I was asked to record a short video to give some background information. You can find it below.
Yes, please, your feedback on the them of context-aware recommendations for learning is most welcome!
Funnily, the original request was to use a DV-camcorder and record on a DVD. I do not have a DV-camcorder – I think. Actually, I am not sure that I know what a DV-camcorder is And there is no time left to ship a DVD to the organizers. However, I can just launch Quicktime, record the video and upload to youtube, so that the result is instantly available.
This is a nice illustration of a topic that I was discussing with my Great Friend Wayne a bit earlier today: we all often think that something is very complicated or impossible or expensive, whereas in fact it can now be done quite easily at virtually no cost. As Wayne puts it: ‘as what is possible is changing, the focus needs to shift to what matters rather than what is possible’. Food for thought!
I arrived a bit too late, after a long walk through the corridors of power at the European Parliament, a maybe-not-very-TED-like location. Because of security, we were not allowed to bring laptops into the meeting. Don’t ask: I don’t understand either. Was fun to take notes with pen and paper though…
Here are some of the things I picked up:
Michel Bauwens talked about “open everything”, including “product hacking” with examples like the ecar blueprint that allows anyone to turn a Toyota Corolla into a fully electric car.
Nicholas Negroponte shared some thoughts about (of course) the OLPC. I know that some people worry that he over-promises and under-delivers, but I agree that he helped to create the concept of a netbook and, as such, has over-delivered. He mentioned that 50% of the kids in Peru teach their parents how to read and write. Think about that…
Bruno Guissani interviewed Karel De Gucht: he remarked that the EU is more like soft powered Venus and the USA is more like hard powered Mars. Which one has been more successful?
Marc Van Montagu had a clear message: we will need Genetically Modified Organisms to feed the planet. The current over-regulation dramatically increases the costs to work on this and the result is that now only very big multinationals can proceed.
Dambisa Moyo from Dead Aid fame made her central thesis very clear: aid disenfranchises Africans and it shields African governments from doing their duty. She also mentioned that there are more poor Chinese or Indians than poor Africans. And 60% of Africans are less than 24 years old!
David Mccandless did what I consider the most TED-like presentation of the day: he had some really nice examples of information visualization: one illustrated when people break up on Facebook – turns out they do so two weeks before Christmas. Should I be worried? In any case, I just ordered his new book: I guess that is kind of an endorsement
Conrad Wolfram gave a passionate speech on the use of computers in mathematics education. He considers computation the ‘production line of math’. He was quite convincing that not doing math on computers is cheating kids out of an opportunity to do more conceptual math work. And it is cheating them out of fun!
Mark Millis was the other most TED-like person: he discussed visiting planets orbiting other stars than our moon. There are a few practical problems, like the fact that it would take the fastest spacecraft about 19.000 years to travel to the nearest star He was very funny and rightly pointed out that many of the thought experiments say more about us than about the stars: for instance, what would be a proper governance model for a colony ship?
John Engel of Uncommon Sound had this nice thought: “don’t give up on an idea just because it’s small or crazy”.
That was a good segway to Djamel Laroussi, who gave a cool guitar concert and remarked that “everything is possible if you don’t know that it is impossible”. Very TED…
R.U.Serious did a rant on transhumanism, with the best W.S.Burroughs impersonation I have ever heard. (OK, I haven’t heard that many…) He urged us to end scarcity and not be too responsible.
Catherine Verfaille explained that the trick of stem cells is to make cells unlearn what they’ve learned, so that they can then learn to be liver or heart or whatever. There is something about the unlearning that I think is also very relevant at people scale rather than cell scale, but I need to think a bit more about that…
Noam Perski had a clear wish: to offset the carbon footprint of cloud computing (which he uses for Jameslist) by donating OLPC’s, which are very energy efficient.
There were a few other speakers that I didn’t include in the list above because, frankly, I didn’t get their message. The problem may be at my end, but still…
Almost all the presenters had trouble dealing with the 18 minutes limit. I sort of understand: that is a short time. The again: many of them are experienced presenters and I had expected them to be better at dealing with this. (I did a three minutes presentation last week and will do a 15 minutes one in two weeks…)
I had a bit the feeling that many of the presenters and also many in the audience were … a bit too full of themselves. So I skipped the closing reception. Maybe I recognized a characteristic that I don’t like too much in myself?
In any case, maybe you were there too? What did you think? Twitter has some of your responses, but would sure love to hear more. Or maybe you have your own TED story to share?
