcare / social care) and an excellent session. Thanks to everyone for generously contributing your thoughts and ideas!

This year's ALT-C conference in Nottingham proved, as usual, a highly engaging conference. The theme, "Beyond Control", generated some very interesting debates around user behaviours and digital literacies, and I was lucky to be present at Dylan Wiliam's stimulating keynote on Tuesday.

Dylan's background in assessment and evidence-informed policy and practice led him to focus on raising achievement in the classroom by creating "learning power environments", drawing on a rich vein of educational research. He looked in detail at the potential afforded by increasingly sophisticated response systems, that are capable of delivering rapid, aggregated, feedback and information on whole-class performance to instructors. He calls these systems "teacher-mediated classroom aggregation technologies". Such systems can help teachers to create excellent conditions for learning, by boosting feedback loops and promoting learner engagement. Dylan emphasised throughout that students' motivation and engagement is essential: "Teachers don't create learning: learners do".

I confess I did... but after some weeks, I still haven't become a regular user.

I was prompted to signed up to Pownce when colleagues and friends did, but I've not yet reached that critical point where visiting the site becomes a natural part of my daily informational round. I don't need to transact large files all that much, because I mostly link to them on the web, and I already have preferred means of communicating with colleagues. So what's to like?