Hewlett at OpenLearn

Another day at the OpenLearn conference, and another mind map

Catherine Casserly presented the work that the Hewlett Foundation funds on OER.

Am very happy to see that they want to look more at metrics. This is the only way that we can measure progress and be held accountable. VERY much in line with what we do on learnometrics.

BTW, there is a feed of all the blogging activity around OpenLearn if you want to read more!

Closing Panel at OpenLearn

One more map of a session at the OpenLearn conference… This one covers the closing panel today.

As mentioned on the map, this was a bit of a missed opportunity IMHO… Why do people always spend most of the panel time on presentations, rather than on discussion among themselves or with the audience?

I guess that the dinner might be a better opportunity for discussion

As before: feedback on this format most welcome!

JSB at OpenLearn

Today and tomorrow, the OpenLearn conference is taking place at the Open University, UK. John Seely Brown did the opening keynote and I used this opportunity to play around with MindMeister as a web based mind mapping application.

See below – read clockwise

Not sure how useful this is: am very interested in your reactions!

University as Foo Camp? Bruce Sterling at ECTEL

Teemu Arina did a nice interview with Bruce Sterling at ECTEL07: “you can’t just go and just reclassify a university as a foo camp”? I don’t know… Is a school without a sage on the stage a Lord of the Flies scenario? I’m not so sure. Many schools with a sage on the stage look more like 1984 scenario’s to me.

In any case: food for thought… What do you think?

BTW, you can listen to Bruce’s keynote on the ECTEL wiki!

Snowflakes a threat to your privacy?

Last week, I had the privilege of opening a series of seminars in Flanders on “ICT and multimedia in higher education“. Of course, I talked about snowflake: if you want to see me explain the concept in Dutch, the video is available.

There were some interesting questions at the end, notably one about the ethical implications of snowflake. The question started with the introduction that no technology is ever neutral in ethical terms – a remark I’ve heard before but am not completely sure about… In any case, the work we do on attention metadata is certainly not without ethical implications. In a more general context, mainstream search engines are getting more pushback because of civil rights worries – see the recent post by Teemu Arina on monetizing privacy or Cory Doctorow’s Scroogled story… It seems clear to me that we will need to regulate this in some way or other. If we don’t, Something Really Bad is going to happen, people are going to be Very Upset and will demand that these technologies be forbidden. And that would make it impossible to snowflake your life!

Teemu mentions my proposal to require total transparency, so that we can all do what google or some government can do. Another approach would be to impose constraints similar to the ones that prevent the mobile phone operators from sharing your location with anybody who would ask to know where you are.

Do you share these concerns about privacy? Do you have other proposals on how to deal with them? Send me a note or leave a comment: I need to understand this better! Help me learn…

EC-TEL07: the conversation continues

Time is broken: how else could it already be more than four weeks ago that EC-TEL07 closed?

Gráinne Conole blogged about the workshop on “WWWrong: What Went Wrong? What Went Right? Exchanging Experiences in Technology Enhanced Learning” that I helped to organize. We had a really good discussion on what failure and success really means in our context and I was struck by how many perspectives people have on this issue – or should I say by how confused people really are about this topic…

Adam blogs that it was “good conference with a lot of interesting talks in very nice location” He participated in the SIRTEL workshop on social information retrieval that I also helped to organize. (The educational data mining workshop is covered by Anjo.)

Mo presented our MACE project, and remarks:

The keynotes (Hermann Maurer and Bruce Sterling) were excellent and big picture, covering a wide range of digital lifestyle topics and wild ideas. Digital quacks & charlatans, why Google is not so non-evil after all, telepathy is trivial, flying cars. No kidding.

Indeed, I was very happy with the keynotes: Bruce did a “different” one, read a piece from his forthcoming new book and got me thinking about “attention camp” – not exactly the vision we try to enable through our work on attention metadata. Hermann talked about the influence of technology on what we learn, not only on how we learn. He also argued that Google has become way too powerful and that it should be forced to break up – a theme that is certainly getting more and more traction.

Kai Pata blogged the keynotes (Bruce, Hermann) in more detail and also covers the session where Pat Manson presented the EU initiatives. Chris enjoyed Hermann’s keynote and Ralf was also struck by attention camp. Davinia started reading some of Hermann’s science fiction writing after the keynote. Both keynotes certainly created a certain “buzz” at the conference and, as mentioned, I was very happy with them.

Of course, you can hear for yourself and check the sound recordings on the EC-TEL wiki, where we also provide recordings of all the other talks! Some presenters have also added their slides, or references to their prototypes on the wiki. This is already becoming a nice addition to the proceedings, though I am a bit underwhelmed with the response so far. (No need to worry: if you presented at ECTEL, then do feel free to add your material now!)

Another outcome is the ECTEL group on facebook – a sign of the times, I guess

Overall, I had a lot of fun and learned a lot. My highlight was the conversation I did with Bruce and Hermann in the evening under the warm evening open Cretan sky, about science fiction, flying cars, expanding the scope of the thinkable, etc. – listen for yourself. Certainly, I want to try more of this different-kind-of-format sessions at conferences. If you have any suggestions, or other feedback on the conference, please let me know!

I need help…

Indeed, I need help, and I think you may need it too…

If you are doing research on Technology Enhanced Learning, then do you know

• which of your papers has been cited most often?
• who has cited you most often?
• which papers cited a particular publication of yours?
• whether more and more or less and less people are citing you over the years?
• whose citing behavior is close to yours?
• which conference or journal contains most citations of your papers?
• which conference or journal contains you cite most often?
• etc.

If google can do a PageRank of every page on the (non-hidden) web, then why can’t we have a CiteRank of every paper in our field? How about making that rank higher for every citation, and more so if the citing paper was itself often cited?

For many of us, these may be “academic questions”, but they are not irrelevant. Citations are the currency of research – a bit like links are the currency of the web. And in some fields, this currency is well managed and accessible to most of the researchers – it seems to me that PubMed acts that way for medicine, and maybe arXiv does for physics.

Of course, general citation indexes like Web of Science are supposed to address this problem, but they are terribly inadequate for our research domain: Web of Science is relatively easy to search, as I can include my affiliation in my search (and I haven’t changed affiliations, which is probably an exception!), but it includes only 13 of my papers and finds only 7 citations of those – though more and more every year, so maybe there is reason to be optimistic

Somewhat more representative for our domain may be citeseer: I am not sure how many of my papers it includes (I can’t seem to search on author?!), but it does find 50 citations to them. This requires browsing through many pages of citations of some paper by some Duval, so this is not very easy to use or process.

DBLP nicely presents a number of different authors whose name resembles mine. It lists 50 of my papers and presents an informative co-author list, but it does not include any information about citations.

Google Scholar seems to include most of my papers and many more references than the previous systems, but there are quite a few doubles and results from (very) gray literature. Also, it is difficult to distinguish self-citations from those by external authors. In a simple exploration, Xavier analysed the google scholar results for our “Metadata Principles and Practicalities” paper: the site mentions 136 references: of which 38 were self references and 10 were unusable, so there were 88 left. Most of those 88 just had the author and the title of the paper (or master thesis or technical report). So, Xavier searched the web and completed the information. As Xavier mentioned to me: “The whole process took me 3 and a half hours and was not fun.”

Bibsonomy claims 235 papers by me, and does not include citation information.

There must be a better way! Maybe you have a suggestion? I can’t believe that all you smart people haven’t come up with a way better approach to managing whom you cite, who cites you, etc…