Shazam for conferences?

Michael Nielsen has a pretty interesting blog pos on “Doing science online” (which I discovered through Bruce Sterling). I pretty much agree with him that

we are going to change the way scientists work; we are going to change the way scientists share information; we are going to change the way expert attention itself is allocated, developing new methods for connecting people, for organizing people, for leveraging people’s skills. They will be redirected, organized, and amplified. The result will speed up the rate at which discoveries are made, not in one small corner of science, but across all of science.

(And if you want to share your ideas on how we are going to make this happen, then please do consider submitting to TELSci2.0!)

The reasons why science will change, IMHO, are very similar to the reasons why music has changed: as we’ve moved from scarcity to abundance, we need to change how we relate to our material. The solution to the explosion of publications is not going to be faster reading

One practical idea I’ve been contemplating lately is that of a ‘Shazam for conferences’. Many of you will be familiar with the Shazam application for music. Basically, it allows you to record 10-15 seconds of an arbitrary song. The application sends that sample to its server and back comes a response that identifies the song, the artist, the album it comes from, etc. Pretty neat, and I’ve discovered quite a few songs this way.

But the real beauty of Shazam, for me, is that it makes it effortless to buy the song (from iTunes), see the clip (on Youtube), tweet that you like it, discover other people in your physical neighborhood who love the song or send an email to your friends to let them know about the song. Effortless, yes, as in 1-click-away…

Now imagine that we would have a tool like that for conferences: you are sitting in the audience, record 10 seconds of the speaker (or, take a picture of a semacode displayed at the side). You then send this off and the reply identifies the speaker, includes a link to his home page, his twitter account, his blog, his publication list, his slideshare account (where you would find the slides he is presenting), a comments page to leave public comments on his presentation, a way to share information about the talk with your colleagues, a template message to blog your comments on his talk on your own blog, with the slides already embedded, etc. You could say – and you would be right – that we can do all of these things already today. But the point is that such an application would make this effortless, as in 1-click-away…

What do you think? Would you like such a tool? Do you know of a similar tool? Do you have a better idea?

Looking in the mirror…

After a travel fiasco, I eventually presented our work on an analysis of the EdMedia conference series to the audience in Hawaii from … Belgium. As I had no video or audio feedback from the room, this was somewhat challenging There is something slightly surreal about sitting in a deserted office building at midnight, talking to your laptop while looking at your own slides and hoping that an audience 12 time zones away can make some sense of what you are saying… It felt a bit like talking to a mirror. Kind of appropriate for a presentation on who we are as the edmedia community… (Thanks to Dave and Martin, I at least had a chat feedback channel.)

This must have been “One of Those Days”, as the recording of our talk didn’t work. Neither did the transmission to the remote participants over Adobe Connect. Seems like we still have some ways to go before the technology is really stable and reliable

However, the slides are online and we will be re-recording the audio, and make it available openly. In the mean time, you can enjoy the nice tool to explore the EdMedia community that Xavier and his team developed. I think that wollpb sums up my view on the tool quite eloquently:

Anyway, I do regret no being at the conference in person, and I do hope that the Travel Gods will be a bit kinder with me from now on… Have fun in Hawaii!

Science2.0 for Technology Enhanced Learning: a tool and a workshop (and more to come!)

Together with my Great Friend Xavier, I will be presenting some work we did on the analysis of the EdMedia conferences next week. You can try out for yourself the tool that the ESPOL team developed to explore 10 years of publications in EdMedia. Or you can also see some screencasts that explain how we analyzed co-authorship and co-citation.

This is part of our ongoing work on leveraging web2.0 techniques to support research on Technology Enhanced Learning. On that topic, I am very excited to launch the call for papers for the 1st Workshop on Web2.0 approaches, tools and technologies to support research on Technology Enhanced Learning (TELSci2.0).

at the 4th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning

(EC-TEL09), Nice, France, September 29 – October 2, 2009

I am very excited to finally move this topic forward! Through the tool mentioned above, I’ve already discovered several authors that I was not familiar with that work on the same topics that I work on – as demonstrated by the fact that we share many citations. The potential here is huge!

In the coming weeks and months, we will be adding more material to drive this tool, like the proceedings of eLearn, ICWL, ECTEL, ICALT, TLT and others. We will also be linking this with information about the web2.0 presence of authors, so as to investigate the link between ‘traditional’ academic publishing and more ‘current’ ways of communicating about our research. More on that in a few days…

For now, please spread the word about the workshop and please consider submitting your own work – deadline is July 5… Or submit a comment here with references to similar tools…

Summer School Fun

I always enjoy speaking at a summer school: the enthusiasm of the PhD. students is always a treat… This year’s Joint European Summer School on Technology Enhanced Learning was no exception!

I was invited to talk about the Snowflake Effect… I added some new slides to make students aware of how crowds are really … stupid, juxtaposing Canetti with Surowiecki… In fact, that was a rhetorical trick: Surowiecki nicely explains that you can only obtain the wisdom of the crowds if the individuals in the crowd make up their mind independently. Otherwise, you get group think. In that case, in my opinion, crowds become … stupid! That is why I believe more in the power of one, connected to many.

BTW, as I gave my talk on June 4, I used the picture of the man in front of the tank 20 years ago to illustrate the power of one. Sadly, this man was not connected to many. It seemed a bit unreal to talk to students who were small infants at the time, about the simple courage of a man and the students that were about their age in 1989… I find it a bit hard at times to understand how we’ve just come to accept that this happened and decided to ‘move on’ with our lives…

What struck me in the reaction from the students is that many did not know about the tools that I used to illustrate the theme of abundance and personalization: I now consider these tools to be ‘mainstream’ and I would have expected the students to live on the ‘bleeding edge’. I had expected that they would show me many new tools and technologies! That was a bit of a mistake on my part…

However, quite a few did share with me their work: I had some great conversations and look forward to getting updates from them as their work progresses. (Please do send me your updates!)

I often ask the audience to write down what struck them in my presentation and why it was relevant to them. Many of the students mentioned that they appreciated my passion. That was nice to hear, but it did make me wonder a bit: shouldn’t ‘passion’ be the norm at a Summer School?

In any case, it was Serious Fun – I look forward to doing this again next year!

Making waves…

You probably don’t need this blog to learn about Google Wave… (See also BBC, TechCrunch, and a gazillion other places…)

It is certainly noteworthy that Google decided to open up the API even before they release Wave – much in line with one open approach to innovation.

And there are certainly applications for Wave in teaching and learning.

But what strikes me most is how this started from reconsidering email and instant messaging:

Wave was born out of the idea that email and instant messaging, as successful as they still are, were both created a very long time ago. We now have a much more robust web full of content and brimming with a desire to share stuff. Or as Lars Rasumussen put it, “Wave is what email would look like if it were invented today.”

Makes me wonder:

‘Schools and universities, as successful as they still are, were both created a very long time ago. We now have a much more robust set of technologies and a desire to share stuff. How would schools and universities look like if they were invented today?’

Maybe we can start working on that wave? Suggestions? Ideas? Do leave a comment…