Just like Frederik, I had an opportunity to add my three minutes of wisdom on an ‘ethical forum’ about ‘The University in the Age of Google and Wikipedia‘ today… There was quite a diverse mix of speakers – their slides will appear on-line later…
It was fun to try and make a contribution in no more than three minutes. Basically, I argued that:
We had discussed Google and Wikipedia. These are 10 and 8 years old respectively. In Internet time, that is an eternity. Search is so passé. It is passive.
We now have Web2.0, with much more of an emphasis on social relations and feeds or streams of suggestions. We now live in a pro-active web.
There is much more coming: for my kids, “FaceBook is for old people”. If the universities cannot cope with Google and Wikipedia, then we are rapidly falling way behind. These are exponential times, after all.
Discussing whether we should adopt or not these new technologies suggests that we have a choice. We do not. That is like discussing whether we want to have electricity in the university buildings. It makes no sense to me.
A much more interesting question is to ask whether we should change what and how we teach now that we have information available in abundance.
A related question is whether we can now do research in a different way, using a science2.0 approach where we can share what we read with our friends and colleagues in a much more flexible way than before and leverage the wisdom of the crowds to remove barriers to research.
Towards the end of the day, Philippe Van Parijs mentioned that he is thorn between enthusiasm for the new opportunities that the technology creates and worries for the dangers it entails. The forum had reinforced both his enthusiasm and his concern. My intervention was one of the reasons why his concern was reinforced .
I’m not sure: I guess I am a bit of an optimist by nature. But I really think that there are enormous benefits, not only in terms of effectiveness and efficiency, but also in terms of global reach and inclusion for instance. What do you think?
I’ve had a really nice day with the folks of Océ and Philips in Eindhoven today, for a day on ‘knowledge productivity’.
It was an interesting experience to listen to Joseph Kessel’s opening keynote: Joseph has a very different background from mine, more influenced (I think) by Peter Drucker than, say, Doug Engelbart (one of my Big Heroes). Yet, his story was very similar to the keynote I did immediately after him. Makes me think that there must be something about it that is really getting to the core? Maybe you can judge for yourself from the slides below…
In the afternoon, I did two conversation sessions with a smaller group of participants. BTW, this is something I really recommend to all of you who present regularly. It is a great way to learn what folks picked up from your talk, what questions they have, etc.
Today, two remarks came back several times from the audience:
People often feel overwhelmed by the abundance of technical options and tools. I pointed out that when I use for instance twitter in class, I don’t start with the tools. Rather, I think about how I can stay close to my students while they work on their projects in between face-to-face sessions, because I want to avoid that they waste time doing not-so-relevant things… I need synchronous communication with them. I could also use MSN chat (probably a good idea a few years ago) or facebook chat (might also work)… Basically, I need to figure out where the students live or how I can get them addicted to a new tool so that they do not need to power up new client for their course – which they will not do or keep doing (because they are … people, just like you and me!) This also means that it is not a problem if we change to google wave or something else later on: it would still be about synchronous communication! In short: don’t worry about the tool – think about the configuration, the orchestration of services that makes sense to support what you want to do! And then pick a tool that works for you…
There were also many questions about sustainability if we give all resources away for free. My answer always circles on the need to remove unnecessary barriers – these may include money, but are much more wide-ranging than just that. By removing those barriers, we are forced to better address the question about where the value is that we provide: if your trainees do not need to come to your training session to get access to the learning material, then what value can you provide them with so that they will still come? And if you cannot provide any additional value, then why would they come?
As I mentioned: this was a really nice day with an audience of 100 or so committed, focused, critical professionals who engaged in active discussions. Thanks, folks! And do not hesitate to continue the conversation – here or elsewhere!
I regularly get questions from folks who want to start blogging: now there’s nice, simple, clear advice on how to start your own blog. I strongly agree with:
Figure out what to write about, and write it.
Don’t worry about a plan; it’s going to change, anyway. Just think about what your point of view is, and what audience you want to reach (just visualization people? technical people? business folks? everybody?).
Think about what you are doing, what you are thinking about, what keeps you up at night, why you do the work you do. You have to find your niche, but if you’re working in visualization, you likely have that, anyway. Think about what the world doesn’t know about the work you do, the value of your work, and visualization in general.
Write it up, hit submit, done.
It really is that easy.
This is just as true for blogs that do not focus on visualization!
Now if only I could find some similar good advice on how to write a book – have been circling around that goal for too long… Suggestions, anyone?
Learning is personal. So, learning environments should be personal too… Many (not all!) of our students do not expect anything less. Yet, organization-wide support for learning environments seems to be incompatible with personalization as witnessed by the one size fits all approach of dominant LMS’s. I will share some of my experiences in this domain: I once chaired the group that helped my university to decide to adopt Blackboard. That university wide system now has more than 90.000 users. Yet, my courses in it only contain a link to a wiki or a blog or a facebook group. In my talk, I will try to provide a happy twist to this ironic story.
Basically, the students have weekly studio sessions with me where we discuss projects they work on in groups of 3 or 4. They are asked to
tweet whenever they work on their projects, so as to provide a ‘pulse’ of what is happening in the course in between face-to-face sessions;
post a bookmark on delicious that relates their work to an external web resource, so as to make them reflect on the relevancy of what we do in ‘the real world’;
blog at least once a week with a status update of what they have done, so that the different project groups (and I) maintain an overview of project progress.
So, what does this have to do with Personal Learning Environments? In my view, the essence is to connect with the personal life of the students: that is very hard to do in a rigid environment that acts as a walled garden in the way that Blackboard does. This is not even a Blackboard problem: I think that the same is true for Moodle and other LMS’s or VLE’s! If the students already live on facebook, then that is where I think we should be when we want to help them learning in an authentic way. Moreover, if their teacher, like me, lives in twitter and RSS land, then that is where he ought to be able to follow and provide feedback on their work! I guess that this is as much about being open as it is about being personal!
I think that I may have some anecdotal evidence that this approach works, as students have developed their assignments into projects that continue after they finished the course: my first year engineering students have adopted a facebook based calendar alternative for their standard blackboard one, developed by my master students in CHI last year. Another student developed a mash-up to rally student protest against the decision by my university to effectively block gmail:
By the way, this makes learning personal for teacher too: feedback on twitter can be quite direct, and the students generate some 200 tweets in the first 3 weeks, I get some 60 suggestions for additional course material per week, and the blogs regularly trigger feedback on-line or in the next face-to-face session. This is learning with the firehose open, not only for the student
I already mentioned open: why don’t you come have a look and leave some feedback for my students: here, or in twitter or in their blogs… You might learn something too !
Over 90% of journals now allow self-archiving, and with ResearchGATE you can easily upload full-text versions of your published work to your profile page. Self-archiving is an important part of the open access movement and helps you to increase your impact as a researcher by making your work more visible and accessible. To date, our members have uploaded several thousand full-text versions of their work.
We welcome your suggestions and feedback!
The ResearchGATE Team
This is really smart: I just uploaded the paper. It’s really hard to figure out what version of which paper can be shared when and under what constraints, so this is really helpful. (Though I often adopt an ‘I’ll ask for forgiveness rather than permission’ approach…) I wonder whether Mendeley has a similar feature?
Two weeks ago, I had the distinct privilege to give the first lecture to first year engineering students in Leuven.
I always like to take a few minutes to make them think about why they are there. This year, I used the quote that
Scientists study the world as it is;
engineers create the world that has never been.
(See slide 7 below.) And, of course, I had asked my twitter friends for advice about what to say at this somewhat special occasion – I still remember my first day at the university many many moons ago…
And some good advice I got – slide 9 and beyond… Ruben Faelens wrote on Facebook
Studying engineering is not only about studying. The university is a cooking pot of the brightest minds of society; and there will never be so many smart people together in such a free climate. If you ever wanted to go on a trip around the world, build a catapult, create the next Google, or build your own robot: you will find people to do it with at the university!
Just don’t forget to study.
“Only a few of you will remain next year” >:-). The ugly truth.
That is actually not accurate: slightly more than half the students pass their first year. I am a glass-half-full kind of person Robert Farrell’s view is quite similar to mine:
It’s all about mindset discipline. You have to THINK like an engineer
My version of that is that I mentioned that it will take engineering to solve some of the more pressing problems of our time, like Global Warming. OK – one could argue that it is also engineers who created that problem in the first place … José Palazzo Oliveira suggested something I actually did after my engineering studies:
Why don`t you try a little of Philosophy?
On facebook, Leo Plugge concluded the conversation with … shall I say a philosophical note:
That, by the time they graduate, the economy will probably look brighter but the environment bleaker. They did wise to choose engineering, if they use it wise.
Over on twitter, Till Nagel had a suggestion for a nice story: I duly followed his suggestion and explained the story to the students:
The story about the ceramics teacher (see e.g. http://kottke.org/09/02/art-and-fear) Art & Fear is generally a great read, not only for artists.
I added Art & Fear to my reading list as well… Wolfgang Reinhard echoed my sentiments about the importance of failure, by suggesting that
would tell them that they live in exciting times,shall try all they can & are allowed to make faults, risk some to realise ideas
that for the next 5 years, they’ll learn more outside that room, than inside (unless they want to become an academic)
And, finally, Xavier reminded me of an excellent way to put some context around their studies, by suggesting the video below, which I showed in class.
All of these were Great suggestions, a reminder (not that I needed one) that I have some truly Great Friends that are full of good ideas when I want to discuss an important topic… Maybe you want to add your suggestion here as well?
There were some 25 participants, and you can read or contribute to the conversation through the #science twitter tag.
Some of the themes that stood out for me:
Obtaining and opening up clean data: all of us struggle with that. Even for such a limited exercise as only one conference series (ECTEL) and just authors, titles, affiliation, location and citation data, a group of people spent quite a bit of time and effort to obtain the data. How can we scale this up to all of the research in our domain? It seems to me that the open access movement should really pay more attention to this question: at least as important as making the actual papers available, it seems to me, is making the bibliographical data openly available – they are now locked up by Thomson-Reuters or Elsevier, and even if you do have access to those systems, you cannot easily get the data out to do your own analysis or visualization! It also seems to me that the publishers should be able to understand that this may help people to discover and find relevant papers, so this may actually increase traffic (and thus revenue?) for them…
Demo fear: I’m so often struck by the fear of many presenters to do a demo of their tools. Especially in a smaller workshop setting, I want to see the tools. Rough is fine, but show the tool: we can read the paper, but it is often not so easy to play with the tool! So, a round of applause to Wolfgang Reinhardt for showing twitterVisBT – a tool that helps to analyze twitter conversations. And, of course, I wanted to set a good example, so we did no presentation and just two demonstrations – with presenters skype’ing in from Ecuador and Germany: Xavier presented our ECTEL visualization and Till showed an early version of an alternative visualization (see below).
Till's visualization of ECTEL
Sharing ideas There was some discussion – prompted by Nicolas’ blog post, about whether it makes sense to share ideas – rather than results. As I mentioned at the workshop, I personally agree that the field of Technology Enhanced Learning is maybe too rich in ideas and not rich enough in hard results, but I think that this is a false dichotomy: sharing ideas does not prevent results from being achieved or shared?! Rather, I would think than an earlier discussion of ideas may make it easier to reach better results earlier? And, even if you worry about people stealing your ideas, you may still want to share early to establish yourself as the first who worked on something? This discussion led Martin to think a bit more about the pedagogy of abundance…
Limits to openness: Barbara asked a question that still has me thinking: are there things we do not want to share? Many of us are involved in preparing bids for the EU funding call late October: do we share openly our plans for such proposals? The answer was a somewhat embarrassed silence. I actually wouldn’t mind to prepare a bid in the open. But I also do think there are limits to what we want to share: for instance, we are interviewing candidates for open positions – I am not comfortable to share even who applied, as it might put some of them in a rather awkward position.
There was much more we discussed – recordings of the sessions will appear on the workshop web site next week (many thanks to Peter for recording!) and there is a lot of follow up activity planned, in my team and elsewhere… “Stay tuned for more!”
BTW, the opening ECTEL09 keynote by Peter Pirolli on social information foraging and sensemaking was very relevant in making explicit the overall context for this science2.0 work: definitely useful to help clarifying why we do what we do…
I’m also quite happy that we will have a presentation and demonstration of Mendeley. And, of course, we will also show our visual exploration of ECTEL.
In related news, I also like the way that ResearchGATE now enables you to claim your publications (from existing digital libraries) and indicates itself whether the publisher allows you to make a copy of the article available under open access. I am on ResearchGate and on Mendeley: so far, these tools haven’t really contributed all that much to my research, but I am SO convinced that the potential is huge… In any case, the workshop and this area of science2.0 really looks like a lot of Serious Fun ahead to me.
By the way, you can still register for the workshop!
My students are analyzing games on the Web: any pointers to games that allow them to download details of who, when, what, ...? "Open games"? - 21 hours ago
And there is no time left to ship a DVD to the organizers. However, I can just launch Quicktime, record the video and upload to youtube, so that the result is instantly available.
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